NMT

I felt blindsided by the readings put out by the US DOT because they paint a picture of all the benefits of bicycle and pedestrian planning and how to do it, but the comments in class point out how difficult it is to actually work with the DOT to get any of these things done. That’s frustrating on so many levels, but based on other comments in class it became clear that it’s also possible, with enough citizen initiative, to get the DOT (NCDOT in this case) to move forward with bicycle planning as was the case earlier this year with the Asheville bike plan. It’s this class commentary that allows me to see the reality of different aspects of planning which is a great complement to the readings.

One question I had that I didn’t ask in class was if there were any known examples of communities that took bicycle planning into their own hands after being frustrated by agonizingly slow government and stubborn governmental agencies. Once I thought more about it though I realized you can’t really work outside of government on this sort of thing because you’re working with public land. I’m sure there are aspects of bike planning that get contracted out to private agencies, but the government does have to be intimately involved.

The documents put out by the World Bank were very surprising for me, but I appreciate the efforts of the World Bank to encourage NMT planning (which I is the first time I’ve said I appreciate the World Bank so it was a revelation for me). I had not considered the thought that developing nations would have planned for NMT. I had the impression that masses of people in China and India just took their lives in their hands by sharing roads with motorized transit and this does appear to be the case in many cities. I was pleasantly surprised to read about plans for bicycling in Bogota and South Africa, but thought about my friend who grew up in Colombia and was not allowed to learn how to ride a bike because it was something only boys did. One of the articles addressed this issue, albeit in a short paragraph about women and bicycling. It was a particularly disturbing to think about half of the population not being included in this type of transport, and I think it would be interesting to learn more about the social and cultural norms surrounding bicycling in counties like Colombia and India and China.