mattotoole

Fewer than 1000 votes are needed to get "Promote Bicycle Transportation" into the final round of voting for "10 Best Ideas For America" at Change.Org. Please cast your vote before tomorrow:

https://www.change.org/ideas/view/promote_bicycle_transportation

Change.Org is a web-based, national pubic input campaign by the incoming administration.

vgXhc

The voting process seems to be somewhat problematic. By promoting only the top-3 proposals from each category (or "cause", as they call it) into the second round, the decision into which category to put a proposal becomes highly significant. As there is no "transportation" category, the person making the proposal has put it into the "other" category -- thus requiring many more votes. Had it been placed in "global warming," for example, the current number of votes would have already been enough to carry it to the second round.
Well, maybe it'll get enough votes anyway but I somehow doubt it, as "fewer than 1000 votes" actually means "more than the amount of votes it already got." Too bad.

Doohickie

Welcome to politics, vgXhc. The whole point is that there are not enough resources to do all the wonderful things one would like, so you have to pick and choose. No matter what method is used, it will be problematic.

ROJA

The website appears to have problems. It won't let me click on the "Vote" button (it is not a link) and it gives me a server error when I attempt to sign up for an account. Has anyone else been able to vote? If so, how?

mattotoole

It was indeed slow this morning, the widget not loading on our site properly, but it seems OK now. Keep trying! As of right now, only 40 votes to go!

Engyo

Freudian or what?

ChipSeal

I don't want the federal government doing anything that has do with local bicycle issues. We can screw it up just fine by ourselves!

JinbaIttai

+1. Not voting. Not to mention I disagree with several causes on that website.

mattotoole

Your local yokels wouldn't be screwing it up so badly if federal transportation dollars came with smartly-tied strings, like mandatory Complete Streets policies, etc.

CB HI

What do you guys expect from the Democrats for "change" and they do not even know what change they want before the election.

Now they cannot even get a web site running right.

CB HI

You mean like the mandatory Complete Streets, that come with the mandatory use, door zone bike lanes?

ChipSeal

Funny how congress thinks they know the situation on our local streets better than our traffic engineers! Pretty good eyesight those folks have!

-=(8)=-

Traffic Engineers are owned by developers. Their interests have nothing to do with
a bicyclists or any vulnerable users best interests.

randya

they don't even have a specific category for transportation policy, that's pretty lame.

ChipSeal

And congress does?

gerv 

I looked up some info on these policies at https://www.completestreets.org/faq.html#Basic

Seems to be an interesting effort aimed at making streets more livable generally. I thought there might be more specific suggestions, but I guess that would be asking a lot. One thing about its implementation interested me:

I guess this data might be a bit old considering what's been happing recently. I actually never thought about the property value of having streets that you could let your kids wander out on. But... in thinking it through... it makes perfect sense that property values would rise in these area.

thanks for pointing this out.

gerv 

Actually, as I read on there are a lot of good suggestions. https://www.completestreets.org/early.html.

There are a bunch of pdfs that offer some good guidelines for local traffic people.

randya

I think you underestimate a bit much Chip. If congress appropriates the money with appropriate conditions attached and the locals are competent, very good things can happen. of course mistakes can also happen, but IMO attempting to take positive steps in the right direction is always better than doing nothing, and there's some risk in every venture.