Delaware 2013 Bicycle Friendly State “Report Card”
Between May of 1997 and March of 2008 (over 10 years), Delaware’s unemployment rate was between 3 and 4%. But for the last four years, unemployment has stubbornly...
We know what we want. And it all comes back to the “Bike and Pedestrian Improvements” program authorization for the Delaware Department of Transportation. We...
by Melissa Nann Burke The News Journal February 15, 2013 Relatively few Delaware workers commute by bike, but they might reconsider when cyclists are whizzing...
How we got off the pedestrian path -
By Tom Vanderbilt|Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2012, at 6:28 AM ET – A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a “Pedestrian Safety” panel was being held.
The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based transportation planner whose firm, as his website notes, “specializes in creating walkable and bikeable streets.” Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me since. Taking stock of the event—one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant attention at traffic safety conferences—he wondered about that inescapable word: pedestrian. If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, “Here comes a pedestrian”?
Of course we wouldn’t. That approaching figure would simply be a person. Pedestrian is a word born from opposition to other modes of travel; the Latin pedester, on foot, gained currency by its semantic tension with equester, on horse. But there is an implied—indeed, synonymous—pejorative. This dates from Ancient Greece. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, the Greek πεζός meant “prosaic, plain, commonplace, uninspired (sometimes contrasted with the winged flight of Pegasus).” Or, in the Latin, pedester could refer to foot soldiers (e.g, peons), “rather than cavalry.” [More ...]
Above/Below: Rt.273 at Red Mill Road, Ogletown. DelDOT is actively adding crosswalks at strategic locations around Delaware, but many remain dangerously unregulated. Even without sidewalks leading up, this intersection is used by bicyclists and pedestrians bridging the gap between Chestnut Hill Estates and Harmony Woods, and has no safety features to accommodate them.
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[...] this one would make it easier for walkable corner stores to set up shop in city neighborhoods. And Bike Delaware, inspired by Tom Vanderbilt’s recent article on America’s walking crisis in Slate, turns a [...]
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-get-the-fuck-outta-the-road-program-aims-to-in,2442/