Transportation for America has unveiled their three new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy.

Transportation for America has unveiled the organization's three new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy. The three principles are as applicable in New Albany as anywhere else. Candidates, your thoughts?

1 Prioritize maintenance
2 Design for safety over speed
3 Connect people to jobs and services

Check it out.

A New Vision for Transportation (Smart Growth America)

Listen Up, Washington: No New Roads (Charles Marohn at Strong Towns)

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A VISION FOR 21ST CENTURY TRANSPORTATION IN AMERICA
Yesterday our colleagues at Transportation for America unveiled their three new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy. That may sound pretty wonky, but taken together, they paint a vision for what the tens of billions we spend on transportation each year should actually accomplish for people. Instead of just talking about how much money to spend, these principles delve into how we can better spend the money we already have.

The principles are worth exploring in their entirety—which you can do here, with some great, shareable graphics—but here's why we're really excited about them: they will help create safer, more walkable communities.

Principle #1: Prioritize maintenance
Outcome #1: Cut the road, bridge, and transit maintenance backlog in half

Principle #2: Design for safety over speed
Outcome #2: Save lives with slower, safer road design

Principle #3: Connect people to jobs and services
Outcome #3: Determine how well the transportation system connects people to jobs and services, and prioritize projects that will improve those connections.

Why these principles matter for Complete Streets

Our work at the National Complete Streets Coalition is all about making sure that everyone who uses our public streets can do so safely, and the second principle—design for safety over speed—speaks directly to that. In far too many communities, maximizing the speed at which vehicles travel is the primary motivation behind street design; too often, safe accommodations for people walking, biking, or using transit are afterthoughts, if they're even considered at all. While politicians and agencies talk a big game about prioritizing safety, in practice, it's really just talk. Pedestrians are being killed by people driving at rates not seen in nearly three decades.

If we had a federal transportation policy that explicitly prioritized safety above everything else, our streets and communities would start to look different. Slip lanes in developed areas might be replaced with bulb outs. Extra wide lanes for cars would be narrowed to slow vehicles, making more space for people.

Sidewalks and slow speed lanes for modes likes bikes and scooters would be the norm, not the exception. Once you leave the interstate, streets would be designed to slow traffic—and protect people—instead of speeding vehicles through places to the detriment of safety for all people who use the street.

And principle three is just as important. Complete Streets, and ultimately complete networks, enable people to reach jobs, schools, grocery stores, and many other resources using whatever mode of travel they choose or rely upon. Using new data, we can better assess whether people can get where they need to go on foot or with a bike or via transit. These data can and should help us prioritize the projects that fill in gaps and missing connections in our network. By measuring what matters, then using those data to guide our decisions and investments, we can create safer, more accessible, thriving communities.

ASK THE BORED: Can't City Hall just stop lying about 4-way-stop upgrades on Spring and Elm between Vincennes and downtown?

Last week at the Bored with Works meeting some rote cowardice broke out.

It's genuinely maddening.

Of course, City (Mike) Hall just finished an artful mini-propaganda blitz for dupe-worthy CNU27 attendees, insisting that Jeff Gahan's half-ass two-way street conversion has magically resolved all automotive-related safety issues.

They're lying, but after all, it's an election year.

Once again, when presented with safety concerns pertaining to traffic speeds from a neighborhood resident who witnesses the problem every single day, Gahan's compromised minions spout craven nonsense: the "manual" prohibits them from doing anything at all, except in those case when they decide to do something from motivations of politics, as opposed to safety.

The criteria for action? It's written on a fortune cookie hidden in Jeff Gahan's down-low bunker.

Accepting city engineer Larry Summers' slippery explanation (above) at face value, and recalling that he used the same well-greased explanation as a convenient excuse not to convert Elm & 13th into a 4-way stop -- right up until the morning it WAS converted, sans coherent explanation -- how can there be enough traffic to justify a 4-way at Elm and 13th, and at Elm and 10th, but not on Spring, one block over?

Are we to surmise that there is a flood of cross traffic between Spring and Oak, which never crosses Spring to get to Market and Main?

Why can't someone in Gahan's administration, ANYONE at this point -- conceding city officials are so thoroughly discredited that Gahan can pick a random janitor to deliver the message, or maybe hand it off to the who sells weenies out front of the City County Building in summer -- simply tell the truth about the street grid?

"We are car-centric to the core. None of us know what it means to walk or ride a bicycle, much less to navigate a wheelchair, but one thing we know for sure is that we're absolutely terrified to offend drivers. We'll continue to make meaningless gestures and co-opt "progressives" who are just as car-centric as us, and we'll talk a great game about our brilliance even as we ignore safety concerns and refuse to take substantive efforts to slow traffic."

That's Gahan's only "manual," isn't it?

#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.

Jeff Speck is writing about Vision Zero. Meanwhile Jeff Gahan is promoting Zero Vision.

Jeff Speck is on Twitter, and here's what he's been saying about traffic safety, political movements ... and Vision Zero. Expect Jeff Gahan to award a contract to HWC Engineering (cha-ching) to explain to him what vision means, zero or otherwise. 

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Today I am tweeting from Rule 33. Adopt Vision Zero: Make a political movement around traffic safety. From #WalkableCityRules (1/4)

In every major American city, pedestrian deaths are a part of life. Often, the victim is a child. (2/4)

The news cycle is predictable: first comes the victim blaming, then the driver blaming—sober drivers are almost never punished—then perhaps a discussion about speed limits and enforcement. (3/4)

Through it all, the crash is called an “accident,” as if it was not preventable. Rarely is the design of the roadway itself considered. And never—never—is there any reconsideration of the professional engineering standards that created the hazard in the first place. (4/4)

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The Swedes, those geniuses of driving safety, know better. For some time, the Swedish traffic safety profession has acknowledged that street design is at the heart of street safety, and modified its engineering standards with an eye to lowering speeds in urban areas. (1/3)

The results are astounding. Their traffic fatality rate as a nation is about one quarter of the US’s, but the biggest difference is in the cities. In 2013, Stockholm, with a similar population to Phoenix, lost six people to car crashes. Phoenix lost 167. (2/3)

Remarkably, Stockholm made it through 2016 without a single pedestrian or cyclist dying. Welcome to Vision Zero, the Swedish path to eliminating traffic deaths. (3/3)

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Welcome to Vision Zero, the Swedish path to eliminating traffic deaths. Now a decade old, Vision Zero has become an international movement, and joining it in earnest means making a commitment to its goals. (1/5)

As of this writing, there are more than 30 “Vision Zero Cities” in the US, including Austin, Boston, Denver, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Washington DC. (2/5)

Each of these cities has approached the commitment in its own way, but joining the Vision Zero network can be a key first step to identifying the elimination of traffic fatalities as an important goal and reorienting policy and investment around that goal. (3/5)

In New York City, for example, the Vision Zero program has organized the insertion (at last count) of 18.5 miles of protected bike lanes, 776 Leading Pedestrian Interval traffic signals, and 107 left-turn calming treatments ... (4/5)

... and also overseen a dramatic crackdown on speeding and failure-to-yield violations. The result? After holding fairly steady for three years, pedestrian fatalities dropped by a whopping 32 percent between 2016 to 2017, from 148 to 101. (5/5)

Here's Jeff Speck, explaining how slower downtown speeds have only a minimal impact on typical commute times -- and there's Team Gahan, ignoring him.

Jeff Speck was on Twitter. Here's what he had to say about commuting times in the context of lower speed limits. 

Here's Jeff Speck to explain how speed kills -- and there's Team Gahan, ignoring him.

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Concerns about lengthened commute times should not be dismissed out of hand. There are many people who commute in and out of downtown each day who have no other use for downtown—at least, not in its current state. (1/6)

They brown-bag their lunches and don't linger after work for cocktails. Most are constrained in both money and time. (2/6)

Some of these people will never have interest in a safer, more vital downtown. Even if it becomes remarkably more appealing, with new public spaces and activities springing up, they will not make use of it. But these people are the exception. (3/6)

Almost everybody, at the very least, wants a downtown they can be proud of. And most suburbanites, when a downtown becomes a destination, will want to visit it on occasion. (4/6)

Moreover, these people’s desires need to be weighed against the desires of all downtown stakeholders. In most places, the majority of downtown workers care a lot about its safety and quality. All downtown residents certainly care. (5/6)

The same goes for merchants, property owners & other investors. It is in this context that the tradeoffs between commute time & safety need to be made clear, & the key question asked: would you rather have a downtown that is quick to drive through, or one worth arriving at? (6/6)

And this.

Citizens and city leaders should be presented with an honest choice. Where commutes will take a bit longer, we should to say so. But, given the whole story, most people have shown themselves willing to spare a minute or two for the good of their city and fellow citizens. (1/3)

This graphic by the transportation planning firm Nelson\Nygaard shows how slower downtown speeds have only a minimal impact on typical commute times. (2/3)

RULE 32: Discuss tradeoffs between speed and safety honestly, with an eye to downtown vitality, civic pride, and lives saved. (3/3) From #WalkableCityRules

Here's Jeff Speck to explain how speed kills -- and there's Team Gahan, ignoring him.

Jeff Speck was on Twitter, Christmas Eve. 

While many different factors influence the safety of humans in cities, none matters nearly so much as the speed at which vehicles are traveling. The relationship between vehicle speed and danger is, to put it mildly, exponential. (1/4)

The death risk to pedestrians from vehicles takes a dramatic upturn at 25 mph. (2/4)

The diagram above is one of many that can be found to communicate this relationship. Others show people falling out of buildings, with 20 mph equaling the second floor and 40 mph equaling the seventh. (3/4)

The basic message to remember is that you are about five times as likely to be killed by a car going 30 as a car going 20, and five times again as likely to be killed by a car going 40. (4/4)

Continued this morning.

This threshold zone of 20 to 40 mph, is basically where it all happens—the difference between bruises, broken bones, and death. And 20 to 40 is roughly the range of speeds that we find cars traveling on the best downtown streets. (1/5)

Keeping cars on the lower end of that range, therefore, must be the central objective of urban street design. (2/5)

The speed of the impact itself is not the only factor. As cars move faster, the likelihood of a crash also rises. Drivers and pedestrians alike have less time to respond to conflicts, stopping distances lengthen, and the driver’s cone of vision narrows. (3/5)

As drivers move more quickly, their cone of vision narrows, making crashes more likely. (4/5)

These factors multiply the impact of speed beyond those indicated in the above graph. It is safe to say that a car traveling 30 mph is probably at least three times as dangerous as one going 25. (5/5)

In Brainerd MN as in New Albany IN: "I find myself having to accept another senseless death, another feeble response, and the promise that nothing is going to change anytime soon."

Marohn's description (link below) of Wise Road in his hometown of Brainerd can be easily visualized in the context of Spring Street in New Albany.

Over a space of car-centric decades, Spring Street was engineered to be a highway zipping traffic through populated areas. The idea was to move cars from one side of the city to the interstate ramp on the other side, as quickly as possible.

Then it became evident that the goal of revitalizing neighborhoods was plainly incompatible with the continued use of this street as a highway. It took more than a decade to convince community pillars of this obvious fact, but finally a handful grudgingly did their homework and concluded something needed to be done -- less about the design, more about silencing dissidents.

We know what happened next. Mayor Jeff Gahan took control of street grid reform not as a means of doing what was needed to slow drivers, but to loudly and garishly pretend he'd done so.

Traffic calming became another grandiose paving project, with the usual cash-laden fruit baskets passed around. Victory was declared, and yet of all the ways Spring Street might have been altered by purposeful design, only the barest minimums were deployed. Accordingly, we were urged to venerate politicians who'd "solved" 20% of the problem.

Now the same pay-to-play engineering firm that gleefully sabotaged Jeff Speck's masterly street grid reform plan at Gahan's behest is conducting yet another round of speed studies.

Does anyone really think HWC Engineering will conclude that the company's Speck retrofit was fundamentally mistaken?

We don't need a mayor who responds to every emerging situation by commissioning another taxpayer-funded study from the same old suspects, who promptly deposit tithes in the re-election fund before producing the pre-determined result.

Rather, we need a mayor who leads. As it stands, we have a vacuous cult of personality.

#FireGahan2019 

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Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn lives just a few miles from one of the deadliest roads in Central Minnesota.

But no one in his town seems to be particularly worried about it. And we bet you have a road just like it in your town.

How have our communities become so apathetic about the deaths of their citizens? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Today, Chuck is taking a hard look at Wise Road, and using it as an object lesson for breaking through the inertia around traffic deaths. 

It won't be easy. There aren't many options—according to Chuck, there's really only two. But it's the hard work we need to do if we want our towns to be strong.

How will you help #slowthecars?

-Kea and the rest of the Strong Towns Team.

Speed Thought Control: Board of Works, city engineer still unable to grasp reality when it comes to speedway street grid dangers, so they spout meaningless drivel.

Team Gahan can be like a pile of wet rags. It can also be like a cat.

There are a number of reasons cats arch their backs, but here are the three main ones ... first is that of the fear aggressor. In this classic Halloween pose, a cat arches his back and shows piloerection (i.e., his hair stands straight up) as a way of making himself look bigger when confronted with danger. When a cat looks like this, he is basically saying, “I’m scared of you but I’m ready to defend myself if you come any closer.” The cat may also make it clear that he’s ready to defend himself by doing things like growling, hissing, spitting and showing his teeth. If you encounter a cat giving this display, the best response is to slowly back away and give the cat his space.

Just like at this week's Bored with Public Works and Safety meeting, from which we learn that one whole year after erecting completely useless, HWC Engineering-inspired crosswalk signals-to-drivers-to-maim-pedestrians, the city now proposes to make a helpful instructional video. Let's hope drivers watch it BEFORE hopping into their speeding cars.

Does HWC get the contract for the video, too?

It's awesome the way the city's expert functionaries are questioned, and ZOOM -- up go their backs. Meanwhile, the stenographer Chris Morris still refuses to question the bilge spewed at him from all directions.

Please, Bill, may we have a reporter who possesses a minuscule iota of intellectual curiosity about the planet?

Seriously, can it get any dumber than this?

I'm not sure whose eyeballs city engineers Larry Summers is using when he surveys supposedly obvious "reduction in speed" on Spring Street, but isn't it inadvertently hilarious that in the immediate aftermath of the story related here ...

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The curious case of the speeding ticket, the honest cop, his fuming chief and the city's abject failure to calm downtown traffic.

... we now have "evidence" in the form of droll claims that fewer speeding tickets have been issued, when in fact the police department vastly curtailed its usual downtown speed traps after two-way streets were implemented -- and rightly so, this being one objective of proper design to reduce speed, which we largely failed to put into place out of political squeamishness, if not stupidity.

Yes: the cops can't write tickets when they're not monitoring speed, can they?

The police presence became noticeable only AFTER neighborhood residents complained to BOW, only to be told smugly that city officials who never walk the streets are a far better judge of such matters than people who live astride them.

Anyone seen my pitchfork?

It's been an utter fiasco, and City Hall remains in a Orwellian state of institutional denial and serial tone deafness. The only sensible thought uttered by any of the officials quoted in the article below is this, from Al Knable:

"I am for whatever works to slow traffic.

Exactly. Shouldn't each of them, mayor and minions, begin any instance of commenting about speed and safety with an affirmation of this simple, single objective?

Shouldn't they be fighting to implement safety measures, rather than making the sort of "we can't do nuthin' at all" excuses, just like this oldie but still goodie:

Summers said he does not think a stop sign or signal can be installed at Fourth and Spring because a traffic count would not warrant one. He said there is not enough traffic on any of the side streets, off of Spring, that would require a stop sign.

Jeeebus, Larry: then conduct the fucking traffic count as a prelude, and if the state's cars-first standards aren't serving the cause of walkable street grid safety, can't we fight against THEM, to do what's right for US, rather than dismissing safety because enhancing safety is too much trouble?

Ah, but wait. 

We'd have to consult with Republicans like Ed Clere to do that, wouldn't we?

And that's why we don't bother fighting for safe streets, isn't it?

Our New Gahanian milieu may be comprised of counter-productive anti-intellectual squalor, but it's our DEMOCRATIC PARTY's counter-productive anti-intellectual squalor. If New Albany can only be as bright as its leading elements, then literally, we're a place where the sun don't shine.

#OurBananaRepublic

Speed Control: New Albany collecting Spring Street speed, by Chris Morris (Tom May's Summa Theologica)

NEW ALBANY — One of the reasons the city of New Albany converted Spring Street to two-way traffic last year was to control speed. And for the most part, it has worked.

Instead of three lanes of traffic heading in one direction, Spring Street was cut down to two lanes going east and west. It's obvious traffic moves at a slower pace from Vincennes to State Street.

"I know from talking to the police chief that traffic tickets along there are down significantly. People are not going as fast as they used to," Larry Summers, New Albany city engineer, said. "If you just eyeball it you can see a marked reduction in speed."

But there are still issues with speed along that stretch of Spring, and following the death of skateboarder Matthew Brewer, who was struck by a minivan at Spring and Ninth streets in August, residents came before the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety pleading that something be done to make the street safer.

The city decided to collect speed data to see if more needs to be done.

This week, crews will begin setting up six radar detector signs, three in each direction. Data will be collected for a month and motorists will be able to see how fast they are traveling once the signs are turned on. Summers hopes it's a wakeup call for some motorists who drive down Spring without paying attention to speed limit signs. Once the data is analyzed, the city will decide its next move.

"When we did the two-way conversion project we said we wanted to do further analysis on the grid," Summers said. "This is a continuation of that in some regards. Speed reduction is very important. We want to make this more of a walkable community."

The radar detector signs will be similar to the ones along McDonald Lane. Paul Lincks, with HWC Engineering, said signs will be placed eastbound near Fourth and Ninth streets, and between 11th and 13th streets. Westbound, signs also will go up between 11th and 13th streets, beyond Ninth Street and before Fifth Street.

Lincks said the radar detector signs should produce results city officials are hoping to achieve when it comes to analyzing speed.

"Let's get the data, look at it, and go from there," he said. "We will be able to compare the speeds cars are traveling to the speed limit to see what is going on."

New Albany City Councilman Al Knable said converting Spring Street to two-way traffic was done to make it less of a thoroughfare, and more of a neighborhood street.

"At times people are still treating it like a thoroughfare," Knable said. "I am for whatever works to slow traffic. I hope this will give us meaningful data to see what the next step might be."

Summers, who lives along Spring Street, believes motorists will pay attention to the speed signs.

"People drive distracted. I hope this is something that gets their attention," he said.

POSSIBLE FOUR-WAY STOPS

Ron Howard knows exactly how to make Spring Street safer, he said. For starters, he would place a four-way stop at Fourth and Spring, at the New Albany Fire Headquarters and Sweet Stuff Bakery. He said motorists on Fourth, looking to cross Spring Street, can not see traffic in either direction when cars are parked along the street. He said they have to cover the crosswalk and almost get out into Spring Street to see if it's safe to cross.

"Your direct line of sight is blocked when cars are parked along the street," he said. "You would have to do away with parking there. It would take a minimum of four spaces and I don't think the bakery would like that. I don't see any other way but to put a stop sign there unless you put up a traffic signal."

Howard said making Fourth and Spring a four-way stop would cost "next to nothing."

"The only way to get out there [on Spring] is to ignore the crosswalk," he said. "You are blind in both directions. It seems to me the safest thing to do."

Others have also suggested putting in a four-way stop and 13th and Elm streets to slow traffic.

Summers said he does not think a stop sign or signal can be installed at Fourth and Spring because a traffic count would not warrant one. He said there is not enough traffic on any of the side streets, off of Spring, that would require a stop sign.

EDUCATING DRIVERS

Summers said the city plans to release a video on its website to educate the public on the new crosswalk signals that were put in when Spring Street was converted to two-way.

An addendum to yesterday's curious case: "Are we supposed to be sympathetic for a driver who was traveling at 144% of the speed limit?"

And ...

We'll continue posting these charts until all our readers have had the chance to learn from them.

In the meantime, let's have a look at another side of the issues discussed in yesterday's post.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The curious case of the speeding ticket, the honest cop, his fuming chief and the city's abject failure to calm downtown traffic.

 ... (The police officer) comes to the window and says “Ma’am, you were going 36.” After I said ok, he said he has to give me a ticket because the chief of police for Floyd County told him he had to write 5 tickets in that spot tonight.

A regular reader raises this interesting point.

Interesting story. Are we supposed to be sympathetic for a woman who was traveling at 144% of the speed limit? I realize that's not the point, at all. But, still. 144%?

When I was tagged onto the driver's original Facebook post, it occurred to me that (a) when the police monitor traffic on Spring Street, they generally do so from one or the other location, and (b) one of these locations is situated where the posted speed is 25 m.p.h., not 30 m.p.h.

It occurred to me to gently make this point on the driver's post, but before I could get back to it, the post had disappeared. Now we know why; the chief of police intervened and the whole matter was swept safely under the rug.

Still, our reader's point is valid: 144%?

36 m.p.h. in a 25 m.p.h. zone works out to 144% higher. Speed kills, and the case we've made time and again in these pages is that in densely populated areas, the very least we can do is have uniform 25 mph speeds, because with the requisite traffic calming measures as suggested by Jeff Speck and others, speeds might be brought far closer to the safer, lower m.p.h. than what passes for safety now.

By the way, when's the last time you saw a semi or a wrecker being ticketed for speeding on Spring Street? Yeah, me either.

Unfortunately, another undisputed fact we've reported time and again in these pages is Mayor Jeff Gahan's complete inability to understand any of this. His interpretation of the two-way streets project was to affix a shoddy veneer of action atop an underlying "business-as-usual" version of nothingness.

Or, to claim victory, monetize, rinse and repeat.

We can fix this in 2019.

Until then, yes, it is fairly common to receive speeding tickets when you're traveling 11 m.p.h. above the limit, whatever the source of the police officer's political directives.

It's the design, stupid: Months too late, but now the city will deploy speed radar detector signs on Spring Street, so as to collect information fundamentally flawed by the mere presence of the detectors.

All the way back on June 22, the Green Mouse observed the inexplicable.

Neighborhood inequality? On the placid street where Caesar lives, traffic must be moving too fast. Someone fetch a traffic engineer!

Back down here in the flood plain, City Hall's two-way grid design changed nothing apart from direction; the new street design continues to produce traffic speeds that are unsafe -- people actually die from it and not a soul employed by the city will address this fact -- and now we erect speed radar detector signs as some sort of compensation, presumably in the hope that the sight of these detectors will itself reduce speeds enough to declare victory ... or give another contract to HWC.

I'll repeat again: every bit of this is perfectly obvious to anyone who spends 15 minutes on foot or riding a bicycle in the vicinity of Spring Street. And yet something this simple continues to elude the professional monetization class in this city.

Why's it so hard for them to admit they're wrong?

Radar detector signs going up on Spring Street in New Albany, by Chris Morris (Collected Sermons of Tom May)

NEW ALBANY — Motorists soon will notice something a little different along Spring Street.

Radar detector signs, similar to the ones on McDonald Lane, are scheduled to be installed the first week of December. There will be six signs, three in each direction spaced along Spring from Vincennes Street to State Street.

City Engineer Larry Summers said the signs will tell drivers how fast they are traveling, and well as collect data on speeds through particular areas of the street.

While the street conversion from one-way to two-way traffic last year slowed traffic, residents along Spring still say other measures need to be taken to keep motorists from exceeding the speed limit. Following the death of skateboarder Matthew Brewer, who was struck by a minivan at Spring and Ninth streets in August, residents came before the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety pleading that something be done to make the street safer.

"Safer Trucking in Changing Cities," or something Nawbany doesn't talk about at all.

SAFER TRUCKING IN CHANGING CITIES from Fields of Vision on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, the same company currently dumping thousands of dollars each year into Mayor Jeff Gahan's re-election fund, and which was given the contract to gut Speck's plan, design last year's two-way reversion and “keep those trucks moving” (as HWC's Jim Rice once observed) now has been given a second contract to explore whether their first contract was a success.

Is this stand-up comedy?
 
What are the chances that HWC will acknowledge failure? After all, wouldn't we be due a refund if so?

Maybe a better way would be having an IMPARTIAL outside firm perform the speed study -- one actually aware of what traffic calming entails. Then again, Gahan has to desire traffic calming, doesn't he?

And the way Gahan's system works at present, doing business with HWC is good for ... business.

Imagine what we could accomplish is we wanted to accomplish something beyond fattening the campaign finance heifer at every turn.

Let's check on the Democratic Party's point of view.

Yep. Business as usual, on ALL fronts.

Excerpts from Jeff Speck's new book, Walkable City Rules: "Many cities have a downtown speed limit of 25. All should—or lower."

2016.

Jeff Speck takes to CityLab to offer excerpts from his new book, and here are the ones I won't be covering in this post.

• Rule 9: Fix your codes -- Eliminate legal barriers to mixed use.
• Rule 53: Understand that cycling follows investment -- Topography, climate, and culture can’t compare.
• Rule 88: Make sticky edges -- Energize public spaces with active, deep facades.
• Rule 100: Don’t give up on sprawl --- It’s where most Americans live.

Click through to read them.

Here's one big thing worth a snip: "Street improvements should be linked to keeping speeding in check."

Not coincidentally, it's the one least understood by City Hall in New Albany. Shall we join together to reduce illegal speeding?

A Step-by-Step Guide for Fixing Badly Planned American Cities, by Jeff Speck (CityLab)

An excerpt from Jeff Speck’s Walkable City Rules, a step-by-step guide to fixing America’s cities and towns.

I published the book Walkable City in 2012. Since then, many of our leaders have realized that establishing walkability as a central goal can make cities better in a whole host of ways. That book did a decent job of inspiring change, but it didn’t tell people exactly how to create it. My new book, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (released on October 15 by Island Press) is an effort to weaponize Walkable City for deployment in the field. An excerpt follows below.
—Jeff Speck

Rule 31: Focus on speeding

Street improvements should be linked to keeping speeding in check.

“It’s the speed, stupid.” Roughly half of this book addresses different aspects of the street and how they are designed and managed. Many of these points may serve multiple objectives and audiences, but they all aim back, in one way or another, at a single issue, vehicle speed.

While many different factors influence the safety of humans in cities, none matters nearly so much as the speed at which vehicles are traveling. The relationship between vehicle speed and danger is, to put it mildly, exponential.

The diagram below is one of many that can be found to communicate this relationship. (Other diagrams show people falling out of buildings, with 20 miles per hour equaling the second floor and 40 miles per hour equaling the seventh.) The basic message to remember is that you are about five times as likely to be killed by a car going 30 as a car going 20, and five times again as likely to be killed by a car going 40.

The risk to pedestrians from vehicles takes a dramatic upturn at 25 miles per hour, as this chart based on data on pedestrian casualties (collected by S.J. Ashton) shows. (The dashed lines are confidence intervals.) (D.C. Richards Transport Research Laboratory)

This threshold zone of 20 to 40 miles per hour is basically where it all happens—the difference between bruises, broken bones, and death. And 20 to 40 is roughly the range of speeds that we find cars traveling on the best downtown streets. Keeping cars on the lower end of that range, therefore, must be the central objective of urban street design.

The speed of the impact itself is not the only factor. As cars move faster, the likelihood of a crash also rises. Drivers and pedestrians alike have less time to respond to conflicts; stopping distances lengthen; and the driver’s cone of vision narrows. These factors multiply the impact of speed beyond those indicated in the above graph. It is safe to say that a car traveling 30 miles per hour is probably at least three times as dangerous as one going 25. Many cities have a downtown speed limit of 25. All should—or lower.

These limits simplify the conversation, because it is no longer necessary to talk about “slowing drivers down.” Who wants to be slowed down? That sounds like congestion. Instead, we can simply talk about “reducing illegal speeding.”

Fast fact about vehicular speeds that kill: "18 mph is the human tolerance of crash impacts."

I'll keep posting about speed because speed kills. If you wish to ignore all available evidence and retain a sense of automotive entitlement, which allows you to drive 40 mph on city streets that pass through neighborhoods, then I'd submit that your entitlement is anti-social -- and whatever the neighborhood must do to restore safety is justified.

If you can't understand any of what I'm writing here, that's not a deal-killer. But thinking of yourself as a "progressive"? That is.

Pioneering Study Affirms Vision Zero Focus on Speed Management, by Veronica Vanterpool (Vision Zero Network)

... Nationally, speed was recorded as a factor in 27% of fatal crashes resulting in 10,111 crash deaths in 2016, according to the study. Research has shown that the likelihood of pedestrians or bicyclists surviving impact with a vehicle increases significantly with each 5 mph decrease in the speed limit. Further highlighting the importance of lower travel speeds, researcher Eric Dumbaugh notes in a recent Vision Zero Network webinar on Safe Systems that 18mph is the human tolerance of crash impacts.

"We can’t eradicate dangerous human errors, but we can design our road systems to protect us."

No matter your station in in life, here's a reminder that if you fancy yourself "progressive," but believe city streets are meant for the convenience of high-speed, pass-through traffic, and not to better serve the needs of a healthy neighborhood occupied by humans, then I've got some jarring news.

Turns out you're not very progressive at all. That's because street grid design is a social justice issue, too.

Beginning today, a new rule: any candidate for public office who fails to display a solid grasp of these issues won't get my vote. We may be perfectly aligned otherwise, but if a candidate feels it best for cars to speed from one end of the city to the other on a street corrupted into a highway, sorry, no go.

In the following, the author focuses on speed limits, which as we know are only partially effective. Other design elements are probably more important. The point is to begin at the beginning: speed kills, and if safety is the goal, we should be doing what it takes to reduce vehicular speeds in neighborhoods.

---


Hey, Neighbor! Slow Down, Speed Matters, by Alli Henry (Walk Arlington)

Alli Henry is the Program Manager for WalkArlington. As an engaged Arlington resident, she spends her days advocating for creating walkable, livable and equitable neighborhoods.

It’s no secret – speed plays a major role in traffic related injuries and fatalities. With national traffic deaths on the rise, cities across the US are embracing safer street policies and lowering speed limits.

Most vehicle crashes can be prevented by avoiding dangerous behaviors like distracted driving, driving under the influence and excessive speeding. Yes – we’re all human and we make mistakes, but human error shouldn’t result in life or death situations. Studies have proven lowering speed limits is a highly effective tool in creating safer environments for all users (i.e. vehicles, bikes and pedestrians) to share the streets.

Boston and Seattle, recently joined a growing list of US cities that have reduced speed limits on arterial (fancy word for major roads) and neighborhood streets in the name of safety initiatives, such as Vision Zero. As highlighted in this Vision Zero video, “No loss of life is acceptable. The road systems need to keep us moving, but it must also be designed to protect us at every turn.”

Speed Matters
It’s no coincidence progressive cities are reducing speed limits to 20-25 mph. Research has determined that traveling above 30 mph puts our most vulnerable users at higher risk of serious injuries and death. A recent study published by Smart Growth America, identified people of color, lower-incomes and older adults as being the highest risk populations.

The graphic below, created by the City of Seattle, illustrates the varied chances of a person walking surviving a collision with a vehicle. Pedestrians have a 90% survival rate if stuck by a vehicle going 20 mph. Sadly, chances of survival are reduced to only 50% when a vehicle is going +10 MPH faster (30 mph).

There’s no single solution to make our streets safer; however, there are proven fixes we can collectively pursue. In addition to speed reductions, tougher school-zone enforcement, installing protected bike lanes and implementing “Complete Streets” are all becoming increasing popular tools.

What’s next?
It’s simple, take action! We must demand safer streets and holistic collaboration from our elected officials, engineers, urban planners, enforcement officers, educators and citizens. After all – we’re all in this together and every day we delay taking action leaves our communities and loved ones vulnerable.

Yes, the fight to remake streets for the use of all people, and not only their cars, is a social justice issue.

The AARP understands it, too.

Crossing the street shouldn’t have to mean crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. While unsafe streets disproportionately affect older people, safe streets are for everyone. It is critically important to adopt policies that ensure our streets are designed for all who use them — pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and public transportation users of all ages. All of us need safe and efficient streets. That won’t happen without change.

It's undoubtedly important to resist harmful agendas, whether propagated by faraway partisan bureaucrats engorged with payola bucks, or local officials just down the street.

Arguably, the local officials are more accessible when it comes to compensatory re-training. It isn't always the case, but it can be a place to start.

Muting the excesses of our car-centric street grid and making it more responsive to the needs of humans isn't about neighborhood safety alone, or the health benefits of alternative modes of transport, or even civic aesthetics. 

All these matter, but as this article makes very clear, car-centric street design perpetuates inequality. That makes it a social justice issue, one that budding community leaders need to be better informed about.

The article has been linked here before, but let's do it again. A refresher course in truthfulness is never a bad thing. There was a time when I didn't understand these concepts, either. Happily, there's ample guidance for those wishing to learn more about the importance of street grid reform.

New Albany inched forward with last year's two-way reversion. We can do far better.

The Hidden Inequality Of America’s Street Design, by Diana Budds (Fast Company)

New data shows that pedestrians in the U.S. are more likely to die if they’re poor, a person of color, uninsured, or old.

Urban design has a long history of perpetuating racial and economic inequality, and the burden of bad streets is still being disproportionately borne by underserved populations. According to a new report, pedestrians in the United States have a higher risk of being killed by cars if they’re people of color, aged 65 or older, uninsured, or from a low-income household.

The report, called “Dangerous by Design 2016,” is authored by the National Complete Streets Coalition, a working group within the nonprofit Smart Growth America, which supports socially equitable, environmentally responsible, and economically healthy urban design strategies. The report focuses on designing streets for multi-modal transportation, and ranks every state and more than 100 major metropolitan areas by what it calls the Pedestrian Danger Index, or PDI, which assesses the likelihood of a car hitting a pedestrian by comparing the rate of pedestrian deaths in an area to the rate of people who walk to work. (SGA calls this the best available measure of how many people are likely to be out walking every day.)

“The leading goal is equity in implementation for all avenues of transportation,” says Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. “It really is about not only treating everyone equitably, but also encouraging departments of transportation to focus on the most underserved.”

Put simply: Bad street design is disproportionately impacting historically marginalized groups in America ...

ASK THE BORED: Faced with 75 signatures on a petition, Nash, Summers and the clueless BOW non-safety board can't muster a single empathetic response.

Last Tuesday the Board of Mute Nostril Agony reached a new low. 

A brief summary: With their own two eyes, 75 neighborhood residents can see that drivers speeding through their neighborhood need to be slowed at the critical intersection of Elm and Jay, and the response from Warren Nash and Larry Summers? In essence, it's this:

We're the experts, peasant, so believe us when we tell you that your own two eyes are quite mistaken. INDOT is like a God, and we merely arrange the sacrifices.

Their hallowed engineering metric says there must be many more cars, traveling at even greater rates of speed, making the situation far worse, before slowing drivers can so much as be considered.

Only then will they check their nut sacks to see if any courage might be hanging there. Spoiler: there isn't, so they'll drag HWC's Jim Rice down from Indianapolis to explain that Daddy Gahan Knows Best.

It's offensive and appalling, this robotic lack of basic human empathy with which Gahan, Nash, Summers and their board of abject time-serving cowards pretend to care about "safety" even as they duck, cover and flee responsibility when drivers claim the lives of Chloe Allen and Matt Brewer, and strike and injure so many others.

However, last Tuesday police chief Todd Bailey offered a potentially devastating, constructive observation.

We have ourselves a precedent.

There's a "line of sight" issue at the intersection of Elm and Jay -- and at several other nearby intersections, too, including Elm and 13th, and 9th at Spring, where the Williams Plumbing trucks continue to park unhindered, and impede sight lines, in spite of this futile ordinance prohibiting it.

Ordinance enforcement, anyone?

(crickets chirp, pins drop, and somewhere, a dog barks)

Instead of tired bureaucratic excuses conjured unconvincingly by the usual C-minus students, maybe there can be action without the same-old campaign fund donations?

Dead Man's Curve has killed, and it will kill again unless our cowardly ruling clique does its job.

Here, there and everywhere, "In crashes that kill pedestrians, the majority of drivers don't face charges."

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Both Jeff Gahan and Warren Nash believe that driver convenience far outranks considerations of human life.