Eliminate jaywalking laws: "The core problem lies with street design, not human behavior."

Yes, we've been here before.

    

Walking is not a crime: Dunman and others on the scourges of jaywalking in auto-erotic America.

Like the jaywalker said: "People don’t obey the rules when they’re driving. Why should I?"

But any little chink to be taken from the imperialistic edifice of automobile supremacy is worth a well-aimed Molotov cocktail here and there. 

9 Reasons to Eliminate Jaywalking Laws Now, by Angie Schmitt and Charles T. Brown (CityLab)

They’ve rarely protected pedestrians, and their enforcement is racially biased. Two street safety experts say there are better ways to curb traffic violence.

On Sept. 23, Kurt Andreas Reinhold, a 42-year-old Black man, was trying to cross a street in San Clemente, California, when two officers from a special “homeless outreach unit” stopped him. An altercation ensued; minutes later, Reinhold, a father of two and down-on-his-luck former youth soccer coach, was shot and killed. In a cellphone video of the confrontation, Reinhold can be heard demanding, “Where did I jaywalk?”

This is a particularly troubling example of a pattern we see all too often. Black and Brown people, especially men, are routinely targeted by police for jaywalking or simply existing in public space. Often these stops result in an escalating series of fines and fees. In other cases — as in San Clemente, as well as in Sacramento, Seattle and New York City — they can end in violence.

Especially at a time when there is intense focus on police brutality and racism, Reinhold’s death should prompt us to pause and consider who is truly served by jaywalking laws. Their effectiveness as safety measures appears to be limited: Despite heavy handed and selective jaywalking enforcement, pedestrian deaths in the U.S. have increased rapidly in the last decade. As two of the top experts on pedestrian safety in the country, we think it is time for cities to consider decriminalizing jaywalking or eliminating the infraction altogether.

Here’s why.

1. Jaywalking is a made-up thing by auto companies to deflect blame when drivers hit pedestrians.
2. The concept of jaywalking encourages drivers to be aggressive toward pedestrians, and for third parties to ignore or excuse pedestrian deaths.
3. Our streets are not designed to make walking safe or convenient.
4. Pedestrians are almost as likely to be struck and killed at an intersection as mid-block.
5. When pedestrians jaywalk, they are often behaving rationally.
6. Jaywalking laws are not enforced fairly.
7. Jaywalking stops are frequently explosive.
8. The focus on jaywalking reflects the lower political status of those who walk — not the societal harm of the activity.
9. The safest countries globally allow jaywalking.

snip

Eliminating jaywalking laws may sound radical, but it’s been discussed before in cities such as Seattle. Other places, like Berkeley, California, are experimenting with new models for traffic enforcement that deemphasize police in favor of crash investigators who are trained to help promote infrastructure changes that improve safety. New York Attorney General Letitia James has advocated for removing police from traffic stops, and a new survey shows a majority of New Yorkers support the idea.

Wider reforms and changes to traffic safety enforcement are needed, from increasing diversity within law enforcement to enhanced data tracking, police training, inclusivity and investment in new social and criminal justice programs. Such efforts must be implemented with a vigilant eye towards reversing existing inequities: Early results from so-called “unbiased” enforcement efforts, such as intelligence-led enforcement, used by cities like Oakland, California, show disparities in traffic stops remain. The time is now, not later, to revisit or eliminate laws like jaywalking that are primarily used as a pretext to stop Black and Brown people — and rarely protected any pedestrians in the first place. 

"Pedestrian is one of those words that conceals what's it's talking about."

I can recall Jeff Gillenwater and I having this conversation perhaps ten years ago, and my subsequent resolution to stop using the word "pedestrian" in favor of calling walkers exactly what they are -- walkers.

It's a variation of the inanity in which we refer to cars hitting pedestrians, not drivers hitting walkers, or two airplanes having a "near miss" when in fact, it was a "near hit."

Language matters, and seeing as one out of a hundred planners, politicians, campaign donors and automobile supremacists actually read (they're too busy driving, aren't they?), the extent of the conceptual difficulty becomes clear.

Why I'm Not a Pedestrian, by Scott Ogilvie

There's kind of an old idea here—the idea that streets are not just for transportation. The idea is that streets are public space.

This was once a perfectly obvious idea. All kinds of life happened on the street that had little to do with transportation. The desire for a bustling street isn't just nostalgia, because the truth is great cities, great places to visit, are always still great places to walk. There's a shortage of great public spaces in this country, and it's often been observed that we'll travel to visit somewhere that is a great place to walk, but we don't always understand how to build those places where we already live.

A thousand years ago, the whole world was your sidewalk. But since the introduction of the car, the space we allow people to walk has narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed. Walking used to be natural, and essential everywhere—but we invented new rules and customs that moved people out of the way so cars could move faster. We’ve put walking in a smaller and smaller box. We call it “alternative transportation” we “accommodate bikes and peds” In short, we put walking on the margins, rather than at the center of what we do.

Even the word pedestrian—which is a common word, one I use a lot, but am trying to use less. Where does that word come from? Before anyone used that word to describe someone walking, pedestrian meant dull, lacking wit and imagination, ordinary. No one used the word pedestrian to mean a person traveling until the emergence of a related word, equestrian. To go by horse. And then along came the word pedestrian, to go by foot, as its counterpart. But who went by horse in cities? The wealthy and powerful went by horse, while the rest of us, the pedestrians, went by foot. The equestrian was pulled by an expensive four-legged vehicle that needed to be fueled and stored and maintained, while the pedestrian made due with their feet. Sounds a little familiar doesn't it?

So perhaps we should retire the word pedestrian if we want to elevate our ideas about walking. Pedestrian is one of those words that conceals what's it's talking about. No one of us ever says, “Look at those small pedestrians trick or treating.” Of course we use normal words like children, walk the dog, walk to the park, and so on. Yet in transportation-speak, you walk out your door, and you've suddenly been transformed into a pedestrian ...

Pedestrians and bicyclists in Amsterdam -- and Deaf Gahan's Nawbany.

On Monday I was walking down the sidewalk on the south side of Market when I saw a bicyclist riding down the sidewalk toward me. At this time of the morning there were no cars whatever on Market, and yet there she was, so I politely asked if she would stop for just a moment and entertain a question or three in the interest of science, and she was amenable.

From a former to a current bicycle rider, do you always ride on the sidewalk?

"Yes, almost always," she said.

But shouldn't bikes be on the street?

"It isn't safe out there -- there's no bike lane."

There's a bike lane on Spring Street.

"Sort of. The traffic still moves too fast, and anyway the bike lane ends and I'm back on the sidewalk again."

What do you think of sharrows?

"You used to ride a bike? Then you know sharrows aren't safe."

---

I thanked her and kept walking, confident that this brief conversation of two or three minutes was two or three minutes linger than any chat ever held between Jeff Gahan's inept minions, his corrupt contractors and a real human being on an actual bicycle.

By the way, there are problems in Amsterdam, too.

Can Amsterdam’s Cyclists and Pedestrians Learn to Get Along? by Sophie Knight (CityLab)

As Amsterdammers jostle for space, the city government is trying to ease conflicts between those on bikes and on foot.

Urbanists around the world swoon over Amsterdam’s cycling culture: residents trundling around cobbled streets with a child balanced on their handlebars or a friend on the back, everyone blissfully free from the road rage that infects car-heavy cities such as London and New York. What’s not to like?

Well, a few things, if you’re a pedestrian. An oncoming cyclist may barrel through a red light or crosswalk or suddenly swerve onto the sidewalk. Cyclists in Amsterdam often park their bikes haphazardly, cluttering street corners and blocking the passage of strollers, wheelchairs, and suitcase-bearing tourists.

And woe betide those who accidentally step onto a bike path. “This is Amsterdam!” is one of the kinder reactions.

“Cyclists are even more antisocial than drivers,” complains Jennifer Brouwer, 37, who is registered blind and who moved to the city’s quieter outskirts from its busy West district because she was tired of conflicts with cyclists. “They’re more likely to think, ‘Oh, I can get away with that,’ like cutting people up, cycling a hair’s breadth away from you… There is just no enforcement.”

Efforts to educate cyclists or tame two-wheelers are met with opprobrium in anti-authoritarian Amsterdam, according to “street coaches” hired by the city to do so. Nevertheless, the local government is trying to balance the needs of cyclists and pedestrians. Aware of pressure on public space as the city’s population swells, the municipality said in 2017 it would prioritize both groups, not just cyclists, in its five-year Bicycle Plan starting that year ...

Gahan eats a Danish, installs campaign finance-themed pedestrian crossing signals.

The Green Mouse received a link from a friend: Danish city installs Viking-themed pedestrian crossing signals (text below). What happened next was very predictable.

It's 2:00 a.m., and a phone rings near Main Street, muffled by the ornamental grasses in a nearby median.

"See here, Rosenbarger. This Viking crosswalk light thingy has potential. Didn't the Vikings raid and pillage everywhere they went? That's some really good shit, but $150 to convert the lights? Say what? How do those Danish mayors get their families to Disney World twice a year on $150? Look, some of our Special Friends can do these for at least $500 each, although you need to make sure we're getting the volume warehouse discount for $100 actual cost, then we can convert every light in the city and put those cute anchors on them -- wait, that's no fun, how about my FACE on each one?

"HAH! That Chowchewsku guy never managed THAT, did he?"

Now for the straight dope.

Danish city installs Viking-themed pedestrian crossing signals

Aug. 26 (UPI) -- A city in Denmark is celebrating its Viking heritage by replacing the crosswalk signal lights with the images of the historic Scandinavian warriors.

The city of Aarhus, which was founded by Vikings in the 8th century, unveiled the first of the Viking-themed crossing signals Monday. The city is planning to install the lights at 17 crossings in the city.

Buenyamin Simsek, a councilor in the Aarhus city planning department, pitched the scheme early in the year and the Moesgaard Museum, located just outside of the city, teamed up with officials to bring the idea to fruition.

Officials said each walking signal costs about $150 to convert.

Automobile supremacy: "The machine that is the established “American Way” can commit countless legal and moral errors and be excused as an individual mistake."

"We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law."

But seriously, I won't bug you; go back to complaining about the traffic on State Street, all the while accepting the underlying premise that "mobility" requires each of us to drive a vehicle, generally all alone, for just about any trip.

We've Gotta Be Perfect, by Arian Horbovetz (Strong Towns)

... The truth is, there is almost no situation in American culture where 40,000 lives are lost each year without a serious debate about whether or not the context of these deaths should lead to drastic changes. Except when it comes to cars.

If electric scooter crashes caused by negligent piloting led to the death of the elderly pedestrian and the hospitalization of two young children in my community, the public would likely call for the end of these machines. But since negligent driving was the cause of both, we see these incidents as “tragic” but ultimately accept them as normalcy. In reality, if these pedestrians and children were hit by electric scooters, bikes, or skateboarders instead of cars and trucks, they would likely still all be alive and relatively healthy. The hypocrisy in the face of potential loss of life is staggering, and shows just how addicted to our cars, trucks and SUVs we truly are.

Some may believe that addiction is too harsh a term. But when we look at the terrors of addiction, we see the unquenchable need to repeatedly engage in an activity, even if the end result can easily be dangerous or deadly. We accept the risk based on an addiction to the high. We defend its potential to ruin our lives and the lives of others around us, especially our loved ones.

A friend and fellow bike commuter recently said something that stuck with me:

“We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”

Indeed, it’s a double standard with maddening predictability. In general, If it’s a car crash, we blame the negligent driver. If it’s a bike, scooter or skateboard, we often blame the machine itself, or the “culture” associated with said machine. For example, if there is a rash of car accidents on the news, one might say “people drive like idiots here!” But if there are a rash of electric scooter crashes, the reaction is typically an urgent call for these machines to be banned or limited ...

The narcissism of car-centrism, part 3: "How Lazy Coverage of Pedestrian Deaths Obscures Why Streets Are So Dangerous."

Paging Bill Hanson and Susan Duncan.

Apart from lazy coverage, I'm trying to remember the last time Louisville metro police and prosecutors took longer than ten grudging minutes to absolve drivers from blame when non-vehicular human beings have been killed by drivers.

It is exceedingly rare, isn't it?

Ever wonder why it's always the car that kills and not the person piloting it?

How Lazy Coverage of Pedestrian Deaths Obscures Why Streets Are So Dangerous, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

When a driver kills someone on foot, is it an act of God, beyond anyone’s power to prevent? Or is it the result of a broken system in desperate need of reform?

To read the coverage of the May 31 killing of 80-year-old Arnulfo Salazar in Charlotte, North Carolina, you’d think it was a random, unpreventable tragedy. Or that Salazar could have saved himself if only he’d been more careful. The stories don’t convey any sense that Salazar was failed by a hostile and unforgiving system.

Let's skip to the conclusion.

One thing that’s certain, however, is that journalists should be more skeptical of police accounts of pedestrian deaths.

Far too often, police rely exclusively on the testimony of the driver — the victim can no longer tell his or her story. And when the only version of events that gets reported is a story that absolves the driver while blaming the victim, the public discussion of street design and driver behavior won’t even mention possibilities for reform. And that means more people will lose their lives.

Vision Zero (not applicable in Nawbany): "Why San Francisco Is Putting Pedestrians First on Its Main Thoroughfare."

 

Gahan, Rosenbarger set to go full frontal Pinocchio about their urbanism credentials when the Congress for the New Urbanism 27 meets in Louisville June 11-15.

Car-centrism is the last socially acceptable form of imperialism in America. Debate among yourselves ... and thanks, B.

Why San Francisco Is Putting Pedestrians First on Its Main Thoroughfare, by Supriya Sridhar (Politico Magazine)

San Francisco plans to shut out cars on one of its major streets.

Legend has it that the young civil engineer who laid down the route for San Francisco’s Market Street in the 1800s so enraged people with the street’s unusual width that a mob chased him out of town. More than a century later, Market Street is one of the city’s key arteries, a wide boulevard on which the city’s historic streetcars jostle with buses, taxicabs, private passenger cars, Uber and Lyft rides, delivery vehicles and thousands of people biking every day. During peak hours, there are 100 buses running in either direction.

But Market Street is also the center of something traffic officials somewhat ominously refer to as the “High-Injury Network,” a collection of about 13 percent of the city’s streets that accounts for three-quarters of the serious and fatal traffic injuries. From January through April, 11 people have died in the area.

“Market street is the spine of San Francisco,” Brian Wiedenmeier, the executive director San Francisco Bicycle Coalition said. “There’s a lot going on already. The last thing we need is more vehicles.”

Next year, the car traffic that has made Market Street so clogged for decades—and also hazardous—should be gone.

Better Market Street, a project organized by six San Francisco city agencies, will transform 2.2 miles of the famous corridor, between Steuart Street and Octavia Boulevard, into a pedestrian oasis. The renovations will feature sidewalk level bikeways, wider public transportation boarding islands and improved sidewalks.

Cities have been wrestling with what to do about traffic since the moment cars first careened onto the scene. And pedestrians often paid the price as planners devised street systems that made it easier for more and more cars to get around and shunted the people to the margins. Reversing this trend at a moment when younger, less car-dependent workers are flocking to cities has been a challenge. Other cities around the country have experimented with pedestrian-first planning. The Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach has existed since 1960, for example; and while it’s popular, it’s just eight blocks long. Boston pedestrianized short stretches of two downtown streets years ago, and Charlotte, N.C., is implementing a comprehensive downtown plan that will turn regular streets in pedestrian-only zones on the weekend. San Francisco’s Market Street makeover, though, is far more ambitious.

It was proposed nine years ago — “Unfortunately, San Francisco has a history of these kinds of big projects taking an incredibly long time to come to fruition,” said Wiedenmeier, who has been working on this for the past decade — and things picked up speed in 2014, when the city embraced an initiative called "Vision Zero," aimed at eliminating car-related fatalities by 2024. In 2015, the city established turn restrictions on Market Street, dissuading cars from using the thoroughfare.

Better Market Street is scheduled to break ground in the summer of 2020. The project still has some final administrative hurdles to overcome, making some supporters impatient. Earlier this month, nearly 100 protesters showed up on Market Street to support the initiative. Wearing bright-yellow T-shirts with bicycles , they demanded speeding up the project’s approval process.

“There is a desire from, I think, everyone to start construction as soon as possible,” Cristina Olea, project manager for Better Market Street, said. “We want a safer street. We want to reduce crashes. We also want people to feel comfortable walking or biking along Market Street.”

Not in New Albany, but "In Car-Choked Brussels, the Pedestrians Are Winning."

The obvious reaction: If pro-pedestrian reforms are the winning strategy for a big city of 2.2 million residents (and countless visitors), then what's the difference between this and a small city of 37,000?

Shouldn't it be easier in the smaller unit?

In Car-Choked Brussels, the Pedestrians Are Winning, by Feargus O'Sullivan (CityLab)

The Belgian capital is one of the most congested in Europe. But an ambitious suite of street makeovers is pushing traffic outside the central city.

Right now, there can be an almost eerie calm to some sections of central Brussels. Take an evening stroll down down Boulevard Anspach, the broad avenue that forms the Belgian capital’s spine, and you may find the roadway empty, its limestone and wrought-iron facades echoing the footsteps of a rare passer-by on the sidewalk.

This uncanny silence in the heart of a blaring metro area of 2.2 million residents—known as one of Europe’s most notoriously congested capitals—is no accident. Right now the Brussels Capital Region is slowly drawing towards completing one of the most ambitious pro-pedestrian makeovers yet seen this century. Carried out on a scale only Madrid can really compete with, Brussels is systematically banishing anything but emergency and delivery vehicles from a large network of streets and squares that are not just central, but axial ...

Team Gahan always doubles down on car-centrism, but "Seattle Tosses Out (the) Rulebook to Protect Pedestrians."

Just think about all those times when the bored of works enumerated the many splendid reasons why they couldn't (wouldn't) help make our streets safe.

Just think about city engineer Larry Summers' passive-aggressive protests -- but traffic flow, but INDOT, but whatever else springs to an obstructionist's mind.

Just think about how different it would be if their first response wasn't "here's why we can't and won't help" but "we'll find a way to help."

Just think if the latter constituted Jeff Gahan's instructions to pliant campaign donors like HWC Engineering, rather than deploying them to defend the car-centric status quo.

Just think if Greg Phipps had the chutzpah to disagree with his overlord to insist on making the situation better, rather than meekly accepting the status quo.

We'll stop there. After all, "just thinking" is precisely what they're not doing.

#FireGahan2019

Seattle Tosses Out Rulebook to Protect Pedestrians, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

Seattle will begin adding safe crosswalks without first assessing if high numbers of pedestrians are going to use them — a direct contradiction of the nation’s road design Bible.

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices states that before communities can add a signalized crosswalk — a crosswalk with a traffic light — there must be at least 93 pedestrians that cross at the location every hour. If pedestrian traffic is insufficient, the manual will also allow a signalized crosswalk only if five pedestrians were struck by drivers (think about that) at that location within a year.

In recent years, some progressive transportation engineers have challenged this rule, noting it subordinates pedestrian safety to the speedy flow of car traffic. (Indeed, as transportation planners sometimes joke, you can’t determine the need for a bridge by measuring how many people are swimming across the river.)

In Seattle, the city’s lead engineer, Dongho Chang, announced that the city was “piloting a new approach” to crossings on its greenway system. The city will add the crosswalk and the signal and then count how many pedestrians cross and see if it reaches the threshold that the MUTCD recommends.

According to Chang, the first experiment — at Ballard Avenue — was successful.

Eventually, some engineers hope, Seattle’s experiment will push other cities to try a new approach and, eventually, encourage action by the national committee responsible for updating the MUTCD. It’s especially important given the sharp increase pedestrian fatalities in recent years.

"The status quo in American road design is claiming more and more lives, according to some transportation safety advocates."

Lest we forget -- the ultimate in status quo.

Just think about all those times when the bored of works enumerated the many splendid reasons why they couldn't (wouldn't) help make our streets safe.

Just think about city engineer Summers' passive-aggressive protests -- but traffic flow, but INDOT, but whatever else springs to an obstructionist's mind.

Just think about how different it would be if their first response wasn't "here's why we can't and won't help" but "we'll find a way to help."

Just think if the latter constituted Jeff Gahan's instructions to pliant campaign donors like HWC Engineering, rather than deploying them to defend the car-centric status quo.

We'll stop there. After all, "just thinking" is precisely what they're not doing. 

#FireGahan2019

America’s Most Dangerous Roads for Pedestrians, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

In the U.S., pedestrian fatalities have climbed 35 percent since 2008. And federal traffic safety regulators aren’t at work, thanks to the government shutdown.

The status quo in American road design is claiming more and more lives, according to some transportation safety advocates. The 2019 edition of Dangerous by Design, a recurring report by Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, finds that the number of people struck and killed while walking has grown a startling 35 percent since 2008.

There are multiple factors behind this, but the report emphasizes one in particular: overly wide arterials that give too much space to cars and too little to humans. High-speed, multi-lane avenues that underpin sprawling urban growth, as opposed to slower, narrower streets that support walkable neighborhoods, are “consistently linked ... to higher rates of both traffic-related deaths for people walking and traffic-related deaths overall,” it states.

The geography of greatest danger gives some weight to that conclusion. The Sun Belt states of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and others are home to some of the country’s most spread-out metro areas. And they are among the states with the highest “pedestrian death index,” which measures how deadly it is for people to walk there. The report calculates this metric based on fatality numbers, controlling for population and how many people walk to work, for the years between 2008 and 2017.

By those counts, Florida is by far the most perilous place to walk in America, with a significantly higher state-wide PDI than Alabama, the second-highest state. Eight of the top 10 most dangerous metropolitan areas landed in the Sunshine State. “It sticks out like a sore thumb,” Emiko Atherton, the director of the National Complete Streets Coalition at Smart Growth America, said on a Tuesday conference call. Atherton emphasized Florida’s automobile-oriented development history, combined with its many population centers, as a primary cause for its unusually lethal numbers.

Billy Hattaway, the director of transportation for the city of Orlando, pointed to state and local efforts to enact “Complete Streets” policies in Florida, whereby roads are explicitly designed to protect pedestrians and cyclists with wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and safer crossing areas. It will take years to see these practices become widespread, Hattaway acknowledged. “In time, we’re hoping to see some improvements,” he said.

But the shape of roads and highways alone can’t explain the growing safety risk of walking in America, which has been noted in many other surveys and contexts. Rising vehicle-miles traveled and low gas prices in the post-recession years has been linked to the rising tide of car crashes and pedestrian fatalities. Some researchers has pointed to the popularity of ride-hailing as another explanation for more vehicular mayhem on the streets. Plenty of safety advocates and planners have laid the blame on personal technology. “The thing that has changed is the smartphone revolution,” Mighk Wilson, a transportation planner for Florida’s Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties, told the Orlando Sentinel last year.

Less publicized, but of great importance, is the kind of vehicle that more drivers are choosing to drive. Nationally, more Americans can be found behind the wheels of ever-more-massive pickup trucks and SUVs—huge, heavy machines that tower over smaller road users ...

NA knows it well: "So many traffic engineers suffer from human-neglect, an inability to perceive humans in their designs."

Hello, Larry. And Jim. Etc, etc. Rinse and repeat.

I trust Strong Towns will forgive me for this full-length reprint. I'd strongly advise clicking over to the Strong Towns web site, rummaging around, and seeing what a system of human-scaled thought actually looks like. People are one thing, and their cars something else. It's debatable whether the tail will stop wagging the dog in our lifetimes, but maybe the imbalance can be slowed.

Thinking in human terms is a good place to start.

---

When Traffic Engineers Can’t Hear You, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

My wife just finished the book Left Neglected and thought the premise was unique enough to tell me about it twice. The main character suffers from a condition called “left neglect” where, because of a neurological injury, they are unable to perceive that there is a left. It’s not that they can’t hear or feel things from the left, but that they do not involuntarily recognize that there is even such a thing as left.

She gave me some examples from the book—people would be speaking and the person with left neglect couldn’t figure out where they were, even though they were standing right there on their left. And as she told me this, it was hard for me not to, metaphorically speaking, draw some parallels to some of my colleagues in the engineering profession. Except instead of left neglect, I’d call it human neglect.

You can tell an engineer that people are there. They can even take steps to acknowledge the presence of humans when prompted. But none of it is intuitive. And the results show it.


I’m going to focus on one today because I keep getting routine updates from a video I posted years ago on the Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI). The video keeps getting passed around engineering circles as a joke, as a way to laugh at Strong Towns and discredit me. These are nearly always behind a paywall (although the sympathetic sometimes send me excerpts), but these conversations often lead to an increase in comments on the YouTube page.

For example, this was posted last week by someone identifying themselves as Luke Popez:

Seven years later....YOU WERE WRONG. About all of it. Diverging diamond has reduced fatalities by 60%.

Here’s a another in that same period from someone identified as Callie Masters:

This guy wants a highway intersection to be as friendly as a teddy bear's picnic spot. Keep your nervous kids at home! We're trying to drive fast here!!

And from James Lemay:

Turns out you were totally wrong about everything.

I was wrong about everything, the diverging diamond is safer than what it replaced, people want to drive fast so stop being such a ninny. These are very interesting assertions, especially since they respond to a contention that I never made. And THAT is the problem.

So many traffic engineers suffer from human-neglect, an inability to perceive humans in their designs. Even when forced to accommodate pedestrians— their pet term for humans—they still don’t intuitively perceive them.

My diverging diamond video was responding to an engineer who had recorded a video to show off the pedestrian-friendly design of the diverging diamond. That engineer asserted throughout the video that the DDI was pedestrian-friendly. To make his case, he noted the Jersey barrier, raised domes for the vision-impaired, decorative brick, push button crossings, and the beautiful view of the interstate, among other features.

This was then, and remains today, totally ludicrous. My video points this out. The DDI design is quintessential checklist engineering: an approach that goes through the motions of meeting each requirement for pedestrian access, but—due to human-neglect—is despotic for people outside of a motor vehicle.

My highest aspiration in making this video was that my fellow engineers would start to recognize the difference between a checklist approach and an actual design that considers humans. (I’ll admit I had some lower aspirations as well.) Not only has that not happened, but these continued responses just demonstrate the widespread human-neglect the profession suffers from.

Engineer: The DDI is pedestrian friendly.

Me: No, it’s actually despotic for humans that are not in a vehicle.

Engineer: You’re wrong. It increases traffic flow and there are fewer crashes per through movement.

This is silly, and it’s inane and unbecoming to suggest that I’m somehow wrong on this because it meets engineering metrics. Of course it does. I’ve never suggested it didn’t. In fact, let me state this clearly in the hopes that it will help some of you traffic engineers:

The DDI is a brilliant design if your goal is to improve traffic flow without increasing the width of the interchange. It will handle more vehicles-per-hour, especially during peak times, and it will do so with improvements to traffic safety. It can also be engineered to accommodate pedestrians in ways that are safer than non-DDI interchanges.

All of this is true, and I’ve never argued that it wasn’t. Here’s what else is true: the DDI is not pedestrian-friendly. Not in the least.

Pedestrian: a person walking along a road or in a developed area

Friendly: kind and pleasant

Jersey barriers, reflective markings, and decorative brick do not magically transform something so despotic into something kind and pleasant. They might make it slightly less despotic—and that’s arguable—but they do not make it friendly. If you want to argue with me on the DDI, if you want to laugh at me and claim I’m wrong, stop creating straw men to beat up, and instead make an argument as to why this interchange is kind and pleasant to someone on foot.

The sad thing is, I don’t think most of these engineers can, not because they are wrong—and they ARE wrong—but because they suffer from human-neglect. This affliction makes them incapable of even knowing they are wrong because they are not perceiving humans beyond the checklists they have created for themselves.

And these are the same people, with the same affliction, who are designing the stroads through our neighborhoods as well. We all deserve better.

---

NA Confidential has been unable to confirm whether New Albany Mayor Jeff M. Gahan or anyone working in the city's administration is under federal investigation or indictment for corruption, bribery or racketeering. It is standard policy of the U.S. Justice Department to refuse to confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of investigations or subjects of investigations. A similar policy exists at the F.B.I.

Blaming the victim in car crashes: "Journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists."

Hello ... THUMP THUMP ... is this thing on?

Bill, Susan, Jason, Chris, et al ... this is the Columbia Journalism Review speaking, not some foaming-at-the-mouth Baylorite radical anarchist trying to take your cars away from you.

When covering car crashes, be careful not to blame the victim, by Meg Dalton

Please feel free to click through and peruse the entire piece ... and then can you explain what you're doing to cure this bias at the News and Tribune?

PEDESTRIAN (AND CYCLIST) BLAME is the predominant framework in a lot of news coverage, according to Angie Schmitt, an editor of Streetsblog, a news site about transportation reform. Journalists will report that the victim “darted” into traffic, a verb you see almost exclusively in stories about traffic deaths. Or they’ll emphasize that the victim was jaywalking, texting while crossing the street, or not wearing a helmet.

“The helmet fixation redirects attention away from the overarching problem of vehicular violence, assisting in its denial,” according to a report released last month by the University of Heidelberg. Even in cases when a helmet would not have prevented death, the absence of one is usually noted, as in The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s 2009 coverage of the death of a young cyclist, Sylvia Bingham. Wearing a helmet would not have made a difference in the outcome of the crash, according to Bingham’s doctor. But the reporter, in the paragraph immediately following that statement, noted Bingham wasn’t wearing a helmet and included two additional incidents in which cyclists lacked them.

Journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists.

Whether it’s speeding, running a red light, texting, or just a general lack of attentiveness, journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists in these situations. These oversights can be startling. For instance, local television station KTSM solely focused on the victim following a fatal 2016 crash in El Paso, Texas. Eduardo Dill attempted to cross a street in his neighborhood in his electric wheelchair when a driver struck him. The police cited Dill’s “failure to yield the right of way” as the contributing factor in the crash, and so did the station’s story.

In reporters’ defense, Schmitt says, crash information usually comes from flawed police reports, which inform the news coverage. Those reports tend to reflect a survivor’s bias since, in crashes with fatal outcomes, the pedestrian or cyclist is not around to share their side of the story. Instead, the reports are usually based on a single eyewitness—the driver.

Pedestrian deaths become less frequent when street lights are more frequent.

It should be noted that New Albany's recently written and adopted comprehensive plan includes a few words about lighting.

Complete streets are also sustainable by providing multi-modal transportation. As a sustainable measure, energy efficient energy sources of lighting should be considered throughout New Albany. 

As I've written again and again, the necessary first step is a municipal bill of rights for non-automotive street users, both as a mission statement of intent and a checklist of measures taken to enhance safety. State our intent, calm the traffic ... then work on the street lights.

Detroit Streetlight Effort Dramatically Reduces Ped Deaths, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog USA)

Detroit is seeing the light.

A new report on streetlights — that most crucial, yet oft-overlooked infrastructure element — shows that pedestrians deaths plummeted in the Motor City from an average of 24 per year to just one, thanks to a two-year, $185-million effort that replaced 65,000 lights [PDF] in a city where 40 percent were not working in 2014.

The results have been more than just illuminating. In 2017, there was just one pedestrian death at night in an unlighted area. And overall, they’re down 40 percent since their height in 2015 ...

Making this place walkable will require understanding concepts as well as exercising the ballot.

We care about walking because it is the most natural, cheapest, energy efficient, space efficient, and accessible way to get around. Cities are the colonies of humans, so we should build them for humans, because what else would we build them for?

Campaign finance, perhaps?

It seems to be the Deaf Gahan way, seeing as money is the only thing he understands amid an ongoing, raging personality disorder.

Meanwhile, who better than a serious accident/wrongful death attorney to provide a working definition of a pedestrian?

A pedestrian is a person on foot or using a conveyance propelled by human power (skates, skateboard) other than a bicycle. Pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, and highway construction workers are known as pedestrians. Pedestrians also include disabled persons who may be using powered devices like self-propelled wheelchairs, tricycles, or quadricycles.

Today is Matt Brewer's funeral. We still don't know the outcome of the investigation into how a driver killed Matt on Monday evening, although we know quite well that city government will seek to deflect responsibility, refuse to discuss the matter publicly, and in all likelihood blame the victim, if implicitly.

It is repugnant behavior, but then again, so are they. As noted on Thursday, we're obliged never to forget Matt, who was a lovely human being, and to remember him in part by working toward rebuilding this car-centric city into a safe, walkable place, whether our craven local officials are willing to extend themselves or not.

To me, either they cooperate in making this city safe for pedestrians, or we vote them into oblivion. In the months to come, let's get straight to it.

What Makes A Place Walkable, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

 ... To measure if a trip is walkable, there are four factors we should consider: safety, distance, convenience, and comfort.

Safety
Having to walk alongside 45 mile per hour traffic, cross a multi-lane highway without crosswalks, or cross over a slip lane while drivers have a green light giving them the right to fly through—these things are outright unsafe. You do not want to risk your life with every trip. For walking to be safe, either all the motorized traffic around you should be going at a safe speed (25 miles per hour or less) or you should be segregated from it (protected or buffered sidewalks, or walking routes that can avoid walking alongside high speed traffic altogether).

Distance
Your destination must be no more than a reasonable distance away—about a mile (around a 20 minute walk) is the upper limit for most people. The area within a reasonable walk is referred to as your walkshed. If you live in Harlem and work in Tribeca, both in Manhattan, you would not likely walk your 7.5 mile commute everyday despite it being a pretty straight walk with sidewalks and thorough "Complete Neighborhoods" the entire way.

Convenience
Walking must be a convenient way to get around—which relates to the distance of the walk, but also that other modes are inconvenient enough that it outweighs the inconvenience of walking. Do you have to pay for parking? Do you have to waste 10 minutes fiddling around with a parking garage two blocks away from where you are trying to go? Does traffic move at a crawl? Is your destination so close that it will actually take longer to drive there?

Comfort
I listed comfort last, because I have seen many places where people walk because walking is the most convenient way to get around, despite narrow sidewalks (thanks to on-street parking on streets that are too narrow to support it), trees and poles blocking the sidewalk, pavement in very bad shape, etc. However, comfort is important in encouraging us to walk. Factors that add to walking comfort include well-lit streets at night, a street layout that does not make pedestrians feel like second class citizens (by allocating pedestrians no accommodations), building fronts that face the street, and no large blank walls (when you have variety and granularity, your brain gets rewarded by seeing progress as you exert energy, making walking feel less exhausting). Comfort is rated lower than safety, distance, or convenience because we should not fall into the trap of thinking people will walk if we just give them wide sidewalks and pretty landscaping. If there is nothing within walking distance worth walking to, what's the point?

Peak Gahanism: $5 million for a single mile's road work, all the while pretending it will benefit pedestrians and bicyclists.

It's important to clearly understand after six-plus years that any infrastructure project touted by Team Gahan as miraculous and conducive for non-automotive road users will be such only by the barest of legalistic margins, if at all (see press release below).

As such, an extra traffic lane on Charlestown Road will contradict any pretend-improvements for non-automotive users, and on Main Street, there'll be bike lanes solely drawn inevitably as spacers, leading to and from nowhere, except deadly sharrow symbols painted in invisible ink on the roadway.

None of it did this guy any good. From last night:

On Spring Street today by Breakwater, a bicyclist riding in a bike lane was hit by a driver.

Meanwhile, the city's own memes are starting to bear an uncanny resemblance to our pieces of blog satire, and the content of press releases like this one is intended to dazzle the eye of readers like my councilman, who are captivated by a neat, clean and sanitary surface sheen, which removes the need to examine the details.

As he never bothered to trouble himself with two years ago.

Remembering Chloe Allen -- and the unfinished task of making streets safe for all users, not just drivers.

We are awash with money, evidently -- and as these projects progress, so will several of Jeff Gahan's more reliable campaign donors.

Summers announces plan to "Walk the Walk" by enhancing car-centrism via the Market Street medians. We advocate nuking them to outer space.

By the way, the lowest bid by a substantial margin for the Market Street median-fluffing -- so low, in fact, that it might impel cosmetic surgery for another whole block -- was submitted by Allterrain Paving, which makes frequent deposits to the advancement of Gahanism in our time.

Move along, folks; nothing to see here. A bid 30% lower than the next closest competitor?

As Dear Leader himself has said, "if shit happens, those checks still come through the US Mail."

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$5 Million Worth of Infrastructure Projects Approved

Two major infrastructure investments were approved at this morning’s Board of Public Works and Safety meeting. The Board approved contracts for the Charlestown Road Infrastructure and Road Improvement Project along with approving contracts for the East Main Street Infrastructure and Road Improvement Project (from State Street to East 5th Street).

These two projects total nearly $5 million worth of infrastructure improvements in New Albany.

“These two road improvements projects add to the growing list of roadway, stormwater, sewer, and other infrastructure improvements currently ongoing or planned for the near future in New Albany,” stated Mayor Jeff Gahan.

The improvements along Charlestown Road will span from Hedden Court to Genung Drive. Planned improvements include the full construction of a curb, gutter, and 6-foot sidewalks on both sides of the road to help improve pedestrian safety throughout the corridor. A newly constructed storm water system will also be in place to assist in drainage. The road will also be milled, widened, and then repaved to 31 feet wide, allowing for a new lane of traffic. This new lane will allow for two-way left-turn lanes, improving the flow of traffic along Charlestown Road.

Infrastructure improvements along East Main Street will span from State Street to East 5th. Planned improvements include addition of on-street parking on both sides of the street throughout the project. Bump out features and bike lanes are planned to assist with bicycle-users and pedestrian safety. Sidewalks will also be updated with ADA compliant crosswalk ramps and new construction where needed. Lighting improvements are also part of the project, which will help improve pedestrian visibility and safety.

Yes, and Charlie Bond was hit by a DRIVER, not a car.

Best wishes to Charlie Bond, who is familiar to anyone who walks downtown. He's recovering from being hit by a DRIVER, not a car, which is doubly interesting in that the local chain newspaper pays tribute to the man's legendary status as super basketball fan, without ever having once mentioned the Spring Street incident that sent him to the hospital.

I wonder what happened? Isn't that why we have newspapers in the first place? Maybe Bill should send hyper-content provider Tom May to either get the story, or proselytize. There's probably a third column slot in there somewhere.

No wonder there is a proliferation of chiropractors. You spend all your time shaking your head.

MORRIS: Every team needs a super fan like Charlie Bond, by Chris Morris (Tom May Every Day and Sunday)

... While sitting around last week recovering from a medical procedure, I found out that Charlie was hit by a car along Spring Street in New Albany. He suffered numerous injuries and was taken to University of Louisville Hospital. It will be a long recovery ...

 ... But just like there has never been another player like Romeo Langford, there will never be another fan like Charlie Bond. He has gained legendary status by just being Charlie. He lives for basketball season. He’s a true Bulldog.

ASK THE BORED: "The sidewalk mistake our cities need to stop making."

It took only six years for Dear Leader's anchor-weighted City Hall to publicize agenda items and ensuing decisions from the Board of Public Works and Safety — and only one week for the feed to be propagandized into meaninglessness.

But this is New Gahania, after all, and now that the sun is out, can we have a conversation about sidewalks -- or is it to be top-down communication only?

Like always?

Meanwhile, the newspaper's coverage of Tuesday's meeting reveals critical information: there'll be a Taco Bell atop the strip mine called Summit Springs.

THE SIDEWALK MISTAKE OUR CITIES NEED TO STOP MAKING, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

 ... Within a few months of the sidewalk being restored, it was closed off again and, months later, it's still impassable. The situation is not just inconvenient, but dangerous — especially for the children, seniors and wheelchair users in my neighborhood.

Unfortunately, this type of treatment of sidewalks and pedestrians is the norm in my city and countless others. Here are a couple more examples of disregard for needs of people walking that I bet you’ve encountered in your town:

• NO WARNING
• PLAYING HOPSCOTCH
• CAR SPACE OVER PEDESTRIAN SPACE
• A SIMPLE SOLUTION

The conclusion:

This should be the case in all of our cities, and it’s not hard to achieve, either. Some signage that directs people, temporary wooden ramps where needed and generic barriers that protect pedestrians walking in the street (which most construction companies likely already have at their disposal anyway) are all that you need.

In order to accomplish this, we need our local leaders to step up and make it a legal requirement for construction projects to preserve or provide an alternative for pedestrian space, and we need development companies to take a few simple steps to put this requirement into action. It won’t involve much effort on the part of any of these entities — like I said, we’re talking about a few feet of sidewalk width — but the positive impact for anyone walking (and that includes people walking from their car into a business or residence) will be significant.

Today's must-read: "Distracted pedestrian laws aren’t really about the evidence. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture."

Far more likely, isn't it?

The Baffler nails it (link below).

All I can say is that I'll do my level best to make this topic an issue in the next round of municipal elections in 2019, irrespective of political parties and candidates.

New Albanians should be disgusted at the vast extent to which Jeff Gahan's clueless coterie squandered the rare opportunity to initiate genuine street grid cultural change in spite of spending millions on projects that while needed, like two-way streets, were cynically and timidly implemented to preserve the car-centric status quo rather than push the city forward.

It remains: speed kills. 

Our next mayor won't necessarily be compelled to tear it all down and start over, but recovering from Gahan's patented shortsightedness will take time and more money. I regret it, but there it is, and "next" will have to deal with it. Let's just make sure there is a "next."

#FireGahan2019

Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”? by Jordan Fraade (The Baffler)

The phantom of the “distracted pedestrian” haunts America

 ... “Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.

SNIP

Despite the best efforts of forward-thinking urban planners, we can fully expect the profitable regime of car-sponsored ped-shaming to continue, egged on by news reports that smear dead pedestrians, government agencies that treat walking as a suspect activity, and car-company executives who accidentally let the mask slip when they’re tasked with programming their driverless cars to respond in crisis situations. This doesn’t mean that crossing the street while distracted on a smartphone is some sort of commendable civic statement, akin to how many New Yorkers view jaywalking. (After one too many close calls, I’ve managed to get in the habit of putting away my own phone when I cross the street—and, yes, I feel much safer for it.) But it does mean that anyone who cares about making cities safer and more equitable should be ready to take the side of pedestrians, even when emotional, error-prone humans are no longer the ones behind the wheel.

People who choose to take in the city with all five senses, rather than observe it behind tinted glass, should have the right to do so without harassment or fear.

Crosswalk safety: Phipps goes on TeeVee; Summers gulps the Kool Aid. Jeff Speck had the street grid answers, but Jeff Gahan urinated on them. Unwalkable New Albany -- what a thrill!

When the somnolent finally awaken, it's cause for acknowledgement, if not champagne toasts.

Maybe my 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps genuinely (albeit belatedly) grasps the way he's been used and comprised, time and again, by both mayor and political party for the past six years. They laugh at Phipps, not with him, and even I find this to be sad. Once discarded, principles are hard to re-establish.

If the anesthesia-flavored Kool-Aid is wearing off, that's progress, and proof of Phipps being "woke" will or will not be displayed in the months to come. Here's a friendly hint, Greg.

Gahan's rancid public housing putsch is an abominable moral and ethical failure, and your silence only abets it. Where is your Human Rights Commission when it's needed the most?  

However, focusing on the topic at hand, maybe Phipps is beginning to see that without Jeff Speck's principled approach to comprehensive street grid reform, two-way automotive friction alone cannot magically produce walkability -- and the majority of bicycle-friendly design components never made it past Gahan's ingrained cowardice.

Can you explain, Jeff Gillenwater?

"Greg Phipps and Larry Summers are both very aware that much more could have been done via this significant expenditure to protect against and start reversing auto-centric culture. It’s too bad both of them chose silence as a means of protecting their vaunted personal positions while a solid plan to do just that was being butchered by their boss. As lots of us have mentioned, two-way conversion as implemented is a bare bones step. Now we’ll have to spend years more and lots of additional money working toward eventually getting it right."

In a nutshell, yes. Let's look at WDRB's coverage.

New Albany councilman concerned about safety at newly installed crosswalks, by Chris Sutter (WDRB)

NEW ALBANY, Ind. (WDRB) -- Pedestrians have the right of way, but apparently those lessons of driver's education are a distant memory for several Hoosiers.

Pedestrian signs and lights were put up at several intersections in downtown New Albany during the two-way street conversions, but City Council Vice President Greg Phipps said few drivers seem to notice or care, blowing right through the intersections ...

And a predictable response from the very same engineer who at one time told me that some form of traffic cones or flexible stakes were being actively considered for use at certain of these intersections. Looks like Larry's been given a high-proof dose of Jeff Gahan's intellectual acquiescence serum.

New Albany City Engineer Larry Summers thinks that could just cause more confusion.

"It's more of an educational component that needs to occur than additional modifications that need to take place," Summers said.

Summers added that the city will be posting Facebook videos to the city's account and sending safety information with the sewer bill so that people are aware of what they need to do at each crossing.

Phipps should consider how different this might have played out had City Hall been willing to publicize HWC Engineering's de-Specked plan before implementation. Collective eyes surely would have spotted this and other issues, but no, it had to be a secret -- because secrecy is what Jeff Gahan is, and he knew all along he'd be gutting Speck's recommendations.

Remember this in 2019, when the secret ballot will come in handier than brooms for the necessary sweeping. As an addendum, below is NAC's post from December 12.

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ASK THE BORED: Crosswalk safety and the silent CM? Hey, we're delighted whenever someone repeats what we've been saying for weeks on end.

In other words, precisely what was written here on November 28 -- and we thank the councilman for reading.

Grid Control, Vol. 30: These weird, useless "enhanced" crosswalk gizmos remind us that HWC's and Deaf Gahan's "complete roads" downtown are not "complete streets."

This passage might have been written by HWC Engineering, hence the sad reality of the imperfect implementation of two-way roads (are they streets?) in New Albany.

That's because as a non-automotive user of the city streets, I've found these credit-card-sized flashing beacons to be complete and utter jokes.

People walking still will find it far safer to look both ways and cross in the middle of a block; in spite of claims that traffic is moving more slowly since the reversion, the fact is that far too few calming measures were built into the rebooted grid. Team Gahan bet the farm that "friction" alone would calm traffic sufficiently for the myriad other two-way benefits to emerge.

Maybe, though these streets are still straightaways, just like before. They're still built to promote speed and indifference, just like before, though now with "enhanced" crosswalk beacons intended not as a legitimate means of rectifying a root problem, but as a "hey, we did something" gesture, another bright, shiny paste-over symbol, this one pointing to how the fundamental mobility issues downtown have not been addressed at all by a "modernization" program that preserved (certainly on purpose) the downtown grid as composed of "complete roads" rather than altered into "complete streets."

By the way, Greg ... it's just the way your political mentor Deaf Gahan wanted it to be. You, me and all the others have been the victims of a bait 'n' switch. I hope you continue to speak out publicly about it, and don't worry; I'm sure Greg Fischer won't unfriend you.

NEW ALBANY: Crosswalk safety questioned, by Chris Morris (Hanson Diffusion Compiler)

Education on flashing yellow lights needed, councilman says

NEW ALBANY — New Albany's grid modernization plan, which converted downtown streets to two-way traffic, has been well received by the driving public. But that is not what brought City Councilman Greg Phipps to Tuesday's New Albany Board of Public Works and Safety meeting Tuesday.

Phipps told the board he is concerned about pedestrian safety at the new crosswalks. He fears a majority of drivers don't understand when the yellow light is flashing to yield to pedestrians. He said that is a formula for disaster.

"I'm afraid a pedestrian will start out in the crosswalk and a driver will be distracted and not see them," Phipps said.

The news crosswalks are activated by a chip. City engineer Larry Summers said some of the chips are not functioning correctly and will have to be replaced. He also said a list is being made of crosswalks and areas along the conversion grid that need to be addressed.

Phipps said a few intersections are more dangerous than others, singling out the one at 10th and Elm streets. He said the red flashing light there has been taken down and drivers are "not coming to a complete stop."

"Motorists are not stopping when lights are flashing," he said.

He said he has seen similar issues at crosswalks at 13th and Spring streets, Eighth and Elm streets and in front of St. Mary's Catholic Church on Spring Street.

Educating the public is key, Phipps said. He said there has been some information about the new crosswalks tucked inside monthly sewer bills. He also told the board he would be in favor of the city paying for and placing flexible yellow cones at intersections to warn the public.

"They [motorists] are used to stopping at red flashing lights, but they need to understand a yellow light flashing alerts them to pedestrians, and pedestrians always have the right of way," Phipps said ...