Last Fair Deal Gone Down.

I seldom visit Next Door, but here and there it's an informative resource, as when a well-attended thread began under the title of "Drag Strip on Elm Street."

The last time I recall this topic being raised by elected and appointed officials was in late June, when city council discussed speeding and other examples of forever escalating driver mayhem in New Albany.

The council's discussion was followed by a revealing intervention by the Board of Public Works and Safety's appointed chairman Warren Nash, who hastened to remind elected public officials that there was no need to discuss problems that don't exist.

But don't take my word for it. After all, I don't attend meetings any longer, in an act of self-censorship explained in depth here: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

Rather, believe Daniel Suddeath of the News and Tribune, who quoted Nash on June 23.

NEW ALBANY — Last week, the New Albany City Council kicked around a few ideas for traffic calming, though the only decision reached was to convene a committee to further explore the issue.

On Tuesday, Warren Nash, president of the New Albany Board of Public Works and Safety, urged the committee and council to be cautious in its approach due to a major improvement project slated to begin next year on the Sherman Minton Bridge.

“I hope your committee will take into account the Sherman Minton Bridge construction during the next two years and not do anything too drastic during that time,” Nash said to Councilman Jason Applegate, chair of the traffic committee that was scheduled to meet Tuesday evening for the first time since the pandemic.

Applegate regularly attends the board of works meetings, which will resume being held in-person likely on July 7, and explained that the committee’s intent isn’t to propose massive projects or to attempt to overstep its bounds.

The board of works oversees city streets as part of its domain while the council is primarily in charge of funding and managing municipal budgets.

Applegate said the committee would like to see a process streamlined “that gets information in kind of a systematic way where maybe there’s a liaison between the council and the board of works on these types of issues.”

The board of works is a three-person body and its members are appointed by the mayor.

Nash referred to the council’s discussion Thursday about speeding and traffic calming. He said he heard several issues raised regarding streets that the board already has projects planned for or where upgrades are in process.

He mentioned some traffic-calming measures and upgrades for Grant Line Road, Mount Tabor Road, McDonald Lane and Slate Run Road, among others.

“We’ve done traffic calming and slowed traffic down on all of those streets, so I think we’ve done a considerable amount of slowing traffic down,” Nash said.

If I've misinterpreted Suddeath's quote, I'm open and eager to be corrected.

Traffic Cluster, Part Two: We'll never resolve traffic issues until "leadership" is willing to lead, not pander.

It occurred to me last night that as the coronavirus pushes unprecedented bicycle sales, here and across the country, Jeff Speck gave us a diagram for downtown streets purposefully rebuilt to accommodate modernity in the form of bikes and biking.

Our mayor threw it out the window.

Had he paid attention and been progressive, we now would have the ideal grid for a pandemic, the sort of step even Jeffersonville hasn't managed.

Instead, we have more of what we plainly specialize in as a municipality: congenital underachievement, plain and simple.

It boils down to this.

According to Team Gahan, all traffic issues have been magically resolved by pure genius since the prime cuts of the Speck grid study were rendered into oatmeal-flecked, fat-encrusted sausage to suit the needs of pay-to-play campaign finance.

According to genuine reality, most such issues remain, because our emperors routinely fail to wear clothes, and partisan politics infects everything, leading otherwise thoughtful people like my district councilman Greg Phipps to cautiously treat symptoms with band-aids, leaving major violators like the thoroughly non-calmed Spring Street three-mile long interstate ramp untouched by critical scrutiny.

Yes, Greg you're absolutely right; four-way stops are needed in the neighborhoods. Drivers occasionally run a four-way at full speed, but usually they at least slow before doing so, whereas stop light signals impel drivers to increase their speed as they approach the intersection.

But unless some of them are placed on Spring Street itself, or something else done to slow ever-escalating speeds (which police bizarrely deny even occur), heavy trucks will continue to travel in excess of 40 mph THROUGH A NEIGHBORHOOD WITH MORE CHILDREN LIVING THERE THAN AT ANY TIME IN PHIPPS' RESIDENCY AND MY OWN.

Phipps need only glance outside his window at the tonnage streaking past and feel the vibrations, but he won't, because City Hall is in denial, and City Hall lickspittles are not allowed to ask questions pertaining to demonstrable reality. Big Daddy must be obeyed, and Spring must remain an artery for dipshit drivers.

Because, I suppose, that's who we are as a city: enablers for misbehavior.

We can change this for the better. All we need is a willingness to act. Why must it be this hard to convince them to attack problems that can be seen plainly with their own eyes?

Perhaps it's because they refuse to look.

New Albany council discusses traffic problems, by Daniel Suddeath (Returning Journalist Laps Papa)

NEW ALBANY — The most prominent concern for residents is traffic, and it’s time to ramp up efforts to ease those worries, New Albany City Councilman Scott Blair said during what may be the last virtual gathering of the body.

Traffic was the primary issue discussed during Thursday’s council meeting, with members expressing different ideas for how to address what they said is a city-wide problem.

"The coronavirus shutdowns are making more obvious a pre-existing epidemic of reckless street design."

A related story yesterday:

The future of work, and of commuting to work, surely will be different.

It should surprise no one that in New Albany, a political process currently being held hostage by mayor and city council president has no room for responsiveness on ANY matter of importance, much less the perennially abused street grid.

I doubt their automobile centrism has abated with quarantine. We'll see. My own period of detachment from involvement with public affairs originally was slated to expire on June 30.

We'll see about THAT, too. Let's have a look at genuine leadership out in Oakland.

Drivers Not Wanted on Oakland’s ‘Slow Streets’, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

The California city isn’t the first to experiment with car restrictions in the coronavirus pandemic, but its plan to discourage drivers is the most extensive.

Last week, Oakland, California, announced a bold answer to shelter-in-place coronavirus claustrophobia: To create more outdoor space and safer corridors for essential travel by foot or bike, the city would restrict access to vehicles on nearly 74 miles of city street — about 10% of the city’s street network.

“In this unprecedented moment we must do everything we can to ensure the safety and well-being of all families across our city,” stated Mayor Libby Schaaf. “Closing roads means opening up our city.”

The “slow streets” initiative, which began on Saturday and will roll out in four segments through the duration of the coronavirus emergency, comes in response to citizen concerns about overcrowded conditions in parks and on sidewalks during the coronavirus lockdown. It’s not really a “closure,” despite the mayor’s phrasing: Emergency vehicles like police cars, fire trucks and ambulances are still permitted to enter these new pedestrian corridors, as are delivery vehicles and residential traffic. In fact, no drivers will be ticketed if they do drive on these streets.

The change is mostly a firm psychological nudge, said Warren Logan, the director of mobility policy and interagency relations in the Oakland mayor’s office. Confronted by a pair of traffic signs and a barricade blocking one lane, drivers now have to think twice about entering these streets. Many will consider taking a different route. And all will hopefully drive more mindfully when they enter a slow-streets zone — an increasingly important concern in cities where the relative absence of traffic has inspired a wave of speeding violations. “When they do turn into the street, they do it carefully,” Logan said.

After a week in action, Oakland officials say the streets are working as planned — no collisions, no reported instances of unsafe gathering, and more families able to move (and dance) at spacious distances. As if out of an earlier era, small children are riding bikes in the middle of the street without their parents needing to worry. “This is an opportunity to remember that these are our streets, not just streets for cars,” Logan said.

The same flawed HWC Engineering campaign donations-meet-street grid bait 'n' switch that wasn't working prior to the pandemic hasn't grown any more sensible with sheltering at home. It was crap then, and so it remains. 

Have Coronavirus Shutdowns Prompted an Epidemic of Reckless Driving? by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

Reports from many cities indicate a surge in aggressive speeding, and with it, automobile crashes. The statistics are remarkable and alarming in light of how much traffic itself has declined, with many businesses closed and residents sheltering at home ...

... The most common tendency I've seen in reporting of this phenomenon is to blame "reckless driving." In other words, it's just that people who have sociopathic and destructive urges are out there on the empty roads playing Ricky Bobby and indulging them, to tragic effect. Is that the whole story?

This pat answer is consistent with our societal bias toward always talking about traffic violence in terms of individual behavior: either it was just a tragic accident, or the people involved should have been paying more attention. Mainstream media rarely interrogate how street design induces drivers to behave in certain ways. Yet we've written about this again and again on Strong Towns, because the evidence is clear: when you design streets to make high speeds comfortable, you make tragedy statistically inevitable.

Over 40,000 Americans die in traffic in a normal year. The number of pedestrians alone killed by U.S. drivers from 2008 to 2017 averages out to one every 1 hour and 46 minutes. If we're appalled by the level of carnage on our roads while most of us are sheltering in place, we should certainly be appalled by the level of carnage the rest of the time. If we think there's an epidemic of reckless driving right now, it's just a continuation of the epidemics of reckless driving that we witnessed in America in 2019, and 2018, and 2017, et cetera. The status quo isn't anything to want to return to here.

The coronavirus shutdowns are making more obvious a pre-existing epidemic of reckless street design.

Estonia's new way to punish speeding: Make motorists stand by the road for an hour.

One can easily imagine this approach leading to violence here in America.

On the desk of a government building, a diorama is laid out. Little vehicles sit by the side of a road, watched over by little policemen. On two recent mornings, this scene was recreated in real life. Drivers caught speeding along the road between Tallinn and the town of Rapla were stopped and given a choice. They could pay a fine, as normal, or take a “timeout” instead, waiting for 45 minutes or an hour, depending on how fast they were going when stopped.

Public reaction in Estonia has been positive.

Estonians have praised the idea for being more egalitarian — monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, as in neighbouring Finland, but everyone has the same number of hours in the day — and because they perceive the punishment as being directly related to the offence, rather than an excuse to fill state coffers.

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)

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.

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 Green Mouse leaned back and drank deeply from his gunmetal flask, the one with the engraved inscription by Gilby Clarke, former guitarist for Guns 'n' Roses.

"You know, Rog, maybe this one's so bizarre even by New Albanian standards that you tell the story straight, with the minimum of embellishment."

Well, I'll give it the good ol' college try.

As with so many modern morality tales, it begins on Facebook. The post, since deleted for reasons which are about to be discussed, became known to the NA Confidential newsroom when I was brought into the ensuing conversation by a mutual friend.

Good thing I had the presence of mind to make a screenshot.

Here's the text:

I never do this, but I can’t help myself.

As I was driving down Spring Street in New Albany, a cop pulls out behind me and turns on his lights. I pulled over to get out of his way. He pulls over behind me. I thought maybe I had a tail light out or something because I wasn’t speeding. He 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. He said others were driving the same speed in front of me, but there was space for him to pull out and pull me over. The officer proceeds to tell me that the Mayor of New Albany is up for re-election and there are tons of political reasons why they do things like this. He said he never gives tickets, but had no choice tonight per the chief. AND for 36mph, my ticket was $165 !!!!

Folks, this is a joke!!!!! If these are the people running the county I live in, I don’t want them to have their positions any longer!!!

So frustrating ......

Shocking, although it makes perfect sense in a demented, distinctly New Gahanian way.

Having failed to implement a panoply of traffic calming measures over and beyond two-way traffic, as suggested by Jeff Speck and others, and with increasing numbers of neighborhood residents along Spring Street beginning to grasp the sheer extent of the engineering debacle, City Hall's improvised damage control is to do what not one street grid reform advocate ever wanted done, which is use police officers better deployed elsewhere to operate speed traps to facilitate the enforcement that might have been achieved with better results through design -- had city officials not been so woefully ignorant of the design principles involved, and determined not to learn anything from the many studies they'd commissioned.

It didn't take long for the post on social media to rouse the ire of Todd Bailey, chief of police.

DO NOT under any circumstances tell a violator I have directed you to write citations. It is YOUR job and to enforce statutes and I will not tolerate any officer giving violators excuses that it is my order that they are getting citations. It is simple to determine who is doing this and in the event you do so you WILL face severe disciplinary action. You enforce traffic laws because it’s your job, not because you have been directed to do so. I have no idea what insanity has led to telling people this but it stops today.

Wow. The pre-election panic by the Democrats may already have started.

The Green Mouse was told that Bailey called the aggrieved party, apologized, trashed the speeding ticket in return for the original post being deleted from Facebook, then had pointed words with the ticketing officer. The memo reprinted above soon followed. 

Let's hope the officer in question, whose inadvertent honesty is appreciated in dissident circles, isn't cashiered. We're already short on police man (and woman) staffing, aren't we? It's a shame available officers are used at speed traps when properly implemented street design might have turned the trick.

Here's another thought.

Gahan's City Hall famously placed Speck's street study in the hands of favored contractor (and huge mayoral campaign donor) HWC Engineering, which fed the report into a nearby sausage grinder and emerged with a plan that has failed to slow traffic, failed to make streets safer for non-automotive users, and failed to enhance walkability.

As such, when the necessary changes eventually must be made, whether during the current occupant's tenure or by whomever follows, will taxpayers foot the bill -- or HWC?

Hello, Larry ... and Jeff, and Warren, and HWC: Improve the city by slowing the cars in walkable places.

The folks at the Strong Towns feed at Twitter finished Sunday with two excellent links.

First, something perhaps never before uttered at a Board of Public Monetization Works and Selective Safety meeting in New Albany.

"If you're looking to help small businesses thrive, maybe you should start thinking about how to slow down your commercial streets."

Cyclists Spend 40% More In London's Shops Than Motorists, by Carlton Reid (Forbes)

New research from Transport for London (TfL) claims that people walking, cycling and using public transport spend more than motorists in local shops. Conducted by Matthew Carmona from University College London's Bartlett School of Planning, the research reveals that those not in cars spend 40% more each month in neighborhood shops than motorists.

The research was conducted in areas of London which have benefitted from Dutch-style streetscape improvements, such as the addition of cycleways ...

From London, Strong Towns moves to Italy.

"It's not every day that you hear about an Italian village that followed North America's lead and ran a highway through its downtown. Will they do what most American cities are afraid to do, and use good design to #slowthecars in their walkable places?"

Italian Village Installs Speed Cameras, Records 58,000 Infractions In 2 Weeks, by Merrit Kennedy (NPR)

... "We hope that these speed gauges can be an effective deterrent to motorists and that they can benefit the citizens of Acquetico, because you do not want to make cash with the fines, but it is necessary to protect people's safety," the mayor told the news agency, according to BBC.

Why so fast?

The mayor proceeds to explain that the highway is designed for speed, and drivers use it as designed.

Wait -- might this be the fundamental problem, Mr. Rice?

ASK THE BORED: The mayor, the board, his HWC and their insincere speeding study for Spring Street.

Let's see if we have this straight.

The same firm channeling thousands of dollars into the mayor's re-election fund is hired to conduct an insincere two-month speed study on the same street it redesigned for the explicit purpose of NOT hindering speedy pass-through traffic, having previously repeated on numerous occasions that nothing can be done to reduce speeds, and the newest study to determine what any of them -- city officials or contractors alike -- could learn just by walking by Spring Street for a little while, watching and feeling the mayhem.

This is the way your city rigs things.

It doesn't have to be this way, you know. Follow the money ... and in 2019, FLUSH the clique.

Speed study planned for Spring Street in New Albany, by Chris Morris (Tom May Compendium)

NEW ALBANY — HWC Engineering, under the direction of the city of New Albany, is preparing to conduct a speed study along Spring Street, from Vincennes to State Street.

While officials say speed has decreased on Spring since the street was converted to two-way traffic last year, they want to collect data and see if there are areas that may need more signage or other mechanisms to slow speed.

Sally Hughes, with HWC Engineering, told the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety Tuesday that radar detection will be placed on poles along Spring "in the next few weeks" to measure traffic for two months. Once data is collected, she will report back to the board of works.

"This will allow us to get a better understanding [of speed] and see if there are additional areas that may need a little more help," Larry Summers, city engineer, said.

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.”

I'm supporting Carrie Klaus for New Albany Township Advisory Board because I believe she'll come to agree with us about social justice and the street grid.

Expensive and useless. We can do better.

I've been sitting on this for almost two months, thinking about it and trying to come up with the best way to be constructive in my critique of a letter that appeared in the local chain newspaper on August 19.

If the writer weren't a Democratic candidate for New Albany Township Advisory Board, I probably wouldn't even have noticed the letter. Because Carrie Klaus is running (as an aside, she is a founder of Soindivisible), it strikes me as important, if for no other reason than my preference in voting for those who are informed and aware of contemporary trends in street grid thinking.

And, by extension, we take these trends very seriously at NA Confidential. Keep reading, and I'll explain why I support Carrie's candidacy even though we seem to disagree on this particular issue ... so far, at least.

Let's begin with the letter itself, reprinted here in full.

4-way stop on busy street bad idea

In response to Wednesday's article "New Albany to monitor road......" * and Ron Howard's suggestion to consider a 4-way stop at Fourth and Spring due to parked cars blocking the view at the intersection. As a downtown resident and business owner who travels these roads often, I think a 4-way stop on a major thoroughfare is a terrible idea, and one that will just shift the problem the residents of Spring Street are experiencing to neighboring streets, such as Market Street, where I live and work, as people try to avoid the congestion created by a 4-way stop.

A better solution to the problem of not being able to see around parked cars would be not allowing cars to park all the way to the street corner. In some locations downtown there is such a small buffer between the last parking spot on a block and the corner that it is nearly impossible to see oncoming traffic without literally being in the driving lane. Take the corner of Holy Trinity Way and Market Street for instance, and go see for yourself.

As a pedestrian and biker in downtown, I agree that something needs to be done about the speed of cars traveling on our streets, but shifting the problem off on other downtown residents doesn't seem the solution. On Market Street we already struggle with vehicles traveling at high rates of speed, including law enforcement that are not out on runs. Creating congestion with a 4-way stop will only make that problem worse for us. And quite frankly, as a motorist, I don't want a downtown filled with 4-way stops. If we start making motorists stop at every intersection, it won't be long before they decide to avoid our downtown altogether.

— Carrie Klaus, New Albany

In effect, Carrie is saying that while speed may be a problem on Spring Street, anything the city does to reduce it would have the effect of sending traffic to other streets, like hers, and this would be improper because that's what Spring Street is for -- to carry a high volume of high traffic speedily from one side of town to the other, come what may for those trying to develop safe and healthy neighborhoods along the way.

The easiest way to counter Carrie's argument is to become familiar with Jeff Speck and read his New Albany Indiana Downtown Street Network Proposal.

New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project in 2017, which conceptually owes its existence to Speck's opening proposal, was not fully implemented. In fact, it was barely implemented at all, owing to the local Democratic Party's stubborn unwillingness to challenge rampaging car-centrism, but still the stated intent of the project was to spread local traffic among four two-way streets, rather bottleneck it on two.

Four thoroughfares are better than one -- IF they're designed to reduce speed. Unfortunately, the latter was ignored by Team Gahan.

Actually, the problems we've had since implementation in terms of persistent speed and recklessness on Spring probably can be attributed to there being too little congestion, not too much. The same applies to Market, and Elm, and even Main.

Traffic always is slower during peak commutes; the speeds (and danger) increase when there are fewer cars during the other 22 hours in a day, hence Speck's original intent of bicycle lanes on Market and Elm as well as Spring, and the current need to replace the feeble yellow-light pedestrian crossings with bolder and safer four-way stops.

Yes, we need at least two of them on Spring between 15th and 7th, and maybe a third between 7th and Bank. Pass-through drivers need to be using I-265, not Spring Street.

A very useful article to supplement Speck's thoughts can be found here. I'm including what seems to be a relevant concluding excerpt.

The Causes of Traffic and Congestion, by Andrew Price (Strong Towns)

 ... At the end of the day, we should not worry too much about congestion or traffic. Congestion is part of the solution, not the problem. Congestion is feedback that we have built a place people want to be. The response to congestion should be to allow that Mexican restaurant to open up 3 blocks away rather than 2 miles away. To create bus lines and bike lanes that give people alternative ways to get around. The incorrect response to congestion is to build faster and wider streets, because that just reinforces car dependency and all of the negative consequences that come with it.

To summarize:

• Development can add traffic. However, development that brings amenities and people closer together and reduces the need to travel so far can actually reduce traffic. With a mixture of uses, you can achieve a high population density with very little motor traffic.
• A highly-connected street network (either a street grid or organic) with many redundancies better distributes the load of traffic and is more resilient to disruptions.
• Designated thoroughfares and bypasses create an illusion of traffic because they funnel the traffic through a single point (and with this comes the fragility of a single point of failure that can bring down the system).
• Attempting to address congestion with solutions that make it easier to drive can make the problem worse by continuing to make the car the preferred way to get around.
• We should not worry too much about congestion, because it creates demand for other modes of transportation and for amenities to be closer.

In summary, New Albany's more densely populated districts -- generally, inside the beltway, and most of all downtown -- need to function as a city, not as a suburb. The conversion of Speck's recommendations into a two-way paving project cost us the chance to make more progress toward urbanizing the street grid in a shorter amount of time. We've no choice at present apart from applying Band-Aids (for instance, the four-way stops) until another opportunity for advancement comes around.

I use the word "progress" in the preceding purposefully. Speaking for myself, I have a strong desire to identify with progressive policies, but they must be comprehensive and inter-related. To speak of social justice needs without applying these precepts to the way people move around is to neglect a very large piece of the puzzle.

I'll be voting for Carrie Klaus when we make it down to the clerk's office in the coming days. I know she's strong on the more commonly discussed social justice issues, and although we haven't met, it's clear to me that she's perfectly capable of seeing that the safest possible street grid for all users is a vital component of the larger social justice picture.

I'll stop there. Let the discussion begin.

---

* the original newspaper article to which Carrie's letter referred:

New Albany to take road, speed counts on downtown grid, by Chris Morris (Tom May Sussudio)

NEW ALBANY — Several residents, including a city councilman, asked the New Albany Board of Public Works & Safety last week to do something to slow traffic along sections of Spring Street after a man was hit and killed at Spring and E. Ninth streets on Aug. 6.

Officials heard their pleas and steps will begin soon to get a better grasp of traffic and speed on the downtown grid.

City engineer Larry Summers told the board Tuesday that traffic volume and speed will start being monitored immediately on all the streets that were converted to two-way last year, which includes Spring, Elm, Market, Bank and Pearl with "intense focus" on Spring.

"We want to get a better understanding of the traffic counts and speed so we can get an appropriate plan in place," Summers said.

Radar enforcement, similar to that on McDonald Lane, is a possibility.

Ron Howard asked the board to also consider a four-way stop at Fourth and Spring streets. He said cars parked along Spring make it difficult to see oncoming traffic.

The ways most states and cities set speed limits? A study shows "how these standard practices may actually lead to more speeding-related fatalities and injuries."

Jeeebus, what a week. I believe there are a substantial number of people locally who are willing to assert that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east -- to give up their first born to the French Foreign Legion and eat durian fruit on their toast for breakfast -- just so long as they can avoid admitting that I'm right about something.

This is priceless, and it pleases me to no end.

But enough of that.

Let's talk about how speed kills. The report in question deals strictly with passenger vehicles, but the correlations with other road users are clear. Here are two excerpts.

NTSB RELEASES FULL REPORT ON SPEEDING-RELATED CRASH STUDY, by Nimotalai Azeez (Smart Growth America)

The safe system approach introduced in the report considers the vulnerability of all road users. How will the recommendations make streets safer for people like you who commute by bike, and those who walk, bicycle, use transit, and drive?

We can’t talk about speeding without talking about people who walk, bike or use transit, younger and older road users, and people with disabilities. The safe system approach, discussed in the report, incorporates the needs of all road users, especially vulnerable ones. Although this report focuses on passenger vehicles, some recommendations apply to all road users by ensuring that appropriate speeds are maintained and enforced.

How does the study treat the influence of road design on traffic crashes?

The report focuses on countermeasures that are considered less widely accepted. But it is important to note that [changing] road design to address speed-related crashes is not yet widely implemented, even if it is generally accepted as good practice. Some jurisdictions are already addressing speed-related crashes using road design, by using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data related to infrastructure and other data-driven measures. Some states, as I have seen firsthand, are already including speed as an emphasis area in their Strategic Highway Safety Plans (SHSP). Some jurisdictions are using design manuals with features that enhance compliance for lower speed limits rather than simply lowering speed limits.

Grid Control, Vol. 1: You people drive so freaking horribly that someone's going to die at Spring and 10th.

The crosswalk is just below camera range.

Today I stood for a while on the northwest corner of Spring and 10th, watching traffic navigate the bend.

In point of fact, perhaps only 10 out of 50 drivers managed to do so without intruding on all or part of the buffer and bike lane. I didn't have the radar gun, but an educated guess is that most were at or just above 35 mph. Later I had an errand that required me to drive, and I approached at 30 mph ... and found it hard to stay in my lane.

Yesterday I watched the driver of a semi rig roar through the bend at a guesstimated speed of 40 mph. He almost brushed the curb. Meanwhile, the police tell me they never ticket truck drivers -- like this rig parked on the sidewalk by Elm Street.

I understand it's early, and the engineers will cite various reasons why this admittedly small sampling at Spring and 10th shouldn't be a cause for concern.

However, I persist in thinking that a four-way stop is merited here for the sake of safety. Glib and condescending HWC Engineering excuses notwithstanding, there needs to be a way to achieve this.

Greg Phipps, are you reading?

Never mind. I didn't think so.

Team Gahan yawns: "Design streets like gun barrels and people will drive like bullets."

Supposedly our city will have two-way downtown streets by year's end, although as I've often counseled, and see no reason to refrain from doing so at this late date, you're advised to be relentlessly skeptical until the work's actually finished.

Design matters, and two-way streets will help. When they're implemented -- IF they're implemented -- piety will be abundant, and Team Gahan will make frequent reference to enhanced safety.

When the functionaries do this, you should look them straight in the eye even when they react by looking at their shoes (the mayor himself will send for Mike Hall, since he cannot abide unscripted), and say with firmness: That's true; two-way streets are safer.

So what took you so damned long?

The real American carnage and how to stop it, by John Bennett (Connect Savannah)

... When it comes to reducing speeding, the way forward is clear, it’s all about street design, and the need is critical. AAA reports 46.0 percent of drivers surveyed admitted having driven 10 mph over the speed limit on a residential street in the past 30 days, with 10.5 percent reporting they did so regularly or fairly often.

Young millennials were 1.4 times more likely to speed on residential streets.

Speeding is further encouraged when streets are designed like freeways, with multiple wide lanes. No matter what the posted speed limit or how many “radar hotspots” are announced on local radio stations, people drive at speeds that feel “right” to them.

To use a line I cribbed from a Maryland-based advocacy group’s Twitter account, “Design streets like gun barrels and people will drive like bullets.”

Driving 10 mph over the speed limit on residential streets may not seem like a big deal, until you consider how mortality rates increase with speed. A person hit by a car going 20 mph has a 5 percent risk of death.

People hit by cars travelling 40 mph will die 80 percent of the time.

For children and older people, the numbers are even more grim.

Mounting research confirms using a Complete Streets approach — to make streets safe and accessible for people who ride bikes, walk and use transit — reduces crashes for everyone, including drivers.

The pestilence of auto-centrism: "To Make Streets Safer, Seattle May Get Rid of Traffic Signals."

As I've said many times before, you simply cannot grasp how badly most of us drive until we've walked (or biked) the same streets we speed through in our cars. Take away the protective wrapping of metal and plastic, and the truth has a better chance of seeping into our craniums.

Stop to consider that as much as I walk in downtown New Albany, it isn't possible for me to constantly monitor signalized intersections. My sampling size is very small, and yet one or two times daily, I witness drivers speeding to race through yellow and red lights -- in a densely populated urban area. Imagine the daily total.

The fact remains that the vast majority of complaints about streets and roads, from potholes through roundabouts, primarily are expressions of annoyance at being forced to reduce speed. And yet, speed obviously kills.

We're not doing very well looking into those mirrors, are we?

To Make Streets Safer, Seattle May Get Rid of Traffic Signals, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

Here’s an intriguing idea to make city streets safer. Seattle is reviewing 10 intersections to see if traffic signals should be replaced with four-way stops.

Signalized intersections carry special risks. Drivers often accelerate into the intersection during the yellow phase to “beat the light,” for instance, leading to high-speed crashes. The Federal Highway Administration warns that improperly placed signals may “significantly increase collisions” [PDF, page 9-35].

One alternative to signals is a roundabout, in which traffic entering the intersection is deflected by a center island, and incoming drivers yield to traffic in the circle. One study cited by the FHWA founds the crashes with injuries declined 78 percent at nine intersections after signals were replaced with roundabouts.

Another option is the basic four-way stop, which is more common in America.

"Engineers design streets for speeds well above the posted limit, so that speeding drivers will be safe—a practice that, of course, causes the very speeding it hopes to protect against."

See also: Charles Marohn's "The Five Ways Engineers Deflect Criticism."

The title of this post is explained by Jeff Speck, right here, but before we consider the "questionable applications of data" on the part of traffic (or "transportation") engineers, resulting in streets intended to accommodate automotive speed at the expense of wider societal safety, here is Speck again to metaphorically explain what HWC Engineering has done to his wonderful walkability plan for New Albany.

The relevant passage is in bold.

Speck: Resist the urge to make every street a highway

Urban design expert Jeff Speck -- who has made repeated appearances in Des Moines -- says transportation engineers often see every new street as a chance to build a highway.

That's a mistake in an era when streets need to be designed to meet diverse community needs, including the ability to walk through an area without crossing four to eight lanes of speedy traffic.

Speck, who runs his own consulting firm and teaches at Harvard University, writes in a blog post in The Atlantic: "Even when traffic engineers have the best intentions, too many simply lack the tools to make successful places. In the typical American city, asking a traffic engineer to design a walkable street is like asking a hammer to insert a screw."

Of course, HWC's merry hammering at screws is occurring according to the wishes of a City Hall that brains long ago forgot. Speck's New Albany streets study might as well have been written in Gaelic, insofar as Mayor Jeff Gahan is concerned. Sections applicable to campaign finance beak-wetting were retained for modification beyond recognition, and the rest was flushed.

The result?

Speck's amazing and transformative principles of walkability now have been truncated to achieve entirely unrelated imperatives, like paving envy and federal monies (see "beak wetting," above), as well as abject capitulation to trucking interests; hence the grainy, filler-stuffed sausage, and a two-way street grid plan stripped of most ancillary usefulness -- but just as with the elevation of the Mighty Trumpolini, Nawbanians elected Gahan, and now you get exactly what you want, good and hard, in the form of a city being built according to his atrophied, sleight-of-hand, Mickey Mouse "vision."

That felt great, so back to the point: Here's how traffic engineers knowingly build streets fit only for speeding cars.

Why The Rules Of The Road Aren’t Enough To Prevent People From Dying, by Anna Maria Barry-Jester (FiveThirtyEight)

... In 2013, 32,719 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, and 2.3 million were injured, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Those numbers were down from the previous year, but motor vehicle crashes remain a leading cause of death, and speed is a leading cause of accidents. The NHTSA estimates a $277 billion annual price tag for those accidents, with an additional $594 billion for “harm from the loss of life and the pain and decreased quality of life due to injuries.”

Given the social and economic toll of speeding, one might assume that we set speed limits with careful calculations aimed at maximizing safety. But that’s not exactly how it works, and a history of questionable applications of data is partly to blame.

Padgett don't mind: "Streets That Encourage Speeding Are Streets That Encourage Drag Racing."

Upon seeing the article's reference to "lanes as wide as 16 feet," Padgett's management had a company-wide monstrous-wide-load-trucking orgasm. After all, size matters when it comes to industrial quality of life.

Meanwhile, folks on Elm, Spring and Market shook their heads and sighed, but that's okay, because Mayor Gahan's going to save us ... some day.

ON THE AVENUES: Complete ventriloquism, or the stagecraft of "throwing" your two-way streets.

Streets That Encourage Speeding Are Streets That Encourage Drag Racing, by David Sachs (Streetsblog)

An unidentified 17-year-old kid without a drivers license killed Nicholas Richling, 26, because he wanted to drive as fast as possible — faster than his drag-racing opponent — on Alameda Boulevard on Sunday evening.

Afterward, Denver PD Sgt. Mike Farr, a crash investigator, pointed to a street design that encourages speeding. “Alameda is a straight shot, a fairly wide boulevard,” Farr told the Denver Post. “These spots exist all over the city.”

Yes, they do. In 2014 David Felan killed 26-year-old Rachel Neiman and injured seven people on Federal Boulevard, a notorious street for drag racing. Alameda and Federal (both urban streets that double as state highways) have incredibly wide lanes — often 12 feet wide, sometimes roomier. Federal has lanes as wide as 16 feet, an alarming width for an urban street ...

Lower speed limits "can set expectations for traffic calming redesigns in the future."

Last week, when Mayor Jeff Gahan finally emerged from the down low bunker to speak publicly about two-way streets for the first time in months, the News and Tribune's Elizabeth Beilman recorded a typical potted Gahanism.

"What we don't want is the volume to turn Spring Street into a raceway," Gahan said.

I hate to be the one to break the news to a sheltered guy who spends most of his time underground reading his own press clippings, but dude -- Spring Street's been a raceway since about 1960.

Since it was made into a one-way street. 

For Gahan to suggest that speeding on New Albany's one-way street grid won't become a problem until tolls come into force constitutes a pole-vault beyond delusional, straight to profoundly sad.

Portland Wants to Rethink Speed Limits By Factoring in Walkers and Bikers, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog USA)

For cities trying to get a handle on traffic fatalities, dangerous motor vehicle speeds are an enormous problem. Once drivers exceed 20 mph, the chances that someone outside the vehicle will survive a collision plummet.

But even on city streets where many people walk and bike, streets with 35 or 40 mph traffic are common. Cities looking to reduce lethal vehicle speeds face a number of obstacles — including restrictions on how they can set speed limits ...

 ... Street design is a more important safety factor than speed limit signs, of course, but lower speed limits can still send a signal to motorists to proceed more cautiously — and they can set expectations for traffic calming redesigns in the future. If the speed limit is 30 mph but motorists consistently go faster, the design clearly needs to change.

In New Albany, orange construction cones might not stand a chance, though guerrilla tactics are all we have left.

Sorry for the gap -- Facebook video embedding doesn't seem to translate well to this platform.

Lori may be onto something here. It's been my observation, admittedly unverified apart from a few radar gun samplings, that since the upper Spring Street project started, speeds have noticeably increased on my stretch of Spring.

It's as though having been slowed by orange cones for a few blocks coming into the city, drivers regard Vincennes as a welcome "green flag," signalling an immediate shift into hyperspace -- and down uncontrolled Spring they fly.

In NA, too? "Traffic Safety Advocates Taking Action Into Their Own Hands."

Would guerrilla orange cones work in New Albany?

Will anything work in New Albany? Thanks for the video, Lori.

Guerrilla Bike Lanes Show Cities How Easy It Is To Make Streets Safer, by Adele Peters (Fast Company)

Since the city won't keep bikers safe, a group of San Francisco bikers is taking matters into its own hands, using a very simple tool—traffic cones ...

... In a few recent interventions, the activists demonstrated how much better design can help. On Golden Gate Avenue, for example, a new painted bike lane was ignored by cars, and it was filled with traffic. When the activists put up simple orange construction cones, cars immediately started staying in their own lane.