The Christian Science Monitor has a very interesting new article on texting and talking while driving, and it talks about how some high-profile fatal crashes are starting to turn the tide in state legislatures, which have been somewhat hesitant to ban the practices.

Click here to read the article.

The article points out the challenges though: Many, many people use cell phones or other wireless devices while driving and the practice is hard to enforce for police. Still, there are new technologies that could help save us, devices that will automatically block incoming texts and return a sentence saying the person is driving.

What do you think?

I got a call from a reader angry about the parking situation downtown, and she specifically wasn’t happy about the city leasing parking to the owners of the Flatiron Building for parking along Bay Street.

It’s not fair that the general public can’t use the 15 parking spaces, which are public property, she said.

The city decades ago first signed a contract with the building owners to guarantee parking along the short section of Bay Street between Prospect and Champion streets (the spaces are across from the American Museum of Radio and Electricity). It was a piece of candy in the late 80s to keep the company from joining the ranks of many others and fleeing downtown.

The contract is a long-term lease of those parking spots, and the company pays full parking rates. They lease the spots from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays for their employees. The Flatiron Building is the triangle-shaped one that now housing the engineering company CH2M Hill.

The city extended the lease to last through August 2010. When the company leaves the space, which they plan to do soon to move to the waterfront, the lease expires.

Click here to see the latest update of the contract.

The Associated Press just reported an interesting article about how there is a revival among U.S. cities of interest in installing street car lines.

Click here to read it.

Bolstered by President Obama’s support for transit options, cities are lining up for federal economic stimulus grants to install streetcar lines, which they hope will provide transportation options and yield economic development benefits.

Opponents say the federal grants are just making the fact that the public will have to subsidize the operations of the streetcars, which aren’t a practical transportation option.

The article mentions the streetcar in Portland, which runs from Northwest Portland in the Pearl District down to the new South Waterfront.

What do you think?

Oh, in case you’re interested, here is a map of the old Bellingham trolley lines:

Check out this recently uploaded local version of Punk’d, where people play elaborate pranks on each other and record their reactions on secret cameras:

In this case, the victim is Andrew Dumont, the vice president of marketing at Tatango.com, a local business. He loves his Audi, so they repossess it.

Local company Horton’s Towing was in on this gag. I found out about it reading Horton’s on Twitter. Click here to follow Horton’s on Twitter.

Click here to follow Johnson’s Towing.

Both companies are Tweeting about wrecks that they’re responding to.

The state Department of Transportation is inviting people to take a survey evaluating the state department’s performance.

Here’s what the survey intro says:

The mission of the Washington State Department of Transportation is to keep people and business moving by operating and improving the state’s transportation systems vital to our taxpayers and communities. We manage more than 20,000 state highway lane miles that carry 86 million vehicle miles a day. The Washington State Ferries, WSDOT’s ferries division, operates 22 ferry vessels and 20 terminals, carrying 23 million passengers a year.

Our state-sponsored Amtrak Cascades service carries more than 700,000 passengers a year, and our state-managed “Grain Train” runs 89 grain cars on 1,432 miles of short-line rail.

Other critical and important transportation programs include our support for commute programs support more than 810,000 commuters statewide, eliminated 170 million vehicle miles traveled annually. We have the largest vanpool program in the country. Our Aviation division operates 16 general aviation airports statewide.

We take our mission very seriously. And, because of that, we would like to know your opinion about how we are doing.

Click here to take the survey.

I just got word from Steve Haugen, traffic operations engineer at Bellingham Public Works, that crews expect to turn on the signal at Chestnut and Railroad Avenue tomorrow (Wednesday).

They have some finishing work to do tomorrow morning, but they expect to turn on the signal tomorrow.

Here’s an bit more on the city’s work to remove the two traffic islands along West Bakerview Road (they’ll start work tomorrow morning, and the city is asking people to avoid that area, if possible). This article will run tomorrow:

City crews will remove traffic islands along West Bakerview Road this week, an effort to decrease congestion and improve safety along the heavily traveled corridor.

Bellingham Public Works crews will work Wednesday through Friday to remove median planters along Bakerview between Palisade Way and Northwest Avenue and between Northwest and Pacific Highway, near Fred Meyer.

The islands at those locations clog up traffic because it limits the number of left-turning vehicles queuing in the center turn lane, city officials said.

“I remember coming to the conclusion that removing the islands was a no-brainer after performing several site visits during (evening rush hour) and witnessing several close calls as traffic consistently stacking into the through lane,” said Steve Haugen, traffic operations engineer at Public Works.

Removing the islands lets more vehicles wait to turn left onto Northwest Avenue and into the Fred Meyer driveway, he said.

The islands were installed to improve the road’s aesthetics when that stretch of Baker-view was widening and improved in 1998, and it was done with the expectation that some islands may have to be modified or removed as traffic increased in the future, Rory Routhe, assistant director of engineering, previously said. Some islands have already been modified, he said.

“We expect more will be modified in the future as needed for safety and capacity re-quirements,” he said.

More than 27,000 vehicles a day use Bakerview east of Northwest, and more than 16,000 a day use it between the freeway and Northwest, according to Public Works data.

The work, which will take place between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., will require some lane closures. Flaggers will be out there directing traffic. Work dates and times are may change, depending on weather or last-minute changes in work schedules, according to Public Works.

I sat down a while back with Andrew Austin, who works at the group Transportation Choices Coalition, and learned a little about what the group is planning with regard to its legislative agenda.

First, the group would like to push the legislature to allow a voter-approved local option for funding transit. The problem, he said, is that even if Whatcom Transportation Authority and Pierce Transit, as examples, wanted to take all of the sales tax they legally can (up to nine-tenths of 1 percent of the sales tax) it would simply stave off cuts, not make the agencies economically sustainable.

“In the next few months we need to find a long-term sustainable funding source for … agencies to go to,” he said. “As we’re poising ourselves to recover from this recession, we need to be poising to grow our transit service, not shrink it.”

As many of you have heard, WTA is joining the ranks of other agencies looking at service cuts. Next year, it’s looking at possibly cutting 25 full-time positions, which means service cuts, including the loss of all Sunday service. It’s because sales tax revenues have taken a dive.

He think a motor-vehicle excise tax seems the most workable option. Currently, voters in an area like Whatcom County can’t vote to increase a motor vehicle excise tax to pay for transit service, but the legislature could change that.

Under the state Constitution, gas tax revenues that right now go to pay for highway projects can’t pay for transit service. Austin said they’d like to see a sales tax on gasoline that could pay for transit.

The legislature commissioned a report that will be delivered back to the legislature’s joint transportation committee, and the report will say which taxes might be palatable to the public (and thus our elected officials).

He blasted the legislature for its lack of interest in supporting transit, while the public, meanwhile, clamors for options other than driving alone, he said. The state doesn’t support transit like it should, he said.

“There’s not very many transit champions in the legislature,” he said.

I asked him about the bus service between Bellingham and Mount Vernon that I remembered was paid with state funds. That’s the only place where the state gives direct funding to transit service (not counting capital purchases), he said, adding that it’s $300,000 a year.

“That should be a model for the rest of the state,” he said.

The state does have four programs, called flexible account, with some funding that do the following: 1. Helps pay for Amtrak service. 2. Pay for Safe Routes to Schools projects 3. Commute trip reduction programs for large businesses, 4. Grant programs for transit capital spending.

The legislature “sucked” money from those program and put it into the roads account, he said.

In the short run, we need to work to fill those accounts again, Austin said, but in the next two to five years we need to find new revenues for highways and transit.

Anyway, this is just a summary of some notes I jotted while sitting down with Austin at The Bagelry a couple of Fridays ago.

What do you think about his ideas? What are you ideas for state transit (and highways, for that matter) spending?

Also, click here to see more on the state’s funding for transportation.

Bellingham Public Works will remove traffic islands on West Bakerview Road starting Wednesday to increase vehicle capacity in the area.

The work will be done from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and it’ll result in some lane closures.

The work will take place between Palisade Way and Northwest Avenue and between Northwest and Pacific Highway.

From the city:

City crews will remove two center landscaped islands and repave the areas upon completion of their removal. The islands are being removed to add more vehicle capacity in the center turn lanes and eliminate a conflict point with through traffic.

The Hannegan Road is now open just south of Lynden city limits.

The county announced a little while ago that they intend to open the bridge for rush hour traffic tonight. The project, which used federal economic stimulus money to replace an ailing bridge, was completed in 46 working days, which is ahead of schedule, according to Whatcom County Public Works.

Over the next few weeks there will be some minor cleanup and construction going on but nothing that’s expected to majorly affect traffic.

With this opening and the recent opening of Hampton Road at Mormon Ditch just south of Lynden, the town got a little easier to get to.