my perception has been substantiated.

“San Diego is one of the darkest cities in the country,” Hamilton said. “It’s a big mystery to me why that is. We’ve worked for years to get the city to fund more streetlights. The policies have been changed in places that are higher in crime and near transit stops.”

While the city allocates $200,000 per year to installing new lighting, the request backlog totals $20 million. Rather than wait for city funding, WalkSanDiego encourages communities to form maintenance assessment districts to finance lighting needs.

also: “San Diego is in the top three to five in the country in terms of the percent of traffic fatalities that involve pedestrians. The national average is 12 to 13 percent and ours is 20 to 25 percent,” Hamilton, WalkSanDiego’s co-founder, said.

sd uptown news, 15.04.10.

latimes, 26.09.11.

There was an article from somewhere else a little while ago that said the same thing.

Sometimes when I spit into the sink I notice a little grey/dark bit.
Usually I attribute this to smoking.

But I don’t do that frequently.
… maybe it’s the black carbon I’ve inhaled from auto exhaust??

ughh..

Sometimes when I go out for a ride and am trying to go real quick somewhere, I think to myself, “breathin’ tailpipe!” 

as a way of confronting the fact that I’m doing my part to reduce my carbon footprint/ghg emissions, through an activity that forces me to put my health and safety at risk. (not like driving doesn’t have its own healthy and safety hazards, but you know what I mean.)

f—ing hell.
San Diego’s (and everywhere else) has got to get physically separated bike lanes. 

because if you have nothing, it’s best to do it right and get the complete deal that really works. Rather than make super slow, spotty incremental improvements that will need an overhaul later.

humanscalecities:

I recently discovered a fascinating story covered in the blog The Urban Country.

As shown in the photograph —the cover of the San Francisco Call—, thousands of protesters in 1896 (100,000 people, according to the newspaper, this is critical mass —  gathered to protest against the invasion of an appliance at that time was beginning to gain prominence in the street, the private car. Market Street, the main artery of the Californian city and currently under review, was suffering from the growing excesses to make room for the car and demonstrators demanded to turn the street to its previous design.

This might be undoubtedly one of the very first protests in favor of the bike and one of the first signs of social awareness of the massive influx of private vehicles on the streets. All background information can be found in The Great Bicycle Protest of 1896. A good story, no doubt.

The protest was not directed against the car as a priority, indeed. The aim was to defend the role of the bicycle as a vehicle for progress, once in the second half of the nineteenth century American cities discovered this “new” way for  transportation and quickly became popular.This rise had to gain a foothold among other modes of transport prior to the generalization of the car, such as carriages, cable cars and trams. The Good Roads movement wanted to dignify the streets and allow the increasingly diverse ways that were occupying it. The march tried to lobby against new rules seeking to corner the bike, as its wide presence was beginning to generate problems of coexistence due to its high level of use. 

theurbancountry, 19.07.11.