Car Culture ← The Urban Country ← Page 6

Our Backwards Approach to Road Safety 29

Jul

2011

A family in Copenhagen by MarkA / RateMyVelo.com English-speaking countries generally take a backwards approach to improving road safety for pedestrians and cyclists. Instead of addressing the root causes of danger, politicians implement band-aid solutions that ignore the root cause in the name of maintaining unimpeded traffic flow for motor vehicles. In most cases, motor ...

No Cars. No Traffic Signals. No Deaths. 77

Jun

2011

Photo by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country Are car-free liveable communities the way of the future? On Friday I posted a video highlighting how most Toronto Cyclists are considerate of others and are just trying to get to their destination in an imperfect city with streets and laws that were designed for automobiles. ...

Technology Instead of Laws to Improve Safety 29

May

2011

Google self-driving car on display – photo by Mac Morrison The powerful 2008 documentary film Zeitgeist 2: Addendum suggests that our monetary system based on fractional reserves is the fundamental root cause of all of our social ills in our present day society. Part III of the film focuses on the use of technology to ...

Making Sure Nobody Walks or Bikes 30

May

2011

Photo courtesy of Who Killed the Electric Car I spotted this billboard while watching Who Killed the Electric Car the other day. I couldn’t find a better quality photo of it, so I captured a screenshot from the movie. The tongue-in-cheek billboard reads “Making sure nobody walks in L.A.”. Although catchy and probably effective for ...

We Are Addicted To Automobiles 18

May

2011

Photo of a traffic jam by buzrael / Flickr In the Twelve Steps to recovery from alcoholism – first published in 1939 in Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism – the first step is defined as: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our ...

Americans Work 2 Hours Each Day To Pay For Their Cars 45

May

2011

Cars & cycle path in Montreal, Quebec – April 2011 – James Schwartz / The Urban Country Imagine you could work 500 hours less every year. That works out to be an extra 12.5 weeks of vacation. Alternatively, imagine you got paid for an extra 500 hours of work each year, without having to work ...

Responsibility & Accountability On Our Streets 33

Apr

2011

Photo courtesy of Jorge / via RateMyVelo.com We spend a lot of time on here talking about improving bicycle infrastructure. Yes, bicycle infrastructure is important to help make bicycling in car-dominated cities more comfortable for people on bicycles. But one issue that gets lost in the push for better infrastructure is the discussion of responsibility ...

The World Has Changed. So Can You. 26

Apr

2011

“The world has changed. You can too” – World Wildlife Foundation commercial. I love this brilliant commercial. It highlights how drastically our society has changed in just 50 years. What was once considered the “norm” is now incomprehensible and even repulsive to our present day society. It prompts one to imagine what the same video ...

Snow Traffic-Calming Measures 6

Mar

2011

Photos by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country Sometimes the best traffic engineering ideas are the ones that appear naturally. While visiting a client yesterday, I encountered this pile of snow that was blocking the entire right lane of this street (as you can see in the photo above). The only traffic calming measure ...