When employers provide — and pay for — guaranteed parking spots, employees are more likely to drive to work. That’s obvious and the reason Donald Shoup came up with the idea for the parking cash-out law adopted by California (read about it in this excerpt from DRIVE that ran in the Toronto Star). Now Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the excellent Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), makes a strong case that if employers provided better parking for bikes, more people would cycle to work.
In his smart essay on Slate.com about the need for cities to invest in more and better parking for bicycles, Vanderbilt looks at some of the effective steps some cities are taking. Portland, not surprisingly, is a leader among US cities, but others are making intelligent moves. New York City, for example, “passed a bill mandating that commercial parking garages provide spaces for bicycles — one bike space for every 10 cars, up to 200 cars.”
He also points out that commuters would be reluctant to drive to work “if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking.”
I recommend reading this blog post — called “Smart growth must become more demanding, more community-oriented, and greener (literally)” — from Kaid Benfield, the director of the Smart Growth Program in Washington, DC. He makes the case, with photos, that density is not enough, we need to insist on density, diversity and design. “We in the smart growth movement need to become much more discriminating in what we support and what we don’t,” he writes. “In particular, we must stop applauding density per se and start advocating what my friend David Crossley, president and founder of the great organization Houston Tomorrow, calls the right kind of density — a built landscape that respects and improves upon its neighborhood instead of overpowering it.”
More on how Quebec is going to lead Canada in the right-to-die debate: 77 percent of the people in that province support legalizing euthanasia, according to a recent Angus Reid poll and this Montreal Gazette article.
Over the years, polls have consistently shown that across the country support for assisted suicide is about 70 percent. Two years ago, 84 percent of people in Quebec were in favour of assisted suicide and it would be interesting to see what that number would be today. I suspect that using the term “euthanasia” instead of “assisted suicide” generates very different results.