Archive for January 20th, 2009

Trying saying that quickly four times in a row!

But it comes via Kris Peeters, a mobility consultant for the city of Antwerp (and author of ‘Voorruitperspectief. Wegen van impliciet autodenken,’ or ‘Windscreen perspective: ways of implicit thinking on cars’, a book unfortunately available only in Dutch), who had written in to elucidate on the situation in Belgium (readers of the book will know that I puzzled over the country’s poor road safety record in comparison to neighboring Netherlands, and even France).

He notes that Belgium’s fatalities actually have been dropping:

“The number of people killed in traffic accidents decreased since 2001. In 2000 the number was 1470, in 2007 it was 1067. Most specialists think the explanation is double. First of all in 2003 “tariffs” for traffic offences have been raised substantially. Secondly the Flemish government (northern part of the country) started installing lots of “speed traps” (the word!) and reduced maximum speed limits significantly (most ‘regional roads’ previously had a speed limit of 90km/h, now it’s 70
km/h).

But, he adds:

The last few years however the decrease of deaths and injuries seems to have stopped due to a hesitating safety policy: some of the fine tariffs have been reconsidered (and even canceled) and efforts done for enforcement are rather ambiguous.”

He also points me to a Flemish program, referenced in the subject line above:

In 2001 the Flemish Parliament introduced the STOP-principle (and since then it was officially adopted by many towns, e.g. Antwerp). In Dutch it is an acronym: “Stappers-Trappers-Openbaar Vervoer-Privévervoer” (S T O P), in English untranslatable as such: “Pedestrians-Bikers-Public Transport - Private Cars”. The principle says that when designing a new street or road the concept should respect the STOP-order: first we should check the interests of the Pedestrians, than those of the bikers — and so on. Of course the principle remains theory in most cases, but the symbolic worth of it can not be overestimated.

The Congress for New Urbanism is circulating a petition:

When a bridge collapsed in Minnesota in 2007, Americans were shocked to learn that thousands of bridges across the country were rated “structurally deficient.”

Fill out the fields below to send a strong message to the new Congress demanding accountability in the economic recovery package.

Sign the petition here.

The Guardian has a slide-show of unsold car stocks around the world, arrayed in vast, serial forms, troubling landscapes of overaccumulation. Like the image of the Los Angeles ports above, which I retrieved via Google Earth, they seem like some strange take on Ed Ruscha’s parking lots. Ruscha saw those lots as a “a machine for the production of oil-spots,” a fleeting and abstract residual artistic form. The cars in these photos are more interesting in the fact that they are still there, rather than what they have left behind.

(hat tip to things magazine)