What four words would you use to describe a community that is ideal for bicycling? What four words would you use to describe a community that is ideal for walking (or using a wheelchair)? You can provide the answers to these questions and others designed to solicit input for the Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Non-motorized Transportation Plan. What in the world is that?

Non-motorized transportation includes walking or using a wheelchair, bicycling, skating, and using pedicabs. The Non-motorized Transportation Plan, as part of the Total Mobility Plan, will serve as an update to the MPO’s Bikeway Plan of 2000 and as well as providing a plan now to address the needs of pedestrians, and other self-powered travelers. The Plan will be developed by:
•    Identifying needed improvements for the non-motorized modes;
•    Identifying areas for amenities to help create a human-scaled environment that encourages use of physically active modes;
•    Prioritizing improvements and identifying funding opportunities

A pedestrian survey and a bicycle survey are now available on the MPO Non-motorized Transportation Plan page. But July 22 is the last day to take the surveys, so hop to it. Also available is an interactive map that allows citizens to “report problem areas” or highlight “preferred routes and frequent destinations.”

Will the realization that it could come here lead to any action besides the emotionally satisfying, but ultimately useless, railing against BP and the government that has been our only response to the spill? Will the possibility of oil slicks from Miami to Maine cause us to comprehend our role in this cataclysm? Will it help us to finally understand that it’s our unrelenting demand for cheap oil that made deep water drilling a viable business proposition? Will it prompt us to take a hard look at how we have built our communities and the way we choose to travel in our daily lives?

Here’s an excellent list of 10 ways cities and towns can kick the offshore-oil habit. How many of these are we doing locally? Aside from the wonderful expansion of on-street bicycle parking, spearheaded by Sean Brandon of the City of Savannah’s Parking and Mobility Services department, the sad answer is not much. In fact, some of the ideas mentioned in the list, including increased density and reduced automobile parking, are fighting words around here! Having been shown the consequences of our oil dependency via television coverage from the Gulf of Mexico, can we now talk seriously about our problems and begin to make responsible decisions about how to make our communities sustainable and livable? Or will it take oil drifting into Wassaw Sound to get our attention?

It’s important to remember that some people don’t have that option. Because of financial, health or other reasons, bicycles are not alternative transportation, but transportation plain and simple. The rest of us, who do have the option to drive, may be curious about the beneficial aspects of riding a bike to work. If there’s one day to give it a try, it’s this Friday. National Bike-to-Work Day will be observed in Savannah with a 2Wheels 2Work bicycle convoy, sponsored by the Savannah Bicycle Campaign, The City of Savannah and the Chatham Environmental Forum. Bicycle commuters will enjoy free coffee from Jittery Joe’s and the company of other cyclists. Full details are available on the Savannah Bicycle Campaign Web site.

Healthy Savannah

A press release describes the goal of the forum “is to help people understand what factors have the greatest impact on our health in Savannah. Keynote speaker Dr. Evelyn Lewis will provide an opportunity for citizens to learn about how their health is affected by factors like public policy and the environment in which we live. Participants will also engage in active dialogue around actions we can take to improve our health individually and within the communities where we live.”

Healthy Savannah — coalition of businesses, nonprofits, healthcare agencies, governments, schools and neighborhoods — is an initiative of City of Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson formed in 2007.  It is a public/private collaboration of over 65 community organizations and growing. The community forum is sponsored by the Junior League of Savannah, The 100 Black Men of Savannah, The City of Savannah, St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System, Memorial Medical Center, GeoVista Credit Union, Savannah State University and the A Phillip Randolph Institute.

Thee vent is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the Healthy Savannah Web site or call Kimberly Pannell at (912) 658-8769.

Standing in Ellis Square yesterday evening, it was a little difficult to remember the ugly parking garage that occupied the square for decades. It was even harder to imagine more than 1,000 parking spaces below all the grass, trees and people having fun. And there were plenty of people having fun.

A ribbon cutting, staple of dedication ceremonies, followed remarks by Mayor Otis Johnson and other government officials. However, instead of sticking to the usual script in which the audience observes dignitaries cutting the ribbon, scissors were distributed to the crowd allowing the public to take part and producing hundreds of instant souvenirs of the event.

There’s a lot to like about the new Ellis Square, including the elements that make it “the most environmentally friendly of Savannah’s squares,” according to city officials. These include “water-efficient plants, energy-efficient lighting and HVAC system in the glass-walled visitors center, and a green roof on the public bathrooms.”

Truly, one of the best things going for Ellis Square is its location and the types of land uses nearby. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs describes the neighborhoods surrounding Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and how they influence the way the park is used:

“Does anything about the physical arrangement of the neighborhood affect the park physically? Yes. This mixture of uses of buildings directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times…In short, Rittenhouse Square is fairly busy continuously for the same reason that a lively sidewalk is used continuously: because of the functional physical diversity among adjacent uses, and hence diversity among users and their schedules.”

The functional diversity of adjacent uses around Ellis Square is represented by shops, restaurants, office buildings, galleries, nightclubs and hotels. These attractors will bring Jacobs’ “mixture of users” into the square at different times of day. Contrast this with Savannah’s beautiful Forsyth Park, which most folks avoid after sundown, unless a concert or other event is scheduled.

Longtime Sustainable Savannah may remember my grumbling about the fact that most of the money spent on the project went toward the parking garage, with only a fraction remaining for the square itself. I’m still not happy with how much public money we spend to provide storage for private automobiles, but I am pleased with the wonderful new public space that citizens can now enjoy.

1. Pedestrian is killed or injured on a local street that’s dangerous by design.
2. News media coverage of the incident uncritically repeats law enforcement warnings that pedestrians should use crosswalks.
3. Readers and viewers of news media coverage  jump at the chance to share stories about “stupid” pedestrians who represent “a nuisance to motorists” because they don’t use crosswalks.

One interesting thing about  WTOC-TV’s coverage was the only cursory mention of a vehicle that hit the pedestrian and left the scene. Instead of exploring that important detail, the report instead spent time blaming the pedestrian for failing to use a crosswalk that does not exist. From the transcript of the broadcast:

“Police say especially when it’s dark the real danger is not using a crosswalk. ‘He was wearing dark clothing the area here is not well lit and it’s not a crosswalk area. Our closest crosswalk is 400 to 500 yards down the road. You know without street lights and dark clothing that’s likely the driver did not see him,’ said [Garden City Police Sgt. Benji] Selph.”

Did you get that? I’ll repeat it again: “Police say especially when it’s dark the real danger is not using a crosswalk.” Sorry, that’s just not true. The real danger is the design of the street itself, which Selph helpfully describes. The crosswalks are hundreds of yards apart and the lighting is poor. And that’s not even mentioning the five lanes of high speed motor vehicle traffic dissecting an urban area in which many residents depend on their feet or bicycles for daily transportation. Crosswalks or not, as long as these factors remain unchanged, people will continue to die on Ogeechee Road. I have no doubt Selph’s advice to use crosswalks was issued with the best intentions. The design of the street, the true culprit in many pedestrian deaths, is beyond his jurisdiction. All he can do is respond to the carnage.

Still, when Selph and his colleagues instinctively repeat the “use crosswalks” mantra, it automatically becomes part of almost every single local news story on pedestrian deaths. Thus, the pedestrian shoulders the blame, even when the closest crosswalk is five football fields away. Do we really expect normal people to walk this far out of the way to cross the street? Really? In a community where able-bodied people feel entitled to park on sidewalks (and usually do so without attracting any attention from law enforcement agencies) in order to save a couple steps?

It appears that we do expect people who walk to endure all sorts of inconveniences we’d never tolerate. And every news story that blames pedestrians for dying on streets that are dangerous by design fuels the unreasonable anger toward people who walk. It reinforces the idea that pedestrians are the problem even when they are not. And it endorses an unfortunate way of thinking about the design of our streets and the behavior of the people who use them, as described in this piece called The Taming of The Motorcar, which was forwarded to me today by a kind Sustainable Savannah reader:

“It is felt that by training the members of the human population, buy teaching them certain tricks, like walking at ‘green’ and stopping at ‘red,’ by putting them behind fences or chains along curbs, their spirit of individuality and independence can be broken so that they will be willing to submit to the regime of the automotive beings.”

Thankfully, that kind of thinking — while still popular among many motorists here in Savannah — was directly contradicted today  by a new United States Department of Transportation Policy Statement. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood described this as the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized. The key recommendations for state departments of transportation  and communities include:

•    Treat walking and bicycling as equals with other transportation modes.
•    Ensure convenient access for people of all ages and abilities.
•    Go beyond minimum design standards.
•    Collect data on walking and biking trips.
•    Set a mode share target for walking and bicycling.
•    Protect sidewalks and shared-use paths the same way roadways are protected
•    Improve nonmotorized facilities during maintenance projects.

Following these recommendations will not only reduce pedestrian deaths and injuries, they will create healthy and vibrant communities. And that’s something no amount of warning people to use crosswalks will accomplish.

Forgive the use of this obvious and overused phrase: Americans have very special relationships with their cars. But it’s true and a couple things I read this week reminded me of this.

First, this letter to the editor of the Savannah Morning News (scroll down to “Safe driving a personal responsibility”) that acknowledges the danger of texting while driving, but warns  we should keep government our of our cars.

“People can do what they want while they drive. The state representatives cannot stop anyone from reading and responding to text messages. It is neither their phone nor their car, so they should back off.”

Of course we can do anything we want while we drive. Isn’t that in the constitution or something? But why limit it to cars? I’d like to ride down the middle of Broughton Street on the back of my moderately tame grizzly bear while swinging my baseball bat. Also, I will be blindfolded. While I don’t mean to intentionally hurt anyone, I understand that my bear could maul a bystander and that my bat could conk someone on the head. Still, it’s my bear, my bat and my blindfold. So back off!

If we get government out of our cars, what should they be doing? Our letter writer knows:

“I can understand them feeling responsible for what goes on, but they should be taking care of more important things like fixing roads, helping people who need jobs and insurance, and the necessities that the state has to deal with.”

It is important to note that “fixing roads” is code that usually means widening them to five lanes or more without any consideration given to road users who do not travel in cars. These “fixed” roads are dangerous by design. Two local teenagers were serioulsy injured on one such road this week. At least our letter writer can take solace in the fact that our elected officials are taking care of more important things, like drafting laws that punish drivers who fail to speed.

As reported by the Savannah Bicycle Campaign last week,  The Savannah-Chatham County Metropolitan Planning Commission and the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority are holding a three-day public workshop and charrette “to examine feasibility of removal of the I-16 exit ramps at Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and Montgomery Street, and to address redevelopment along the 52-block corridor.” The event is scheduled for Feb. 17, 18 and 19 at the Con-Ed Resource Center Ball Room, 714 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. A flier for this event can be downloaded here.

Eric Curl wrote about the potential for flyover removal in the Savannah Morning News last year. He quoted Lise Sundrla of the SDRA commenting about the economic impacts of the flyover:

“There are social and cultural reasons that support the removal,” Sundrla said. “From an economic perspective, (property values) drop drastically from south of the flyover to the north.”

And Christian Sottile described how removal of flyover would position the city relative to other communities grappling with the negative effects of highways on urban areas.

“The flyover would be another model project,” Sottile said. “In this point in history (its removal) would place Savannah in vanguard of cities reclaiming their urban centers from world of high-speed travel.”

All sessions are open to the public. For more information, call Ellen Harris, I-16 Study Project Manager, 651-1482; or Lise Sundrla, (SDRA)  at 651-6973.

Landers describes the study’s methodology, which uses a variety of data sources “to come up with a block-by-block analysis of how convenient it is to choose fresh and healthy over fatty and fast. The group calculated a ‘food balance’ score for each city block by dividing the distance from it to any mainstream food provider (such as Kroger) by the distance to any fringe food venue (such as McDonald’s).”

The story  notes that lack of healthy food options is not exlusive to low income, inner city neighborhoods:

Kathryn Martin, chair of Healthy Savannah, knows that from first-hand experience. She’s lived in Southbridge since she moved to Savannah six years ago. “Southbridge is considered affluent, but when I moved there the closest place to access healthy food was 7 miles away in Pooler,” said Martin, a former administrator of the Chatham County Health Department who now is the Medical College of Georgia assistant dean for Southeast Georgia campus. “Officially, I was in a food desert.”

The difference, of course, between affluent communities such as Southbridge and some other neighborhoods is that nearly everyone in Southbridge has access to a car (sometimes more than one car) and thus easy access to healthy food. In other parts of Savannah, where residents depend on public transportation to travel outside their neighborhoods, the food that’s easy to find is often not the healthiest choice. And the study addresses this in one of its recommendations:

Identify traffic routes, especially pedestrian pathways, to mainstream food venues and identify ways to shorten and improve those routes. The dot maps showing the locations of mainstream and fringe food venues will aid in prioritizing where to start on this task.

The study, “A New Day in the Garden: A Food Desert and Food Balance Analysis in Savannah, Georgia,” can be downloaded here.

WTOC’s story hinted that the next area of expansion would be to apartment complexes. A worthy goal for sure, but there’s tons more room for additional progress. From The New Home Economics blog today comes news of a “pay as you throw” garbage hauler in Minnesota that charges based on the weight of trash. That way, folks who generate more trash pay more to have it trucked to the landfill. Meanwhile, an incentive is provided to those who recycle, compost and consider packaging and other waste disposal impacts before making purchases. Charging by weight instead of flat fee also allows the use of  smaller trucks.