At its meeting on Wednesday, The Tucson-Pima County Bicycle Advisory Committee voted to support the creation of a distracted driving ordinance in the City of Tucson and encourage other jurisdictions to enact their own distracted driving law.
According to draft meeting minutes the motion passed unanimously with two abstentions.
The BAC said they would support a ban that would be a primary law, meaning police officers would be able to pull over a driver for texting rather than waiting for a driver to violate another law.
The Tucson City Council is considering a ban on text messaging within the city limits and decided to continue discussing the law in the coming weeks.
KOLD has a good story about the ban. Check it out.
Bicycle staffing in the city
The BAC passed a motion urging the Tucson City Council and transportation director to increase the city bicycle staffing level.
Currently Tom Thivener, the bicycle and pedestrian program manager, is the only Tucson employee working on bicycling projects. At this point only 75 percent of his time is spent on bike-related planning.
According to a presentation to the BAC, the American Association of Bicycle and Pedestrians Professionals publishes a report every year about to the number of city staff full time employees working within the Departments of Transportation. Currently Tucson is ranked 25th in the number of employees despite having the sixth highest level of bike commuters.
According to the presentation, studies have shown cities with more employees see faster gains in bike riding.
The BAC’s motion said the group recognized the correlation between higher staffing levels and increased ridership and urged the city to add more employees to work on bicycling.
Can someone tell me what that said please? I couldn’t read the entire article ’cause I was texting. What about BAC?
http://tucson12.tv/programs/MayorandCouncil/index.php?view=MSS110911lo&p=1&viewhi=MSS110911hi&p=1
To hear the Mayor and Council Study Session, where they discussed the proposed texting while driving ban, go to 3 minutes, 30 seconds in.
There should be 100 Tom Thivener’s working for the city! 😀
The elephant in the room is Tucson’s high poverty rate. Face it, poor people can’t afford fancy-dancy bikes and all those oh-so-essential accessories.
Yet they ride.
We see them on major roads and side streets, pedaling away on clunkers that are long past their prime. They’re usually wearing work clothes, and by this I mean work of the hot and sweaty variety. I’ve even seen them using their hard hats as bike helmets
They, too, should be part of the discussion about bicycling in Tucson.
I don’t see the need at all to couch cyclists as poor people or those with “fancy-dancy bikes and all those oh-so-essential accessories.” In fact, such commentary sounds pretty elitist or at least smug.
All cyclists on the road, riding legally, share the same risks. It doesn’t matter the bike, the clothes, or the social status. We are all at risk from people texting while driving and from people talking cell phones while driving, and by all, I mean cyclists and drivers.
I didn’t realize that it was so important to some what some people wear or what they don’t wear when considering whether they worthy of joining the conversation. Silly me thought that all cyclists had vested interest in making the roads safer for cycling. Silly me.