Traffic Engineers’ Epic Fail
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
Traffic engineers didn't decide to put the school on a busy arterial State-Designated Highway. Syracuse Utah has just 6 main arterial roads, and over 50+ small slow neighborhood streets. 90% of the roads in this town are already slow side streets safe for children (the exact ones StrongTowns advocates for), why did they build the schools exclusively on the 5% of roads designated to handle actual traffic needs?
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Ironically, we have a safer way to build streets like this. It's called a freeway, and it's great because it keeps nearly 100% grade-separation between people driving and people walking, while still handling massive transit requirements at high speeds. But we can't have those in cities, because StrongTowns hates them. They are too safe, promote affordable housing too much, and let people get to too many places too quickly.
StrongTowns gets the luxury of claiming every street should be impossible to drive on, and can prattle on about how cheap it is to destroy a street (it costs nothing!). Because StrongTowns does not do any actual engineering or design, they are simply a political campaign against cars.
Real traffic engineers have to actually handle transportation needs of real citizens everyday. Real traffic engineers don't get the luxury of just wishing away peoples lives, or jobs, or homes. So while I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, I don't see anything wrong with traffic engineers work here.
I see a school system that decided building two schools on opposite sides of a "State Highway 108" was a great idea, and is now suffering terrible consequences because of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_Route_108
And in any case, if the tradeoff you are suggesting is dead kids versus "impossible to drive on, war on cars" I'm sure where an engineers opinion will fall. But traffic engineers aren't all that.
Rarely are these things difficult to mostly solve, but it requires at least some minimal effort. Sadly, that is too much to ask of most people in North America.
>The teen was crossing from the junior high Monday about 8:30 p.m. when a southbound car struck him
This didn't happen during normal business hours.
What does "safe engineering" mean and how is that different than "engineering?"
It never was. The suggestion is "don't put kids in the few areas of the city specifically marked as dangerous".
It's like building a school inside of a river, watching kids drown, and suggesting the water is at fault and should get out of the way. Or building a school on an airport runway and complaining the noise scares the children and suggesting the airplanes are at fault and should land elsewhere.
I'm afraid your thinking on this is roughly 60 years behind. Of course vehicular deaths are not "natural".
Look, the schools are already there, no sense tearing them down now and traffic calming is a fine solution but it shouldn't have been like this in the first place. There are plenty of areas marked as too dangerous for pedestrians when it comes to zoning decisions and this should have been one of them.
You don't don't seem to be reading what the OP is writing. They are clearly laying the blame at the feet of the people who decided to build 2 schools on opposite sides of a dangerous street. Where are you getting "it's no ones fault"
To blame the school placement (likely decided by the very same governmental body doing the street design) is the epitome of the problem here: "what are the pedestrians doing on my street".
These problems are widely known and currently, they have no solutions in sight. Most people want to keep the status quo, but even if there was a mass movement to change this situation, I doubt the money would be allocated. The money most certainly exists, but much of it is currently wasted (defense, bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, weapons, more weapons, etc.), at least at the federal level. I don't think any state currently has the budget to even begin to make a dent in car culture. Hell, we can't even replace hundred year old critical infrastructure bridges, yet anti-car people want a whole new infrastructure (either that, or they're delusionally thinking that everyone can cram into downtown somehow). Car culture is here to stay. That's what the market dictates in the US, anyway.
Er...yes. That's the reason there's anti-car rhetoric.
But you're also overstating the problem, which I wouldn't have thought was possible. Car culture is pervasive, but plenty of major American cities have decent-ish public transit.
Your whole argument is weird. It seems like you're saying "This problem is real, massive, and pervasive, therefore we need to stop trying to fix it and ignore it completely."
And, living near Seattle as I currently do, the notion that we'd need to completely rebuild everything for public transit to work at all is not accurate. Plenty of major cities have decent public transit already. There may be a few cities that are beyond saving, and it wouldn't work in small towns, but that's true anywhere; no one in rural Germany is taking the bus to work, no matter how great it is in Frankfurt.
Freeways divide neighborhoods; we can't plop them down everywhere, and definitely not in this situation. It takes a massive amount of room to move vehicles at a rapid rate, and it discourages pedestrian-friendly, dense land use (then again, it looks like they already made that decision with a bunch of single-family house subdivisions). Notice nearby that the stuff you can access from I-15 is a bunch of big roads, malls, car dealerships, and an Air Force base. Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.
Plus, as we see in any majorly dense area, the freeways turn into buffers for inadequate local traffic capacity as they very quickly turn into parking lots. Low volume exits onto slow surface streets with tons of intersections jams everything up.
Neither of these are necessarily true. Urban Freeways are better at connecting neighborhoods than arterial streets are, because the freeway is off grade (either way above, or way below pedestrians), and therefore there is nothing present to 'divide' anything. Pedestrians and bicycles can freely move around anytime without any waiting for anything and with 100% safety at all times.
Additionally, since freeways capacities are so much higher, they encourage high density land use, since they can support so much more transportation of people. That encouragement doesn't guarantee high density will happen, builders preferences and peoples budgets will still dictate cheap single family houses most of the time regardless. But that's not something the freeway itself influences. (In the same way that a train station encourages high density, but many are still in suburban areas anyway).
The only real drawback is price. Ugly, space-wasting rural freeways at ground level are much cheaper. But they are worse for drivers and pedestrians, every bit as bad as what we see here for everyone.
> Nobody really likes living next to it, either: there's measurably worse air pollution and much higher noise.
The air pollution and noise is mostly unchanged (same exact cars making the same trips). And Electric Cars already fully solved both of these problems anyway, it's just a matter of time as gasoline vehicles get phased out.
It looks like their current solution to the crosswalk is to add a stoplight to it. Which ironically will actually increase air pollution, as previously-traveling cars will now often sit idling, right next to two schools...
Can you show an example? 280 in San Francisco comes to mind. The division is the underpass or the overpass, and the frontage roads required to support it. Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use. It's not limited to freeways, either -- you can achieve a similar effect with grade-separated railways.
It's green, it's safe, it's pedestrian / bike friendly and they are always at grade, so it's accessible. Cars only go 10mph (the distance is so short, they couldn't go much faster anyway). The freeway takes up almost no land -- it's just a single 1 minute walk to either side. Plant bollards at both ends to block the cars, and it's now 100% safety for everyone at all times.
Here's a really creative example from Seattle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_Park
> Any big grade change and long distance between buildings suppresses non-car use
I don't think that's inherently true, it's just the cheap way to do it. Freeways can be high density and pedestrian friendly too. They just usually aren't, for the same reasons buildings aren't -- it costs money.
Additionally, there doesn't need to be any distance between buildings to have a freeway. See Cobo Center in Detroit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-10_(Michigan_highway) or Washington State Convention Center in Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Convention_Ce...
I can’t easily figure out what proportion of other trips happen by bike/walking, what proportion of students walk/bike to school, etc., but I would be surprised if they match cities like NYC or Boston or most parts of Europe.
I don’t know what your neighborhood is like in person: how well trafficked is that underpass by pedestrians and cyclists in practice? Having some freeway underpasses near low-traffic streets be “pedestrian and bike friendly” doesn’t really help anyone if nobody walks or bikes anyway because there is nothing nearby to walk to because nearby places are extremely spread out and largely designed with the expectation that people will visit them by car, e.g surrounded by giant parking lots, with inconvenient road plans, etc.
The Southern CA town I grew up was similar low-density suburban with freeways passing through, and there were various ostensibly pedestrian-friendly freeway crossings here and there, but in practice few people ever walked anywhere except in the small downtown area or maybe exercising their dogs or going to one or another park (a decent number of kids <16 rode bikes around though). One of the nicest low-density suburban places I know of, but life for kids without cars was necessarily highly structured and relatively isolating.
You picked a spot right near the downtown between a low-density residential neighborhood and a commercial area, but looking at a satellite view and map search most of the residential areas in the city and surrounds seem to be relatively far from shops, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, ..., (at least compared to denser cities) so in practice many trips probably require a car. I’ve never been there so I can’t tell you what it’s like in practice.
But anyway, with that said, as low-density suburban development goes, Grand Rapids looks pretty nice, just judging from satellite view. Not my personal cup of tea, but definitely better than lots of places in the US.
The worst part though was getting off work late and tring to go for a nice walk, only to find the sidewalks and half the street flooded from the heavy irrigation! I get that rain storms there flood things, but this was a consistent "lets flood a lane on either side of the street watering our lawn".
And this is the best-case scenario, where the highway is relatively permeable because it's next to downtown.
The Columbus freeway cap is a far better example of integrating a freeway into a neighborhood: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/.a/6a00d834518cc969e... https://www.google.com/maps/place/Columbus,+OH/@39.9740161,-... But it's an expensive enough project that it can't be possibly be duplicated on every street crossing, and the freeway infrastructure surrounding it still profoundly separates downtown from its neighborhoods.
What Strong Towns is about is prioritizing cheap, maintainable infrastructure that supports walking and biking— and freeways are not remotely cheap, especially when designed to be anything but an awful experience for those not in a car.
I have a similar straight road with a school near my house. To make matters worse it's a main artery to the freeway. However, the city solved this much better. As suggested in the article the road is fairly narrow and there are physical separators in the middle of the road in the area where the school is. You can still easily go the speed limit, yet from my anecdotal experience of driving the road at least twice a day I'm pretty much the only person going slightly over the speed limit. I would argue that the road very much works as intended to transport cars efficiently and children safely.
High speed transportation of people is the exact opposite of what encourages high density land use. If you can live 30 miles from work, and get to work in 30 minutes by freeway-driving, that's acceptable. If that same trip would take two hours, perhaps you'd consider living closer to work.
Given how politically acerbic your comment is towards StrongTowns and their efforts to save lives, your argument is incredibly badly reasoned. These are separate schools with separate facilities serving separate age groups. It is unlikely the reason this young junior high student was crossing the street at 8:30pm[1] was to visit the elementary school.
There are not that many schools along typical commuter routes. It seems unlikely that calming traffic along this one would seriously impact the "transportation needs of real [sic] citizens everyday."
[1] https://www.ksl.com/?sid=43931746&nid=148&title=syracuse-tra...
There is a pretty obvious solution — put in a traffic light controlled by a button. Lights have high compliance.
Strongtowns is what it is. They have a particular agenda and they present questions that fit their answers.
You say they can't with away the people's lives. True, but they can't wish away the bad decisions made by others either. They still have a choice to make, between allowing a dangerous situation for children or a worse traffic circulation. And it's valid to judge that decision.
The article is blaming all the wrong factors.
Then over time developers built neighborhoods and the population exploded, so as the population grew the roads had to be expanded. Traffic planners had to move people somewhere, and they compensated for the wide streets with 20mph school speed limits, volunteer crossing guards, extensive education of children and drivers, and regular active enforcement of the school speed.
So the article comes across as clueless, seemingly almost deliberately so to exploit a tragedy.
As for the 20mph speed limit - besides the fact that he specifically says they are irrelevant, since drivers don't respect them -, how would that have helped, considering it was 8:30pm when the accident happened? And I'm betting the "volunteer crossing guards" weren't around either. Apparently kids sometimes leave schools outside "schooltime" - who'd a thunk it.
Finally, if we're talking about what he left out - maybe you should add the other detail he didn't mention: that there had been already 15 accidents in the crosswalk in question in the last five years. So maybe it should have been clear by now that the methods weren't working.
(By the way, "the population exploded and the streets had to be expanded" is false. Governments have tools to control the growth of the population, like permits and zoning.)
Clearly.
If we didn’t have them, people would live closer, we would have better public transport, better walking and cycling infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have a wasteful, excessive driving culture. And to many people steeped in the toxic car culture, riding a bike either means you got a DUI or you are crazy and deserve to die.
Its not just "StrongTowns hates them", it's that a lot of cities have gotten the shit end of the stick, transportation-wise, and people who actually live in the city don't want to live next to a fucking highway for the convenience of suburbanites. It's not a conspiracy, there's political support for these policies in cities.
Just use park and ride, cut throughs can go fuck themselves, you sound entitled as hell. It's not your God given right to shit up other peoples' home with your car.
Add in that usual London traffic moves at about bicycle speed, and the central part of town is a very human friendly place.
I am glad they added a new "t-charge" (similar to the older congestion charge) to specifically target cars with worse emissions recently.
However, the lights themselves are ridiculous and will probably get someone killed as well. I've never seen something like this before. Normally, crosswalk lights are yellow, and they flash yellow when someone is crossing the road. Other times I've seen flashing lights on the crosswalk itself to show that someone is crossing. These are great.
The ones installed on Sloat are flashing red lights, but they don't look like a traffic signal. I don't know why they chose this, but it's very confusing and I don't know what a flashing red light means in a non-traffic light context. It's stupid and overengineered, and they should have stuck with something much more conventional, like flashing yellow lights.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/traff_lgt...
As in, pedestrians unquestionably have the right of way, but since our cities are so overtly auto-oriented, we make the pedestrians beg for their rights by pushing a button. These are emblematic of the spectacular failures of urban design that happened in the USA in the last 80 or so years.
Anyone who doesn't understand any part of this should never drive on public roads.
That street needs to be narrowed, have parked cars on the side, have speed tables, a boulevard, dynamic feedback signs, or other traffic calming measures. Physical objects and changes to the environment are what cause drivers to slow down in urban environments, not flimsy metal signs.
There have been numerous studies and research projects on this. Here's one by the Federal Highway Administration showing the effects of various traffic calming techniques in situations just like this one: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08067/
And in fact, based on Google Street View imagery, it appears they are in the process of doing exactly that:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0919153,-112.0647278,3a,75y,...
My city has some crosswalks with big, obvious flashing lights similar to this, and they really catch your attention more. Some of them have button that immediately turns the flashing lights on so you don't really have to wait for lights to cycle like you do at a normal intersection, which probably makes them more effective.
DO NOT have public schools and other such facilities RIGHT NEXT to the high speed corridors.
Those belong in the middle of residential areas.
Design it for the safety of the pedestrians too. Some nice unclimbable walls that clearly show no other path across than the crosswalk (with as another reply stated, should be BRIGHT and VISIBLE).
Yes, there should be safety space between the road and that wall; but it should deny reward for skipping the crosswalk.
"Let's Turn this Dangerous, Expensive Road Back into a Safe Neighborhood Street"
"Dying to Widen Highways - Oregon’s DOT seems to be more concerned with making cars go faster than saving lives."
The site seems to have a rather ... specific focus.
Perhaps to civil & traffic engineers, but to urban planners, it is well known the detrimental effects streets can have on cities.
This is hyperbole. The street is designed to efficiently move car traffic. The design error here is in creating a situation where a large number of children will walk across it. The author's goal appears to be to design streets so that they make getting hit by a car less deadly, which strikes me as perverse.
It's certainly possible to make the street better for walking across by making it worse at efficiently moving car traffic, but it's also possible to replace the crosswalk with a pedestrian overpass and eliminate the conflict entirely.
Pedestrian overpasses require those who cross to physically climb over traffic. Better than a wall, but let's acknowledge the cost of that. They're also enormous and expensive, whether you design them terribly or well.[1]
The calming proposals include: narrower lanes, a raised median, and a traffic light to explicitly priortize and protect pedestrians when crossing. What about those makes them an imposition?
[1] https://candysdirt.com/2016/04/28/fugly-pedestrian-bridge-ha... http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Footbridge-an-eleg...
All of the calming proposals create an imposition. The whole point of traffic calming is to impede the flow of traffic so as to reduce its speed. Without effective alternatives, reducing the speed of this road reduces its capacity to get people from one part of town to another, and it appears that state road 108 is, in fact a major road. It provides access to a number of businesses including a Walmart supercenter, churches, four public schools and city hall.
The obvious alternative to driving is a public bus service, which also uses the road. It stops near the two schools hourly most times of day.
So to make the interaction of the road and the schools safer, the city could redesign the road and make traffic worse, more substantially redesign the whole transportation infrastructure, or add a pedestrian overpass. The latter is not an insignificant project, but it usually costs less than the examples you linked.
Really interested in what data analysis is done in the states regarding (KSI - Killed and Serious Injured). In the UK we hold good data and can related designs and design improvement to the KSI.
I strongly agree with the article, we should aim for zero-killed. The balance can be vehicle congestion vs. space vs. cost vs. time. Because our modelling is very good we can tell the impact of a new school and the behaviour of the pedestrians. I could talk about the hierarchy of roads, but Traffic Engineers need to start influencing the politicians that make some of the decisions. How ? - By clear data and model that show with this design you will have this KSIs.
Just look at those pictures. How can anyone live in that area and not think that they live in an environment and society that is openly hostile to pedestrians (school children)?
Mainstream American culture holds that it is apartment buildings and street life which are the true menaces to children. From the Street View, this place would be considered ideal to raise a family, because there's plenty of room for huge houses and huge yards/open nature areas between them.
That children can't transport themselves beyond the closed-world snow-globe of your immediate subdivision is considered a feature, as it limits the trouble they can get into. The most they should be doing without your accompaniment (in this mindset) is playing with other neighborhood kids in parks or in each other's houses.
Who is surprised, then, that the car represents freedom to so many of these kids? Where I grew up, a car was needed for everything, which meant that I had almost no access to the normal world at age 15 and almost unlimited access on my 16th birthday.
Like a fish who doesn't know what water is, most Americans don't even realize that car culture is all around them. And an appreciation for the status quo is baked in very early. The car is simply how you get places. How could it be any other way?
[0] I think this is actually really important. A twelve-year-old should be able to pick up some groceries, mail a letter, grab a bite to eat at a lunch counter, and so on, but these basic acts of socialization are completely alien to suburban kids.
Compare Japan via this adorable TV show about childrens' first errants. They are as young as 2 or 3 years:
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/09/why-are-littl...
(Germany, Singapore are also on the saner side. But I don't know of any cute TV shows.)
I really hope that you walk your 11 acres rather than driving around in one of those militarized-golf-cart abominations. Your knees will just get worse if you never walk around.
Roads need to be designed for their purpose, and their purpose also includes allowing pedestrians to cross safely even if the pedestrian and the driver suffer from a momentary distraction.
The field you're referring to is called "highway engineering" or "traffic engineering", depending on specifics, and safety is absolutely a critical component either way.
I have lots of questions: Why isn't there a pedestrian bridge? Why are the schools on opposite sides of the road when there is obviously land on the same side? Why is there a major thoroughfare in front of a school?
I know the answer: nobody is willing to sign off with money until the outcry is large enough. It seems like the traffic engineers know that there is a problem (15 accidents in the last 5 years and a traffic light plan already in flight), but you can tell from the article that all their solutions are cheap.
That tells me everything I need to know.
> Why isn't there a pedestrian bridge?
Signals that you don't really care about people walking or people with disabilities and want them to drive.
Ok, that was flippant, I realize, but the only time I've seen anyone use prefer overpasses and such is the Vegas strip and that's because it is outright hostile to walk next to or across.
> Why is there a major thoroughfare in front of a school?
Everybody is driven to school. Look at the land use around the school.
We have such a tunnel in my hometown for the local elementary school and it works pretty okay.
https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.2516734,149.0794549,3a,60y,...
https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.4122069,149.1282473,3a,75y,...
> A quick physics lesson: The force of impact from a car increases quadratically with speed. This means that doubling the speed quadruples the force of the impact.
That is absolutely not what quadratically means.
The original data is from https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
If you look, on page 9, you can see the plots of impact speed vs risk of death. They are clearly non-linear, and they you can also read that they tried various fitting methods for missing data (and quadratic best fit things).
I'm just guessing that you are confused because it does not appear the constant for the x^2 term is >1.
If you want to accelerate pedestrian to certain speed you have to pump kinetic energy into him. You do that by applying a force over some distance (distance is how much pedestrian will squish during impact before it starts moving with the car) so to acellerate to double speed, you need to pump in quadruple energy, you need to quadruple the force since squishing distance is the same (until you reach speeds that pulverize pedestrian bones).
f(x)=a*x^2
f(2*x)=a*(2*x)^2=a*4*x^2=4*a*x^2=4*f(x)
To say it another way: 4x^2 != 2x^2