Strong Towns Throwback Friday: "We should not be asking engineers to design streets."

There'll come a time when the critique can be renewed. Until then, we'll live with the myriad errors.

design-streets">Engineers should not design streets, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

Last Friday I was participating in the 5th Annual Mayor's Bike Ride in Duluth following a week spent sharing the Strong Towns message on the Iron Range. The friendly woman riding next to me asked me what could be done to to better educate engineers so they would start to build streets that were about more than simply about moving cars. My answer rejected the premise of the question: We should not be asking engineers to design streets ...

Head, meet wall: "Zurich shows that effective transportation requires that we widen our focus to see beyond cars."

CityLab is completely free. There's nothing stopping you from following this link and achieving a greater understanding of places where sensible solutions are allowed to exist.

What Does This Street In Zürich Mean?, by Norman Garrick (CityLab)

If you see how cars, streetcars, bikes, and pedestrians use this Swiss street, you can better understand what’s wrong with so many other urban thoroughfares.

Above is a picture of a pretty typical city street in Zürich, Switzerland.

What do you see?

In some ways, this scene represents a kind of Rorschach Test for transportation and urban planning. If you are a passenger on a tram riding on one of the two sets of rails that take up most of the street, this scene represents freedom of movement and a sense that transit is privileged in Zürich. If you’re a pedestrian, this is a relatively comfortable street to be on, with useful services, restaurants, and a few interesting stores (check out the model train store at the corner with Haldenbachstrasse). If you’re on a bike, this, like most other streets in Zürich, is OK, but not great.

But if you’re an American tourist, your first thought might be that these Europeans are real strange: Look at that long line of car traffic on the right, and look at all that road space going to waste. And an engineer or planner trained in the conventional mode will probably agree with you, and see a picture of abject failure. In the parlance of the traffic planner, this is a street operating at Level of Service F.

snip

Let us first deal with the American tourist who sees inefficiency. During the peak hour, the vehicle lanes carry about 400 cars and perhaps 500 people. (I counted!) The two tramlines carry about 3,500 people per hour. So, notwithstanding the fact that at first glance the tram lanes seem empty and remarkably inefficient, the numbers tell a different story—the tram lanes are doing yeoman’s work, carrying 7 times more people than the car lanes, and they could easily carry many more. And this is before we even start to consider the environmental and economic advantages of transit over cars. (People in Zürich have unlimited access to all transit in the city for just $1,000 per year, yet the subsidy from the city, state and the nation is modest, since the fare box returns, and other revenues, pay about two-thirds of the cost of operating the system.)

I'll stop there. I'm too depressed to keep snipping.

"The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Not only is car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely free from social stigma.

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

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media. We demand to be in control, and we insist the rest of you get the hell out of our way.

The headline is to be taken as sarcasm, by the way.

THE FUTURE IS FOUR WHEELS, CYCLISTS BE DAMNED, by Jacob Bacharach (The Outline)

Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.

 ... Nationally, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have spiked since 2009. The ubiquity of cell phones and the growing preponderance of integrated screens in vehicles is a major contributing factor, as is the American preference for trucks and SUVs, with which their taller front profile makes them far more deadly in collisions than the lower, slanting hoods of normal cars.

There is also the unrelenting, often murderous hostility of drivers toward pedestrians and people on bikes. No cyclist I know has not been menaced by an enraged driver — brushed past within inches, bumped at an intersection, run off the road — and most of us have been menaced more than once. No pedestrian who has to cross at a mid-block crosswalk is unfamiliar with the experience of a driver actually speeding up when they see you; no one who has crossed at a regular intersection is unfamiliar with a turning driver laying on the horn and waiting until the last second to jam on the breaks as you scurry out of the way.

The car is a very specifically American symbol of freedom, but like so many instruments and symbols of American freedom, it is a tool of domination and control. A car is a missile and a castle, a self-propelled, multi-ton fortress, hermetically sealed against the intrusions of weather, environment, and, of course, other people. Drivers view the world through the lenses of speed and convenience — most of the anger at cyclists, in my experience, is at having to drive at something resembling a normal urban speed limit because there’s a bike in front of them — but also through the lens of ownership. Streets belong to cars. The rest of us are interlopers, invaders, invasive species.

In fact, most Americans, and certainly most of our political leaders, seem to view our car-based infrastructure as essentially organic and inevitable, and anything that impedes, slows, reduces, or provides an alternative to the circulation and storage of internal combustion vehicles is an engineered scheme to alter an essentially natural order. Newspapers relentlessly editorialize about massive road and highway projects as absolute fundamentals of economic wellbeing and development, whereas rail and bike lanes and other multi-modal transit options are generally treated as luxe amenities at best, or public menaces at worst.

(snip)

But cars are not creatures and have not evolved to fit their environment; we have designed our environment around cars ...

 ... And here, curiously, we find a great undiagnosed cause at the root of our supposed cultural malaise. (Also, incidentally, a great undiagnosed source of national violence: cars kill as many people in America — around 40,000 a year — as guns.) These, too, are persistent bugaboos of op-ed writers and pundits: fragmentation and atomization; loneliness and disconnection; declines in communal values and an absence of interpersonal interaction.

Well, easy enough to blame it on the internet, but for a century now we have been putting things farther and farther apart and, more and more, traveling to and from everyplace in single occupancy vehicles, grimly zooming from garage to garage, interacting with no other humans along the way except for that fucking cyclist taking up the whole goddamn road! The interactions that presumably create the sorts of communities that conservatives and columnists so frequently lament losing require more than a front porch on which to sit; they require some strolling passersby as well.

"While we inherited a transportation system built on racial discrimination and a belief that moving cars is most important, it does not mean that we can continue with the same type of thinking."

Here's the link, and the title says it all.

Equitable, just and inclusive transportation systems are within our reach, by Veronica O. Davis (Roads & Bridges)

Taking into consideration Team Gahan's ongoing aversion to books and reading, not to mention genuinely purposeful and inclusive communication, I'll highlight the conclusion while noting that the entire article is worth ten minutes of every one's time.

Bringing it all together

As transportation professionals, we are charged with ensuring people are able to move from Point A to Point B safely and reliably. While we inherited a transportation system built on racial discrimination and a belief that moving cars is most important, it does not mean that we can continue with the same type of thinking. Even as we grapple with new technologies such as autonomous vehicles, dockless bike-share systems and scooters, we are susceptible to repeating past mistakes unless we completely shift the paradigm. In point of fact, complete streets and Vision Zero require us to think, act, and design differently.

We must:

• Make bold decisions to reallocate lanes for single-occupancy vehicles to other modes such as public transit, biking and walking.
• Champion complete streets and Vision Zero as a philosophy and a way of doing business so they become more than paper documents.
• Recognize whose voice is not being heard in the process and then being proactive and reach out to those communities. This may include increasing resources to be able to engage the community.
• Create a framework and vision that sets the ground rules for new technologies to serve all communities.
• Increase the number of women and people of color within the profession, so we may reflect the communities we serve.

Following the examples set by our predecessors is not an option. We must shift the paradigm to right historical injustices by designing a network that is inclusive of all people as we prepare for the future.

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?

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 ...

Green street design: New Albany can't have nice things because our "leaders" don't, and our "pillars" aren't.

Because for the clique to even intelligently discuss it, they'd first be compelled to imagine it. They can't, and it's not even close.

And so we settle for the best that C-minus students can offer. It isn't much.

‘A VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF GREEN’: HOW STREET DESIGN CAN BE CALMED BY NATURE, by David Goldberg (Sightline)

Making Cascadia’s streets more like gardens ensures complete streets are green streets.

A revolution is brewing in the streets of Cascadia’s major cities. Not since the mid-20th century has this region seen such a wholesale remaking of city rights of way.

Rapid growth is driving experimentation in ways to move more and more people through the same corridors, whether by foot, bicycle, transit, rideshare or private vehicle, all while accommodating a rising tsunami of deliveries. And as as ever more buildings fill urban space, those public rights of way become critically important refuges for greenery.

Until recently, traffic engineers designed streets solely to move cars. For them, street trees were to be eliminated as roadside hazards and landscaped zones were a hindrance to “vehicle throughput.” Today, though, planners increasingly see space for trees and plants as vital to safety, clean waterways, and resiliency and adaptation to climate change.

Some cities are beginning to fuse four strains of fresh thinking that have emerged over the last decade or so:

Complete Streets
Vision Zero
Green Stormwater Infrastructure
Urban Forestry

“Trees and other plants clean the air, add economic value to real estate and commercial sales and they make places where people want to be,” said John Massengale, co-author with Victor Dover of Street Design: the Secret to Great Cities and Towns (Wiley 2013). “Perhaps most importantly, they slow cars down, which is critical to achieving Vision Zero.”

“There is a virtuous cycle of green,” said Brice Maryman, senior landscape architect at MIG|SvR in Seattle. “Giving street space over to plants and trees helps slow vehicles, and once you have slower vehicles you can use even more space for natural functions.”

Also, some of the same techniques that can be used to calm traffic and create safe zones for people on foot or bicycle offer opportunities to introduce more soothing vegetation and ecological functions—ensuring that complete streets are green streets ...

Granted, clogging our streets with charitable donation bucket brigades MIGHT slow traffic, but it would be UNSAFE to bet on it.

Noting in advance that my 3rd district council representative Greg Phipps is absolutely correct in expressing disgust with the solar-powered Nothing Doing Machines, as erected by planners who never walk, for the ostensible purpose of helping pedestrians cross the street, here's the rough paraphrase of a conversation he and I had following Thursday evening's soul-crushing student city council meeting.

Me: We need to talk about the street grid.

Greg: I know you have issues, but look, at times you have to compromise, and it's better than it was before. It's a start.

Me: Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say it is better than before. It can still be improved, so we need to talk about the next phases for improvement.

Greg: Well, you know, probably nothing else is ever going to happen.

Me: 

As reported earlier, council devoted thirty minutes to a discussion of potential ways to alter the body's own previous legislation in 2013 to ban non-profits, little leaguers, knitting circles and Dishevel New Albany from sending volunteers wading out into the street to solicit donations from road-enraged drivers at major  intersections.

Back in 2013, when Dan Coffey lobbied furiously in favor of this ban (now he's caterwauling just as frenetically against it), the major point in its favor was safety:

"Drivers suck and they're distracted, and walkers suck and they're distracted, and we need to keep them separate." 

Actually there's a far better argument, one so obvious that even Bob Caesar grasps a shard of it, in that if non-profits can't come up with any better way to raise money than shaming distracted drivers, maybe they need to rethink their entire existence.

But I digress.

Last Thursday night, the discussion got predictably weird when Phipps suggested that in the aftermath of the two-way grid project's completion, and the addition of turn lanes at those major intersections preferred by city-sanctioned panhandlers, it is more dangerous for bucket brigades in 2018 than it was in 2013, to which Coffey turned on this lazy fastball down the middle of the chute and correctly replied, paraphrased:

But if the grid project actually has slowed traffic and improved matters for the pedestrians like you say it has, wouldn't collecting donations be safer, not more dangerous?

Yes, it was THAT kind of night. Here's a series at Strong Towns, which I'll introduce with this passage, substituting Our Town for Wichita):

In cities where Vision Zero has worked, the public sector has shown dedication to reorienting its departments away from the traditional, siloed approach toward a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach to streets that involve traffic engineers, police and fire departments, elected officials, public health professionals, and the community from the very outset of streets projects — extending this collaboration to community-wide planning for safe streets.

In New Albany, we must change our conception of streets simply as conduits to move cars as efficiently as possible to places that enhance the health, wealth, and safety of all New Albanians.

In successful cities, streets are for people.

A New Vision for our Streets: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 by Alex Pemberton

A completely preventable traffic death shows us how street design makes our cities unsafe, and how simple adjustments could change that.

Hey, engineers: "Forgiving design and the forgiveness of slow speed are two very different approaches because they serve two very different needs."

I'll keep saying it until someone in the Down Low City Hall Bunker starts paying attention.

FORGIVING DESIGN VS. THE FORGIVENESS OF SLOW SPEEDS, by Jon Larsen (Strong Towns)

When something works in one situation, it often gets applied to many situations, and sometimes this choice is a big mistake. In the transportation world, it’s common to apply safety standards and designs from high-speed highways to city streets. Ironically, these “safety features” can be downright dangerous. Today, I’ll explain how we got here, why this is a problem, and what we can do about it.

The concept of forgiving design was developed by transportation engineers to lessen or avoid the impact of “run off the road” crashes. The general premise is that highways should have broad shoulders with gentle slopes and a roadside clear zone which is free of fixed objects such as light poles. These design elements provide drivers time to make corrective action if they start to drift off the road, and if they do crash, it is less severe.

Civil engineering students across the country learn these principles when studying about the geometric design of highways. They learn about the impact of shoulder widths, clear zones, slopes, and drainage features, as well as how to mitigate the dangers of fixed roadside objects through the use of barriers and crash attenuators. I have no doubt that lives have been saved on our high-speed highways as a result of these concepts, but they have been misapplied — resulting in negative unintended consequences — elsewhere.

I think at least part of the problem stems from the fact that minimal attention or training for engineers is given to the design of urban and local streets, resulting in a tendency to apply highway design principles to these streets in the name of safety. 

This backfires, because forgiving design features encourage speeding in places where people should be driving slow. When drivers see wide, straight stretches of pavement with no obstructions on either side, they intuitively think that it’s safe to drive fast. This is a big problem on streets (as opposed to highways or roads), because streets are places where people walk, bike, shop, live, work, etc. These activities are incompatible with and downright dangerous when mixed with high speed traffic. The bottom line is this: On streets, the design objective needs to flip from forgiving design to the forgiveness of slow speeds.

The concept of focusing on slow speeds for streets is something that is explored regularly here at Strong Towns, including my most recent article, which discussed how to create a system of safe, human-centered streets. The good news is that traffic engineers are increasingly talking about forgiving design vs. the forgiveness of slow speeds and Strong Towns is at the forefront with the #SlowtheCars movement. Attitudes are changing worldwide as we realize the power of slow ...

"Traffic and road capacity are not the inevitable result of growth. They are the product of very deliberate choices that have been made to shape our communities around the private automobile."

Think of it as a goal for 2020 and beyond.

STREETS AS PLACES: HOW TRANSPORTATION CAN CREATE A SENSE OF COMMUNITY, Project for Public Spaces

“The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the center.”
–William H. Whyte

While streets were once a place where we stopped for conversation and children played, they are now the exclusive domain of cars. Even where sidewalks are present along highways and high-speed streets, they feel inhospitable and out of place.

Traffic and road capacity are not the inevitable result of growth. They are the product of very deliberate choices that have been made to shape our communities around the private automobile. We have the ability to make different choices--starting with the decision to design our streets as comfortable places for people.

Thankfully, in recent years a growing number of people around the world have stood up and demanded something better. PPS is helping to show the way forward, assisting communities realize a different vision of what transportation can be.

Downtown streets can become destinations worth visiting, not just thruways to and from the workplace ...

Bullet points for 2019.

10 Qualities of a Great Street

PPS has identified ten qualities that, in conjunction with the principles described above, contribute to the success of great streets.

• Attractions & Destinations. 
• Identity & Image. 
• Active Edge Uses. 
• Amenities. 
• Management. 
• Seasonal Strategies. 
• Diverse User Groups. 
• Traffic, Transit & the Pedestrian. 
• Blending of Uses and Modes. 
• Neighborhood Preservation. 

"American cities are getting a little loosey-goosey with curb control, experimenting with policies that just might make the places more livable, for everyone."

Blocking handicapped parking
to light the Christmas tree.
Quintessential New Albany.

As it pertains to HWC Engineering's ham-fisted hatchet job on Jeff Speck's grid proposals, it would be interesting to know if any of the curbside issues discussed by Aarian Marshall in this article ever were allowed to intrude upon the "modernization" conversation.

If the conversation was initiated with Jeff Gahan, then the mayor's likely answer takes the form of another question:

"Uber? What's that?"

In New Albany, "modernization" means catching up to the year you graduated high school, just prior to trundling off to the 35th class reunion.

TO SEE THE FUTURE OF CITIES, WATCH THE CURB. YES, THE CURB, by Aarian Marshall (Wired)

... The battleground is ubiquitous but rarely merits a second look. In some places, it occupies mere inches of space. But the territory is now fertile soil, its coveters many. We are talking, of course, about the curb.

The curbside has always been a a place for walking and loitering. But in just the past decade, smartphone technology has enabled new transportation services, all of them looking for their own bit of the terrain. The curb is home to bike share programs and the cycling lanes that help their users get around safely. It’s a spot to pick up and drop off passengers (Uber, Lyft, Chariot, Via, public buses and streetcars, paratransit) and things (UPS, FedEx, Instacart, Postmates). Some cities have set aside space for carshare services (Zipcar, Maven), or scooter-shares (Scoot). Others have found new and creative ways to charge for parking spots, experimenting with tech that adjusts prices based on demand.

“Cities have started to rethink how their streets are designed from curb from curb,” says Matthew Roe, who directs street design initiatives for the National Association of City Transportation Officials and authored a new curbside management white paper released this week. “They’ve started to realize they need more tools to manage that valuable curbside space. It’s the most valuable space that a city owns and one of the most underutilized.”

What you do with the curb sets the tone for your whole city. And through this grey chunk of concrete, local governments are starting to communicate how they'll handle their entire transportation systems. Favor a system that asks citizens to share resources, by making room for, say a bikeshare program, and you say one thing. Favor private parking for residents, and you declare war: “When I think about curb, the first thing that comes to mind is how people react when you take away parking,” said Sarah Jones, the planning director for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. She was speaking at a surprisingly lively event about curbs, hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area research and advocacy organization SPUR this month. Residents complain, Jones said, of private interests taking over the space, but they don't seem to get that this is exactly what's been happening all along. “I’m not sure what is privatizing public space more than storing your vehicle in it," she said.

Us, too: "Louisville’s roads need to be designed for citizens, not cars."

If Greg Fischer's words aren't enough, just think where this leaves Jeff Gahan.

Speechless?

Streets for People: Louisville’s roads need to be designed for citizens, not cars, by Chris Glasser (Insider Louisville)

This is the first in a series of articles focusing on Louisville’s street design. Written by Bicycling for Louisville Executive Director Chris Glasser, the “Streets for People” series will be published with the goal of encouraging a (polite and civil) online discussion of these topics. Please see the comment form below.

... Mayor Greg Fischer, it should be noted, is fantastic at talking about the need for our city to shift away from its car dependency. Fischer was one of the driving forces behind a national report on “Innovation Districts,” which advocates for redesigning cities’ infrastructure for improved walkability. In his strategic plan for Louisville, the top goal is to “improve multi-modal transportation and community streetscapes.” Fischer is as well-spoken as any leader on the importance of walkable, bikeable, inviting city space.

This is great. Unfortunately, it’s not enough.

When being interviewed by Charlie Rose recently, the mayor argued that actions speak louder than words. “You know, what I always say is, I don’t watch the lips, I watch the actions,” he said. “That’s really what’s critical and that’s how people judge us.”

To take Fischer at his word and judge him by his own standard, our city is falling well short of the administration’s stated top goal. Fischer’s annual budgets speak volumes on this matter — they’re his defining action, louder than his words. Yes, there is a small amount allocated to build a bike network — a pittance that Metro Council undercuts every year during the budget review period — but beyond that, there is virtually nothing that will begin to push us toward achieving Fischer’s goal of 25 percent of trips occurring on foot, bike or bus by 2030.

What can be done? Here are three suggestions, along with a map to show where they could be implemented:

Fund two-way street conversions in urban neighborhoods.
Remove traffic signals, replace them with stop signs.
Design major intersections to be nodes, not throughways.

The end of the beginning: "Blame the road design, not the phone."

When one's only strong impression about street design is that it should facilitate his or her rapid passage through populated urban areas, certain nuances are bound to be missed -- "steamrolled" might be a better way of putting it.

Here in New Albany, two-way streets are being put into service this month without the ballyhooed "enhanced" crosswalks being finished. The first such crosswalk was installed earlier this year at Main at W. 1st following a period of years during which City hall insisted it couldn't be done.

ASK THE BORED: Tucson's first rainbow crosswalk -- and we get stuck with dozens of lousy anchors enabled by municipal cowardice.

CM David Barksdale added that in his experience, the flashing lights not only fail to make an impression on drivers far too busy checking their iPhones, but also taper off too quickly once daring walkers have waded into the street.

Allow me to add that if solar-activated yellow flashing lights do not convince drivers to yield to pedestrians, soon-to-be ubiquitous sharrow symbols painted on streets do not convince drivers to share space with bicyclists.

Except that Main Street really hasn't been calmed in terms of design, has it?

With everything being done to encourage humans to pass on foot from the south side to the north side, and vice versa, Main Street remains a high-speed wasteland of automobile-centric design all the way from the sewage treatment plant to the beginning of the beautification area on Mansion Row.

The enhanced crosswalk at W. 1st is pleasant enough, but until street design on both sides supports its use -- and assuming drivers give a damn -- it's a very small pleasantry, indeed.

Just remember: The current realization of two-way streets and improved street design is not the end of a necessary adjustment to New Albany's auto-centric streets.

It's just the end of the beginning. Note that yet another media source blames the car for the accident .. not the driver.

BLAME THE ROAD DESIGN, NOT THE PHONE, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

In one of many recent news stories on "distracted walking," WPVI-TV Philadelphia reports that a "girl chatting on FaceTime [was] struck and critically injured by [a] car in Abington." As Lloyd Alter, writing for TreeHugger, summarizes it:

There was a serious crash recently near Philadelphia; a fourteen year old girl was crossing a street in a crosswalk, in a school zone, with signs posted on posts and tent signs all over the place saying that pedestrians have right of way. There are no trees, no obstructions, no reason whatsoever that the driver couldn't see that there was a pedestrian.

And yet, unsurprisingly, the WPVI-TV article focuses almost solely on the fact that the now-critically injured girl was on her iPhone when she was hit and implies that she is to blame for her injuries. In the 27-sentence article, there are only two mentions of the driver who struck this high schooler—one to explain that the driver stopped the car after the crash and the other mentioning that "no charges have been filed at this time."

In the article, we read about how bystanders dutifully called 911, how first responders rushed the girl to the hospital, and even how school counselors "have been made available to her peers." However, nowhere do we read that local officials are reassessing the design of the road on which this crash occurred to prevent future crashes from happening ...

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.

Fascist Indiana senator proposes "block traffic and you die bill," this idea being consistent with the broad principles of autocentrism, if not social justice.

Indiana GOP -- group photo.

This is no more than an extreme example of the usual doctrine of cars having all the rights to our streets, and other users none. Jim Tomes merely dispenses with the hypocrisy, because most governmental units in the state feel the same way about their daily pedestrians and bicyclists as Tomes does about protesters.

Am I the only person here who is desperately eager to see this bill advance so Ron Grooms will have to vote on it?

(thanks B)

Indiana bill would allow police to shut down protests 'by any means necessary', by Joanna Walters (The Guardian)

Opponents in Indianapolis argue the proposed law, simply labelled Senate Bill 285, or SB 285, would give police power ‘even to the point of costing lives’

A bill that would require public officials in Indiana to dispatch law enforcement swiftly to remove any protesters blocking traffic by “any means necessary” prompted uproar on Wednesday.

Opponents of the bill, introduced by a Republican state senator, rushed to the general assembly in Indianapolis on Wednesday afternoon to attend a hearing for the legislation, arguing that it could give a green light to the police to shut down protests harshly “even to the point of costing lives”.

Urgent note to Deaf Gahan: More evidence that street design = street safety = social justice, even more so than a doggie fun park.

At this late date, it can't be denied that street safety in New Albany relies on one factor, and one factor alone, to the exclusion of all others.

In short, someone in a position of municipal authority just might consider street safety for all users beyond the same old auto-centric boilerplate, naturally doing so piecemeal for one singular stretch of roadway, though never as an organic citywide whole, so long as the 80-20 federal matching funds come through.

Until then, we cross our fingers and wade into the interstate-rated traffic lanes, as pedestrians have been doing along Grant Line Road for the past 30 years.

Grant Line Pedway Project in New Albany moving forward (Beilman; N and T)

It has taken five years and a second Gahan administration for the ruling City Hall junta to even begin making faint, barely detectable gurgling sounds about public safety in this context.

Consequently, we must not ever forget that in New Albany, public safety has consistently come second or worse, forever submerged behind Gahan's bright, shiny baubles.

New parks and recreation facilities were prioritized, and came first. Doggie exercise was prioritized, and came first. The Farmers Market was prioritized, and came first. Subsidized luxury housing and initiatives to demolish public (read: affordable) housing units were prioritized, and came or is coming first.

In fact, the word "oblivious" has met its match in Gahan. Oblivious surrenders, and says go ahead, shoot me now. Never has a New Albany mayor remained so stubbornly aloof from the reality of everyday life in this city. Agoraphobia is a crippling affliction; too bad the rest of us must pay for it.

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

Gahan’s grandiosely termed Downtown Street Grid Improvement Project might yield a bare minimum return on investment by restoring two-way streets, but otherwise it’s just another of his mock Potemkin façades, dedicated to garnering as much campaign finance lubrication as possible from the usual suspects in engineering and construction without making truly transformative changes to the grid.

It’s why the forever uncomprehending Gahan stripped Jeff Speck’s plan of its most potentially useful recommendations, and it’s why we’ll have to add them back as we’re able, with or without City Hall’s permission.

Street safety?

Clearly it's a social justice issue, not a campaign finance issue. Unfortunately for New Albanians, if "bad street design is disproportionately impacting historically marginalized groups in America," then Gahan's instinctive response is to ship the marginalized elsewhere, not fix the problem.

But there's a funny part to all this.

Gahan thinks he's a Democrat. Cue the laugh track, at least until you try to cross the street outside.

The Hidden Inequality Of America's Street Design, by Diana Budds (Co.Design)

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.

"The Ideology of Traffic" moves traffic, but creating wealth is something else entirely.

Which ideology is it? Traffic or wealth creation? Charles Marohn breaks it down: The Ideology of Traffic (Strong Towns).

Folks like Irv Stumler and David Aebersold should be reading. They might learn something.

They won't ... so they don't.

This weekend, there was an article that appeared in the NY Post titled The Real Reason for New York City’s Traffic Nightmare. I know the Post is tabloidy; the story contained all anonymous sources and lacked even a rudimentary level of fact checking that you’d find in an actual news story. Still, it fits the ideology of the traffic engineering profession and I saw the piece widely distributed. Here’s a quote:

“The traffic is being engineered,” a former top NYPD official told The Post, explaining a long-term plan that began under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and hasn’t slowed with Mayor de Blasio.

“The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion, to slow traffic down, to favor bikers and pedestrians,” the former official said.

“There’s a reduction in capacity through the introduction of bike lanes and streets and lanes being closed down.”

Let’s apply a contrasting value system to this quote, not one based on moving traffic but one based on building wealth. Here’s how each of these statements could be rewritten:

Ideology of Traffic: The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion.

Ideology of Wealth Creation: The city streets are being engineered to make property more valuable, encourage investment and improve the city’s tax base while reducing its overall costs.

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Ideology of Traffic: The city streets are being engineered to slow traffic.

Ideology of Wealth Creation: The city streets are being engineered to improve the quality of the space for the people who live, work and own property there.

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Ideology of Traffic: The city streets are being engineered to favor bikers and pedestrians.

Ideology of Wealth Creation: The city streets are being engineered to favor the access of high volumes of people over the movement of comparatively small volumes of automobiles.

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Ideology of Traffic: There’s a reduction in capacity through the introduction of bike lanes and streets and lanes being closed down.

Ideology of Wealth Creation: There’s an improvement in the quality of the place and it’s corresponding value through the introduction of bike lanes and the closing of some streets and lanes.

Before the Suburban Experiment, cities were built with an ideology of wealth creation. 

Read it, Irv: "Design Is Better Than Enforcement To Make Cities Safer For Everyone."

I apologize for doing this, but since the article is very short and directly addresses current social media yammering over the Upper Spring road diet and (impending?) two-way street plan, I'm reprinting it in its entirety. Look at these ideas as the antidotes to the Stumlers, Padgetts and Seabrooks of our community.

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Design Is Better Than Enforcement To Make Cities Safer For Everyone, by Charlie Sorrel (Fast Coexist)

Ticketing drivers isn't the answer to create streets that are friendly for pedestrians and cyclists.


Much as cyclists might like to see bad drivers punished for their distracted driving and their bike-harassing crimes, enforcement isn't the most effective way to make the streets safer. The best way to stop "accidents" is to design better roads.

Slower cars means safer roads, and while adding speed cameras and reducing speed limits can help, nothing beats a design that stops drivers from speeding in the first place. Also, slower cars mean less injury in the case of a collision, but again, avoiding the collision to begin with is even better.

Alon Levy, writing for Pedestrian Observations, makes the argument for better infrastructure. One of the main causes of accidents is driver fatigue and sleepiness, which is in turn caused in large part by monotony. You're a lot more likely to doze of on a long stretch of featureless highway, with mile after mile of unchanging scenery, then you are to fall asleep while navigating curved country lanes or narrow city streets.

"It is better to design roads to have more frequent stimuli: trees, sidewalks with pedestrians, commercial development, [and] residential development," writes Levy. Another trick is to make lanes narrower. Drivers speed up in wider lanes, and they're also pedestrian-hostile, making it harder to cross streets safely. Narrowing them helps in both cases, and could create more space at the side of the road for bigger sidewalks or wider bike lanes.

Levy cites Sweden as a good example of road redistribution. In Stockholm, the few arterial roadways in the city have "seen changes giving away space from cars to public transit and pedestrians." Many roads only have one lane in each direction for cars, with other lanes given over to pedestrians, buses, and bikes. Levy also covers "setbacks," the wasted land in front of a building that sets it back from the road. Some U.S. zoning laws mandate these setbacks, and these should be repealed, for a more pedestrian-friendly space.

Another urban problem is drivers using residential streets as shortcuts between larger roads. In the U.K., these are called "rat-runs." The problem chokes otherwise quiet streets at rush hour, as well as making the streets more dangerous at off-peak hours, as cars hurtle down roads where children should be playing and bikes should be ambling. The solution, common in the Netherlands, is to block one end of the street to motor vehicles with posts that let cyclists and pedestrians pass unmolested.

Urban sprawl, and the unchecked ingress of the automobile into every area of our cities, is clearly the problem. And better infrastructure, designed to make driving more difficult in order to make cites better for everyone, is an obvious solution. But it requires bold decisions, like the Barcelona's controversial Super Block scheme, and those decisions require a political will that is often too weak in the face of bullying from car drivers. Design may be more important than enforcement, then, but it's strong politics that will make those changes.

"Does this dangerous street look familiar?"

I'm reprinting this e-mail verbatim. It is self-explanatory. New Albany has dozens of "dangerous by design" candidates, but surely Grant Line Road between Wal-Mart and Beechwood nears the top of an infamous list.

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We need your help.

For too many people, a walk is a deadly risk. Poorly designed streets have led to an epidemic of pedestrian fatalities, especially among people of color and in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods.

You might live near or have to use one of these dangerous streets or intersections every day. We want to see what you see.

This fall, Smart Growth America's National Complete Streets Coalition will release Dangerous by Design 2016, a report that will again rank the nation’s most dangerous places to walk using the Pedestrian Danger Index. This year’s report will dive deep into how income, race, and place play an outsized role in how likely people are to be killed while walking.

Help us illustrate the hazards you face everyday. Send us photos of streets in your neighborhood that are “dangerous by design.” Streets like these:

Poorly designed streets like these above—often built or designed with federal dollars or guidelines—endanger pedestrians, cyclists and drivers alike. And as Dangerous by Design will continue to illustrate, people of color and census tracts with below average income are disproportionately represented.

Here’s how you can help:

• Send in photos via email to photos@completestreets.org. This email address can only receive 10MB of attachments at a time.
• High-resolution photos are preferred for maximum quality.
• Please indicate how photos are to be credited if used online or in the report.
• Provide information about the photo. Where was the photo taken? Is this a street that you have to use regularly?

We want to see the missing crosswalks, missing curb ramps, and the long and dangerous treks along busy highways. We want to see every way that our current road designs have failed to provide for the safety and convenience of everyone that needs to use them. View photo submissions from our past reports.

Send us photos of the deadly conditions for pedestrians near you. We’re preparing our report now, so please pass them along as soon as you can. And stay tuned for more about Dangerous by Design 2016.

Sincerely,

Emiko Atherton,
Director, National Complete Streets Coalition
Smart Growth America  

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.