ON THE AVENUES: Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon (The Big Bang Remix).

Pedestrians being hit by cars is a car problem. Car congestion is a car problem. Noise and air pollution from car exhaust is a car problem. The solution is less space devoted to cars and fewer cars.
-- Momifornia on Twitter

Nawbany was awash in cascading waves of irony the past week, and seeing as we’re not the sort of city that appreciates the variety of honesty that irony elicits, my brief return from internal (infernal?) exile is merited.

According to reliable reports on social media, it appears that Mayor Jeff Gahan was involved in an automobile accident on Monday afternoon at the contested intersection of Klerner Lane and Mt. Tabor Road.

First and foremost, we believe no one was hurt. Had there been an injury, and if any of it had been relayed by the picked-over carcass of deceased local media, I would not discuss the accident in this space. 

So, disclaimers aside, it was reported that on Monday the armored mayoral SUV (Nawbany lacks Saudi-sized oil reserves, but galdurn it, we have a sewer utility cash cow) t-boned a smaller car, with a photo clearly showing the mayor talking on his cell phone, probably with Rudy Giuliani (or the city attorney, whichever one picked up first), and absent the pandemic face covering timorously beseeched by his safely captive city council.

The witness who broke the story added that the mayor then left the scene before police arrived.

Wait -- you may be asking, “forget bad driving, Roger, but why is the intersection contested”?

Thanks for asking.

Originally the mayor sought to place a roundabout at this precise location, as part of a barely plausible multi-million dollar “improvement” project for Mt. Tabor Road, which local residents spent something like five years contesting, at their own expense, accurately characterizing it as an expensive boondoggle, constructed in such a way as to attract even more speeding cut-through traffic in a residential area, thus contradicting the claims of proponents in City Hall (and nowhere else) that traffic would be slowed and calmed for all time.

These neighborhood advocates, those fated to live adjacent to the “improvements,” felt strongly that with increased traffic there’d be even more instances of vehicular mayhem, a prediction scornfully rejected by the mayor, who blamed partisan politics, and in essence asked residents whether they believed the mayoral clique or their own two eyes.

As documented during the past two years, and now proven in 2020 by the automobile-supremacist mayor himself, their own two eyes proved plenty accurate. 

 

Naturally the residents were never once asked whether they wanted road “improvements.” The project was imposed from above, by the elites.

Welcome to Nawbany, pilgrim -- and if you don’t have a car, you’re not really welcome at all. 

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In fact, as this baleful year of 2020 limps to the finish line, motor vehicles of all stripes are moving way too fast all over town.

In response, City Hall continues to insist with a straight face that we should believe the increasingly illusory, North Korean-style press releases, which breathlessly laud the unprecedented achievement of universal street grid calming and pervasive lawfulness, as achieved throughout the city by the shining wonder of perfect governance.

But I live on Spring Street, and can attest that these claims are utterly fictitious, or as my father might have put it, “bullshit.”

Apart from obvious examples like chronic speeding at all hours of the day, there’s the noisy and disruptive HyperCar auto polishing and sales lot located in my East Spring Street neighborhood, which in the beginning claimed it would be servicing cars only, and not selling cars, at least for a very long time, but forgot the promises almost immediately as city officials yawned, and currently has so many fancy souped-up race cars crammed into its lot that some of them must always be parked (illegally) on 13th Street, with HyperCars employees and customers getting their jollies by taking all these cars on cacophonous spins around the block, dozens of times each day, while shifting, revving, squealing tires, screeching and emitting bursts of metallic flatulence that I’m guessing combine to produce something akin to an orgasm.

As such, and in an instance of profound irony that comes close to matching the mayor’s Mt. Tabor mishap, on Thursday evening one of hyper-diaper’s cars parked illegally on 13th Street was creamed by a hit-and-run driver, who paused long enough for nearby residents to emerge from their homes and chase the fleeing driver to Market Street.

I considered risking bad karma by laughing my ass off, but didn't. A better response is crying in frustration at the perennial backwardness displayed by Nawbany.

Here we are in Midtown, supposedly a municipal showplace for genteel “blue” progressivism, and instead of urbanism we have hyperactive race cars on one side of Spring at 13th, and the failed candidate Oxendine’s clown-car discount funeral home on the other.

And our presumed neighborhood leaders? They’re AWOL, as always.

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What makes the irony of the mayor’s recent driver’s ed fender bender even more delicious is that it transpired in the yard of a neighborhood resident who helped leaded the opposition to the Mt. Tabor “improvement” project.

She heard the crash and snapped a photo of the two damaged vehicles, with unmasked mayor (literally and figuratively) standing in her yard. Upon publishing the photo of a public event that occurred in front of her house, the ruling elites circled the wagons and commenced slagging, leading to the usual drooling defenses of the mayor as a wonderful human being on a par with Gandhi, or perhaps even the departing humanitarian Donald Trump.

Pfui. It’s all irrelevant.

Again and again I’ve pointed out that quite a lot of New Albany’s foot dragging pertaining to complete streets, walkability and all-purpose urban modernity -- the city’s abject refusal to so much as try leveling the playing field via mobility solutions not reliant on internal combustion engines -- stems from the abysmal and persistent ignorance of elected and appointed public officials who, in effect, have neither been anywhere nor seen anything, and who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a book if the pages slapped them in the face like the palm fronds adorning their hard seltzers.

City Hall has willfully botched these equations ever since Gahan began consolidating power, because power in little-pond Nawbany is about campaign finance funding from pay-to-play skimming, the proceeds from which simply cannot be generated by walking or biking projects. Rather, automobile supremacy equals cash. It’s unfortunate, but true.

At least the mayor now has direct experience of what it’s like to run afoul of city streets he’s done so much to curate in his own image, and I can only hope that some sweet day he’ll take the debacle a step further and attempt to use one of his favored push-button (un)controlled urban crosswalks, with their tiny flashing yellow lights ignored as hot rods roar and tow trucks cruise at 60 mph on “calmed” stretches of Gahanesque speedways, learning in accordance with those of us who walk, and despairing of making it to the other side alive.

Maybe then, at last, he’d grasp the profound disconnect he has imposed on those without cars. Yes, it means he’d have to go out for a walk, and admittedly that’s about as unlikely as a Democratic Party grandee being spotted on a bicycle. But a boy can dream, especially when dreams are all we have in the complete and unmitigated absence of principle.

The errant politician probably won't have to answer for it; his handlers will shelter him, and the super-duper-hyper-racecar place will deny that it creates daily mayhem on residential streets, but I'm just happy with any dent, real or metaphorical, placed in our local default of automobile supremacy.

Maybe we’ll get a clue, some day. After all, even a stopped pre-digital clock is right twice each day.

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November 7: On (or off) the Avenues, there's got to be a morning after. 

October 8: ON THE AVENUES: I'm voting for Biden. Otherwise it's Trump's burgeoning fascist GOP death cult. 

October 1: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to the last will and testament of NA Confidential. 

September 24: ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss. 

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

"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 ...

Slick Jeffie knows how to slow the cars, but he won't. Maybe Mark Seabrook will take action where the Democrats have failed.

“You move through a space and you dwell in a place.”

Here's another one:

Streets ahead: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality, by Charlemagne (The Economist)

It isn't rocket science, but it might as well be given the timidity displayed by Gahan's ruling elite. If they would periodically remove themselves from their own massive vehicles, walk around a bit and survey the situation, they'd understand; if it doesn't feel safe without 4,000 lbs of plastic and metal as protection, then it probably isn't.

But that's no way to perpetuate Gahan's lifeblood of pay-to-play political patronage, is it?

Why Speed Kills Cities, by Andrew Small (City Lab)

U.S. cities are dropping urban speed limits in an effort to boost safety and lower crash rates. But the benefits of less-rapid urban mobility don’t end there.

 ... The most obvious immediate benefit to a fundamentally slower city is the safety boost it delivers. Reducing speeds is the best, easiest, and fastest way to quickly radically improve safety, for both drivers and anyone in front of them. A recent report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that rising speed limits in the United States have led to an additional estimated 37,000 deaths over the past 25 years. “We know that very small changes in speed can have big consequences for pedestrians,” says Jessica Cicchino, the vice president of research at IIHS. “A pedestrian struck at 25 miles per hour has 25 percent chance of being seriously injured—but that climbs to a 50 percent chance at 33 miles per hour.” Importantly, lower speed limits also reduce the number of crashes, as an IIHS study found last year in Boston after it lowered its default speed in 2017.

Speed kills in a more abstract sense, too. Building urban roads that can handle a large number of vehicles traveling at 35 miles per hour and up means making them wider, with fewer curves. High-speed highways and street-level limited-access urban thoroughfares famously do a host of bad things to those who live nearby or underneath these big hostile barriers. What’s less discussed is what they’re doing to the people inside the cars. In his recent book Building and Dwelling, the planner and urban scholar Richard Sennett writes about how going faster in cities has lead urbanites to value “space” over “place.”

“You move through a space and you dwell in a place,” Sennett told CityLab’s Ian Klaus last year. “It’s a distinction for me that has to do with speed and automobiles. When people start driving at a certain speed, they lose awareness of where they are. … Where this gets reflected in urbanism is the more we create spaces where people move fast, the less they understand about what those spaces are. At about 28 or 30 mph people, moving through an urban environment stop being in a place and are in space instead.”

The time benefits one gets from boosting speeds in urban areas can end up being surprisingly modest: In downtown streets, the difference between a 25 mph commute and 45 mph commute is roughly an additional 48 seconds for every three-quarters of a mile traveled, according to Nelson\Nygaard. It’s also worth remembering that even urban “rapid transit” often isn’t really all that fast. (The New York City subway averages 17 miles per hour.)

When human- or animal-powered urban movement was the norm, there was much less anxiety about losing time in traffic jams, Sennett writes; in the twisted streets of old cities, congestion was accepted as just an fact of life. Only when cities like Paris transitioned from narrow lanes to wide Haussmann-style boulevards did urbanites began to associate speed with freedom of movement—witness reports of widespread road rage that sprouted up in Paris in the 1870s and early 1880s. Urban traffic jams today are a visceral sign that something has gone wrong—the city wasn’t working. Like not being physically touched in public, the desire to move freely—and not be stuck in traffic—is a sensation we take for granted as natural. But it’s a historical construction of our auto-centric sensibilities.

In his prescient 1973 essay, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” André Gorz makes a similar point about how private cars turned speed into a commodity that, when introduced into the city, created havoc: “When everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie,” he wrote, “everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets.”

Sennett also uses traffic flows to show the problem of scaling from the local to the urban—a theme in the debate to how to create an “open city.” He compares Lewis Mumford’s top-down garden city urbanism with Jane Jacobs’s bottom-up street-ballet localism. Both Mumford and Jacobs famously loathed the impact of the automobile, but Mumford argues that you can’t build infrastructure bit-by-bit, the way Jacobs sees the urban fabric: When you’re engineering how to circulate millions of vehicle trips, you have to plan at a bigger scale. By that logic, perhaps urbanists shouldn’t demand slow lanes or slow neighborhoods: They should ask for a slow city ...

Remembering Matt Brewer, bidding Williams Plumbing an affectionate farewell and beseeching City Hall to give a damn about public safety.

One year ago yesterday, Matt Brewer was struck and killed NOT by a minivan, as stated in this article, but by a DRIVER.

Apparently the minivan's DRIVER was exonerated on the scene by the NAPD, and later by the Floyd County Prosecutor, although we can't know any of this for sure because there exists no clear pathway for the general public to know the results of such investigations even though the facts are essential.

There is zero transparency in such matters, because the American legal system seems to be constituted to protect drivers of automobiles first and foremost, not non-drivers who suffer the brunt of auto supremacy's daily mayhem.

However there remains a very good chance that Matt was struck and killed owing to the obstruction of an illegally parked Williams Plumbing truck on the northeastern corner of Spring and 9th, as I documented last year in this series of nighttime photos. Watch as the red car approaches, disappears for an instant behind the truck, then reappears to continue speeding down Spring.

It literally constitutes a "dead man's curve," with the dogleg in the street constituting the first hazard, then the commercial vehicles stacked at the corner -- and, of course, dangerous speeds have NOT been reduced by City Hall's ineffectual "calming."

In fact these commercial vehicles have blocked sight lines at this corner since 1987, when Williams Plumbing bought the building and converted it to what amounts to an industrial use, which in practice has meant neglecting it consistently into a neighborhood eyesore.

Imagine: as the Williams Plumbing fleet of commercial vehicles has grown they've been parked for free on the public right of way -- advertised free on the public right of way, and been safety hazards on the public right of way. It's been a privileged existence, "free" of responsibility.

Why?

In fact, I've been pointing to all of this -- the parking violations, the dilapidation of the building and the cheek of it all -- almost from the inception of the blog.

2008.

All of it to a rousing chorus of snores from city officials, who for 32 years have been shirking THEIR responsibilities.

Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

Earlier this year I asked street commissioner Mickey Thompson if something had  been said at long last to Williams Plumbing about the illegally parked trucks, as I'd noticed they'd been moved around the corner to occupy public parking spaces on THAT street, not Spring (still illegal, by the way, but less of a public safety hazard).

Thompson said yes -- because he'd said something, not ordinance enforcement, the existence of which is rumored though not always witnessed save for street sweeping day.

Two weeks later the trucks began appearing parked on the southwestern side of Spring, blocking vision there, then predictably soon returned to their previous location of 32 years by the sidewalk in front of the decaying building.

I'll leave it to others to memorialize Matt, for whom I still mourn -- not as a spouse or the closest of friends, just as an acquaintance, neighbor and fellow lover of life whose day always was brightened when our paths crossed. As Rickert's story below well illustrates, Matt inspired many and will continue to do so. We mustn't forget him. 

Speaking for myself as a heretic, rabble-rouser and all-purpose irritant, I'm as angry today as I was last year, but "adulting" means sublimating anger into something positive. Ideally this would be Jeff Gahan and his merry crew of oblivious car-centric campaign finance leeches deciding finally to take action to make the city safe for non-automotive users, but I know this isn't going to happen.

Consequently I take great joy in this announcement.

As far as I'm concerned, good riddance. A bit of advice to neighborhoods around the city: be on the lookout for a relocated Williams Plumbing. One of your buildings is about to be trashed.

Hopefully the structure, once a delight when Cora Shrader owned it, isn't too far gone that it can't be saved, and put to better use than Williams Plumbing has these past 32 years.

Matt, you're missed. You remain an inspiration, but you deserved better from the mouth-breathing cretins who run this city.

Southern Indiana skater remembered for his inspiration, passion; friends and family gathered for a memorial skate Tuesday for Matt Brewer, by Aprile Rickert (Hanson's Bible Verses)

NEW ALBANY — Bright. Loving. Happy-go-lucky. Super chill. Simple.

This is how friends and family described Matt Brewer at a memorial skate Tuesday at Silver Street Park in New Albany, an event that allowed them to come together and celebrate the man they lost one year ago.

Matt died Aug. 6 of last year at the hospital from injuries suffered when he was hit by a minivan at Spring and Ninth streets. He was doing what he loved most at the time of the accident — skateboarding — and those who knew him said he leaves behind a legacy of inspiration and positivity in the local skate community.

"He loved it," his mother, Judy Brewer, said as she and other family members sat under a shade tree Tuesday afternoon, watching his friends skate the park in his memory. "If he wasn't working, he was skating. All the time. He'd just go down to the park and skate all hours of the night."

The day after Matt died last year, dozens of friends showed up to the skatepark at the New Albany riverfront — a spot where Matt had spent a lot of his time — to show their love. His mother said it made her happy to see them out again Tuesday at the one-year anniversary.

"I think it's great," she said. "It's nice that people still remember him and the guy he was and what he liked to do."

But those there at the park don't have any intention of forgetting the man who taught them so much — as a friend, a teacher, a supporter.

"I think a lot of local skaters just looked up to him — he was skating all the time," said Scott Thompson, who grew up with Matt and went to high school with him. "He was a really good guy, too. He was really kind."

T.J. Gusler said he started skating when he was around 13 or 14, about 10 years younger than Matt. Gusler said Matt had a way about him that made one want to do well.

"He was super supportive," Gusler said. "If you were trying something and it was like a big deal, he'd get his camera out and you're like 'Oh, Matt's excited; I'm going to keep trying to do this.'"

The memorial wasn't held this year at the riverfront park, which is undergoing remodeling to make way for a new park there as part of a skatepark/art installation project of the Carnegie Center for Art & History. He'll always be part of that riverfront space, his friends say.

"You knew every day you'd go down there and he'd be there, ready to go," said Shane Hockersmith, who was one of the scores of skaters Matt inspired throughout Southern Indiana and Louisville. "[He] would do anything for any of us, especially kids growing up who skated. He would take you to spots with him, show you how to do things, sit and talk to you.

"He was definitely the biggest supporter of skating."

Matt's spirit is one that will live on in the community, with seeds that have taken root in the younger kids. Andrew Nicholson, skater and downtown resident who helped organize Tuesday's event with the others in the skate scene, said he'd met Matt four or five years ago when Nicholson had started teaching his son to skate.

Matt had helped, teaching the 10-year-old cool tricks, supporting him and his father along the way.

"Matt would encourage my son not only to be a better skater but to keep trying," Nicholson said. "And he'd encourage me to be a better skater and reassure me that I was doing a good job as a father."

This was just the way Matt was, Nicholson said. His character helped others to be better.

"Seeing him constantly going at it inspired other skaters to keep going," Nicholson said. "I've never seen Matt mad; he always had a smile. Even if you weren't a skater you always got greeted with a smile."

Nicholson called the local skate community "very tight, very close, very supportive," which was evident in the faces of those who turned out to honor their friend.

"The skate community here in Southern Indiana and Louisville is an encouraging group of guys, girls, people, who like to push one another to not only be better skaters, but be better humans," he said.

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 ...

In America, automobile supremacy means we walk less, but we die more. Evidently we want it that way.

Having been to Europe numerous times, and at the risk of generalizing, the basic difference is that most European countries put the brake on automobile supremacy. Driving remains more of a privilege, less of a right, and while there surely are tracts of the continent where cars are necessary, subsidized public transit in urban areas lessens the need to drive.

It's that simple -- and my guess would be that in Europe, every now and again a driver actually is prosecuted for killing a non-driver. Recall that when Matt Brewer was killed, the driver who hit him was exonerated by police within minutes, and later the prosecutor yawningly followed suit.

June 19, 2019 photo.

And those Williams Plumbing sight line impediments are right back where they were, on the street, blocking fields of vision for all users even as ordinance enforcement personnel pluck the low-hanging fruit by ticketing street sweeping violations.

Why is the city obligated to provide commercial parking for four, five and maybe six vehicles?

Didn't rogue elements in the Street Department only recently ask Williams not to continue parking these vehicles on Spring Street?

Did someone over-turn the surprising edict?

(When parked in a line on 9th Street, they also block handicap accessibility on the sidewalk, but first things first).

Why are drivers killing so many pedestrians?

Because, like Williams Plumbing's fleet of vision blockers, drivers are coddled, everywhere and always. BOW should be embarrassed; unfortunately too few of the city's Democratic "leaders" are capable of feeling shame.

Why Are U.S. Drivers Killing So Many Pedestrians? by Joe Cortright (Strong Towns)

If anything else—a disease, terrorists, gun-wielding crazies—killed as many Americans as cars do, we’d regard it as a national emergency. Especially if the death rate had grown by 50 percent in less than a decade. But as new data from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association (via Streetsblog) show, that’s exactly what’s happened with the pedestrian death toll in the U.S. In the nine years from 2009 to 2018, pedestrian deaths increased 51 percent from 4,109 to 6,227.

There are lots of reasons given for the increase: distracted driving due to smart phone use, a decline in gas prices that has prompted even more driving, poor road design, a culture that privileges car travel and denigrates walking, and the increasing prevalence of more lethal sport utility vehicles. Undoubtedly, all of these factors contribute.

While some may regard a pedestrian death toll as somehow unavoidable, the recent experience of European countries as a group suggests that there’s nothing about modern life (Europeans have high rates of car ownership and as many smart phones as Americans) that means the pedestrian death toll must be high and rising. In fact, at the same time pedestrian deaths have been soaring in the U.S., they’ve been dropping steadily in Europe. In the latest nine year period for which European data are available, pedestrian deaths decreased from 8,342 to 5,320, a decline of 36 percent ...

"The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," as the author refers to it, not only is a form of imperialism. It's perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media.

Single-family-only zoning, parking requirements, the mortgage-interest tax deduction ("the deduction primarily subsidizes large houses in car-centric areas"), prioritization of motorists' convenience over public safety, insurance inadequacies, tort law, criminal law ... the list of ways that the legal system institutionalizes this mode of imperialism is lengthy and daunting.

What's it going to take to make improvements, or do we continue to shrug and say nothing can be done?

Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It, by Gregory Shill (The Atlantic)

The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.

 ... As I detail in a forthcoming journal article, over the course of several generations lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties. They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year and seriously injures more than 4 million more. Include all those harmed by emissions and climate change, and the damage is even greater. As a teenager growing up in the shadow of Detroit, I had no reason to feel this was unjust, much less encouraged by law. It is both.

It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.

Let’s begin at the state and local levels ...

Especially this.

In other words, the very fact that car crashes cause so much social damage makes it hard for those who are injured or killed by reckless drivers to receive justice.

In a similar spirit, criminal law has carved out a lesser category uniquely for vehicular manslaughter. Deep down, all of us who drive are afraid of accidentally killing someone and going to jail; this lesser charge was originally envisioned to persuade juries to convict reckless drivers. Yet this accommodation reflects a pattern. Even when a motorist kills someone and is found to have been violating the law while doing so (for example, by running a red light), criminal charges are rarely brought and judges go light. So often do police officers in New York fail to enforce road-safety rules—and illegally park their own vehicles on sidewalks and bike facilities—that specific Twitter accounts are dedicated to each type of misbehavior. Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.”

And the conclusion.

Americans customarily describe motor-vehicle crashes as accidents. But the harms that come to so many of our loved ones are the predictable output of a broken system of laws. No struggle for justice in America has been successful without changing the law. The struggle against automobile supremacy is no different.

#SlowTheCars ... because Slick Jeffrey Gahan doesn't give a damn about pedestrian safety on Spring west of State.

A reader writes:

I just realized that the City County Building doesn’t even have a crosswalk on Spring Street! They don’t value any pedestrian’s right of way, do they?

Or, here:

Yes, it's the enduringly hazardous spot where West 1st Street crosses E. Spring to become Hauss (but there is no) Square (there).

Jeff Speck suggested a possible way to reformat one-way streets near the interstate interchange into two-ways, but Jeff Gahan chose to ignore this advice owing to his abject terror of offending drivers who race through this area on a daily basis. You see, Gahan and his team want New Albany to be walkable, though for only so long as drivers aren't inconvenienced.

If westbound drivers not increasing speeds to beat the light at Spring and State, they're doing it to avoid a stop at Scribner Drive -- precisely at the spot where a dozen legal offices and the public library lie directly across the street from both local and federal government buildings.

There is not even the pretense of a crosswalk at West 1st, and some of the most amusing (as well as harrowing) spectacles I've ever witnessed are government employees -- up to and including city council members -- precariously balancing their Big Gulps as they dodge flying cars and trucks to try to cross to the City County Building.

You can't help thinking: They see the problem, they experience the problem, years go past ... and absolutely nothing is done. Then, as we talk to them about walkability, the topic is greeted with blank faces.

I'll make it easy: if you fear for your life then no, it isn't walkable, no matter how many times Pinocchio Rosenbarger insists it is. Verily, If not for dysfunction, we'd have no function at all.

But this week on Friday, Gahan will meet Speck again -- and the lies will flow like cash-stuffed envelopes from HWC Engineering.

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.

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.”

Public safety for non-automotive humans? Gahan fails, utterly.

This fellow is a candidate for city council in Cincinnati. Note his words in bold. Can you imagine a New Albanian politician -- any New Albanian politician -- stating the case this forcefully? Alas, I cannot. The needs of drivers in a narrow sense always outweigh the needs of humans from a broader perspective -- and had Jeff Gahan ever understood any of this, would there be a single sharrow painted on a New Albany street, or those idiotic pedestrian crossing lights?

Opinion: Fatalities climb as few changes are made to calm traffic, by Derek Bauman (Cincinnati.com)

The people of Cincinnati are facing a public safety crisis of immense proportions. Since 2013, crashes involving pedestrians are up nearly 50%. Thirty-six pedestrians have been killed in that time.

During 2018, in the city of Cincinnati alone, more than one person a day was struck by a car. As a candidate for Cincinnati City Council in 2017 and crisscrossing our city, I heard a consistent message from residents everywhere. We want safe streets. We want to feel comfortable walking to the neighborhood coffee shop. We want traffic to be calmed. We want road diets. We want drivers to slow down. We want to be able to ride a bike safely. We want more traffic enforcement. We want to feel safe, and our children to be safe, when walking to school.

Despite these pleas for help, not a whole lot changed. It’s been business as usual while the body count continued to climb.

As with INDOT: "Good intentions get subordinated, on project after project, to destructive business-as-usual practices."

Reading this essay you begin to grasp the nature of the problem.

The same old engineering and design vendors who play the game by stuffing Jeff Gahan's pockets with cash are the ones operating by INDOT template, institutionally reinforcing mistakes over and over, and yet they're hired over and over again even as the Zombie Mayor chants "walkability," which surely cannot occur in any substantive form when the same old engineering and design suspects are car-centric, declaring drivers the victors, not people seeking alternative mobility options.

Thus Gahan's pronouncements about walkability can be viewed only as propaganda touts from a shill primarily concerned with campaign finance, not genuine solutions.

Why State DOTs Keep Making the Same Mistakes... and How to Break That Cycle, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

You know the saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?”

No; we’re not saying the people who work at most of our state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the U.S. are insane. But advocates for safe, welcoming, vibrant urban streets just might be if we think we can achieve our goals without comprehensive institutional reform within these agencies. That’s the message of a fascinating new blog post series by our friends at Smart Growth America, called How to Build a Better State DOT.

You can read the whole series here, and it is well worth reading. Smart Growth America’s insights here are not superficial, but come from people with a wealth of accumulated experience within these agencies, and a deep understanding of how good intentions get subordinated, on project after project, to destructive business-as-usual practices.

Some key insights ...

#SlowTheCars: "We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe."

Our urban streets will not be safe until we slow cars. We won't make a significant dent in slowing cars if our toolbox is a combination of signage, more enforcement and driver education. Those are all nice, but the primary hurdle we need to overcome is our propensity to over-engineer, to apply highway thinking to local streets.
-- Charles Marohn

An oldie (2015) but a goodie. Last week while walking to work down the south side of Spring Street at around 10:00 a.m., I paused to watch the digital display by Williams Plumbing, situated just after the horrendous curve at 10th Street. For almost five minutes the sign continuously read "too fast, slow down," or whatever the words.

Gahan botched the two-way reversion, and now, beginning next year with a different mayor and a new council, it will be time at last to find ways to repair the short-sighted damage. 

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Slow the cars, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Yield in the crosswalk, sure. Outside of the crosswalk....well, good luck mate.

For those of you that drive, I’d like you to start taking note of something. I’d like you to mentally document the way that pedestrians act at crosswalks. When you approach a crosswalk and there is a pedestrian walking across the street, look at how they respond to your presence.

If they are like most people, they will do something to pick up their pace and clear the intersection more quickly. They’ll walk faster. They might even run. I’ve even seen people retreat back to the side of the road then wave me – the driver – through.

Now think of approaching that same intersection except, instead of a pedestrian crossing, there is someone in another car. What does that other driver do? Do they pick up their pace to clear the intersection for you? Do they retreat whence they came and wave you through? Of course not.

Why the difference?

The obvious answer would be the asymmetry of danger between the pedestrian and the automobile driver, the former being far more vulnerable. That might be the case in some instances, but you can observe pedestrians rushing across the street even when the car is fully stopped, the driver has made eye contact and there is no real risk.

I think a more pernicious reason for this behavior is that many – perhaps most – Americans today have accepted the notion that streets are for cars. Period. Anyone not in a car might be allowed in this space as a courtesy, but the paved street is – first and foremost – the dominion of cars.

Last week someone sent me this video on pedestrian safety from the Des Moines police department. While very well-intentioned, especially considering (insert your own crass SWAT team and/or militarization reference), I found the premise to be incredibly disturbing. First, they state that there is confusion over who has the right-of-way at “intersections and at crosswalks.” Okay, but then they add this (0:48):

The biggest problem drivers face is being able to understand all the different types of pedestrian signs.

Say what?

Now, to cut the police a little slack, their role in this crazy system is to maintain order. There is nothing more orderly than a bunch of signs and a plethora of laws telling us where each type is to be deployed and how everyone is legally required to act at said deployment. I’m not shocked that the Des Moines police department might view this as a regulatory problem.

Still….drivers are having trouble understanding the signs? So, if every driver clearly saw and understood the signs but pedestrians were still getting mowed down – or, more likely, people were simply choosing not to walk because they did not feel safe or comfortable doing so – that would be okay? It would be orderly, but that is clearly not the optimum outcome.

One of my twin hometowns – Baxter, the fully suburban one – took this thinking to the next illogical step in a recent project they completed. Along their expanded stroad are not only signs for a pedestrian crossing just in case one encounters that sub-variant species rarely found in suburbia, Homo Sapian Carless, but they actually each have a preceding sign telling you there is a sign coming up. Very orderly. Very dumb.

Just the Federal Highway Administration
defining a street as a highway.

This is all to be expected, however, for a centralized system like ours. While there are many local projects that don’t get state or federal funding – the small ones – the outside resources for the rest is what drives the mission and focus of all these local street departments. For instance, the bible for placing signage is a book known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The Federal Highway Administration version of the MUTCD – think of it as Patient Zero – defines a street as “see Highway” (no joke). It then defines a highway as:

Highway—a general term for denoting a public way for purposes of vehicular travel, including the entire area within the right-of-way.

Is it any wonder people don’t feel safe crossing a street outside of car? The mentality of our entire system – and subsequently everything we communicate to driver and pedestrian alike – is that the street is the sole dominion of the automobile. Everything and everyone else is an interloper to be tolerated, at best.

And if you think that is too harsh, consider this paradox: When we design for fast-moving traffic, we go to great lengths to remove obstacles from the clear zone; anything that won’t give like a tree or a wall. Anything we have to place in this clear zone we then design to be “breakaway” so that it gives way when a car collides with it. I’ve even seen state DOT’s demand that retailers remove sandwich board signs on the sidewalk, not because it was distracting but because the signs could damage a vehicle if the vehicle went off the stroad and hit them (note the sign was four feet from the actual building, which might also cause some damage if struck).

We go through all this trouble to make things safe for vehicles and their drivers, but then we allow – and sometimes even design for – pedestrians to be in this space. We put sidewalks right on the edge of roadways that we post at 45 mph, even knowing that most people will drive 55 mph. Regardless, a pedestrian struck at 45 mph is just as dead. Perhaps traffic engineers are not offended by this as pedestrians are technically “breakaway” as well.

So we tolerate pedestrians, essentially at their own risk. If we wanted to build streets to not just tolerate pedestrians but to actually accommodate people – who, by the way, are the main indicator species of a financially productive place – what would we do differently?

Last week someone sent me one of those articles that details the history of automobile/pedestrian interaction. This one was in Collector’s Weekly and, despite the unnecessarily provocative title, was a great read. The most amazing part – and the answer to making streets that are financially productive once more – is the different attitude towards pedestrians. From the article:

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. “Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,” says [Peter] Norton, “so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.” Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

As the article went on, it detailed things such as “silent policeman” and “traffic turtles” that essentially thwarted the speed ambitions of drivers so as to keep the public realm safe for everyone. The expectations were different:

“If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, ‘What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,’” says Norton.

“In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, ‘What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?’ That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed—blaming the driver was really automatic then. It didn’t help if they said something like, ‘The kid darted out into the street!,’ because the answer would’ve been, ‘That’s what kids do. By choosing to operate this dangerous machine, it’s your job to watch out for others.’ It would be like if you drove a motorcycle in a hallway today and hit somebody—you couldn’t say, ‘Oh, well, they just jumped out in front of me,’ because the response would be that you shouldn’t operate a motorcycle in a hallway.”

Forgiving design principles that traffic engineers employ have replaced the “that’s what kids do” burden on the driver with a “that’s what drivers do” burden on all of society. If we want to make our cities prosperous again, we have to return that burden to the driver. Not just at intersections. Not just where there are properly specified signs. It is their burden, their responsibility, everywhere, all the time. Period.

Now here’s the catch: we need to design our streets to reflect that reality. We need to design our streets so that drivers feel unsafe driving at speeds that are unsafe. That’s an entirely different America than the one we live in now, but one that’s actually less expensive to build and more financially successful once completed.

"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 ...

"The Twelve Days of Safety Myths" is must reading for every candidate seeking office this year. How many of them will bother?

Jeff Gahan's self-interested City Hall isn't the only governing entity that would prefer you not ask questions of the sort raised in articles like this one.

Like many such aggregations of functionaries dependent on the status quo, New Albany's pillars wish us to trust preferred contractors/consultants/vendors like HWC Engineering, which can be trusted to maintain the car-centric status quo for all the beak-wetters.

Safety myths like these are at least part of the reason for Jeff Speck's street grid recommendations being rendered into fatty, filler-stuffed sausage by HWC.

And $5,000 more ... every single year. Coincidence?

I'm reprinting the text of the Strong Towns article in its entirety, but if you wish to read Kostelec's full treatment of each safety myth, you'll need to click through to the Strong Townsweb site  and follow the individual links there.

While you're there, look around. No doctrine is perfect, but Strong Towns provides an efficient model for responsible local planning and governance.

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The Twelve Days of Safety Myths, by Don Kostelec (Strong Towns)

“But it doesn’t meet the standard.”

Heard that line before? Ever since the first video that Strong Towns ever created back in 2010 (the low-low-low-budget fan favorite Conversation With an Engineer) we have worked to expose the myths and excuses that too many in the traffic engineering profession use to justify deadly street designs. We’re talking about designs that prioritize automobile speed and traffic flow over human safety.

So we were delighted when our good friend Don Kostelec—transportation planner, avid blogger and Twitter user, and longtime safe-streets advocate—devoted an epic twelve-day series of essays in December to brilliantly dismantling some of the most common of these excuses for inaction or half-hearted action on safety—especially from state Departments of Transportation (DOTs).

Titled “The Twelve Days of Safety Myths” in honor of the classic Christmas song, Kostelec’s series is way too much for us to re-post here in its entirety, but it is absolutely worth reading in its entirety. Laypeople and transportation professionals alike can learn a lot.

We wanted to make sure our readers didn’t miss this must-read series, so here are links to all twelve installments. – Strong Towns Staff.

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The Twelve Days of Safety Myths, by Don Kostelec

In the carol “The 12 days of Christmas,” the gifts are grander and grander with each passing day. I’m not sure I’ve accomplished that for you in this series, but I hope the time you spend reading them is well spent.

The goal was to help you dispel the common myths you hear from transportation agencies with regard to safety. The guidance isn’t as sacred as they want you to believe. The safety tips don’t make much sense when you look at the research. Even the research isn’t as clear cut as we would all like it to be.

I want you to be the drummers drumming to advocate for safer streets. I want you to be the pipers piping to influence changes in policies and practices. I want you to light the coals that keep the engineering lords a-leaping when they try to deny your requests.

On the 1st day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… bright, reflective vests!
A heavy “windshield bias”—a condition brought on by those who travel primarily by automobile but are tasked with developing safety initiatives for those outside a car—is revealed in campaigns and related materials that tell people who walk and bike what they should wear, without any consideration for an individual’s circumstances, the lack of proper roadway lighting to illuminate the marked and unmarked crosswalks, or the likely inadequacy of a motorist’s headlights.

On the 2nd Day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… magical force field paint!
The idea that paint is a solution for a safety issue is probably the single worst default position a designer can take. I look back on projects and plans I was involved with during my less-enlightened days and think, “I can’t believe I actually recommended a sharrow.” Or, “Why did I mention nothing more than adding a crosswalk?”

It doesn’t take too deep of a dive into prevailing design guidance and research to find language that discourages the use of paint as a standalone safety countermeasure.

On the 3rd day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… lifesaving tchotchkes!
Have you ever considered how much money traffic safety offices spend on swag to promote their campaigns? Who knew that “Toward Zero Deaths” thumb drives saved lives?

On the 4th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “shared responsibility!”
A child, all of 100 pounds, is mowed down by a person driving a 4,500-pound pickup truck. What will you likely hear from police officers, highway safety engineers, Governors Highway Safety Association, and state DOTs? “Now, remember, children, safety is a shared responsibility!”

Bull pucky. Shared responsibility on the road isn’t a valid expectation of people who walk and bike until they are given equal consideration in road design and equal opportunity to move safely throughout the system.

On the 5th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… 5-stage crossings!
“Alternative intersections” is putting it nicely. All of these designs require navigation by pedestrians (and bicyclists in some situations) in what traffic engineers call “stages”. A two-stage crossing, for example, is something we’re all familiar with. It’s essentially a median or refuge island at a street crossing. Crossing to the next island is a stage….

The problem comes into play at traditional signalized intersections where the introduction of two-stage, three-stage and four-stage crossings have become commonplace. Be aware at a public meeting when a traffic engineer starts spouting the virtues of requiring pedestrians to do multi-stage crossing.

The problem is they fail to consider the value of a pedestrian’s time. Which is funny, because they love to talk about how many seconds they shave off a commute and use that compute a “value of time saved” dollar figure to woo elected officials and the public into spending billions on these crazy designs. In failing to consider a pedestrian’s time, they’ve also failed to consider the Federal Highway Administration’s own published guidance related to pedestrian delay and safety.

On the 6th Day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… AASHTO standards!
Standard, /ˈstandərd/, noun: a required or agreed level of quality or attainment.

Required level? Or agreed level? Nearly everyone, especially the engineers, use the definition of standard that aligns more with it being a “requirement” rather than an agreed to level of treatment. Pitching elements of the AASHTO—the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials— "Green Book" as a requirement allows engineers to deflect questions about their decisions. On the contrary, if they used the term “standard” to mean something mutually agreed upon, that would open up the design to a true community-based approach.

But the interesting part is this: Not even AASHTO refers to its Green Book as a standard. It’s guidance.

On the 7th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “the nearest crosswalk!”
“Just go to the nearest crosswalk.”

Seems simple enough, eh? Pedestrians, just go to the nearest crosswalk and cross there. How many times have you heard that from a traffic safety campaign or a law enforcement agency?

These agencies never bother to examine how traffic engineers have designed roads to promote greater dominance of motorists on the streets. On a section of Glenwood Avenue in Boise, ID, there is a 3,700-foot gap between signalized intersections. That’s 500 seconds of walking time (!!!!!!) for a pedestrian who comes out mid-block in this stretch hoping to cross the street. The equivalent is like forcing a motorist to drive five miles up the road to make a U-turn just to cross the street.

On the 8th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… Complete Streets policy!
The Safety House has so many lights strung upon it that it puts Clark Griswold’s abode to shame.

Context Sensitive Solutions. Complete Streets Policy. Active Transportation Plans. Corridor Studies. Environmental Justice. Heads Up. Vision Zero.

I’m tired of the false promises. I’m tired of being strung along by the engineering profession, telling us that whatever their latest wave of buzzword practices will be finally be the solution that leads to safer streets for all road users. The buzzwords seem to evolve but the actual engineering of streets doesn’t.

On the 9th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “94 percent!”
How many times have you heard that go-to excuse from transportation agencies? “If everyone would just…”

If everyone would just obey the speed limit. If everyone would just use a crosswalk. If everyone would just stop texting and driving. If everyone would just stop drinking and driving. After all, since 94% of crashes are caused by human error, we’d be a lot safer if everyone would just….

On the 10th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “FHWA says so!”
The 10th day is a potpourri of items illustrating how the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a misunderstood organization. Just as AASHTO publishes “guidance” rather than “standards,” so does FHWA. It’s nearly impossible to find the words “shall” or “must” in FHWA’s published reports. The word “should” is prevalent across the wide spectrum of their transportation literature.

As we already know, transportation departments use FHWA’s publications and supported efforts to justify wider roads for cars at the expense of safety for people who walk and bike. However, if you look closely, you’ll find ample support from FHWA for equitable treatment of people who walk and bike. In all, FHWA isn’t the bad guy, here. We just have to learn how to use them to our advantage.

On the 11th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… “Make eye contact!”
I walk or bike with my daughter every day to school. We have since she was in preschool. Our journey in Boise includes crossing a signalized, t-intersection of a five-lane road and a three-lane road. We cross the three-lane leg of that intersection.

Our walk today was indicative of how ill-informed the tip is for pedestrians to make eye contact. It doesn’t align with how roads are actually engineered and how motorists are encouraged via that engineering to operate on them.

On the 12th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me… 12-foot travel lanes!
Sadly, it’s at the local and state level where the prevailing “standard” becomes a barrier to safety, all in the name of shaving a few seconds off a driver’s experience. The tendency is to give drivers the most forgiving road they can possibly design.

What engineers term the “forgiving road” is one that forgives the mistakes motorists make. Wanna speed because you’re late? Our roads accommodate that to a certain degree. Not so much when the pedestrian is running late and needs to get to a bus stop on that same road.

When you delve into the issues, you realize that the authors of the “standards” aren’t the bad guys. Their works promote a very flexible mindset, and have for many years. Lane widths are one such example. The recently-released 7th edition of the AASHTO Green Book is a testament to that, and it provides all the support you need for narrower travel lanes in your community.