Lies.

“It’s not so much about the measurement being wrong, it’s that the whole underlying thesis is wrong”
-- University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick

Travel Demand Modeling (TDM) for the Ohio River Bridges Project? It was just another example of pseudoscience.

A Twitter denizen named Nolan Gray, who describes himself as a "once and future city planner" offered a valuable link, introducing it with this:

Most city planning and civil engineering heuristics and models—trip generation, floor area ratios, street widths, farm-near-me/">minimum parking requirements, among dozens of others—are legally-mandated bits of pseudoscience.

And our own ORBP? It's one of the single most shining, flagrant examples of the perpetual con game.

Although there are many reasons the Ohio River Bridges Project was a total urban planning debacle, one that has not gotten much attention is the role travel demand models played in putting lipstick on the $2.5 billion pig. One potential reason for that is because those who work in the field have come to expect nothing less.

A long read and a necessary read.

The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation, by Aaron Gordon (Vice)

For the last 70 years, American transportation planners have been using the same model to decide what to build. There’s just one problem: it’s often wrong.

In November 2011, the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project published a 595-page document that was supposed to finally end a decades-long battle over a highway. The project was a controversial one, to say the least.

At a time when many cities around the country were re-evaluating whether urban highways had a place in their downtowns, Louisville was doubling down. It not only wanted to keep the infamous “Spaghetti junction” where Interstates 64, 65, and 71 meet in a tangled interchange, but it wanted to build more on top of it. In addition, the political alliance behind the project aimed to expand the I-64 crossing to double the lane capacity, as well as build a whole new bridge just down the river—doubling the number of lanes that crossed the river from six to 12—all for a tidy $2.5 billion.

But in order to get approval to use federal funds for this expensive proposition, the project backers had to provide evidence that Louisville actually needed this expansion. Using a legally-mandated industry practice called Travel Demand Modeling (TDM), the project backers hired an engineering firm to predict what traffic will look like 20 years in the future, in this case, by 2030. They concluded that the number of cross-river trips would increase by 29 percent. The implication was obvious: if they did nothing, traffic would get worse. As a result, the project got federal approval and moved ahead.

Two subsequent studies, however, also funded by the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project, came to a very different conclusion.

Two years later, engineering firm CDM Smith looked at what traffic conditions actually had been while the project was seeking approval. It found that from 2010 to 2013, cross-river traffic had actually fallen by .9 percent.

The other study, this one for potential bond-holders, was far more puzzling. It concluded that by 2030, the combined cross-river traffic would be just 132,000 trips, some 15 percent lower than the SDEIS had predicted. Even worse, according to this new study, the combined 12 lanes of river crossings would carry some 4,000 fewer daily trips than just the I-65 bridge did in 2007 alone, completely underfarm-near-me/">mining the argument that Louisville needed these new bridges.

Aaron Renn, an urban policy researcher and frequent critic of the Ohio River Bridges project, extensively documented these shenanigans. “No matter how crazy this project is,” he wrote back in 2013 when that bond-holder study came out, “it always manages to find ways to show that it’s even more wacky than I thought.”

The project is now finished, and everyone in Louisville can see for themselves which prediction was the better one. In 2018, a post-construction traffic study showed that cross-river trips decreased by 2 percent from 2013 to 2018. As a result, the project has been called by Vox, among others, a “boondoggle” of epic proportions.

The Louisville highway project is hardly the first time travel demand models have missed the mark. Despite them being a legally required portion of any transportation infrastructure project that gets federal dollars, it is one of urban planning’s worst kept secrets that these models are error-prone at best and fundamentally flawed at worst.

Recently, I asked Renn how important those initial, rosy traffic forecasts of double-digit growth were to the boondoggle actually getting built.

“I think it was very important,” Renn said. “Because I don’t believe they could have gotten approval to build the project if they had not had traffic forecasts that said traffic across the river is going to increase substantially. If there isn’t going to be an increase in traffic, how do you justify building two bridges? ...”

Jumping to the conclusion, as a rather painful reminder of every meeting I ever attended where the carefully structured "models" were cloaked with unimpeachable "science," having the effect of reducing rock-headed elected officials to tears of joy at the thought of their own self-deception.

Perhaps the most useful thing the model does is obscure that debate behind a veil of scientific certainty. Behind hard, solid numbers. “From the standpoint of a citizen, these numbers essentially come out of a black box,” he said. “You don’t have any idea how they generated these numbers, so you can’t begin to critique them.”

In other words, the model shuts people up. It may not be honest, but in the world of transportation politics, there’s nothing more valuable than that.

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 ...

Essential reading for HWC's Jim Rice: "Four Ways Traffic Engineers Thwart Public Will."

Marohn dissects a situation in Springfield, Massachusetts; it's about traffic in front of a library, and a clueless board of works, and ... you'll just have to read the whole essay.

Please read it.

Four Ways Traffic Engineers Thwart Public Will, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... There are four common methods traffic engineers use assert their power and thwart the will of elected officials and the public those officials represent. They are all unbecoming of a profession that is supposed to be about public service. The August 6 letter from the Springfield Director of Public Works contains all four. I’m going to review those today in the hopes that, if we can’t affect change in Springfield, at least other cities can learn from their (repeated and ongoing) mistakes.

#1: A Focus on Process, Not Outcomes
Time and again I’ve watched engineers talk down to public officials, minimizing their concerns, by pretending there is some long and dignified legacy of deliberation that goes into every action taken by an engineer ... I touch on this first because the arrogance deeply bothers me. This issue keeps coming up because people keep getting hit, getting killed, and those responsible for the dangerous situation—those who could do something about it—seem unwilling to do anything. People have been elected because they said they would find answers. To fall back on process—silly councilors, we’ve already considered this many times—when it’s clearly not working is tone deaf, at best.

#2: A Reliance on Standards, Not Observation
An engineer working for their own priorities, instead of the priorities of the elected officials or the public at large, will quote industry standards as if they are inviolable laws instead of what they really are: guidelines for the typical scenario. This letter includes plenty of that. Here’s one example ... the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices is a favorite for engineers to cite, but in a unique situation like that being examined along State Street in Springfield, the rote standards don’t easily apply. That’s why we have professional engineers, not merely technicians. Engineers are supposed to think, to use their professional judgement in places where it is warranted.


#3: Elevating Engineering Values Over Human Values
I’ve written about how engineers assert their own values into design decisions, holding them up as truth when in fact they are a subjective ordering that should be made by elected officials. The decision to prioritize traffic flow over safety, for example. Another is the decision to establish a design speed incompatible with the neighborhood. These decisions are made without presenting them as options to elected officials, even though they are an assertion of values, not truth. This letter is full of the engineer’s values being asserted as truth ... the letter talks about “traffic queues” and “Level of Service” as if they were commandments handed down from a divine authority, not merely a set of values being asserted by the Public Works Department.

#4: Pretending to be Powerless Due to a Higher Authority
The fourth way engineers thwart the will of elected officials and the public is to assert that they are powerless, that ultimate authority resides elsewhere. Layered on this assertion of powerlessness is the implied threat that the real governing authority is not very nice, that they are likely to react poorly if provoked by such silly requests.

This is the kind of thing I did when I was a kid and used to babysit. You know, I would let you stay up late, but your mom said I needed to get you to bed on time and we don’t want her mad at us, do we. It’s juvenile, but as part of the broader conversation, it provides the final knockout blow. There is a false sense of empathy projected while simultaneously deflecting any responsibility from the engineer ... of all people, politicians should understand this to be false. None of these decisions are absolutely technical; they are all somewhat political. This is especially true in a unique situation like State Street, where multiple deaths have occurred. It’s a stretch to suggest that reasonable action here might require state board to provide some type of waiver, but it’s absurd to suggest the city could not make a compelling case.

Cities are not powerless. Great local engineers that want to assert the values of the community (instead of opposing them) can become strong advocates for the community with state appeals boards. 

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

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

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

Thinking in human terms is a good place to start.

---

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

And from James Lemay:

Turns out you were totally wrong about everything.

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

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

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

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

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

Engineer: The DDI is pedestrian friendly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendly: kind and pleasant

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

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

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

---

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

If you want to know how Deaf Gahan purposefully botched the Speck plan for walkable streets, read this article. Hint: HWC dunnit.

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

It's very, very simple.

Jeff Speck conducted a street grid study with a mind toward incorporating two-way streets within the context of a larger mandate to redesign downtown streets for the improvement of navigation by all users, not just drivers, and to make them friendlier for non-drivers -- cyclists, walkers, handicapped users, and so on, in a future tense.

Jeff Gahan chortled and handed this plan to HWC Engineering bearing a post-it note:

Apart from the directional shift to two-way traffic -- even Phipps might notice if we don't do at least that much -- do absolutely nothing to inconvenience a driver, or to improve the experience for non-drivers. This shit's for show only, and nothing more. After all, the Feds are paying for it, and we can spin the paving project if nothing else. 

The traffic engineers at HWC were happy to obey the mayor's orders. They got paid, another few thousand bucks passed into Gahan's re-election fund, and just as neighborhood activists were gearing up yet again to picket City Hall for ignoring its obligation to make streets safe, skateboarder Matt Brewer was killed by a driver where a dangerous curve at 10th and Spring feeds into an intersection at 9th, with vision chronically blocked by commercial vehicles that have been illegally parked on the street for the past 15 years without a single peep from ordinance enforcement.

Team Gahan subsequently has ducked, covered and emitted robotic, gurgling and bureaucratic non-answers.

NA Confidential: Brief question: has the accident report about Matt Brewer been released? I’m particularly interested in the role of those Williams Plumbing trucks forever parked illegally on the street, blocking the view. Thank you.

Chief Todd Bailey: All crash investigations handled by the Combined Accident Reconstruction Team are maintained by the Floyd County Prosecutor’s Office. I can tell you the case is still under investigation but if you’re looking for specific information you’ll need to inquire with the Prosecutor.

It's just another reason of too many that Nanny Barksdale got the Reisz-stag all wrong: It isn't the working conditions which are inhumane at City Hall. It's the ruling clique itself.

As if to highlight the gesture of thumbing his nose at critics, Gahan quickly appointed superannuated mafioso wannabe Warren Nash to the Human Rights Commission, and Nash just as rapidly engineered the hiring of his son the councilman to a job with the housing authority.

Jeffrey and the DemoDisnyDixiecrats looked out upon the carnage and found it good. That snoring you hear? It's the News and Tribune, eagerly defending the right of mayors to advertise.

Meanwhile, if you want to know exactly how Gahan botched the Speck plan for two-way streets, read this article. It's one of the best Strong Town pieces I've ever read on the topic:

"Instead of helping connect people to the places they need to go, our city has built expensive public facilities that are both life-threatening and insulting to folks who don’t drive. We have effectively removed much of the public from the public right-of-way. And that's not fair."

Fair, schmair. Deaf Gahan and baseball hall of famer Jim Rice don't give a rat's ass about fair. It's all about the money for them, as the rest of us push the beg button at the dysfunctional-by-design "crosswalks" and hope drivers don't mow us down.

A LOSing Proposition, by Sarah Kobos (Strong Towns)

In cities throughout America, traffic studies are conducted to determine the Level of Service (LOS) for cars. This scientific-sounding metric basically looks at the busiest 15 minutes of the busiest hour of the day, and determines how well auto traffic flows through a given intersection.

Traffic engineers use this data to justify road expansion projects. It’s a bit like showing up during that one holiday meal when you’re hosting every leaf on your family tree, and declaring that the dining room is cramped, so you should add a second story to your house.

Despite its limitations, LOS remains popular because it’s simple. When a street is clogged with traffic during peak use (i.e. supply equals demand), it earns an LOS grade of F. When there’s not another car between you and the horizon? Congratulations! You get an A!

By overemphasizing LOS, we justify expensive, overbuilt streets that are dangerously inhospitable to people—just so folks who use the least efficient form of transportation (single-occupancy cars) won’t be inconvenienced during peak travel times. In doing so, we ignore the many variables that influence the transportation system as a whole: land use and zoning, pedestrian comfort, bike safety, viable transit, trip generation, etc.

But what about the Level of Service for people who walk and bike? Enter the Multi-Modal Level of Service (MMLOS), brought to you by the Highway Capacity Manual. (Because nobody understands the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users like the dudes who design the highways.)

Because it's easy to measure, the Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS) focuses on four main variables: existence of a sidewalk, separation of pedestrians from motorized vehicles, motorized vehicle volumes, and motorized vehicle speeds.

If you want insight into the mind of a traffic engineer, consider “space per pedestrian,” a key metric based on the width of the sidewalk and pedestrian volumes. I love this because it’s so ridiculous.

All that “space” is not a sign of success. Much of our public right-of-way is so hostile to cyclists and pedestrians that only the most desperate people—the folks with no other alternative—even attempt to walk or bike. If there’s a lot of space on a sidewalk, it’s usually because it’s a lousy or impractical place to walk; it's not comfortable or useful to people on foot. There are a lot of sidewalks like that in America ...

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 ...

Meet Dongho Chang: "Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets."

A boy can dream. I had such high hopes for Larry Summers, and maybe he'll be able to rally, but in the end -- so predictably, and so sadly -- Jeff Gahan's dull mediocrity corrupts everyone and everything it touches.

We could have been contenders, alas. Meanwhile, try to imagine our city hall functionaries walking or riding bikes.

Can't do it, can you?

Perhaps they don't feel safe. If only they had some way of correcting this fear ...

Meet the man striving to make Seattle’s streets safer, more efficient, by David Gutman (Seattle Times)

Seattle’s chief traffic engineer is less concerned with how fast cars are getting through the city and more concerned with how people — on foot, on bike, in buses and cars — interact with the streets.

Dongho Chang’s Twitter feed is boring.

You want caustic political opinions or an endless cavalcade of bad news? Look elsewhere.

What you’ll get from Chang, the city of Seattle’s chief traffic engineer:

Pictures of plastic speed bumps outside a West Seattle elementary school. New crosswalks in Lake City. New curb ramps in South Park. Protected bike lanes all over the place.

Chang’s feed is a catalog of changes to Seattle’s street grid and urban landscape. Almost all those changes are small, but when taken together, they paint a picture of a city in transformation, one less focused on fast car travel and more focused on making streets safe and reliable for walkers, bikers, bus riders and drivers.

Seattle isn’t building many new streets these days. Chang, along with dozens of engineers and technicians, works to make the streets we have function better, rejiggering speed limits and lane lines, trying new ideas to make the streets more welcoming and more efficient.

The results, like them or not, are apparent: Seattle’s not getting easier for drivers anytime soon. But it’s one of the safest cities in the country for pedestrians. And while downtown neighborhoods have added 45,000 jobs in the last six years, the rate of drive-alone commuters has declined, and transit use has spiked.

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

They've been called "enhanced" crosswalks and "high visibility" crosswalks. They're a prominent feature of downtown New Albany's new two-way street (or is it "road"?) grid.

In the following announcement from the University of Virginia, crosswalk safety remains entirely about the pedestrian, who must "use" these mechanisms correctly in the faith-driven hope that drivers might understand their own responsibilities to share the patch.

Not everyone pushes the button.

But how many drivers are paying attention?

How many know what this means?

Rapid Flashing Beacons Enhance Crosswalk Safety at the Push of a Button

... “Rapid Flashing Beacons allow the University to put more lights in more locations across Grounds in ways that are less invasive, easier to maintain, and less disruptive to traffic. Most importantly, RFBs are very reliable. All of this points to increased pedestrian safety if used correctly,” said Director of Safety and Emergency Preparedness Marge Sidebottom.

Because these lights are above ground at approximately eye level, it’s easy for pedestrians to check that lights are flashing before entering the crosswalk. Drivers should be aware that flashing lights means that a pedestrian is near. Unfortunately, though, not everyone pushes the button.

“The key to safety is that pedestrians must activate the lights,” Sidebottom said. “Studies have shown that the rapid flashing lights are effective in getting drivers' attention, but pedestrians need to push the button. Then, they need make sure that cars have stopped before entering the road. Pedestrians always face the greatest danger in a run-in with a car, regardless of who has the legal right-of-way.”

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

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

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

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

Charles Marohn nails the explanation of this difference in a six-year-old post from Strong Towns. It is published here in its entirety. Jeff Gahan made sausage out of Jeff Speck's prime proposals by handing them to HWC Engineering, and HWC Engineering co-opted it in precisely the fashion described by Marohn.

Speck understood the transformative nature of a genuine complete street. Gahan feared it.

Cowardice won.

---

CO-OPTING COMPLETE STREETS

The idea of a Complete Street is compelling in almost every way, but when the engineering profession begins to adopt it wholesale, we need to pause and look at the outcomes. Are we getting Complete Streets, or are we getting Complete Roads. The difference is tremendous and will impact the financial viability of an approach to building places that is long overdue.

The Complete Streets concept is one that is long overdue. We've spent two generations transforming a public realm once comprised of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods into auto-only zones. These are places where the kids used to play ball in the street. Today a kid can't even play safely in their own front yard.

At Strong Towns, we've worked to illuminate the fact that this transformation has been done at tremendous financial cost. This is not only because the construction of wider, flatter and straighter streets has been expensive, but because the auto-centric nature of the transformed public realm drives private-sector investment out of traditional neighborhoods, dislocating it to places that provide more buffering to the car.

Not only that, but the redevelopment that has happened in these neighborhoods has largely been on a suburban framework, using the parking ratios, setbacks and coverage restrictions of modern zoning to reduce density (and the rate of return). Financially, these places are largely insolvent, lacking the tax base to maintain their basic infrastructure.

Enter the concept of a Complete Street. To me, the fundamental contribution of Complete Streets to the discourse surrounding the future of our towns and neighborhoods is the recognition that our streets must serve more than just cars and that the public realm can no longer be an auto-only zone. The fact that the Complete Streets model has broken the stranglehold that the auto-only design mentality has had on our streets should be the cause of unending rejoice.

In March I was able to have dinner with Kaid Benfield. During the course of our conversation, he enlightened me on how the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards were tweaked with Neighborhood Design principles. The result, LEED-ND, takes a great concept -- buildings that are energy efficient and environmentally friendly -- and overlays it on a development framework that reinforces these principles. In other words, no more "green" buildings in the middle of a greenfield, with 30 mile commutes each way.

In a similar vein, we're going to now, humbly, suggest a way in which the Complete Streets concept can evolve to achieve what I believe is its principle intent, that being Complete Neighborhoods.

I've now seen two projects where engineers promoted the use of "complete streets". In each I see the engineering profession co-opting the Complete Streets moniker without any thought to a Complete Neighborhood. For the engineers on these projects, the approach remains the same. I'll quote from our piece, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:

An engineer designing a street or road prioritizes the world in this way, no matter how they are instructed:

Traffic speed
Traffic volume
Safety
Cost

The rest of the world generally would prioritize things differently, as follows:

Safety
Cost
Traffic volume
Traffic speed

In other words, the engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a projected volume. Once those parameters are set, only then does an engineer look at mitigating for safety and, finally, how to reduce the overall cost (which at that point is nearly always ridiculously expensive).

One of the places I've seen Complete Streets applied is My Hometown's Last Great Old Economy Project (also known as the College Drive project). In this instance, the design starts with a minimum design speed and a projected traffic volume, the latter being the stated impetus for the project. This analysis provides us with four lanes of fast-moving traffic. The engineers then move on to the "safety" criteria and the mandate that -- if we can afford it -- we accommodate bikes and pedestrians. This is done, of course, at tremendous cost - estimated at over $7 million for a mile of road.

Now notice that I called this route a "road" and not a "street". Understanding the difference between a road and a street is critical to understanding the problem we have with engineers misusing the Complete Streets approach. From our Placemaking Principles for a Strong Town:

To build an affordable transportation system, a Strong Town utilizes roads to move traffic safely at high speeds outside of neighborhoods and urban areas. Within neighborhoods and urban areas, a Strong Town uses complex streets to equally accommodate the full range of transportation options available to residents.

Roads move cars at high speeds. Streets move cars at very slow speeds. We should build roads outside of neighborhoods, connecting communities across distances. We should build streets within neighborhoods where there are homes, businesses and other destinations. The auto-road is a post-WW II replacement of the rail-road. The street should be what it has always been; the street.

The fundamental design flaw of the post WW II development pattern -- the false premise upon which every other design tragedy has been committed -- is the transformation of our streets into roads.

High speed auto travel has no place in urban areas where the cost of development demands a complex neighborhood pattern with a mixing of uses, multiple modes of travel and a public realm that enhances the value of the adjacent properties. High speed traffic destroys value in our neighborhoods. It drives out investment. There is no amount of pedestrian enhancement that we can build to offset the negative response people have to being in the close proximity of speeding traffic.

Without aggressive traffic calming -- which is part of the Complete Streets playbook -- we will simply be building Complete Roads. A Complete Road will not transform the public realm, no matter how much money we put into accommodating pedestrians and bikers with bridges and tunnels. A Complete Road will not attract significant private-sector investment in the key neighborhoods where we have so much existing infrastructure liability. And a Complete Road will cost a fortune, without changing the insolvency problem facing our cities.

If there is one thing our current financial situation should teach us about the engineering profession it is this: engineers will bankrupt us if given the chance to build our cities and towns the way they envision them. It is predictable that the engineering profession will embrace the concept of a Complete Road -- which is nothing more than a bad design made PC by throwing an expensive bone to bikers and pedestrians -- because it fits with their hierarchy of values (speed, volume, safety and then cost). Insidiously, promoting Complete Roads will ensure them more funding than they would otherwise receive. You can call them "streets" all you want - unchecked, they are going to build "roads". (For example, check out the 14-foot highway lane widths on the Complete "Street" cross section on My Hometown's Last Great Old Economy Project).

We love Complete Streets. They are essential to a Strong Town. Let's get out there and build them, but make sure the engineers don't con you into a Complete Road. Demand slow cars and a Complete Neighborhood to go along with your Complete Street.

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For previous Grid Control series links, go here.

Golden oldie, no less vital: "Attacking the Language Bias in Transportation Engineering."

Cartoon by Ian Lockwood. 

My advice stays the same.

Print this 2013 article on card stock. Roll it up and add a rubber band. The next time Pinocchio Rosenbarger rises at a public meeting to defend a Gahanian campaign finance clip job, apply the article to Rosenbarger's cheek in a vigorous upward arc.

Congratulations. You'll have struck a blow against auto-centrism in New Albany.

Attacking the Language Bias in Transportation Engineering, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

“Improvement.” “Upgrade.” “Level of Service.” The traffic engineering profession is full of buzzwords laden with meaning — and, for the most part, the embedded meaning is something to the effect of “cars are king.”

Ian Lockwood, P.E., has been working in the engineering profession for 30 years. He served as the chief transportation official for the city of West Palm Beach, Florida, before joining the engineering firm AECOM as a consultant and completing a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard.

Lockwood is on a mission to reform the way his profession uses language. I got a chance to sit down with him last week at the Congress for New Urbanism conference in Salt Lake City. Here’s what he had to say ...

As New Albanians ruefully recall, it was called the East Main Street IMPROVEMENT Project.

AS: Can you give us some examples of biased words?

IL: Probably the one we hear the most is “improvement.” When a conventional traffic engineer talks about an improvement, often it might mean a widening. It’s hard to argue against an “improvement,” because it’s a subjectively labeled word and it implies it’s getting better, even though it might not be getting better for all the user groups. It contains a bias for the automobile user over and above the other folks.

"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.

Greenery adorning a one-way street is like putting lipstick on a pig -- even in 1958.

1958, as viewed through rose-tinted glasses.

Yesterday I devoted four hours of my life to dissecting Irv Stumler's mono-rants about the street grid.

ON THE AVENUES: Irv Stumler screams, "We don't deserve two-way streets!"

In retrospect, my first mistake was listening to what Stumler has to say, which is nothing, although it's certainly an endlessly repetitive form of nothingness. In an odd sort of way, I'm probably enabling civic dysfunction in this manner, and maybe I'm a better candidate for the padded cell than Irv, but damn it, the way I was raised was to try your best to win by making a better argument.

This is exactly what we've done, and will continue to do. I shift from "I" to "we" precisely because of the following comments from reader B, and others like it, which are indicative of the factual heft behind our case.

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Mr. Stumler's one-way street study from 1958 was compiled by a professor engineer using anecdotal reports from police officers, safety patrol officers and the like.

Mr. Stumler better watch out - in the report, the author, Prof. Calvin Gilbert Reen (born 1898) praises the virtues of fully controlled, well marked pedestrian intersections with crossing lights on all four sides of one-way street intersections.

Over and over, Prof. Reen claims well-marked, well-lighted pedestrian crossings reduce pedestrian fatalities. The quoted price in the report Mr. Stumler praises for such intersections is $3,500 (in 1958 dollars) per square.

In today's dollars, the plans outlined in Mr. Stumler's report would cost the City $29,054 dollars per each intersection. An affordable safety precaution made necessary due to the increased speed, traffic flow and volume brought about by one-way streets.

You may read the report Mr. Stumler recommends: Practical Traffic Engineering for Small Communities.

As for quoting studies that are very nearly 60 years old ... 

It's silly to see someone quote an engineering study from 1958 as a currently credible reference.

For example, in 1958, America and Russia were still conducting atomic bomb tests above ground, the process having been deemed "safe" by engineers.

Fallout from above ground nucelar testing was the most serious health consequence. Radioiodine concentrates in milk when consumed by cows when grazing, and then concentrates in human thyroid glands when contaminated milk is ingested. This concentration effect is especially strong in children.

The effect of these exposures boosted the chance of contracting thyroid cancer some time during a lifetime. It is now possible to estimate the overall effect of the total radiation exposure had on the American population.

From the 380 million person-rads of total exposure, roughly 120,000 extra cases of thyroid cancer were expected to develop, resulting in some 6,000 unnecessary deaths.

"We can "safely" test atomic bombs above ground" - so said engineers in 1958.

"If this isn't the job of an engineer -- and it's not -- who should design streets? The answer is as simple as it is radical: everyone."

They're roads, not streets.

This is too good not to print in its entirety .The point isn't to spark conflicts between engineers or to malign those charged with engineering jobs. Rather, it is to delineate between streets and roads, and to urge democratization of the planning process as it pertains to their proper uses in a varied environment.  

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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.

A quick review for those of you that are new here (which might be up to half the audience -- amazing). Roads and streets are two separate things. The function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad -- a road on rails -- where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two.

In contrast, the function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobile) are the indicator species of success. So, in short, with a street we're trying to create environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish.

Engineers are well-suited to constructing roads. Road environments are quite simple and, thus, lend themselves well to things like design manuals and uniform guidelines. There are only so many variables and the relationship they have to each other is fairly straightforward. In the United States, we have tested, refined and codified an engineering approach to roads that is pretty amazing and, in terms of engineering, the envy of the world.

There are two primary variables for designing a road: design speed and projected traffic volume. From those two numbers, we can derive the number of lanes, lane width, shoulder width, the width of clear zones and the allowable horizontal and vertical curvature. From those factors, we can specify all the pavement markings and signage that are necessary. We can then monitor things like the Level of Service, the 85th percentile speed and traffic counts to optimize how the road functions over time. Engineers are really good at this.

Engineers are not good at building streets nor, I would argue, can the typical engineer readily become good at it. Streets that produce wealth for a community are complex environments. They do not lend themselves well to rote standards or even design guidelines. There are numerous variables at play that interact with each other, forming feedback loops and changing in ways that are impossible to predict.

Consider just one variable: the future of the adjacent land. The operative component of building wealth on a street is building. Who owns the property? What are they going to do with it? What is their capacity? Will they stick with it? Will they find the love of their life and move across the country? Each property has a near infinite set of complexities to it that change and respond to change, each of which is far more important to the wealth capacity of the street than, for example, lane width.

If we're trying to create an ecosystem that results in our indicator species (people) showing up in greater and greater numbers, we can't just focus on one or two variables. It can't be just design speed and volume. The natural ecosystem equivalent would be an observation that productive forests have trees and so we hire our forest engineers to go out and plant rows and rows of the optimum tree. It's obvious that, absent other flora and fauna, insects and bacteria, sunlight and rain and a myriad of other variables, the trees we are planting just aren't enough to get the ecosystem we're after.

If we're trying to create a natural ecosystem, we first have to recognize the environment we're in. A desert ecosystem will be far different than a northern forest. We then need to seed the basic elements, but we don't direct them day-to-day; we nurture them as they grow. If we know what we're after -- if we know our indicator species of success -- if we see the experiment getting way off track, we can intervene in small ways to nudge it back on course. We can introduce small changes and see how the system responds. Over time, our natural ecosystem will show us how it wants to grow.

We do a disservice to our communities when we treat streets as if they were roads, when we ignore the complex environments streets are meant to create and treat them as if they were simple throughput models. Streets need to be designed block by block. Those designs need to be responsive and adaptable.

Understanding that 99%+ of all streets that will exist a decade from now already exist today, what we're really talking about here in North America isn't building new streets but making good use of existing streets. The way we do this -- the way we design block by block in ways that are responsive and adaptable -- is to try things and see what works. Our tools are not traffic counters and code books but paint, cones and straw bales. Before we make any change permanent, we test it -- and possibly other variations -- first to see what works.

So if this isn't the job of an engineer -- and it's not -- who should design streets? The answer is as simple as it is radical: everyone. Building a productive street is a collective endeavor that involves the people who live on it, those who own property on it, those who traverse it as well as the myriad of professionals who have expertise they can lend to the discussion.

Put your least technical person on staff in charge of your next street. Empower them to meet with people, observe how people use the street and then experiment, in a low cost way, with different alternatives. Keep experimenting until you start to see your indicator species show up (outside of their cars, of course). Now you have a design you can hand over to your engineer to specify the technical stuff -- pavement thickness, paint specs, etc... -- and get the project built.

Engineers are highly competent at building roads. When you are trying to move automobiles quickly from one place to another, put your engineering in charge and do what they recommend. When you are trying to build a street -- when you are trying to make your city wealthier and more prosperous -- make your engineer one small voice in a larger chorus of people whose words and, especially, whose actions dictate what your design should be.

Bicycle Infrastructure Fail(s): "The primary problem is that traffic engineering ... still has influence on planning and urban design."

Which is why, when you remark to an engineer that your city won't ever get the streets right until it decides that one really must break eggs to make an omelette, and the engineer replies that "every day I break more eggs than Waffle House," it's perfectly clear just how big of a broom will be needed for the toxic clean-up.

Or maybe a scythe and a few pitchforks wouldn't hurt, either.

If we design cities for humans, with respect for the human experience, safety, logic and ease-of-use, you wouldn’t see stuff like a bike lane in the middle of a street, or sharrows, in any city.

Ding ding ding -- that magic word, sharrows, which is the invariable "do nothing and declare victory" tactic of the Rosenbarger sect.

To paraphrase Stonewall Jackson: "Fire 'em. Fire 'em all."

Bicycle Infrastructure Fail(s), by Mikael Colville-Andersen (Cities of the Future)

... Best Practice in bicycle infrastructure is basically a century old. Dedicated bike paths date from 1892 when an equestrian path was turned over to bikes on Esplanade in Copenhagen. In 1915, the first on-street, curb-separated cycle track was installed on Strandboulevarden. From there, protected bike infrastructure spread out around the world.

Over 100 years, the infrastructure has been tested by easily hundreds of millions of daily cyclists. Planners have tweaked and experimented, made mistakes and fixed them and ended up with a Best Practice that is simple, effective, safe and cost-efficient. Generations of planners and engineers have done an amazing job and just handed us everything we need on a silver platter. There are only four types of infrastructure in Danish Best Practice. One of the designs fits any street in the nation and any street in any city in the world. Copy-paste, baby.

Why, then, do we see crap like in the photo, above, showing up on city streets? Who, in their right mind, would ACTUALLY choose to put cyclists in the middle of a street with speeding cars on either side? Certainly not anyone with an understanding of the bicycle’s role in urban life as transport or a sincere desire to encourage cycling and keep people safe. As I suggested on Twitter, find the person who is responsible and fire them. A flippant remark – but still a serious one.

The primary problem is that traffic engineering, in certain countries, still has influence on planning and urban design. In America, where this infrastructure was put in, bicycles are placed in the same category as motorized vehicles. In countries that GET the bicycle’s role in cities, they are regarded as fast-moving pedestrians and we’ve been planning for them for a century.

The feds, walkability and bike lanes: Why local and state traffic engineers should be trusted as far as you can toss their cars.

Contrary to perceptions, the greatest threat to pedestrian safety is not crime, but the very real danger of automobiles moving quickly. Yet most traffic engineers, often in the name of safety, continually redesign city streets to support higher-speed driving.
-- Jeff Speck

It seems that the Feds want to make several points perfectly clear. Click the link to read this gratifying testimony, in black and white.

Of course, this doesn't explain Jeff Gahan's failure to make use of the transformational walking and cycling measures offered him by Speck, and buttressed with cold, hard fact by John Gilderbloom.

But that's political cowardice, which isn't directly addressed by the FHA in its memo.

Feds to Traffic Engineers: Use Our Money to Build Protected Bike Lanes, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

The Federal Highway Administration wants to clear the air: Yes, state and local transportation agencies should use federal money to construct high-quality biking and walking infrastructure.

State and local DOTs deploy an array of excuses to avoid building designs like protected bike lanes. “It’s not in the manual” is a favorite. So is “the feds won’t fund that.”

Whether these excuses are cynical or sincere, FHWA wants you to know that they’re bogus.

City Hall's street grid surrender: "All the extra expense, time, and proposed iterations have nothing to do with securing federal funds."

Perhaps owing to the approach of the primary, hell has broken loose these past few days, and I'm struggling to keep up with the daily proliferation of reasons to vote against Jeff Gahan.

Just the other day, someone asked a very good question about the destructiveness of one-way, arterial interstate highways running through our urban neighborhoods, and by extension, about waning hope for the principled implementation of Jeff Speck's downtown street network proposals.

They (city government) have been talking about fixing this problem for quite a while! Why can't they get it done?

The Bookseller succinctly answered.

This administration has never taken ownership of the idea and will continue to straddle the issue, pretending that no one will notice that they have had four years to do this. Now they are ginning up a high-cost solution so as to spread the money around to preferred vendors.

The "high cost solution" of which the Bookseller speaks is discussed here: The predicted gutting of Speck begins as Mayor Jeff Gahan gives the finger to complete streets advocates.

Also, we now know that this week's Bored of Works decision to award a consultancy contract to one of the usual street engineering suspects, thus delaying action on streets for up to 18 months, was at least in part a pre-emptive response to Padgett, et al, in the crane erector's forthcoming legal challenge to the Main Street project.

(Once again, it has proven impossible for Team Gahan to be publicly truthful about its motivations v.v. street grid reform.)

It's probably moot, given that City Hall has botched the entire streets issue to a possibly irreparable degree, but nonetheless, prior to yesterday's revelation of the lawsuit filed against the city by our charmingly civic minded value-extractive looters, a question arose with regard to the stated Bored of Works rationale of delaying Speck so to garner federal lucre.

I am confused by the notion that we need more time and consultancy expenditures to get federal money. Haven't we been told privately for years that the federal money already was in place?

Jeff G gave the answer, pre-Padgett lawsuit.

Yes, we have been told that and it's long been reflected in the KIPDA budget. An engineering plan of some sort is likely necessary for federal qualification but nowhere near to the multi-option, stray-from-the-original extent they are talking about. All they actually need to do is produce engineering/construction plans for the Speck plan with minimal justification and environmental review, justification that Speck himself has already largely provided. All the extra expense, time, and proposed iterations have nothing to do with securing federal funds. 

Again, the recent Main Street example (that used federal funds over and above the state's long-term maintenance money) shoots them in the foot. Honestly, given the low cost of most of the Speck plan, it's questionable whether we even need federal funding as using it will require adhering to more stringent (and sometimes nonsensical) federal guidelines which, in turn, will drive costs up -- something that, again, happened with the Main Street Project.

Traffic congestion, traffic safety, and how NOT to be confused about them.

As you consider the considerable merits of a two way street grid in New Albany, and find it hard to wrap yourself around some of the things we've been saying, read the two paragraphs below.

Jeff Speck provides pertinent answers for you, and just because Bob Caesar can't grasp them, it does not mean you can't.

Jeff Speck: Walkable City / Slideshow (Thinking In Practice)

You mention that building more roads in fact leads to more congestion. An interesting notion – could you elaborate on that?

In constrained road systems, the principle constraint to driving is congestion. If you allay congestion by building more roadway, people drive more, and quickly fill up the new space. This is identified as the Fundamental Law of Traffic Congestion, and not disputed among thoughtful planners.

What are some of the major challenges in the advocacy of walkability and pedestrian-friendly environments? What do you usually come up against in your work?

The principal challenge is overcoming the confusion, in fact, that surrounds traffic congestion, as well as traffic safety. Convincing populations that new roads will not solve their traffic woes is possible, but convincing the municipal engineers, who were educated differently (and wrongly) can be harder. They were also taught, in the US at least, that the way to make roads safer is to make them wider, with fewer obstacles like trees. Recent studies show that this, too, is wrong. Wider, simpler, clearer roads cause people to drive faster, and dramatically increase the likelihood of death by automobile.

Duh: Slower street speeds and our urban quality of life go together like turkey and dressing.

Yesterday's post recorded roughly double the customary number of page views:

Georgetown resident: Top speed when driving on 'em is why we have 'em, so get us through New Albany as fast as humanly possible.

Suggesting that the sole purpose of streets is to transport people as efficiently as possible from one location to another is like suggesting that the sole purpose of sex is procreation. Surely, engaging in both forms of commuting can be about more than merely a speedy arrival at the destination.

Dear reader, to refresh your memory, here's what the suburbanite had to say:

#5 Reed Wrege 2013-11-22 21:57

The purpose of streets is to transport people as efficiently as possible from one location to another.

The intent of making more streets in New Albany two way is to slow down traffic. This is already being accomplished by the horrible lack of synchronization of the traffic lights.

I am not interested in having traffic slowed further...particularly as the volume is increasing!

Let's be clear about this: The correspondent is attacking the notion of two-way streets because two-way streets will slow down traffic, which he accuses traffic lights of doing already. His blithe assumption: High speed driving in urban areas is safe.

Here's another point of view, from Jeff Speck, which incorporates the counterintuitive world of traffic engineering and makes a series of crucial points about safety, which in an urban context necessarily involves ... that's right, slowing down traffic.

With fat lanes, traffic engineers kill in the name of safety
by Jeff Speck (Greater Greater Washington)

DC resident Jeff Speck wrote Suburban Nation, the best-selling book about city planning since Jane Jacobs. Greater Greater Washington is pleased to present 3 weekly excerpts from his new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.
Contrary to perceptions, the greatest threat to pedestrian safety is not crime, but the very real danger of automobiles moving quickly. Yet most traffic engineers, often in the name of safety, continually redesign city streets to support higher-speed driving.

This approach is so counterintuitive that it strains credulity: 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 ...

... As with induced demand, the engineers have once again failed to comprehend that the way they design streets will have any impact on the way that people use them. By their logic, just as more lanes can't cause more driving, high-speed lanes can't cause high speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the second great misunderstanding that lies at the root of most urban degradation today. Widening a city's streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter gun violence.

Here's a primer on streets, roads and stroads.

And: Here's the handout.

An introduction to the "sad results" of one-way streets.

The paper from which this extract is drawn has been around for quite a while. Then again, New Albany is a slowly reacting kind of place, where the 21st century sometimes remains a nebulous, illusory concept.

Last week: Two way streets: A Seinfeldist dialogue about nothing, but not for want of trying.

The report referenced here is onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/circulars/ec019/Ec019_f2.pdf" style="font-weight: bold;">Downtown Streets: Are We Strangling Ourselves on One-Way Networks?, by G. Wade Walker, Walter M. Kulash, and Brian T. McHugh (TRB Circular E-C019: Urban Street Symposium, 1999). The link leads to a .pdf that is very long, and just as relevant.

INTRODUCTION

Ever since the explosion of automobile use that occurred after WWII, people have moved their residences further and further from downtown centers, out into new suburban communities. With this exodus came a daily travel ritual in which suburbanites in motor vehicles behave as tides do, placing a tremendous strain on the downtown street network. The historical response to this strain has been to improve the efficiency of moving vehicles into and out of the city at all costs, without considering other system users.

We now understand that downtowns that operate predominantly as a place of work and clear out in the evening are the ones most often struggling to foster new development and business ventures. The longstanding mantra to seek the greatest speed by which commuter motorists can flee the city has accelerated the downtown deterioration process.

The sad results are streets congested with fast-moving automobiles and barren of lively pedestrian, cultural, or commercial activity after the mad evening exodus.

As many communities are in the process of revitalizing their downtowns, a common issue is the prevalence of intricate and often confusing one-way street networks.

This legacy of one-way streets can be traced back to when the streets’ sole mission was to move traffic into and out of the downtown employment center as quickly as possible. An emerging role of downtown as a cultural and entertainment center is now challenging embedded mindset that the primary purpose of streets is the unequivocal movement of commuter automobile traffic.