Seattle poster
The panel at the right is from a poster called The Commuter Toolkit put out by International Sustainable Solutions for an organization called the International Sustainability Institute. You may view it full size by clicking it or view the full poster. This poster shows a scene in downtown, Seattle, Washington, USA and the poster bears the names of various sponsors in the Seattle area.
The comparisons of space used by different travel modes in the poster are misleading. They show the space which people occupy standing still in posed photos, not the space which each mode of transportation actually uses. Cars would not be spaced so closely if in motion, and they also take space to park. Nor would buses be spaced so closely, and they also use bus stops and bus garages. The bicyclists are standing over their bicycles, not riding, etc. Neither does the poster address the throughput and travel times for the different modes or the suitability of different modes for different trips of different distances. I addressed an earlier example of a similar poster on this blog but there’s a twist to this particular version: the bicyclists are shown riding down the middle of Second Avenue in Seattle, but look over to the right side of the picture: that’s a bike lane — also with cars in it in the car picture. Similarly for the bus-only lane at the left side of the photos. No train runs on this street!
The bike lane was more recently replaced by a two-way separated bikeway, into which speed humps are being installed because the bikeway cannot safely support normal downhill bicycle travel speeds on this sloping street, though that’s another story.
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It seems to me the poster very effectively makes exactly the point it is trying to make. How would you improve on it?
So, we don’t have to think about actual use of space or trip times for different transportation modes, all we have to do is show how much space people and vehicles take up when crowded together for a photo op, and prove that we, and people who take this seriously, are too stupid or deluded to know any better. Facts don’t matter as long as you can create a pretty picture, is what you are saying. Maybe I’m old-fashioned about that.