Re-Imagining Cleveland's Transportation Future - Film Fest you probably missed

Last week the 2019 Sustainable Transportation and Action Team [STAT2019] held a small film fest at the Capitol Theater in Detroit Shoreway to bring together a plethora of professionals involved with transit with a couple of goals in mind. Firstly, to expose the various professional groups to each other and give them a forum to get acquainted, secondly, to offer a way to see what other communities are successfully achieving in order to understand how similar techniques could work locally.

I wanted to offer the list of films here for those that would be interested, you can watch them, and others, online for free.

• Journey to Pittsburgh to Walk and Bike
• Gary Toth: Reinventing Transportation Planning as Community Development
• Indianapolis Cultural Trail
• Chicago's Bus Tracker - Taking the Guesswork Out of Waiting for the Bus
• Major Bike Mojo in Minneapolis
• The Case for Open Data in Transit
• Making Streets Safer for Seniors
• Portland Bicycle Boulevards
• NACTO's Cities for Cycling
• Portland (Green) Bike Box!
• Snowy Neckdowns - Winter Traffic Calming
• MBA Traffic Calming

The event was sponsored by SC2019, NOACA, Access for All and the Cleveland Earthday Coalition. Flyer by TOIstudio.

The complications with walking: Part One - Standing Up

By now anyone with access to a television, internet or newspaper has heard the story of Raquel Nelson, an Atlanta mother recently convicted of vehicular manslaughter owed to the death of her son at the hands of an "imparied" driver while the Nelson family was crossing the street. You see, in Georgia, crossing a street not at a marked pedestrian way places the fault upon the pedestrian, even though the driver was currently under the influence of "drugs and alcohol" (according to early releases) and had been previously convicted of hit and run, once on the exact same stretch of road, that had little import on allocation of charges.

The conviction resulted in 12 months probation, community service and court costs. The possible maximum conviction was 36 months in jail. There has been little word on sentence of the driver as he had pleaded guilty.

The event occurred as Raquel was crossing the street from a bus stop to her apartment. A full recount of the story can be found here (thanks to the AP). The question isn't whether the action of crossing the street violated the law but whether the law itself and the planning that resulted in this occurrence should itself be held up to question. From my point of view there are many additional guilty parties; the traffic engineers who allowed for such a high speed thoroughfare in such close proximity to residences, the public transit organization that located the bus stop away from legal crossings, the legislative body that makes pedestrians second class citizens to automobiles, the law enforcement agencies that allowed someone twice convicted of hit and run to stay behind the wheel and the urban planners, that allowed this sort of development (hub and highway spoke) to itself occur.

Ms. Raquel Nelson has the option of a retrial, however nothing can be done now for her son. The legacy of his death should require us all to rethink our actions, as drivers, planners, voters and pedestrians and vehemently demand that our communities be safer for ourselves and our children.

An online petition can be found on the Transportation for America website demanding a full pardon for Raquel Nelson. The next question is how to halt the potentially fatal pattern of poor planning and rectify our already dangerous systems and neighborhoods.

PBS has also posted a very interesting video on pedestrian v. vehicular transit in Georgia.