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From the Chairby Jonathan Harris Hello Sierra Club Rhode Island Chapter members, Then we held a community meeting at our office in Providence. The meeting was a great forum with a lively discussion of how to implement a Complete Streets philosophy in Providence. During that meeting, we took a vote and agreed to focus our Complete Streets Providence campaign on Elmwood Avenue. This allows us to build onto an ongoing redesign and repaving project taking place on that street. It’s a great opportunity for us to push for changes to Elmwood at a time when the planning process is already open.
What can you do to promote Complete Streets in your own neighborhood? Call, e-mail, write, or have a face-face conversation with your elected officials. Tell them you want safer streets and the opportunity to choose your transit mode. Contact Mike Lewis at DOT (401-222-2481), and tell him you support a Complete Streets agenda and a continuous bike lane on Elmwood. Thank you for your support. Complete Streets RIby Abel Collins Sierra Club’s goal in reforming Rhode Island’s transportation system is to enhance our range of transportation choices. That’s why we’ve joined forces with other organizations around the state to form a coalition group, the Coalition for Transportation Choices. Right now, our transportation choices are pretty limited. When we walk out the door to go to work or play, most of us have a single option: hop in the car. Overdependence on the personal automobile in our transportation system has not only limited our freedom of choice, but is disastrous for our quality of life. Decades of car dependence have left us with sprawling development patterns that consume our open spaces and wild places, even as they produce dysfunctional communities devoid of neighborliness, sedentary lifestyles that lead to epidemics of obesity and diabetes, transportation costs that are second only to housing costs in our household budgets, and, of course, tailpipe emissions that destroy air quality and cause climate change. Complete Streets is a term for a design philosophy to heal these ills. This philosophy offers us a full range of transportation options. In the Complete Streets vision, walking out the door is followed by a choice – between walking, biking, transit ridership, and, finally, the car. Under Complete Streets design, all of these options are equally safe and convenient. The Complete Streets philosophy equalizes the level of amenities each mode of transportation is offered on a given road, while shifting transportation planning priorities to make our cities and towns more livable. This vision is what the Rhode Island Sierra Club, AARP, and the Coalition for Transportation Choices are working to implement. Our first step is to get Rhode Island municipalities to adopt Complete Streets policies through town or city council resolutions and to bring them to life through their comprehensive plans. We’re also working to design “showcase streets” around the state to demonstrate how streets can provide for a diverse set of transportation choices beyond the car. The vision is already taking shape around the state. Newport has adopted a Complete Streets resolution, and the Elmwood Avenue resurfacing project in Providence is incorporating elements of Complete Streets design. If you want your town or city to be a part of the Complete Streets movement, or if you know of a DOT or municipal project that could be made into a Complete Streets showcase, contact Sierra Club’s program manager, Abel Collins (abel.collins@sierraclub.org). By building Complete Streets in RI, we can increase transportation choices, freeing ourselves to choose healthier, less expensive, and more environmentally conscious ways to get to work and play, and restoring our streets to safe and enjoyable public spaces that serve as the heart of livable Rhode Island neighborhoods. These benefits are the promise of Complete Streets RI, and Sierra Club is working to make them a reality. Transportation Factoids!
And they say driving saves time… A 60-mile traffic jam in China in August brought 11,000 vehicles to an 11-day standstill. Read more...
No such thing as a free parking spot… The High Cost of Free Parking, a new book by Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA, estimates the subsidy given to U.S. drivers in the form of free parking somewhere in the range of $127 - $386 billion/year (based on 2002 data). Shoup calls free parking spots, which are often mandated by law, “a fertility drug for cars”. Read more...
If you build it, they will ride… Forty percent of Americans say they would choose to commute by bike if safer routes were available. Read more...
Four BP oil spills every dayA visit with the Delta Chapterby Sarah Schumann
This summer’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill was a harrowing event for many across the nation. Those haunting images of the seemingly unstoppable flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico were like something from our worst nightmares. But the bigger nightmare is something that doesn’t show up as well on film: the fact that the total volume of oil spilled in the Gulf this summer is equivalent to only one-fourth of the oil that Americans consume every day. Environmentalists are hoping that the BP oil spill will galvanize Americans into seriously questioning the need to burn 20,000,000 barrels of oil per day. Unfortunately, shifting off of oil is not a clear-cut matter of recognizing the threat and stopping the behaviors that cause it. Most Americans have now heard of climate change and understand the basic process that makes it happen. And while not all of them agree that it is occurring, it’s not just deniers who are continuing to cause the problem. Even hard-core greenies drive cars, turn on lights and laptops, and take the occasional cross-country flight. In much the same way, residents of the Gulf Coast continue to support an industry that has dumped 5,000,000 barrels of oil into their front yards over the course of this summer. Taking advantage of Sierra Club's nationwide grassroots network, I visited Louisiana last month and chatted with Devin Martin, Conservation Coordinator of the Delta Chapter of the Sierra Club. I asked him about the difficulties inherent to environmental activism in a state where 16% of the economy is based on oil extraction. “I would say we’re a little bit more careful than some other folks in trying not to paint the oil industry as some big, demonic entity,” Devin told me. “So many people work in the oil industry, that it’s become engrained.” As an example, he recalled seeing a mural depicting Louisiana’s scenic bayous, graced with birdlife, aquatic creatures, kayakers – and an oil derrick in the background. “It’s become part of our landscape and our culture,” he explained. Even environmentalists in the region are reluctant to criticize the oil industry, Devin continued. Those who do must be careful about the wording they use. For instance, he said, it would be political suicide to call for an end to offshore drilling. Moreover, people just wouldn’t say that – like other environmentalists in the region, Devin has family members who work in the oil industry; it wouldn’t occur to him to put people’s livelihoods at risk. However, he clarified, oil field work “is not necessarily something people want to do for a living – it’s just what’s there.” He told me that most oil workers send their children to college and hope they’ll do something else for a living. People are in favor of green jobs, but so far, few opportunities have become available. “If we want to move away from oil and gas,” Devin concluded, “we’ve got to make sure that there’s something else for them to do.” And that’s the hardest part: building green alternatives so that people can keep doing the things they need to in the short run, without harming ourselves and our planet in the long run. That’s a problem the Rhode Island chapter is facing, too, as we promote a transportation system in Rhode Island that enables people to get around without cars. Just as oil is firmly engrained in Louisiana’s economy, automobile transportation is engrained in Rhode Island’s day-to-day life and planning choices. As long as oil drilling is fulfilling Louisiana’s job needs, and car-based travel is fulfilling Rhode Island’s transportation needs, we will have oil spills – both the kind that occurred in the Gulf this summer, and the kind that occurs in the atmosphere every single day of the year. When green alternatives are non-existent or inferior to the status quo, we will continue to do the things that harm us. That’s why the most important thing environmentalists can do is to construct viable green alternatives. In Rhode Island, this can start by adding bike lanes to our favorite streets, or stepping up RIPTA funding to increase the convenience of bus travel. When eco-friendly modes of transportation become as practical as car travel, we’ll be ready to plug the oil flow once and for all -- protecting ourselves from the worst effects of climate change, and saving our compatriots in the Gulf from another debilitating spill. Got any personal reflections you'd like to share? Send in your thoughts on transportation, the environment, or anything else Rhode Island, and we'll share them with fellow Sierrans in our new Personal Reflections column! Contact: schumannsarah@gmail.com |
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