Tag Archives: street design

those fantastic American bike lanes

Recently I was talking about passive house, an extremely innovative energy standard that has taken root in Europe, Germany in particular. What I was surprised to learn was that the genesis of the idea was in the United States. There seems to be a pattern where innovative ideas come out of the United States but get implemented elsewhere. For example, here are a couple surprising articles about bike (cycling) lanes in the U.S. For example, protected bike lanes were all the rage right around the turn of the 20th century, before automobiles became the dominant technology. The historical images in this article are fascinating – it was not unusual for the bike lane to be paved and the horse and buggy lanes not. The layout of some of the bike lanes looks very familiar from today’s recreational trails.

Much more recently, the U.S. Federal Highway Authority had a serious standard for protected bike lanes in the 1970s, and it seemed like they were likely to move forward. Of course, we all know they did not. But again, in Europe, they did on a large scale. I don’t know whether the Dutch and Danish designs were copied or inspired by the American designs, but they did start to take off right around that time.

Donald Shoup retirement

Here is a nice tribute to Donald Shoup, who is retiring from the University of California.

Shoup’s most notable contribution to America’s planning landscape is in highlighting the consequences of underpricing parking. In The High Cost of Free Parking, he demonstrated that minimum parking requirements artificially inflate building costs by adding the costs of accommodating parked cars to new development and then giving away those benefits to drivers who park for free. These costs can be substantial: As Shoup has pointed out repeatedly, free parking at work is often worth more than if employers filled up their workers’ gas tanks. Shoup highlighted the true price of this invisible subsidy and unveiled new ways for city planners to encourage public transit use and address environmental concerns.

As technology evolved, Shoup folded new innovations into his ideas. In April 2011 San Francisco launched SFpark, a system based on Shoup’s work that adapts the price of street parking spaces to match demand. Adjustments according to time of day, location and day of the week allow smart parking meters to change their prices, with a target of keeping 15% of spaces vacant on any block. Drivers searching for parking can use their smartphones to find a space at a distance from their destination at a price they’re willing to pay. By more closely matching the price of a space with demand, drivers waste less time and fuel circling the block looking for a spot to park. The system has helped the city manage meter occupancy effectively and has reduced circling for parking by 50%, according to a 2014 study, and “smart parking” programs are appearing in Los Angeles and other cities. “His ideas have largely defined what is considered best practice for much of the field of parking management, ideas that increasingly are being put in place in cities around the world,” SFpark program director Jay Primus says.

Removing parking minimums from the zoning code seems like such an easy, obvious step. But what causes political opposition, at least where I live, is the perception that if new developments are built without parking, then people will just buy cars anyway and crowd out on-street spaces for people who already live there. I don’t necessarily buy this. If parking is truly valuable to people, they should be willing to pay more for a development that includes a parking space. If they are not doing this, it tells us that the demand for parking is not actually there. If they can walk safely to work, school, and shopping, and parking is expensive, many people will make the choice not to own cars, especially with options like car share and Uber becoming more accessible every day. Where I live, this is definitely happening.

There is something else happening where I live though. On-street parking is incredibly cheap, and as a result there is more demand for it than supply. People feel incredibly indignant about this, which makes it politically very difficult to limit parking or raise parking prices. There is a legitimate argument that if you raise parking prices, the rich will be able to have cars and the poor will not. If the city provided excellent walking, biking, and public transportation in all neighborhoods though, this would not be a problem.

So here is my solution, right out of an economics textbook: completely deregulate parking prices so it is all market all the time, including street spaces. You might want to do this gradually and limit the fluctuations that can occur, just so it doesn’t get too crazy. Then take the public revenues, tax the private revenues, and invest the proceeds dollar for dollar in pedestrian infrastructure, bike infrastructure, and public transportation, making sure the benefits are highly visible in neighborhoods that need them most. To do this you probably need a single unified agency or authority in charge of parking and all modes of transportation, and under the control of local leaders with some guts. There are a few more policies that might nudge the system even more, like property taxes and stormwater fees that discourage land speculators from turning vacant lots into parking and holding onto them for decades.

kids and risk

I like the way Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, talks about risk:

I think that we are thinking like lawyers a lot now because our society is so litigious, especially in America. For instance, one kid fell off a swing, maybe 20 years ago, broke her arm, sued the park district, and suddenly park districts across America started taking out high swings, they started taking out teeter-totters – see-saws – they started taking out merry-go-rounds. And so they started thinking like lawyers and then we started internalising the idea that, like, “Oh my God! It must be very dangerous for our children to do these things if they’re being removed from regular life.” And everything started seeming so dangerous that we sort of forgot, like, yes, some things are a little dangerous – you go on a merry-go-round, there’s a chance you’ll fall off, there’s a chance you might, your kid might break an arm. There’s also a chance they’ll have a fantastic time, they’ll lose weight, they’ll be fit, they’ll have something fun to do after school instead of just turning on the TV or going to the computer. But we always think in terms of the what if? worst case scenario, and that’s thinking like a lawyer. Because a lawyer could go to court and say, “We knew that these merry-go-rounds are dangerous! And why did they have one there? I’m asking you!” And we think ahead to that point and get rid of anything fun, even if the risk is tiny, because we think a tiny risk even is not worth it.

…in the same day that I’m saying children should go to the park, 769 children will be diagnosed with diabetes,” – that’s in the United States. That’s twice as many as 10 years ago. Nobody says, “How dare you let your child stay inside! What if they get diabetes?” Nobody says that. “How dare you let your kids stay at home just watching TV – they’re gonna get depressed, they’re gonna get fat, they’re not gonna have any friends, they’re not gonna have memories of their childhood.” Nobody thinks about the trade-off. Everything is straight to: you let your child have one iota of freedom, what if something terrible happens. They see the iota[?], they see the rape, murder and dismemberment and they try to put them together and of course it doesn’t work. What I’m suggesting is let your kids have the kind of well-thought-out freedom with you training them. Train them to cross the street, train them, “Don’t go off with strangers”, train them to swim. You know, I do think our job is to keep our children safe, but I don’t think that the outside is so unsafe that we have to regard it as Predators’ Ball every time you open the door.

I agree with most of this, except that the outside really is unsafe, not because of predatory humans but because of motor vehicles – you really can’t “train them to cross the street” safely because the streets are not designed safely. In reasonably developed countries that are not at war, I am positive that cars are the biggest source of violence against children. Of course at the present time we need to train our children to cross our unsafe streets as safely as possible. We also have to accept the risk that they can cross the street exactly the way we train them and still never come home. If we don’t want to accept this risk, then we can’t continue to accept unsafe street designs. Politicians and planners and engineers who perpetuate unsafe street designs, and all the rest of us who complacently accept them, are the real murderers and dismemberers of children. The solutions are known. This is a risk to children we really can do something about. Let’s do it!

2014 Report Card

It’s taken me a while to get out a “year in review” post for 2014, but anyway, here it is. This won’t be a masterpiece of the essay form. I’m just going to ramble on about some interesting trends and themes from the year, along with a few relevant links.

The critical question this blog tries to answer is, is our civilization failing or not? I’ll talk about our human economy, our planetary system, and make some attempt to tie the two together.

Overall Human Health and Wellbeing. First, there are some very happy statistics to report. For example, worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. What better measure of progress could there be than more happy, healthy childhoods? And it’s not just about increasing wealth – people in developing countries today have much better health outcomes at the same level of wealth compared to developing countries of the past (for example, Indonesia today vs. the United States when it passed the same income level). It’s hard to argue against the idea that economic growth and technological change have obviously eliminated a lot of human suffering. So, I think the important questions are, will these trends continue? Is the system stable? Can the natural environment continue to support this trend indefinitely? There may also be an important question of whether we had the right to exploit the natural environment to get us to the point where we are now, but that is an academic question at this point.

Financial System Instability. Let’s talk about the stability of our human economic system. The U.S. economy may finally seem to be picking up from the aftermath of the severe 2007-8 financial crisis, but it is certainly far below where it would be if that hadn’t happened and the prior growth trend had just continued since then. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well, however – Europe and Japan are looking particularly slow if not in an outright deflationary spiral, at the same time developing countries appear to be slowing down. Some are calling this a “new normal” for the world economy. More scary than that, the industry-written regulations and perverse incentives allowing the excessive risk taking that caused the crisis have not been fully addressed and the whole episode could recur in the short term.

Thoughts on Ecosystem and Economic “Pulsing”. 2007-8 was a textbook financial crisis – although it was caused by novel forms of money and risk taking beyond the direct reach of government regulators and central banks, it was not that different from crises caused by plain old speculation and over-lending back when there were no central banks around. It’s hard to draw a direct link from the financial crisis to ecosystem services, climate change, or natural resource scarcity. However, if we think about natural ecosystems, they are resilient to outside stressors up to a point – say, moderate fluctuations in temperature, hydrology, or pressure from non-native species. However, say a major fluctuation happens such as a major flood or fire that causes serious damage. In the absence of major outside stressors, the system will eventually recover to its original state, but in the presence of major outside stressors, even if they did not cause the flood or fire, it may never bounce back all the way. In the same way, our human economy may appear resilient to the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, and so forth for a long time, but then when something comes out of left field, like a major financial crisis, war, or epidemic, we may not be able to recover to our previous trend. This probably also applies to the effects of technology on employment, as discussed below. In the absence of major shocks coming from outside the system, we’ll see a long, slow slide in employment and possibly a long, slow rise in energy and food prices, with so much noise in the signal that it will be easy for the naysayers to hold sway for long periods of time. But when those major events happen, we may see sudden, painful changes that we have no obvious way of mitigating quickly.

Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Automation, and Employment. After decades of slow but steady progress, these technologies are really coming into their own. Robots are being used to keep miners in line and to drive cars, for example. Manufacturing has become a high-tech industry. As computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow. At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

Will our society recognize and solve this employment problem? American corporate society, and its admirers around the world, are unlikely to. Something very similar to this happened with agricultural automation in the early- to mid-20th century, and with globalization in the mid- to late-20th century. As agriculture became more automated, many displaced workers moved from rural areas in the U.S. southeast to urban areas in the U.S. northeast, looking for factory work. Unfortunately, the factory jobs that existed previously were being moved to developing countries with abundant low-wage labor. The pockets of poverty, unemployment, and social problems created by these forces have not been adequately addressed to this day. To the individual worker, it doesn’t much matter whether your job is being taken by a local robot or an overseas human. Unemployment created by technological forces today could resemble what was created by globalization yesterday, only on a much larger scale. We can only hope that the larger scale will drive real political solutions, such as better education and training, sharing of available work, and more widespread ownership of the labor-saving technology.

Of course, one of the earliest and probably the most shameful example of a modern capitalist system generating wealth for an elite few at the expense of workers is the American slavery system of the 18th and 19th centuries. We just can’t trust amoral, self-interested private enterprise to maximize welfare in the absence of a strong moral compass coming from the larger society. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Another example of extreme corporate immorality: Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook.

The Gospel of Shareholder Value. There is an important debate over whether people who run corporations have any ethical responsibility to anything other than profit seeking. Well duh, everyone on Earth has an ethical responsibility. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. There is even evidence that the ideology of profit maximization is a drag on innovation. Except billions of people out there who have worshiped at business schools would disagree with me. And I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion. Noam Chomsky had a quote that I particularly loved, so I am going to repeat it here:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger. So take the financial crisis. One of the reasons for it is that — there are several, but one is — say if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction, they — if they’re paying attention — cover their own potential losses. They do not take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the possibility that the whole system will crash if one of their risky transactions goes bad. That just about happened with AIG, the huge insurance company. They were involved in risky transactions which they couldn’t cover. The whole system was really going to collapse, but of course state power intervened to rescue them. The task of the state is to rescue the rich and the powerful and to protect them, and if that violates market principles, okay, we don’t care about market principles. The market principles are essentially for the poor. But systemic risk is an externality that’s not considered, which would take down the system repeatedly, if you didn’t have state power intervening. Well there’s another one, that’s even bigger — that’s destruction of the environment. Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

Our Ecological Footprint. WWF issued an updated Living Planet Report in 2014 suggesting that our annual consumption of natural resources (including the obvious ones like energy and water extraction, straightforward ones like the ability to grow food, but also the less obvious ones like ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products) is continuing to exceed what the Earth can handle each year by at least 50%. We’re like spoiled trust fund babies – we have such incredible resources at our disposable, we never learn to live within our means and one day the resources run out, even if that takes a long time. As we recover from the financial crisis, we have a chance to do things differently, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future.

Other Big Stories from 2014:

  • World War I. 100 years ago, World War I was in full swing. Remember The Guns of August? Well, that was August 1914 they were talking about. Let’s hope we’re not about to blunder into another conflict. But (and I’m cheating a little here because I read this in 2015), the World Economic Forum named “interstate conflict” as both high probability and high consequence in its global risk report.
  • Ebola. Obviously, Ebola was a very bad thing that happened to a whole lot of people. To those of us lucky enough that we weren’t directly in its path, it is a chance to selfishly reflect whether Ebola or something even worse could be coming down the pike. Let’s hope not.
  • Severe Drought and Water Depletion in the Western U.S.: California has been in the midst of a historic drought, although they got some rain recently. Some are describing this as the new normal. Besides rainfall, glaciers, snowpack, and groundwater all seem to be disappearing in some important food-growing areas.
  • Solar grid parity is here! At least some places, some times…

Conclusion. Yes, I think we are on a path to collapse if nothing changes. And I don’t see things changing enough, or fast enough. There are glimmers of hope though. Lest you think I offer only negatives and no solutions, here are two solutions I harp on constantly throughout the blog:

  • Green infrastructure. This is how we fix the hydrologic cycle, close the loop on nutrients, begin to cleanse the atmosphere, protect wild creatures and genetic diversity, and create a society of people with some sense of connection to and stewardship over nature. Don’t act like it’s such a big mystery. It’s known technology. There has been plenty written about trees, design of wildlife corridors and connectivity, for examples. There is simply no excuse for cities to do such a crappy job with these things.
  • Muscle-Powered Transportation. Cars are clearly the root of all evil, the spawn of Mordor, as I pointed out several times (sorry, I just sat through 6+ hours of Hobbit movies). Unless you are perhaps that rare hobbit who can own a car without your morals being completed corrupted by its evil powers. But for the rest of us, I explained several times why getting rid of cars would be good. Here is just one example:

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

simple, 9-part safety instructions for crossing a Philadelphia street

131 pedestrians died in New York City in 2014, which is below the average of about 250 and the lowest recorded since 1910. However, the vision is zero. Here in Philadelphia we are not quite as advanced in our thinking, but when New York does something we will predictably try it 5-10 years later.

Mayor Bill de Blasio made Vision Zero a key policy priority for his first year. “Our top responsibility is protecting the health and safety of our people… From tougher enforcement to more safely-designed streets and stronger laws, we’ll confront this problem from every side,” remarked de Blasio upon the launch of his initiative last January.

I would put the majority of effort into safely-designed streets. I’ve been thinking recently about how I am going to teach my son to cross a Philadelphia street. It can’t just be “cross in the crosswalk when you have a walk signal” because that would mean certain death. No, it’s something like this:

  1. Using your eyes, try to locate where the crosswalk used to be before the paint wore off.
  2. If nobody is coming at you really fast, consider taking a step into the crosswalk just before the walk signal turns green, because the light for turning drivers will turn green at the same time, and turning drivers will gun their engines when they see that green light, or even a second or two before they think it is going to turn green (especially taxis).
  3. But before you take that first step, you better check for drivers who are going to gun their engines through the intersection just after their light turns red. Anyone can do this, but taxi drivers are especially bad. Don’t assume a police car or city bus won’t do it.
  4. Especially watch out for drivers in a left turn lane. They are going to gun their engines to make a quick left in a gap of traffic. They have a green light at the same time you have your walk signal. They are focusing all their attention on oncoming traffic and not on you. They will gun their engines on yellow and for several seconds after the light turns red, too.
  5. Watch out for drivers making fast right turns on green too, especially on wide streets with long, rounded corners.
  6. You know what, forget it. If you have a red “don’t walk” signal and nobody is coming, that is the safest time to cross because you know the turning cars also have a red light and have to stop – or realistically, at least slow down and look. But jaywalking in the middle of a block when nobody is coming is even safer. Just watch out for parked cars about to peel out.
  7. By the way, if a police officer is directing traffic, do not assume they will not direct that traffic to kill you. They will! They are directing traffic, not you.
  8. Always pay close attention to what drivers are doing. Always try to guess what they are going to do next, assume they are going to do something stupid or homicidal and have a sense of what you are going to do if they do that.
  9. But never let them know you’re paying attention. If they catch you paying attention, glare or make rude gestures, unless you suspect they are armed. Better yet, don’t be angry. Take a picture of the asshole and start a website called “I almost killed a pedestrian today and my license plate is…”

Never mind, I can’t explain this to a small child. I guess I just won’t let him walk on the street alone, ever. Come to think of it, I won’t let any of his grandparents or any friends visiting from the suburbs walk on the street alone either.

How can we accept a system that gives children a signal telling them to walk when it is not safe to walk??? It’s morally incomprehensible! We can design and build safe streets. But before we do that, we can start with simple, cheap fine tuning of the streets we have now. Turn off stop lights in favor of stop signs as much as possible. Where we think we have to have stop lights, allow absolutely no left turns on green, anywhere, ever – use turn arrows instead, with the pedestrian signal red when the turn arrow is green. Use curb extensions so right turns on green can be done only at a slow crawl. These simple things will help most drivers who are not actually homicidal maniacs, but just trying to get places on time or not accustomed to driving around pedestrians. For the remaining bad apples, get more police officers out there on foot and punish dangerous driving like the violent antisocial behavior it is. What, the police are too busy with other things? In New York City lately they have 250 pedestrian deaths a year and something like 300 murders, so they are in the same range as causes of violent death. I don’t have the stats on how many are children and the elderly in each category, but I am willing to bet those stats would fall more on the pedestrian side. So we need to think about what our priorities should be.

December 2014 in Review

At the end of November, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give December posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-12):

  • When you consider roads, streets, and parking, cars take up more space in cities than housing. (-2)
  • The latest on productivity and economic growth: Paul Krugman says there is risk of deflationary spirals in many countries, and the U.S. economy is nothing to right home about. (-1)
  • There are a few legitimate scientists out there warning of sudden, catastrophic climate change in the near future. (-1)
  • Automation (meaning robots and AI) is estimated to threaten 47% of all U.S. jobs. One area of active research into automation: weaponry. Only one negative point because there are also some positive implications. (-1)
  • Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood is a depressing but entertaining reminder that bio-apocalypse is possible. (-2)
  • Before the recent rains, the drought in California was estimated to be a once-in-1200-years event. Major droughts in major food growing regions are not good news, especially with depletion of groundwater, and loss of snowpack and glaciers also in the news. (-2)
  • William Lazonick argues provides evidence that the rise in the gospel of shareholder value correlated with the growth slowdown that started in the 1970s – his explanation is that before that, retained earnings were a cornerstone of R&D and innovation in the economy. Loss of a point because it’s good to hear a dissenting voice, but the economy is still run by disciples of the profits for now. (-1)
  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are warning that the U.S. financial system may still be dangerously unstable. (-2)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • There are some new ideas out there for teaching computer programming, even to young children: Loco Robo, Scratch, and for-profit “programming boot camps”. (+1)
  • You can now get genetically customized probiotics for your vagina. (+1)
  • There are plenty of ideas and models out there for safe, walkable streets, some as simple as narrower lanes. But as I point out, the Dutch and Danish designs are pretty much perfect and should just be adopted everywhere. (+1)
  • I linked to a new video depicting Michael Graves’s idea for “linear cities“. These could be very sustainable ecological if they meant the rest of the landscape is left in a mostly natural condition. I am not as sure about social sustainability – done wrong, they could be like living in a mall or subway station. This was one of my all-time more popular posts. (+1)
  • There are new algorithms out there for aggregating and synthesizing large amounts of scientific literature. Maybe this can increase the returns to R&D and help boost innovation. (+1)
  • There will be several international conferences in 2015 with potential to make real progress on financial stability and sustainability. The phrase “deep decarbonization” has been uttered. (+1)
  • Some evidence suggests that the oceans have absorbed a lot of global warming over the past decade or so, preventing the more extreme range of land surface warming that had been predicted. This is a good short- to medium-term trend, but it may not continue in the long term. (+0)

change during December 2014: -12 + 6 = -6

Hope for the Future Index (end of December 2014): -2 -6 = -8

10-foot lanes

Here’s an article arguing compellingly for 10-foot lanes on city streets. 12-foot lanes might save time and lives on highways, but on city streets they waste space and kill people.

On city streets, most drivers ignore posted speed limits, and instead drive the speed at which they feel safe. That speed is set by the cues provided by the environment. Are there other cars near me? Is an intersection approaching? Can I see around that corner? Are there trees and buildings near the road? Are there people walking or biking nearby? And: How wide is my lane?

All of these factors matter, and others, too. The simplest one to discuss, and probably the most impactful, is lane width. When lanes are built too wide, many bad things happen. In a sentence: pedestrians are forced to walk further across streets on which cars are moving too fast and bikes don’t fit.

I think we need to move toward safe, multi-modal streets on the Dutch and Danish models worldwide. This will be truly sustainable – safe, healthy, low-energy, low-carbon, and supportive of creative, innovative urban ecosystems where people can come together to solve problems. These are major capital investments with tax dollars, so a cost-effective way to do them is to develop the new standards, adopt them as business as usual, and then upgrade our streets to the new standards as they wear out.

That is a vision, but I see some cheap, easy short-term retrofits that could be done right away without major capital investment. Repainting with narrower lanes (streets need to be painted periodically anyway), and giving the saved space to pedestrians, bicycles, and green infrastructure would be pretty easy. Once streets get repainted, the next incremental step is bollards or other physical protections for pedestrians and cyclists. Some more short-term parking and loading zones would be helpful in a lot of cities – if we had more of those in Philadelphia you wouldn’t have so many people blocking the bike lanes we do have. Another short-term thing that could be done is to turn off stoplights and go back to stop signs on a lot of lower-traffic streets – this should even save a little energy and money. Stop signs are much safer for pedestrians, because all the vehicles have to stop or at least almost stop. You don’t have people gunning the engine on a yellow light to clear the intersection or make a quick turn – that is when pedestrians and cyclists die. Finally, on higher-traffic streets, light signals can be reprogrammed so that pedestrians are not in conflict with cars. Left turns on green just absolutely have to go away. I think right turns on green can be made a lot safer by  small curb extension requiring a sharper turn, but we should think seriously about whether we want any turns on green. Let’s think about the pedestrian scramble model, where all traffic stops and pedestrians can cross diagonally. Cyclists could be allowed to treat this like a stop sign. Then, add turn arrows for all turns and it’s pretty safe for everyone.

transportation news

Transportation is today’s topic.

First, a fantastic set of facts and figures on just how much space cars actually take up in cities.

According to the FHWA’s Highway Statistics report, large U.S. cities average 4.7 road-miles per 1,000 residents, or 25 road-feet per capita. Assuming 50-foot average road width, this is 1,240 square feet of road area per capita, or about 1,500 per motor vehicle. In addition, there are typically 2-6 off-street parking spaces per vehicle. These parking spaces, including their driveways, require, on average, about 300 square feet, or 600 to 2,400 square feet total…

As a result, in automobile-dependent communities with road and parking supply sufficient to keep traffic congestion to the level typical in U.S. cities, plus parking spaces at most destinations, a city must devote between 2,000 and 4,000 square feet (200-400 square meters) of land to roads and off-street parking per automobile. This exceeds the amount of land devoted to housing per capita for moderate to high development densities (i.e., more than 10 residents per acre, which means less than about 4,000 square feet per capita), and is far more land than most urban neighborhoods devote to public parks. This illustrates the problems that growing cities face if they try to develop automobile-oriented transport systems where most residents own a private car: they will need to devote more land to roads and parking than to housing.

Second, an interview with a Swede:

If we can create a system where people are safe, why shouldn’t we? Why should we put the whole responsibility on the individual road user, when we know they will talk on their phones, they will do lots of things that we might not be happy about? So let’s try to build a more human-friendly system instead. And we have the knowledge to do that.

But to do that we need to have those who build this to actually accept this philosophy. Even in our country context, it still has been a struggle to get our road engineers to understand that they are responsible, it starts with them. Then the individual road user also has a responsibility. But if something goes wrong it goes back to the designer of the system.

There’s a little bit of engineer-bashing there. We engineers are great at solving the problems that are put in front of us. We aren’t always great at framing the problem in new and better ways – for example, an objective of safe streets for all users and not just maximum flow rate of cars. But if you frame the problem in that new and better way and give it to the engineers, we will solve it for you.

Speaking of engineer bashing:

“If there was honest predicting, some percentage of them would under-predict traffic,” he said. “There would be a bell curve. Instead… what we have is these projections that are always immensely above what the actual traffic is.”

There is ample incentive for these firms to inflate numbers. Firms that predict high levels of traffic attract investment dollars and regulatory approvals, which lead to construction projects, and the same firms often end up directly cashing in.

The article is about some anecdotal cases where future traffic was overestimated, toll road companies went bankrupt, and taxpayers were left paying at least part of the bill. This is unfortunate, but it is a pretty serious charge to accuse an engineer of purposely enriching private parties at the expense of the public. (Full disclosure: I have professional ties to organizations mentioned in this article, although I don’t have direct involvement or knowledge of any projects mentioned.) I think the correct conclusion here is that it is time for some of the tools and assumptions and methods used in transportation engineering and planning in the United States to be seriously reexamined and brought up to date.