Category: Uncategorized

Truxel Bridge on STAR

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STAR, Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders, has created several posts on Truxel Bridge, the City of Sacramento effort to add a motor vehicle, transit, walking and bicycling bridge over the American River in alignment with Truxel Road. The STAR interest is that the original bridge proposal, approved by Sacramento County under the American River Parkway Plan and by SacRT, was for a bridge that carried light rail, walking and bicycling, not motor vehicles.

View these posts, and likely more to come in the future, on STAR at category ‘Truxel Bridge‘.

summer in the mountains

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I spend much of my summer in the mountains, backpacking, so this blog will be pretty inactive until August. I may have a chance to catch up on some topics, but may not.

One of the interesting effects I notice going back and forth between backpacking and hiking in the mountains, and bicycling in town, is that it uses different muscle groups! Though each keeps me in pretty decent overall condition, I do get sore and adjusting muscles going back and forth.

When I go backpacking, I generally take Amtrak (train and/or bus) to Truckee, and then get closer to where I’m going on TART and BlueGo. The west shore shuttle, called the Emerald Bay Trolley this year, takes me close to several trailheads, and also makes connections from the south shore to the north shore. Most of my trips are in the Granite Chief Wilderness, which is off the northwest side of Lake Tahoe, the Desolation Wilderness off the southwest side, the Mokelumne Wilderness south of the Tahoe basin, and of course the Tahoe Rim Trail. To some degree, all of these locations are accessible by public transportation.

On a day in between backpack trips, yesterday, I went to San Francisco for Sunday Streets. This event was in Golden Gate Park and along The Great Highway. It is fun to bicycle along streets and roads closed to motor vehicles, but these long routes don’t have the connections to local businesses and local people that other locales such as The Mission have, and so for me, are a bit less fun. The next Sunday Streets event on Sunday, July 28, is The Mission, which is along Valencia and 24th Streets in the Mission district. Go!

Blogs I read

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I read one transportation blog religiously: StreetsBlog. The four sub-blogs, for New York, where it originated, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Capitol Hill, generate their own blog posts, but also serve as an aggregator for transportation blog over North America, and to a small degree the world. The news is of very local issues, as specific as neighborhoods and streets, city, state, regional, and national issues. Some are serious, some irreverent. Some are offered by advocacy organizations, some by professional planners, some with academic expertise, and some by interested individuals.

Among the blogs linked from StreetsBlog that I often click through to are Kaid Benfeld on NRDC’s Switchboard, The Transport Politic, Grist, and How We Drive. Kaid, as well as some other bloggers on Switchboard, cover the political, environmental, and livability aspects of transportation, and the Transport Politic covers similar ground but is written by a planner, Yonah Freemark. Grist addresses environmental issues through several bloggers, including a former editor at StreetsBlog, Ellie Blue. How We Drive is by Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), probably the best book I’ve read on the culture of driving. I’m sure you’ll find something interesting on StreetsBlog.

And while you are there, click on over to StreetFilms, a wonderful collection of short and entertaining spots on improving transportation system and livability.

Let me know what blogs interest you!

Getting started

Dan Allison1 Comment

As I ride my bike and use transit, and even to some degree as I walk, I think about our transportation system. In part this is my job, as a Safe Routes to School Coordinator, to observe, document, and reflect on the patterns of traffic and human behavior. But is is also just part of how I relate to the world. I believe that the two most important activities we do in our lives, for their impact on the earth, are eating and getting around. Eating is something I very much enjoy, but don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. Getting around is.

I’ve been living in Sacramento since April 2011, but there was a long period of transition as I left Carson City. There was also a long period of transition in becoming car-free. I’ll have more to say about being car-free in the future, but it has already faded into the background for me. I spend much more time thinking about how I get around than on the fact that I have no car and rarely drive.

This blog will collect my thoughts about how our transportation system works in Sacramento, both for me and for other people. Just so you know, I don’t think the system works very well. A system designed to give priority to the personal motor vehicle doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for us personally, it doesn’t work for us as a society, and it most certainly does not work for our relationship with the earth. We are killing the earth for our own convenience, and I feel strongly that we must stop.

I have a personal blog (link at right) on which I’ve posted a bit about transportation issues, and I’ll link back to those posts here and sometimes cross-post, but most of what will show up here is transportation ideas I’ve had rattling around for some time, and reactions to the day-to-day joy and challenge of getting around.