Redwood City Forward

An important program to make e-bikes more affordable!

E-Bike Purchase Incentives - CalBike CalBike's $10M E-Bike Affordability Program will provide grants to help 10,000 Californians afford the best green transportation: e-bikes.

Our state and city have made great strides in housing production and equity. But it’s important to remember what the antecedents of exclusionary zoning are: rent seeking, exclusion and segregation.

NIMBYism is Segregation Persisting On housing restrictions as the latest phase in the struggle against America’s tendencies towards becoming a closed access order.

Scooters have come to Redwood City! Whee!

Two preeminent climate scientists have written about the importance of housing near transit in the fight against climate change. It's an absolute banger.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/05/31/opinion-denser-housing-at-bart-stations-is-climate-smart

Absolutely amazing.

A fun event!

Grab your bike & join us, County Supervisor Joe Simitian, Mayor of Mountain View Lucas Ramirez, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, & Housing Trust Silicon Valley for an affordable housing tour by bike! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wheelie-home-2022-tickets-329025372747

It’s amazing to see a transportation secretary not only admit to the problem of our nation’s deadly roads, but devote real resources to safety improvements.

We have a crisis on our streets. Far too many of our families, friends and loved ones have been impacted by the tragic results of traffic crashes.

We are deploying resources to help fix this. Starting today, funding is available through the Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which will provide up to $6 billion over five years for communities of all sizes to make their streets safer.

We know that traffic fatalities are happening at an outsized rate in rural and tribal communities. That's why we are making it as easy as possible for smaller communities and tribal governments to apply for these funds. Go to https://www.transportation.gov/SS4A to learn how. Together, we can save lives.

A bipartisan Wall Street Journal op-Ed calls for an end to exclusionary zoning and outdated land use policies such as parking minimums which drive up the cost of housing, encourage automobile dependence, restrict opportunity and throttle the economy.

Opinion | America Needs More Houses The shortage is caused by a combination of zoning and financing rules and supply-chain constraints.

The evolution of transportation.

These are pictures of public plazas in Europe that were used for car parking as recently as 2004 and a child in a municipal parking garage in the US. A city that can figure out how to prioritize people over cars in the public sphere will be quieter, healthier, safer and more beautiful, interesting and prosperous than cities which center storage for empty 3-ton steel boxes.

Europe used to have higher rates of traffic fatalities than the United States. And American cities used to be just as walkable and human centered as European cities. Because prior to the 1940s *all* cities and towns were human centered.

Safe streets are a choice. And that means that continued road deaths and injuries are also a choice.

Petrichor on Twitter “ They fought hard to get it, against rigid and determined opposition. Here's an extract from a film about the early days of the struggle for cycling infrastructure https://t.co/3fCoCsX6eW”

Are we really going to let Fayetteville, Arkansas beat us to it?

This is awesome, but coastal California cities should be the leaders in evidence based policy.

No Minimum Parking Requirements? No Problem for Fayetteville, Arkansas - Sightline Institute In 2015, the city council of Fayetteville, Arkansas, adopted a radical but simple idea: do away with minimum parking mandates and let businesses decide for themselves how much parking they need. The average person walking down the main drag of Dickson Street might be surprised to learn that this gro...

If democratic strongholds lived up to their professed values, California would be the happiest place on earth. But blue states are the most inequitable on housing policy, education funding and segregation (which is a direct product of housing policy) and progressive taxation. Let’s walk our talk.

Opinion | Blue States, You’re the Problem Why do states with Democratic majorities fail to live up to their values?

Land use policy is energy policy, climate policy , transportation policy, equity policy and health policy.

Compact cities with bountiful housing, centered on people rather than cars are better on every possible metric. Except maybe free/cheap parking.

Running a bus down a big wide road doesn’t make it “transit centric.” Wide, multi-lane roads like Woodside, El Camino Real and Veterans are designed for maximum automobile throughput and speed. This means that people living along them are exposed to higher levels of air and noise pollution and that these streets are less pleasant and more dangerous for anyone outside of a car.

If we want equity, we can either make these streets truly transit centric (eg, restrict automobile traffic and widen and improve sidewalks, bike lanes and e-transit service) or we can concetrate new housing away from these hazards.

Small, inexpensive changes make a huge difference in safety. Especially for people who are harder to see, like children or those walking at night. Safety for all road users should be the design standard for our streets.

For decades, our transportation system has prioritized the convenience of people driving over the lives of people walking, biking or on transit. We are all pedestrians at some point, either at the beginning and end of life or going from a bus, train or car to our destination.

Redwood City can be a child first, people first city.

Let’s bust the myth: a car-friendly neighborhood isn’t a child-friendly neighborhood DC is in many ways a pro-child city. But one area where the District and many other cities could perform better is designing public spaces that prioritize children over cars.

As droughts become more frequent and more severe, it's probably worth considering what types of housing use the most water. Multi-family housing uses a fraction of the water per household that a single family home uses and the denser the housing the less water per household we use.

SB9 and SB10 have passed the California Assembly with strong margins.

“Mobility in cities is about space.” - Brent Toderian

Brent Toderian on Twitter “A bike-lane moved 2.5X as many people as a regular traffic lane in a study, & given that they are half the width, the study concluded that bike-lanes are 5X as efficient as vehicle traffic lanes. HT Mobility in cities is about space. https://t.co/RExumvhxAY”