Traffic

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1. 

   Deborah Fulghieri

    /  September 9, 2019

   A similar idea about parking lots directs parking spots to be made too narrow to accommodate anything but subcompact cars, so that people will exchange their pickup trucks and minivans for smaller cars. The idea has logical incentives: why doesn’t it work?

   The town planning department purposely omitted space for mass transit in the Ephesus-15-501 area that hosts thousands of apartments. I had to assume that, like the absence of affordable housing requirements and 7-story stick-built construction in the FBC zone, it was to save money for developer-clients. I concluded that transit-friendly, like affordable housing and bicycle-friendly, are expressions for changing the subject or veneering a sense of benevolence over such projects.

   May I add that I live near a “Chapel Hill – Bicycle-Friendly Town” sign at the very spot where two cyclists were killed by a hit-and-run (never solved), up the road from where a man walking in front of his own house was struck and killed by a driver (the victim deemed to have “failed to give way to a vehicle”). The town usually installs a streetlight or two where a traffic death occurs to prevent another one, at the very least.