The Cost of Public Participation

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Image source (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

The typical citizen might not pay a team of communications experts and lawyers to spend hours doing hearing prep before public testimony, like Mark Zuckerberg did. Nonetheless, there are significant costs associated with providing testimony at a public hearing before a group of decisionmakers. I tallied up what it recently cost me to speak for one minute before our local transit board (MTS) on a community project to promote walkability. Here's a breakdown of the costs:

Transportation - $15
This includes mileage costs to drive to the meeting based on AAA's rates, plus parking.

Theoretically I could have taken transit to the meeting. That would have tripled my travel time, adding significantly to what I had to pay for childcare while I was away. Plus, a transit ticket costs three times more than parking at the MTS offices. (I'll allow that bit of irony to sink in before we move on).

Childcare - $45
This is what I pay my nanny for 2.5 hours of work. It's on the high end of childcare rates in my area, but not wildly so.

My youngest daughter is too young to be in school full time, so I needed to hire someone to watch her during the hearing, as well as to take my older daughter to school because the hearing started fairly early in the morning.

Clothing - $10
This cost was tricky, because while I didn't buy something specifically for this hearing, I also don't typically wear a dress and heels on my average work-from-home/schlep-kids-around day. I amortized the cost of my outfit for the hearing, using the assumption that I'd wear again in the future for other work meetings or hearings.

To anyone out there who's thinking, "It doesn't matter what you wear, it's what you say that counts." 

...that sounds like a lovely reality you exist in, sometime I'd like to join you there. Meanwhile, the rest of us know that appearance matters, especially for women. The way you present yourself in a hearing will impact how effective your testimony is. That doesn't *always* mean you show up in an expensive outfit (e.g., don't come to a hearing in a beach community wearing a suit, trust me on this), but in this case it did.

Time - 5 hours/$100-$325
Here's another challenging cost to quantify. The value of time varies by person and circumstance, and is based on all sorts of factors that I'm not going to go into in detail because this isn't a post about opportunity cost.

Suffice it to say, for a busy mom like me who works on an hourly/contract basis, time is at a premium and I valued it accordingly. The five hours I spent preparing for and attending this hearing were hours I didn't get to spend with my family, working, volunteering on other community projects--or sleeping, which I really missed. This isn't a robust economic analysis of time value, but I'm comfortable with this range for myself--and I think it's appropriate for many working adults.

Adding it all up
In total, it cost me somewhere in the range of $170 to $395 to provide one minute of testimony at a public hearing.

When we lament the lack of public participation (especially by women) in our planning process, are we really considering how much we are asking people to spend to participate? I place a very high value on being involved in my community in this way, but that's not true for most people. If we want to bring everyone into the conversations, we need to do more to reduce the time, travel, and other costs associated with public participation. 

Walking Towards Justice Series

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I'm really happy that America Walks has started this important discussion of how factors such as gender, race, and income level impact the walkability of our communities. As an industry and advocacy community, we've been guilty of ignoring these issues for too long, and it's great to see that beginning to change.

I'm especially excited to see that the next webinar in the series will focus on street harassment, which  I've both experienced (like probably every other woman) and written about in the past. Street harassment harms women's mobility, reduces walkability, and is a serious concern for women all over the world. I'm looking forward to this discussion!

You can register for the upcoming webinar here. 

Sexism on the Sidewalk: How Poor Street Design Keeps Women from Walking

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Source: www.pedbikeimages.org/Dan Burden

“Can we walk there?” my daughter asked.

I was facing down a long afternoon with four kids under eight. A trip to the local coffee shop was in order, and since it was less than a mile away, I did what any good walkability advocate would do: I tossed all the kids in the mini-van and drove there.

My choice, like so many of women’s travel choices, was based primarily on safety. I was confident the kids could walk that far, and I knew it would be the healthier and more interesting choice for all of us--but without good walkability, I wasn’t sure that I could keep them all safe.

All across the country women, in particular mothers, make similar choices every day. Poor street design, disparate land use, time constraints, lack of personal safety—all of these conspire to force women off their feet and into cars. We have built a transportation system that discounts women’s travel needs, and women—and our communities—are suffering for it.

To understand what we should be doing better, it’s important to understand how women’s travel is different from men’s travel. Women make more trips than men, but travel shorter distances. They travel more with children, and their trips are more likely to be household-serving (e.g., shopping, daycare, errands), rather than for work or leisure. Women are also more likely to trip-chain (stop at multiple locations along the way during one trip). In particular for women with young children who haven’t started school, gender drives travel patterns.

Source: www.pedbikeimages.org/Dan Burden

In theory, the trips women take the most are ideally suited for walking. Short trips to the school, grocery store, or similar locations should be simple to complete on foot--and in the most walkable neighborhoods, women do walk a lot. However, more often we’ve built walkablility out of our neighborhoods. Our streets lack sidewalks where kids can walking hand-in-hand or be pushed in a stroller. We fail to provide safe, regular crossing points along key routes. We create neighborhoods where stores, schools, and (critically) childcare are too far apart to be accessed on a single walking trip. We fail to consider the design elements (lighting, lack of hidden spaces, etc.) that can deter crime and make women feel safe while walking.

These challenges have a real impact on women’s health. One recent study investigated the physical activity patterns of over 700,000 people in 111 different countries. Using travel data from cell phone records, the researchers developed a measure of activity inequality that quantified the difference between the most physically active and least physically active portions of the population. Not surprisingly, the US appears near the head of the list of least equal countries, topped only by Egypt, Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia.

On Strollers, Sidewalks, and Sexism

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Yes, I'm *totally oblivious* for not hefting my double stroller up this amazing sidewalk, and instead choosing to walk in the street every day. 

It started with what might have seemed like a straightforward question to someone like Gary Richards of the Mercury News (aka Mr. Roadshow). A reader was upset by parents pushing strollers in the street. "Is there any legal prohibition to using the streets for such use when sidewalks are available?"

Mr. Roadshow answered that while technically legal, strollers should use the sidewalk because "That's common sense."

Readers were quick to respond with letters detailing the many reasons someone with a stroller (or a wheelchair) might choose the street over the sidewalk. Mr. Roadshow published a handful, but ended with a letter from a man complaining about "a pack of several oblivious moms pushing strollers in the street."

That this is an example of blatant institutional sexism appears lost on Mr. Roadshow, not to mention plenty of other people in the transportation community. Here's the thing:

Travel is gendered. 

How and why women move in public spaces is different from men. One way that it's different is that women are responsible for more child-related travel. Sure, anyone *can* push a stroller. But most of the time, the person pushing the stroller is a woman. When we talk about travel with strollers, we're talking about women's travel.

Constructing public spaces that make travel unsafe for certain classes of people (i.e., women), but not others, is discrimination.

To be clear, I'm not talking here about "interpersonal discrimination." Interpersonal discrimination is saying you can't have this job because you're a women. Institutional/structural discrimination is saying you're free to ride this trolley, but we're not going to give you space to store your stroller on it. Also a lot of strange men will probably try to talk to you while you ride.

Safe travel is something that should be enjoyed equally by everyone. It's not. Because of how they typically travel, some classes of people experience more danger on our roadways than others. When a roadway lacks a space for people to walk safely with strollers, that burden falls disproportionately on women (see above). Yes, this is a pedestrian rights issue. It's also a women's issue.

Blaming victims of gender discrimination for conditions outside their control compounds the problem

Travel behavior is extremely complicated, but it's rarely irrational. When a group of women consistently chooses to walk in the street, it's safe to assume that they have a good reason for doing so--not that they lack common sense.

Chalking up women's behavior on the road to poor judgment is not only belittling, it leads to policy "solutions" that fail to address the root problem. If you assume the problem is that women don't understand the rules of the road, then yes, educating them about those rules and increasing enforcement might have an impact. But all the education and enforcement in the world isn't going to move women out of the street when they don't have a viable alternative.

Pedestrian advocates must acknowledge the role that institutional bias plays in our cities and transportation networks, and work actively to remove it.
  
To their credit, some organizations are beginning to do this, but as a community we still have a long way to go. It's not going to be easy. This type of discrimination is so deeply incorporated into our society that it can be difficult to recognize, and even harder to eliminate. That doesn't mean we get to ignore it.

A good place to start is by taking the time to genuinely listen to what women (and people of color, and children, and people with disabilities, etc. etc.) say about their travel, rather than dismissing their concerns because they don't match our own experience.

(That goes for me too, for the record. I'm well aware that for all the challenges I face as a woman who walks and bikes, I also enjoy any number of benefits because I'm a white person living in an upper middle class neighborhood.)

Remember why we do this.

We don't advocate for sidewalks, we advocate for the people who use them. Most often, those are people are women (and children, and the elderly, and the disabled, and people of color.) That makes use, as pedestrian advocates, de facto women's rights advocates.

It's time we began to act like them. 

Is Our Obsession with Work Trips Making it Harder to Walk?

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Basking in the glory of Circulate San Diego's Captain VZ at a Bike to Work Day pit stop

You can tell by my smile in this picture that I love a good Bike to Work Day pit stop as much as the next cyclist. But guess what? I'm not biking to work in this picture; I'm biking to the grocery store.

This underlines something about travel behavior and policy that has bothered me for a while: we focus on work trips, despite the fact that most of our travel isn't for work. The latest California Household Travel Survey data shows that about 10 percent of California's travel is work-related, similar to the latest national data showing that commute trips are about 15 percent of travel.

There's a pretty obvious explanation for our work-trip bias: it's what the Census counts. Since 1960, the Census has asked every working American how they get to and from their job. Often it's the only data that's regularly (if you call every 10 years "regularly") gathered about walking and biking within a city. Because of this, Census data often becomes the proxy for "how many people walk or bike in our city."

To see the problems with this, let's go back to 1959 and take a look at why we started counting commute trips in the first place. Here's an excerpt from a congressional subcommittee hearing on plans for the 1960 Census:

As you can see, a key reason for counting work trips was to help solve "problems of highway planning." Put another way, the government was hoping to figure out how best to get workers (mostly men) who owned cars (mostly men and families with higher incomes) and lived far enough from central cities to drive on highways (mostly white people) to work.

Shockingly, focusing on the travel patterns of rich, white men led to investments in transportation infrastructure that mainly benefited wealthier, whiter, suburban households, usually at the expense of poorer, less-white, urban communities.

While we're (very) slowly beginning to consider issues of equity in our transportation system, the emphasis on work travel continues to color the way to talk about, and plan for, transportation. Here's a beautiful graphic from a report by ARUP, Cities Alive: Towards a Walking Word:

Walkability Starts When Street Harassment Ends

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Courtesy of Stop Telling Women to Smile by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh 

"Smile!"

It's been nearly 20 years, and I'm still angry at the young men who yelled that at me as I walked to and from my first urban planning job in downtown San Diego.

At the time, I was also confused. No one had ever explained to me how insidious street harassment can be. No one had pointed out how women are trained to think it's "their problem" if they don't appreciate a cat-call or a comment on their looks. No one told me that "Smile" is code for "Pay attention to me, even if you don't want to." All I knew was that I was uncomfortable. And I was mad.

Obviously that hasn't stopped me from walking and biking, but street harassment does keep other people--in particular women and people of color--away from active transportation. As a pedestrian advocate (and mom of two girls), here are the three things I'm going to do to make sure other people don't have to experience what I did.

1. Call it what it is.
Even now, street harassment is justified or explained away as harmless banter or "compliments." When we call out harassment for what it is, we give victims the ability to address it appropriately, instead of making them feel like they are the ones doing something wrong.

2. Respond.

Street harassment is about power, and figuring out the right response is difficult when you're already in a position of vulnerability. Stop Street Harassment is one great resource for ways to respond effectively, providing info and links from the practical ("Using your voice, facial expressions, and body language together, without mixed signals, show assertiveness and strength.") to the whimsical:

Courtesy of The Rior

3. Be an ally. 
Street harassers get away with harassment because their victims can't fight back. But often they're surrounded by people who can fight back, but who choose to remain silent. This needs to change, both on and off the street. Not only should we refuse to tolerate street harassment in the moment, we also need to include more women in conversations about transportation and infrastructure. In the 20 years since that first urban planning job, I've spent a lot of time in meetings where women are sorely underrepresented. We can't build transportation systems that work for everyone until we start hearing from everyone. 

How I Teach my Kids to Cross the Street

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The Ramona books by Beverly Cleary are some of my daughter's favorites, mainly (I suspect) because they chronicle the same struggles she faces in her life right now: starting school, sharing a room, grouchy parents.

Since the first books in the series were written in the late 1960s, I'm always struck by the subtle differences between social norms then and now. Ramona, for instance, walks to school. By herself. In kindergarten. I'm pretty sure if I let my daughter do that I'd be considered crazy, if not criminal.

But I've got big dreams of someday sending these short people off on the epic four-block walk to school without the slew of grown-ups you see in the background, and that means I spend a lot of time talking to them about how to walk safely. Here's what I tell them about crossing the street:

1. Be predictable
Kids are already at a disadvantage because they're small, and thus less visible. If they're going to be seen by drivers, they should put themselves in places where those drivers are already going to look. That means no darting out between cars, crossing mid-block, or running a red light. It means crossing in the crosswalk, ideally at an intersection with stop signs or signals. I fully believe that there are times and places where crossing rules should be broken, but I don't trust my kids to be able to make those types of judgment calls yet.

2. Use the Three-Second Rule
I see so many kids treating the crosswalk signal like it's a checkered flag in a drag race, launching into the street the second the light turns green. Every time it happens, I cringe. Drivers run those lights All. The. Time.

Knowing this, I've stolen a rule my friend created for her kids: count to three before crossing. It won't save my kids from drivers who blatantly run lights, but it keeps them out of the path of drivers to try to sneak through the intersection just as the light changes.

3. Look, Listen, and Go
That's the mantra for my kids when they cross the street, and they're probably already sick of hearing me say it. Every time we walk I remind them that it doesn't matter what I (or anyone else) says, at the end of the day it's their responsibility to look and listen for cars before they cross.

4. Trust No One
This one can be hard, because kids are used to being told what to do. But when it comes to crossing, I teach my kids that they need to be the ones to decide what's safe. That means making eye contact with drivers before crossing, not just assuming they will stop when they're supposed to.

It also means refusing to cross when a driver stops for them in the middle of the road. Rarely do I feel called to yell in blog posts, but will everyone PLEASE STOP DOING THIS. You've just created a super dangerous situation for my kids by pressuring them to cross the street while blocking their view of the roadway and blocking other drivers' views of my kids. I tell my kids to just wave those drivers on, and wait until they can cross safely on their own.

Don't let all these rules give you the wrong impression: I absolutely think kids should be allowed to walk places on their own, and I have no intention of holding my kids' hands every morning until they leave for college. Ramona was so proud the first time that she walked to school on her own, and I want my kids to have that same feeling too. 

Road Funding as an Awkward Dinner Party

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Strong Towns, one of my favorite wonky planning blogs, recently posted this story explaining how Road Funding as a Prisoner's Dilemma. I expanded on what they wrote a bit to focus on how road funding is particularly problematic for people who walk and bike. Here goes:

We've all had that moment at the end of a night out to dinner with friends when the last drink has been guzzled and it's time to split the bill. Many a sitcom episode has hinged over whether the bill should be split evenly between all parties, or painstakingly calculated on a who-had-which-entree basis.

It turns out that the way we think about paying the dinner bill is remarkably similar to how we think about paying for roads.

Imagine that you're out to dinner with three other friends. It's a small table, so you can all see what the other person orders. When the bill comes, it's easy enough to split things up in a way that makes it "fair" for everyone. If Friend A had an extra glass of wine, she knows her friends will notice if she doesn't chip in a few more dollars. If Friend B forgets to add in the tax, it will be obvious to everyone. Because of this, no one at the table is tempted to have more than they want or can afford to pay for.

Now imagine that you're out to dinner with a large group of friends and acquaintances, including a few people you've never met before. Since the table is huge, you can't really see what the people at the other end are ordering, but you can tell right away that it's going to be too complicated to figure out individual checks. You resign yourself to splitting the bill evenly 23 ways, regardless of your personal menu choices. Because of this, you order a few extra drinks so that you're sure you get your money's worth. You wake up the next morning with a nasty hangover, and a lingering sense of injustice. Even though you didn't really want that fifth beer, drinking it was the only way you could think of to get your fair share.

We fund roadways as if we're all sitting at a really big dinner table. A large part of roadway funding comes from things like sales taxes, property taxes, or development fees. None of these have a direct relationship to driving, so they don't have a strong influence on our travel choices--just as what I eat for dinner at the big table doesn't have a direct relationship to my bill.

The problem is that my steak dinner isn't free, and neither is the one that the person at the other end of the table ate. Driving does impose real costs on our communities, in the form of congestion, pollution, and poor traffic safety. But since no one is held directly accountable for these costs, we have an incentive to drive more than we should. I eat more than I really want to at the big group dinner, because the alternative is paying the price of a bottle of wine when all I had to drink was water. And that's not just bad for me--since everyone at the table does the same thing, we all end up overeating and spending more on dinner than we wanted to.

So who's the pedestrian in all of this? The pedestrian is the vegetarian at the table. She's the person who is always going to end up overpaying for dinner, because her salad is never going to cost as much as her neighbor's roast chicken. As vulnerable road users, pedestrians bear a disproportionate burden of the costs of driving. But they pay the same bill as everyone else in the form of sales taxes, income taxes, and property taxes.

This bothers me at the policy table almost as much as it bothers me at the dinner table (can you tell I'm the vegetarian?). Transportation planners have long touted direct fees as the best way to ensure drivers pay the true cost of their travel choices. California is finally getting serious about implementing the idea. Hopefully our decisionmakers will get on board. Otherwise, we're all in for a serious hangover.

The Importance of Road Width, in Three Pictures

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Biking home this weekend, I was struck yet again by how critical roadway width is to creating a walkable (and bikeable) environment. Here are some Google Streetview shots of the route we took down Jewel Street in Pacific Beach, one of my favorite (read: I don't feel like I'm about to be driven off the road) north-south rides through PB.

Here's what Jewel Street looks like when it's 30 feet wide, with parallel parking on both sides and a parkway between the sidewalk and street.

Notice that even with only a few scrawny palm streets and for shade and relatively narrow sidewalks, the street still feels comfortable and "human-scaled." (It also feels safe to bike on, even without fancy bike infrastructure, because the narrow travel way forces cars to slow down.) I regularly see kids playing in the street here, using the roadway as an extension of their yard.

Here's Jewel Street a few blocks further down, with a 40-foot width. This would be considered the pretty much the minimum width for a street built today.

Even though nothing else has changed besides the width (arguably the parkway and street trees are a even little nicer), the street feels more "auto-oriented" and the neighborhood seems less inviting for walking or biking.

Then we arrive at this monstrosity, a few blocks further north. At a width of about 46 feet, the street allows for diagonal parking on one side--but the awful design of the multi-family housing to the east precludes parallel parking on the other side of the street, making for an exceptional wide travel way:

Here all semblance of walkability has been sacrificed in the name of driving and parking. The parkway is gone, the sidewalk slopes awkwardly to allow cars to drive over it at any point, and there's not a street tree in sight. And then of course, there's the hideous design of the multi-family housing that lines this block. Particularly on the right, this street says to me,  "Here is a place where cars live. If you're lucky, we might let some people squeeze in, too."

We need to be sure our roadway standards result in more of the first picture and less of the last. Narrow streets are great streets, for everyone.

Walking in Slovakia

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John Westmore has posted a new episode in his great Perils for Pedestrians series, this time focusing on walking and biking in the City of Bratislava, Slovakia.

While pedestrian and bicycle advocacy is relatively new to Slovakia, there seems to be a strong and growing group of advocates who are working to make public spaces more accessible on foot and by bike. They've created some ad-hoc sharrows and DIY crossings to help provide safer and more direct routes to people using active transportation in the city.

I actually spent a day in Bratislava several years ago, and found it to be fairly walkable (as compared to most cities in the US, that is).  You can see that there are many spaces in the central part of the city where pedestrians have full reign in the street space.

There's also a nice pedestrian path along the waterfront, where you'll also find restaurants and shops below (undoubtedly expensive) residential development that takes advantage of the riverfront views.

Of course, there are also the same problems that plague many older (and not so old) cities that were designed prior to the automobile. Sidewalks have been squeezed to the edge of the street and narrowed to unreasonable widths to make room for vehicle traffic, and parked cars block the pedestrian travel way to the extent that people are forced to walk in the street itself.

Given this, it's encouraging to hear local advocates talking about creating more walkable and bikeable streets. I was especially struck by one of the first people interviewed in the segment, who described public space as, "A space where you can see democracy on the sidewalk." I've written before about the idea of sidewalks as democratic spaces, but I think that view is especially poignant when you're talking about sidewalks in a country where most people still remember a time when no place in the country--certainly not the sidewalks--was democratic.

Is the street Open or Half-Open?

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Cruising down the street at a CicloSDias event in Pacific Beach

I have a confession to make: sometimes I have a problem fully embracing Ciclovia events. Turns out I might not be alone, although the reasons outlined in this post from LA Streetsblog might be a little different from mine.

As Joe Linton writes, there were two Open Streets events this Saturday in the LA area. One, in Lawndale, opens a two-mile route from 8 am to 10 am. The second, in Burbank, allows cyclists who pre-register to ride a one-mile parade ride (the streets were already closed) for an hour and a half before the parade starts.

In both cases, Linton questions the short duration, minimal length of the route, early hours (too early for many adjacent businesses to be open), and (in the case of Burbank) pre-registration requirement. I'd add the requirement (in Lawndale) that kids under 13 be accompanied by an adult to the list of concerns. I was well under 13 when I rode my bike unaccompanied to school, piano lessons, and who knows where else--certainly more dangerous places than a car-free public street full of vigilant adult eyes.

Linton suggests that events like these, with their many restrictions and short duration, don't really demonstrate the benefits of a "true" Open Street event, where long routes full of engaging activities help the public imagine different (and maybe even better!) ways of using street space than just for moving cars. He points out that these lackluster "ciclovia-itas" might even backfire, giving critics an easy example to point to when they complain that it isn't worth the trouble to close streets to traffic.

To these criticisms I'd also add my own, which I think can be a problem with many ciclovia events: they're too bike-centric. As a cyclist I love biking and enjoy the ability to zip down a street unencumbered by pesky automobiles. As a pedestrian, I feel nervous about wandering a street filled with less-than-expert cyclists pedaling in every direction--and I definitely wouldn't turn my unpredictable two-year-old loose in that sort of environment.

Open streets events are often sold as a way to highlight and encourage visitors to local businesses that line the route. But it's pedestrians who visit those businesses, not cyclists (unless they're riding their bikes into the business, a cyclist becomes a pedestrian once they dismount). I'm not saying that who can't open streets to both modes at the same time, but if you look at the Burbank and Lawndale events (as an example), they're billed as primarily biking events. The "ticket" to the Burbank event is even a bike-shaped pin.

If we want to have successful Open Streets events that fulfill the true intent of the Ciclovia movement, we do need to make sure the routes and hours are long enough to provide value to participants. But we also have to make sure that all users feel safe and welcome along the Open Street route. Otherwise, the street is only "half-open" to pedestrians. 

Trick-or-Treat!

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photo courtesy of WalkArlington

A quick reminder that the most fun night of the year is also one of the most dangerous for pedestrians--especially short ones who have a tendency to be more focused on the next sugar handout than the cars on the street (that's me I'm describing). 

If you're looking for a neighborhood that with give you the most treat for your trick, check out Zillow's Trick or Treat Index for 2015, which ranks cities and neighborhoods based on factors such as crime rates and housing density. 

Have fun!

Walking Comes First in European Transportation Policy

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It seems like we're always looking to Europe as we try to improve pedestrian safety here in the US. Are they really doing things so much better over there? Short answer: yes.

You can see why by taking a look at this one simple chart from the European Transport and Safety Council's new report Making Walking and Cycling on Europe's Roads Safer. It illustrates one of the report's key recommended policies:  


"Further develop a policy of modal priority for road users, particularly in urban areas, the hierarchy being based on safety, vulnerability and sustainability. Walking should be at the top of the hierarchy, followed by cycling and use of public transport."

That's pretty wonky policy language to wade through, so let me put it more simply: Walking comes first.

Let me translate a few more of those wonky policies for you.

"Give priority in road maintenance to the quality of surfaces on footways, cycle paths and the parts of carriageways most used by crossing pedestrians and by cyclists."

Walking comes first when maintaining roads.

"Provide shorter and safer routes for pedestrians and cyclists by ensuring that routes are direct and that the quickest routes are also the safest. Travel time should be increased on unsafe routes and decreased on safe routes."

Walking comes first when designating travel routes.

"Prioritise the safety of cyclists and pedestrians when developing sustainable urban mobility plans."

Walking comes first when drafting transportation plans.

You get the idea.

It's worth noting that the report also devotes a considerable amount of space to promoting low speed limits in urban areas, particularly those with lots of bike and ped traffic:

"Encourage local authorities to adopt zones with a speed limit of 30km/h in residential areas and areas used by many pedestrians and cyclist."

"Introduce lower speed limits for junctions and intersections."

"Prepare national enforcement plans with yearly targets for compliance in the areas of speeding, especially in urban areas, where there are high numbers of pedestrians and cyclists."

I'll do the math for you--that's 18 mph. Most of the roads in my neighborhood are designed for speeds at least twice that high, and that's just the residential roads. I'd love to see a state law lowering the default speed on residential roads to 18 mph, but I doubt that's happening any time soon. Until then, maybe Pacific Beach can be the test case?

Latest Child Traffic Safety Statistics

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is out with its latest fact sheet on traffic safety, this time focused on child safety. Including data from 2013, the latest year from which data is available, here are a few key statistics:

•  Of the 4,735 pedestrian traffic fatalities, 236 (5%) were children
• One-fifth (21%) of the child traffic fatalities were pedestrians
• Of the estimated 66,000 injured pedestrians in traffic crashes, 10,000 (15%) were children

It took me a minute to recover from that first statistic--nearly 5,000 people killed walking in just one year. The good news is that according to the fact sheet, the number of child pedestrian traffic fatalities decreased by 36 percent, from 366 fatalities in 2004 to 236 in 2013. The biggest decrease came in the oldest age group. Does this mean our roads are getting safer, or are kids just walking less?

Here's one statistic that might help answer that question: 81 percent of child pedestrian traffic fatalities occurred at non-intersection locations, an increase from 77 percent in 2012. This suggests to me that any improvements in safety could be due to fewer kids walking, and not to safer roads.

It's also an important reminder that we continue to have a serious problem with roadway design. Roads are for people, and they need to keep all people safe--especially kids. Right now we've only designed them to keep drivers safe, and the result is dire for kids who dare to venture into roadways outside the designated pedestrian crossing locations.

The fix for this problem is not to push kids off roadways or blame them for "foolishly" using space that is meant for cars. The fix is to create roadways where kids aren't killed when they walk in "non-intersection locations." It's time to stop protecting cars at the expense of protecting children.

When you design roads this way, people die

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One of the downsides of being a pedestrian advocate and transportation planner it that I have to spend a disproportionate amount of time reading horrifying stories like this one, about a 7-month-old baby killed (and father severely injured) at a street crossing here in San Diego. It's so hard to wrap my head around what it must be like for these parents as they try to pick up the pieces of their lives.

This week the City is working on updates to the intersection aimed at preventing similar crashes in the future, including installing a new signal at the intersection. We say it so often that it's cliche, but it shouldn't take the death of child to fix intersections that are so obviously dangerous. Here's a picture of the crossing where the crash took place:

Notice that the northbound right "turn" isn't really a turn at all, more of a channelized "veer" that aims high-speed traffic straight at a crosswalk. Moreover, the crosswalk is set back just enough from the intersection to make pedestrians less visible to drivers. This is a space designed for cars, and cars alone. Is it any surprise that people are hurt and killed here?

The most frustrating part is that there really isn't much purpose to this stretch of roadway, other than moving cars as quickly as possible at the expense of walkability and pedestrian safety--a point neighbors have picked up on. They've asked the City to close down the road and make the entire space into a park. Let's hope the City listens, before someone else is killed at this crossing.

Walking and Access to Jobs

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A newly-released report from the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota ranks the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US based on accessibility to jobs on foot. According to Access Across America:Walking 2014, New York has the highest job accessibility by walking. As you can see by the map below, there are hundreds of thousands of jobs within walking distance in Manhattan and the surrounding neighborhoods, but the entire region provides fairly good access to jobs on foot.

Compare New York to San Diego, where even the densest neighborhoods can't offer many jobs within easy walking distance.









The study will provide a basis for future work on walking and employment access. According to the authors, "Using this data as a starting point, future reports in the Access Across America series will track the way that accessibility in these metropolitan areas evolves in response to transportation and safety investments and land use decisions." It's important to have a baseline; one the big challenges in pedestrian advocacy is simply a lack of data about walking. With studies like this, we'll have a better understanding of existing conditions for pedestrians, which can help us determine how to effectively improve walking conditions.

You can find the full ranking of cities in the report, but here's the top ten:

1. New York
2. San Francisco
3. Los Angeles
4. Chicago
5. Washington
6. Seattle
7. Boston
8. Philadelphia
9. San Jose
10. Denver

And one last map, for people who continue to insist that LA is only for driving. Take a look at all of that green and yellow...

Walking Towards Change

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Photo courtesy of The European Magazine

One cold December day in 1913, a man put on a Santa suit and started America down the path towards criminalizing walking. “Jay-walker!” he taunted, startling people who strolled in the middle of the street. With the help of the auto lobby the term soon became ubiquitous, and suddenly roads were no longer the rightful domain of pedestrians.

A century later we’re struggling to overcome the problems we created by shifting the focus of public space from people to cars. In 2013, nearly 5,000 pedestrians died in traffic crashes in the US, and 66,000 were injured. Obesity rates in the US have soared in the past two decades, driven by neighborhood designs that discourage physical activity. Air pollution, water pollution, habitat loss, and other environmental troubles are all linked to the predominance of private vehicle travel in America.

Read the full article in the European Magazine here.

The Two-Road System: A New Vision for Sustainable Living

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Image courtesy of Access Magazine

In the latest issue of Access Mark Delucchi and Kenneth Kurani have figured out a solution to all our transportation problems. Okay, maybe not quite every last one. But, they do offer a radical new design for cities that would lessen the safety and pollution problems created by excess vehicle travel (aka, how we get around most cities today).

The concept centers around the idea of a two-road network. In two-road cities, one street network would be dedicated to pedestrians, bikes, mopeds, golf carts, and other "low-speed, low-mass vehicles (LLM). The other would serve cars, vans, trucks, and the rest of the "fast, heavy vehicle" inventory (FHV). By separating LLMs from FHVs, walking, biking and other sustainable forms of travel become safer and easier, leading to environmental benefits in the form of reduced vehicle miles traveled. At the same time, the FHV network becomes more efficient, because it isn't required to carry the high volumes of traffic it does today.

Delucchi and Kurani acknowledge that they aren't the first to consider the idea of separating transportation modes in this way. They point to work by William Garrison at UC Berkeley, but if you read this post about the history of the sidewalk you'll see that the idea has been around much longer than that.

Leonardo Da Vinci's vision for a two-road system, circa the late 1400s

Nonetheless, the two-road network idea has yet to gain much traction in the real world. Delucchi and Kurani note that some cities have managed to at least partially implement the system (Davis in California, Houten in the Netherlands). But they suggest that future cities could be constructed around this pattern, particularly in developing countries that are expanding quickly into green space. Using the two-road system could help these countries become more sustainable, even as they embrace the automobile.

As incomes rise in places like India and China, people are driving more and more. This is already creating serious problems for pedestrians in those countries (and everyone else impacted by pollution from driving). A two-road network is one way to reduce pedestrian injuries while potentially lowering pollution from vehicle travel.
 

Complete Streets are Complete for Everyone

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www.pedbikeimages.org / Jan Moser

This new post from Strong Towns offers a helpful take on creating streets that are universally accessible. Written from the perspective of someone who both implements streets for people with disabilities and uses a wheelchair herself, the post from author Heidi Johnson-Wright highlights some of the key elements that make a street "work" for someone in a wheelchair (not to mention those of us who push strollers, etc.). Here are some

Build wide sidewalks
For me, the ideal accessible pedestrian path of travel is as wide as the sidewalks lining the great avenues of New York City. Plenty of room for walkers, wheelers, babies in strollers and then some. Lots of space for me to safely pass around slow walkers when I'm in a hurry.

Keep paving in travel ways smooth
...smooth concrete with narrow stress joints works for me. I also love wide, flat flagstones like the ones used throughout Barcelona. I dislike even the smoothest of pavers and despise brickwork. What looks like tiny seams to walkers means major up-and-down bumping for wheelers.

Avoid "cookie-cutter" curb ramps
...differences in terrain and limitations of space require different ramp designs in order to be compliant and safe. Level landings at top and bottom are essential...And please: TWO curb ramps per corner instead of a single diagonal ramp.

Keep sidewalks clear of obstructions, even temporary ones
Coordination between local public works, transit, utilities, and state DOT is essential to preventing obstructions caused by landscaping, light poles, street signs, signal boxes, bus shelters, bus benches, newspaper boxes, bike racks, etc. Just as bad are sidewalks suddenly blocked off with little or no warning...I mean many months of torn up or obstructed rights of way due to long-term construction projects which provide no alternative, accessible, safe pathway.

If you take a look at the street from last week's post, you'll see it follows the bulk of the these rules. The sidewalk could be wider, but paving along travel ways is smooth, two curb ramps are in place, and obstructions are pushed to the edge of the sidewalk in the "street furniture zone."

Complete Streets, Ecuador Style

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I was browsing through some of my non-American transportation pictures when I came across this photo of an amazing street in Baños in Ecuador. Isn't it great?

But before I break down the details of what makes this street so awesome, a note on why I was looking at streets in Ecuador in the first place: So often when we point to examples of the best complete streets, we're showing places in affluent (read: white) neighborhoods in Europe or the US. At the same time, we're often working in neighborhoods that don't exactly share those demographics. It's worth noting that Copenhagen and San Francisco don't have the monopoly on walkability.

For the record, I'm just as guilty as the next planner of doing this-- thus my perusal of South American streetscapes. Which brings us back to the street above. First, let's look at land use: two stories of residential over street-level storefronts. This keeps the density relatively high while maintaining a "human scale:" the buildings are probably about 35 feet high and are proportionate to the width of the street. The variety of commercial uses on the ground floor serve residents in the neighborhood, making it easier to accomplish daily errands without driving.

About those commercial uses--notice how they're set up with outdoor displays, café seating, and windows to engage people walking down the street. You can see at a glance that this street would be interesting to explore. Importantly, those outdoor displays and café tables aren't blocking the sidewalk, and neither are the planters and benches on the other side of the travel way. I especially like how there are decorative tiles in the street furniture zone of the sidewalk, but not in the pedestrian pathway. Decorative paving looks great, but it can be tricky to navigate (e.g., try walking on cobblestones in heels).