Q. Motor vehicles

An urban freeway packed full of electric cars at rush hour is still a climate disaster. I'm not a fan of too many automobiles, period. That said, I'll still suggest ways to reduce gasoline use in the short term.

Personal note: I learned to drive at age 40. I knew that someday I'd have to be able to drive in the event that my wife couldn't drive as the decades passed by.

For further reading: https://theconversation.com/driverless-cars-wont-be-good-for-the-environment-if-they-lead-to-more-auto-use-173819

Q1. Express lanes funneling thru traffic past bad weaves

A two mile long left express lane blocked off with many bollards should carry thru traffic speedily beyond a major choke point on any existing six lane or eight lane urban freeway. Defining the express lane immediately increases the same freeway's traffic throughput by perhaps 20% during rush hours at a relatively very low cost.

This new express lane system breaks down completely when scofflaws choose to stop dead in the middle of the road waiting to cut into or out of the express lane. Lane integrity must be guarded rigorously by automatic cameras and fines. My sense is that extreme fines, with steep discounts for all scofflaws able to show by their federal tax returns that they are of limited means, would control wealthier drivers and poorer drivers more equally.

Even a one inch triangular shaped raised concrete bump running between the double yellow lines would further deter illegal lane changes, more than bollards. On rare occasions an accident blocking the highway might mean that the express lane must be repurposed, and in these cases an overly strong bump between lanes causes trouble.

Q2. Handicapped parking spots

My wife is heat-sensitive and can't walk far on July afternoons. If we paid a certain doctor $300 for certification, we could get a note describing my wife's symptoms and that would be good enough for getting a handicapped parking hanger. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of money. Disability access shouldn't be about being wealthy but sometimes it is.

My wife is chemically sensitive. She can't ride a bus because she reacts to people's perfumes and scented shampoos.

A friend told me that our state's handicapped parking hangers are made out of cheap plastic that snaps right off, and then the hangers don't work. In general there's no feedback mechanism whereby people can complain about shoddy and thoughtless state practices.

We might consider two kinds of disability access parking spaces, one for people who physically can't move very far or fast, another for people who need extra room unloading and loading their chairs but who can roll at least a short distance once they're in their chairs.

Q3. Free 20 minute parking spots

Cities need numbers of on-street 20-minute parking spots so that 20% of drivers aren't all circling around the city looking for that last parking space. I'd recommend modest enforcement of the 20 minute rule unless the city has evidence of persistent scofflaws. The real goal is to provide parking for local grab and go merchants. Confiscating taxpayer money the hard way is often politically a bad idea.

One possible extension would be the installation of a parking meter-like device that counts down the seconds from 20 minutes on a large display. A sonic button senses when a car has pulled in and the parking meter needs to start counting down.

If really needed, an anti-scofflaw version uses texting to inform the city exactly when the most recent car pulled into the parking space. A meter reader would be hovering near the space roughly 19 minutes after the car pulls in.

Our city is adding a few separated bike paths on a major street by taking over the parking lane on one side of the street. Drivers and local businesses are going to miss the parking spots. I recommend, for almost every side street on both sides of the major artery, that the first parking space next to the main street be designated as a 20 minute limit parking space, the second parking space down from the main street be designated as a 30 minute space, the next two parking spaces down be designated as 1 hour parking spaces and that all four of these spaces be well-delineated by white paint on the road. This helps to solve the problems of local businesses and of drivers who need to make a quick pickup.

Q4. Traffic signals showing both red and yellow

The USA-dominated 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals allows traffic signals to show both red and yellow lights. If it were up to me, showing both red and yellow should mean that the signal is about to turn completely red, but red light violation fines don't apply until full red. I recommend that traffic signals switch from green to yellow, then from yellow to yellow-red simultaneously, then from yellow-red to red alone. This use of three equally timed switchings, not two, allows drivers to anticipate and time exactly when the light will turn red alone. It should lead to fewer accidents from drivers plowing late through the intersection, and to slightly more drivers getting through the intersection with each light change cycle, which can save a bit of gas.

Q5. Reducing wrong way drivers

Some off-ramps on limited-access highways should have air horns to reduce fatalities caused by drunk drivers driving the wrong way on these ramps. It's also possible to have a loud voice telling drunk drivers to turn right, with a path between the wrong way and the right way on-ramp, so that they wind up on the right way on-ramp.

Q6. A campus mobility access service that uses golf carts

Part of true transit integrity is being fully responsible for approaching 100% mobility access.

Numbers of multi-day annual conferences are held on college campuses or on similar sites in the summer. In this case, Friends General Conference and its pre-conference typically covers an 8 day period in early July. The conference moves around the United States and Canada, and it has 1000 or 2000 attenders. Numbers of attenders have mobility problems. It turns out that even among apparently healthy-looking younger people, a few have hidden mobility problems such as bad backs, vision issues or chronic fatigue syndrome. We’ve had people who thought they could walk 1/2 mile but they only made it 1/4 mile, and then they were stuck sitting on the college campus’s grass for two hours.

Our solution is to rent 7 to 10 golf carts for eight days, preferably electrics. We’ve been running the golf cart service each year from the late 1990s until covid disrupted the conference.

We buy an unlimited minute cell phone number for eight days. We print this number on our 150 priority rider golf cart passes, on our 60 official golf cart driver licenses and on the backs of our waterproofed campus driving maps which are tied onto golf cart steering wheels with 2 foot strings. We have six reimbursed part-time staff to cover the phone from 7:00-8:45 a.m., 8:30-12:45, 12:30-3:00, 2:45-5:45, 5:30-8:15 and 8:00-10:30 p.m. Each shift dispatcher gets at least 1/2 of a mealtime. It’s better to reimburse two golf cart service co-coordinators than to suddenly have zero coordinators one day for whatever reason.

Volunteer drivers can be found. Driving a golf cart on a nice day with the wind in your hair and a grateful, interesting conference attender by your side is one of the best volunteer jobs around. We find volunteers for the midnight movie/dance/cabaret runs and for any 6:00 a.m. shuttles to the airport. We run up to 50 volunteer drivers through a packed hour of training because golf carts can be rather primitive and dangerous beasts. We surpass every college’s golf cart safety requirements for their own work-study students.

In practice, a rider calls our Golf Cart Central number and then the shift dispatcher calls any driver in the area that might be able to pick up the rider. In practice, our drivers soon learn when to wait for large workshops to let out, when to cruise around campus looking for riders and when to call it a day.

Moving people who have picked up priority rider cards is our top priority. In 20 years we’ve never had an issue with an able-bodied person taking a priority rider card. Our second priority is moving any freight or luggage. Our third priority is moving parents with small children to children’s programs. Finally we let anybody ride. If the temperature ever approaches 100 degrees, we find that quite a few extra people are temporarily mobility-impaired.

We’ve found that mobility-impaired people love our conference because they can get full days and evenings out of it. Consequently, conference registration is up. We’ve given out as many as 120 priority rider cards at a conference.