Are Your Streets Safe for Pedestrians?

We are encouraging people to walk more and more for various reasons such as health benefits,to decrease car congestion, decrease CO² emissions, decrease use of fossil fuels the over all socio-economic benfits are huge. http://www.walkinginfo.org/why/benefits.cfm

But are your streets safe for additional pedestrian traffic? The walking population is growing due to various initiaitives such as Safe Routes to School http://www.saferoutesinfo.org/ , initiatives by the EPA to decrease use of cars thus reducing CO² emissions and fossil fule usage,and address growing health concerns of our population.

The Obama Adminsitration has increased funding for walking and biking initiatives to $1.2B. Monies will be spent to enhance and extend the non-car modes of transportation intrastructure such as buses, high speed rail, walking and bike paths.

Americans want and need safe alternatives to driving," Ray LaHood, transportation secretary under Obama, said in a statement. "By making biking and walking safer and more accessible, we'll be able to provide Americans with more choices and help foster more active, livable communities."

Community leaders have you accessed your streets for safety for this growing walking and biking population?

Let’s review some simple accessment tools you can use.

Develop a safe walking task group madeof citizens young and old, engineers,planners, decision makers,and safety professionals.

Utilization of the PEDSAFE,Pedestrian Safety Guilde and Countermeasure Selction System. http://www.walkinginfo.org/pedsafe/about.cfm This contains all the information about the program with a short discussion below..

Pedestrians Most at Risk

Crash involvement rates (crashes per 100,000 people) are the highest for 5- to 9-year-old males, who tend to dart out into the street. This problem may be compounded by the fact that speeds are frequently a problem in areas where children are walking and playing. In general, males are more likely to be involved in a crash than females; in 2003, 69 percent of pedestrian fatalities were male, and the male pedestrian injury rate was 58 percent higher than for females.2Rates for older persons (age 65 and over) are lower than for most age groups, which may reflect greater caution by older pedestrians (e.g., less walking at night, fewer dart-outs) and a reduced amount of walking near traffic. However, older adult pedestrians are much more vulnerable to serious injury or death when struck by a motor vehicle than younger pedestrians. For example, the percentage of pedestrian crashes resulting in death exceeds 20 percent for pedestrians over age 75, compared to less than 8 percent for pedestrians under age 14.3,4

Our sidewalks are shared by many; see below. The furniture/planter zone may also need to accommodate snow storage thus taking away from the actual pedestrian zone.

Below some of the Pedestrian zone has been taken by car overhang thus potentially making this walking area unsafe.

A solution for this would be the installation of car stops/wheel stops to prevent this overhang.

Education needs to be stepped up about pedestrian and bike safety in the United States. Other countries have been walking and cycling for years.
The neglect of pedestrian and bicycling safety has made walking and cycling dangerous ways of getting around American cities. Walking and cycling can be made quite safe, however, as clearly shown by the much lower fatality and injury rates in The Netherlands and Germany. There is no good reason why American cities could not adopt many of the same measures to enhance safety. The necessary methods and technology are already available, with decades of successful experience in Europe.
read more http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/461679_6

Traffic Calming of Residential Neighborhoods

Traffic calming limits the speeds of motor vehicle traffic, both by law -- 30 km per hour (19 mph) or less -- and through physical barriers such as raised intersections and crosswalks, traffic circles, road narrowing, zigzag routes, curves, speed humps, and artificial dead ends created by midblock street closures.[10] Traffic calming gives pedestrians, bicyclists, and playing children as much right to use residential streets as motor vehicles; indeed, motor vehicles are required to yield to these other users. In both The Netherlands [41] and Germany, traffic calming is area-wide and not for isolated streets. That ensures that faster through traffic gets displaced to arterial routes designed to handle it and not simply shifted from one local road to another.

The most important safety impact of traffic calming is the reduced speeds of motor vehicles. This is crucial not only to the motorist's ability to avoid hitting pedestrians and bicyclists but also to the survival of nonmotorists in a crash. The British Department of Transport, for example, found that the risk of pedestrian death in crashes rises from 5% at 20 mph to 45% at 30 mph and 85% at 40 mph.[42]

Area-wide traffic calming in Dutch neighborhoods has reduced traffic accidents by 20% to 70%.[43] Traffic calming in German neighborhoods has reduced traffic injuries overall by 20% to 70% and serious traffic injuries by 35% to 56%.[44] A comprehensive review of traffic calming impacts in Denmark, Great Britain, Germany, and The Netherlands found that traffic injuries fell by an average of 53% in traffic-calmed neighborhoods.[45] In short, traffic calming greatly reduces the danger of traffic deaths and injuries in residential neighborhoods. Traffic calming greatly improves not only pedestrian safety but also the safety of bicycling, since much bike use -- especially by children -- is in residential neighborhoods.
Read more http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/461679

“Traffic calming has its origins in the Dutch "Woonerf" schemes of the 1970's, and since then has been further extended and refined throughout northern Europe, but particularly in Germany and the Netherlands.

“The concept of traffic calming is fundamentally concerned with reducing the adverse impact of motor vehicles on built up areas. This usually involves reducing vehicle speeds, providing more space for pedestrians and cyclists, and improving the local environment.

The original "Woonerf" schemes introduced the concept of shared space between vehicle and pedestrian. Streets were reconstructed so as to tip the balance in favour of the residential function of the street and to reduce the domination of motor vehicles. Speed humps, chicanes, road narrowing, planting and other measures were introduced to both physically and visually reinforce the message that the motorist is only a guest in the area and that the residential function takes priority.

Traffic calming techniques are now applied to whole areas of towns and not just to individual streets. Main traffic arteries, villages, shopping streets and town centres have all been included. Area wide traffic calming schemes seek to calm both the main roads and the residential roads in an area so as to ameliorate the impact of any traffic transfer as a consequence of traffic calming.”
http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/projects/primavera/p_calming.html#a3
Traffic calming products are now manufactured in North America by RubberForm Recycled Products, LLC. http://www.rubberform.com/ They have been working closely with state police utilizing the speed bumps and humps at checkpoints. To make this work environment safer for citizens and police officers.

The Price of Cheap Goods

Mr Crumb just read an article that relates to RubberForm and the issues that we face in selling our American made product here in America. Over the years we have been conditioned to look for the best deal and save our pennies, but as we all have found out at some point cheaper does not always mean better. Cheaper many times means a product made with lower grade materials and more recently found out materials that may not be healthy for humans to be around. We are buying products that are made over seas simply because the cost a few pennies less and in many cases will need to be replaced in a shorter time.

Jim Hightower from The Progressive writes an article that shows so of the issues that we face as consumers:

Jim Hightower tallies the cost of cheap goods. Like a cat watching the wrong mouse hole, we’re being told to look to Chinese manufacturers when assessing blame for the toxic products that are being exported from there. But wait a minute—where, oh where, are our own country’s regulatory watchdogs?

The big shock is not that Chinese-made toys are laden with lead, but that America’s Consumer Product Safety Commission is a toothless watchdog that employs exactly one inspector to oversee the safety of all toys sold in the U.S. Likewise, the Food and Drug Administration has licensed 714 Chinese plants to manufacture the key ingredients for a growing percentage of the antibiotics, painkillers, and other drugs we buy, but provides practically no oversight of these plants. In 2007, for example, the FDA inspected only thirteen of them.

An even bigger shock is that our consumer protection laws are so riddled with loopholes that unsafe products can legally come into our country. Take phthalate, a chemical additive in plastics that is suspected by scientists here and in Europe of inhibiting testosterone production in infant boys. Yet, Mark Schapiro, author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, reports that while the European Union has banned the use of phthalates in products aimed at children under three years of age, our government has refused to act.

Thus, China has factories that manufacture two lines of toys—one without phthalates for shipment to European countries, and one with phthalates for export to our children.

The problem is not with the Chinese, but with our own corporate chieftains who have moved their manufacturing to China specifically to get these kinds of low-cost shortcuts in production, while simultaneously demanding that Washington cut back on regulations that protect us consumers. We must put our own house in order.

Such giants as Wal-Mart, Dell, and Disney are profiting enormously from this double whammy of low-cost production and lackadaisical regulation. Not content to profiteer, however, the top executives insist that they should get credit for serving the moral good. Look, they say, we are helping American families by bringing cheap products to them. What these moral exemplars don’t mention is that the goods are cheap only because the lives of Chinese factory workers are so undervalued. It’s common to find child labor, sixteen-hour days, constant exposure to lead and other poisons, wage rip-offs, and other abuses in factories that stock the shelves of our stores and line the pockets of our corporate CEOs.

You want cheap? What’s a finger worth? A study of factories in just one area near Hong Kong found that workers there lose or break 40,000 fingers on the job every year.

Or consider the cheap treatment of a sixteen-year-old boy in China who works from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week, running a plastic molding machine to produce stuff for Wal-Mart stores. His hands are covered with blisters, because, as he explained to a New York Times reporter, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.” The boy’s reward is to be paid even less than China’s poverty-level minimum wage of 55 cents an hour.

Corporate officials here claim that they’re appalled by these conditions, but they shrug and say they simply can’t keep track of what goes on in all those factories. BS! They’re the ones demanding cheap production, even if it cheapens lives in China and endangers consumers here.

Note that Wal-Mart boasts that it’s able to track every penny of cost in its sprawling system of procuring and marketing products. Its bean counters know the price of every item coming out of even the most remote Chinese factory. The corporation simply values price over lives.

Here is a link to the original article as it was found in The Progressive

http://www.progressive.org/mag_high0308

Environmental Constitution

At RubberForm we care about the environment on a large scale and continue to do our part to help in cleaning up America by using recycled tires and creating green products for everyday use. However things can not be done on a national level with out the help of local communities doing their part to pitch in.It takes many small steps to make a large change and recently a local coalition was formed near RubberForm's headquarters called the Western New York Environmental Alliance (WNYEA). They put together the following to ensure that the WNYEA would be consistent in its activities toward developing and implementing a plan for action on the environment.

We, the people of Western New York, are resolved to work collaboratively to improve our environment and our regional, international community. We are a Great Lakes region and stewards of the world's largest supply of fresh water, vast forests, rich agricultural land, abundant wildlife, an incredible built heritage, historic park systems, the magnificent Niagara Falls and hundreds of wonderful communities. Unfortunately, much of our natural heritage has been lost and what remains is threatened. And, like the rest of the world, we face the prospects of climate change. We therefore establish this agenda to protect and restore our globally significant environment.

We know that our environmental resources are immeasurable assets; they have direct impacts on our quality of life and our economy. Healthy ecosystems provide habitat for wildlife; they provide clean air, clean water and other ecological services such as stormwater control and carbon sequestration; and they provide recreational and business opportunities. The environment is a source of wealth for all of us.

Like our natural heritage, our environmental community is strong. We are the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, a product of both our legacy of contamination and our determination to seek action through justice. We are home to thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations aiming to improve our region.

Although our assets are plentiful and our voices numerous, our region and its people have suffered through the despoiling of our environment and the fragmentation of our collective efforts. Our dwindling population, declining health, vacant and contaminated land, and faltering economy are proof of this. Although some progress has been made, much more is needed. At this time, we make a commitment to collaboratively increase our region's environmental literacy, preserve its biodiversity, and ensure that our energy is sustainable, our air is clean, our water drinkable, our fish edible, and our forests, farms, and gardens plentiful.

With Our Shared Agenda for Action, we have a vision for our future. Together, we are committed to strengthening the work of our environmental community through collaboration and implementation. This includes long term, overarching goals as well as specific measurable actions that can be accomplished soon. We are determined to leave those who follow us a sustainable, thriving community where they can live healthfully, work productively, learn, teach, grow old, and choose their own path. This is the aim of the Western New York Environmental Alliance- the purpose of Our Shared Agenda for Action.

If more communities took a proactive stance to the natural beauty that surrounds them and perseveration efforts to keep it looking that way we would be one step closer to correcting the environmental issues.

To read more about this idea and the Western New York Environmental Alliance visit them on the web by clicking HERE

At RubberForm we care about the environment on a large scale and continue to do our part to help in cleaning up America by using recycled tires and creating green products for everyday use. However things can not be done on a national level with out the help of local communities doing their part to pitch in.
It takes many small steps to make a large change and recently a local coalition was formed near RubberForm's headquarters called the Western New York Environmental Alliance (WNYEA). They put together the following to ensure that the WNYEA would be consistent in its activities toward developing and implementing a plan for action on the environment.

We, the people of Western New York, are resolved to work collaboratively to improve our environment and our regional, international community. We are a Great Lakes region and stewards of the world's largest supply of fresh water, vast forests, rich agricultural land, abundant wildlife, an incredible built heritage, historic park systems, the magnificent Niagara Falls and hundreds of wonderful communities. Unfortunately, much of our natural heritage has been lost and what remains is threatened. And, like the rest of the world, we face the prospects of climate change. We therefore establish this agenda to protect and restore our globally significant environment.

We know that our environmental resources are immeasurable assets; they have direct impacts on our quality of life and our economy. Healthy ecosystems provide habitat for wildlife; they provide clean air, clean water and other ecological services such as stormwater control and carbon sequestration; and they provide recreational and business opportunities. The environment is a source of wealth for all of us.

Like our natural heritage, our environmental community is strong. We are the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, a product of both our legacy of contamination and our determination to seek action through justice. We are home to thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations aiming to improve our region.

Although our assets are plentiful and our voices numerous, our region and its people have suffered through the despoiling of our environment and the fragmentation of our collective efforts. Our dwindling population, declining health, vacant and contaminated land, and faltering economy are proof of this. Although some progress has been made, much more is needed. At this time, we make a commitment to collaboratively increase our region's environmental literacy, preserve its biodiversity, and ensure that our energy is sustainable, our air is clean, our water drinkable, our fish edible, and our forests, farms, and gardens plentiful.

With Our Shared Agenda for Action, we have a vision for our future. Together, we are committed to strengthening the work of our environmental community through collaboration and implementation. This includes long term, overarching goals as well as specific measurable actions that can be accomplished soon. We are determined to leave those who follow us a sustainable, thriving community where they can live healthfully, work productively, learn, teach, grow old, and choose their own path. This is the aim of the Western New York Environmental Alliance- the purpose of Our Shared Agenda for Action.

If more communities took a proactive stance to the natural beauty that surrounds them and perseveration efforts to keep it looking that way we would be one step closer to correcting the environmental issues.

To read more about this idea and the Western New York Environmental Alliance visit them on the web by clicking HERE

Do You Know Where Your Tires Go?

Although today's tires endure additional miles than they have in the past, the amount of cars on the road is increasing along with the average number of miles driven annually. According to the ninth report on scrap tire markets issued by the Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA), one waste (also known as scrap) tire is discarded annually per person in the United States.

But where do all these tires go? To help us answer this question, RMA did an analysis of scrap tire management in the United States. In their latest report for 2007, they found that more scrap tires were consumed in end-use markets than ever before, 89.3 percent to be exact. These markets include tire-derived fuel, in which about 54% of the total scrap tires generated were burned for its use. Civil engineering, ground rubber applications, and other smaller markets are included in this.

Yet, even with all of the reuse and recycling efforts, a great amount of scrap tires still end up in landfills each year. At the end of 2007, about 594.0 thousand tons of scrap tires were landfilled in the United States. This compares to the 477.2 thousand tons that were reportedly landfilled in 2005. These data indicated an increase in scrap tire landfilling in the last two years.

It was also reported that at the end of 2007, about 128.36 million scrap tires remained in stockpiles in the United States. Stockpiles truly are liabilities and are a growing issue of much concern. Aside from being unsightly, rainwater accumulates in these stockpiles which then become a breeding ground for an enormous number of mosquitoes that can transmit infectious disease. The real primary concern though is fires. Tire pile fires have lasted for months, cost millions of dollars to fight, and required the evacuation of neighborhoods. They cause significant environmental harm from toxic soot fall-out and the run-off of oil and water. When burned, tires release irritants and potentially carcinogenic compounds into the atmosphere. Some experts no longer consider the question of "if" a stockpile will catch fire but "when" it will burn.

Considering all of these statisics, we should have more of an incentive to buy American-made products. So before we purchase "recycled" products sourced and manufactured off-shore, keep in mind that we need to clean up our enormous scrap tire problem here first.

More on the latest Scrap Tire Report

Do we want to clean up another country's scrap tire problem?

During the first quarter of 2008 we posed this question to Mark Piepkorn of Building Green. Do we want to clean up another country's scrap tire problem? Today lots of recycled products are coming into our country from off-shore manufacturers. The original waste could have come from the US but what is environmental about shipping waste to another country, remanufacturing into a product and then shipping it back to the US? You need to ask when you buy recycled, where do these recycled products come from and for scrap-tire product, where are the recycled rubber products made and where do the scrap tires comes from, hopefully the US.
Please read Mark's article...

The title of this post is taken from a question we received about the source of recycled rubber used for a parking-bumper and speed-bump manufacturer. It motivated me to do some digging to get a better understanding of the scrap tire industry. As it turns out, it's actually kind of fascinating. The following is unverified single-pass research, and any thoughts, additions, or corrections are welcome.

The Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA) provides a bunch of info on domestic scrap tires in a 2006 report titled Scrap Tire Markets in the United States. According to their data, in 2005 almost seven-eighths of domestic scrap tires were finding their way to end-use markets - about 259 million tires. Nearly seven-eighths, or 87%, is an exceptionally respectable rate of reuse. (The EPA estimated an 80.4% end-use market rate in 2003, two years earlier.) For comparison, a reclamation fact sheet from the The Aluminum Association shows that just 52% of aluminum cans were recycled in 2005 (down from a 1997 high of 66.5%).

The RMA estimate appears to be based on U.S.-manufactured tires only, however. Their report says that "about 299 million tires were generated in the U.S. in 2005" - seven-eighths of that number is right in the neighborhood of the number of scrap tires generated. It's not clear, however, that the scrap tire number excludes tires of non-domestic origin, which would change the figure some. A 2006 article in the Toledo Blade titled U.S. tire maker betting on China reported, "Nearly 102 million passenger tires were imported into the United States last year, estimates the Rubber Manufacturers Association. And although $7.7 billion worth of rubber tires and tubes were imported into the United States last year, only $2.8 billion worth were exported, according to the U.S. Census Bureau." It's a little frustrating that they switched from units to dollars in mid-stream, but we can derive that in 2005 we imported about 36% more new tires than we exported, and it appears that something over 25% of the tires sold in the U.S. came from somewhere else. (In 2005, anyway. In 2006, Tire Business magazine ran an article titled Off-shore tire influx deepens amid slumping domestic production that reported, "Every other replacement market passenger tire sold in the U.S. today is made outside the U.S. Three out of five replacement light truck tires sold in the U.S. are made elsewhere. Two out of three replacement medium truck tires sold in the U.S. are made outside the U.S.")

One more little complication: In addition to not counting "retreadable casings" as scrap tires, the RMA also doesn't count "used tires" that are either resold in the U.S. or - more significantly - exported for sale in other countries. RMA notes that "there is a significant likelihood that more tires are exported than have been reported." The EPA chimes in, "Many scrap tires are exported to foreign countries to be reused as retreads, especially in countries with growing populations of automobile drivers such as Japan and Mexico. According to Mexico's National Association of Tire Distributors, as many as 20% of tires sold in Mexico are imported as used tires from the US and then retreaded for reuse. The downside of exporting scrap tires is that the receiving countries may end up with a disproportionate amount of tires, in addition to their own internally-generated scrap tires."

An argument seems to be shaping up that scrap tires, like just about every other complex manufactured thing, generally aren't very local to anywhere. The constituent materials of tires include natural rubber (a.k.a. polyisoprene - 95% of which comes from Asia... and tires and tubes account for over half of total global use); synthetic rubbers such as styrene-butadiene co-polymer (SBR), polybutadiene, and halobutyl (crude oil is the principal raw material of synthetic rubber - RMA indicates that it takes about five gallons of oil to make a tire, and two more for the energy of the manufacturing process... which accounts only for the onsite manufacturing part of the lifecycle); carbon black (a nanomaterial used for coloration and reinforcement, it's generally produced by the incomplete combustion of 'sour' natural gas); and smaller amounts of other reinforcing, cross-linking, accelerating, activating, and antioxidant compounds and materials.

But it remains that reducing the transportation energy along any part of the lifecycle of tires is to be applauded. And even when mitigating factors like how things are counted or not counted are considered, the reuse ratio is still nothing short of inspiring.

So to what markets are these scrap tires going? Mostly, they're getting burned at cement factories. According to the RMA report, 52% were burned as fuel for cement kilns, pulp and paper mills, and industrial and utility boilers. 16% were used for civil engineering and construction purposes - such as using shreds in road projects, septic fields, and landfill construction (which is evidently different than putting shredded tires in a landfill). Ground-rubber applications including playground and sport surfacing, rubber-modified asphalt, and feedstock for new products had a 12% share... which, unfortunately, is still catching up with the 14% "land disposed" slice of the scrap tire pie. (Only two years earlier, however, 25% were being landfilled.)

This brings me to an uplifting note to close on: tire dumps - that is, "stockpiles" - are being rapidly and significantly depleted... over 80% since 1990. Which sets the imagination looking toward the future, when demand for dead tires exceeds supply.

Orginally Posted on Building Green February 26, 2008 1:57 PM by Mark Piepkorn