In Washington Square Park, light writers make the most of the dark / Photo: Alex Fortney

On the eve of Halloween, I ventured across the East River to cycle through the eerily dark and silent streets of lower Manhattan. With Sandy’s storm surge freshly receded and my sister a refugee on my futon in Bed Stuy, we hopped on bikes and rode into the Financial District to gather clothes and valuables from her apartment one block from the South Street Seaport.

This week, the internet has been abuzz with articles on the relief efforts, the role of climate and ecology in the storm’s severity, and the stark illustration of how a NYC that commutes by car is a NYC in constant gridlock.

While I’ve been very conscious of all of that, what I noticed most on the ground was how social behavior has adapted to this nearly disparate nighttime landscape of the city below 34th Street.  There are no traffic lights, no street lights; there just aren’t any lights at all. For the most part, streets signs and traffic control devices are simply meaningless or invisible. Save for the few with traffic cops, intersections play host to a bizarre dance between cross and opposing traffic. Intuition prevails: minor streets stop for major streets; cars stop for bikes; everyone is stopping for pedestrians. The natural order of transport, untamed.

With no moon and with the light pollution uptown blocked out by the midrises and highrises inbetween, electric light has become an important part of human interaction. Stirring in the shadows of one’s peripheral vision is at once routine and unsettling. We quickly fell in step with the apparent norm when approaching others: each party shines a light at the other, makes an immediate judgement that the strangers are twilight wanders like themselves, and passes by, cordially cautious. It all feels rehearsed and official, as if we all did it in elementary school libraries right after practicing stop-drop-and-roll.

After crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, the incredible darkness was all consuming. Then suddenly, the awe and anxiety terminated by the tower of City Hall, lit like the surface of a star, as though we were astronauts reaching the point of orbit where the sun suddenly bursts forth from Earth’s horizon. Our ride up Broadway was quiet. It is only when we reached the rear entrance to my sister’s building that we began our interactions, talking with the staff loading a truck with the piles of garbage bags filled with 32 floors’ worth of rotting refrigerator contents, and squeezing past other tenants in the fire stairs, meagerly lit by a single glow stick. Out of necessity or fear, everyone simply deferred to trust, assuming others had legitimate reasons to be there, and that no one was up to mischief or criminality.

The NYSE building, presumably lit by generator / Photo: David Nelson

The Financial District was the darkest of all, perhaps reflecting it mostly daytime population. The reds and blues of cop cars and the Stock Exchange’s up-lit columns cut through the darkness. Those columns had attracted a few handfuls of twenty-somethings and I wondered if they had anything to do with Occupy.

Once I had my sister were safely back in Brooklyn, my girlfriend and I rode back into the city, this time to venture uptown. Chinatown, Little Italy, and NoHo were perhaps where the de facto traffic pattern was most pronounced, when crossing the big streets of Canal, Delancey, and Houston.

We were now taking the familiar route of my afternoon commute. In the hard-hit East Village, we passed by a few resilient restaurants and bars operating by candlelight. Glow sticks and LEDs were accessories with purpose here, a part of individuals’ advertised identities. My favorite example was a flamboyant individual who wore a large medallion blinking with orange, green and purple lights. On Saint Mark’s Place between 1st and Avenue A, we found ourselves in the midst of a crowd. As soon as we were about twenty feet away, someone off in the shadows pressed play. We were comically startled. A dozen people started dancing to the harmonies of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel.  There vehemence of the lyrics seemed particularly apropos, given the situation: “Ain’t no river wide enough,” the radio blared.  We headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge. It was nearly 2am; time to go home.

Reflecting on the sights and sounds of the evening on the chilly climb up the bridge, I was struck by adaptability and endurance of the urban experience. People were defining new norms for social interaction, on the fly. Behavior toward key aspects of city life–individuality, mobility–were adapting to extreme conditions. And, as it turns out, even in the dark, people are still fundamentally attracted to people.

At Cleveland’s Market Square Park, local residents, businesses, and leaders have invested heavily in Place Capital. / Photo: PPS

“We’ve been wrong for the last 67 years,” Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, announced in his closing address at last month’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place (PWPB) conference. “Ok. Time to admit it, and move on! We have completely screwed up transportation in this country. We can never expect to see the legislative or policy change until people understand the fundamental underlying problem. Asking for 20% more bike lanes is not enough.”

The following week, at the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, the same attitude was present. In her opening remarks to the gathering of market managers and advocates assembled at the Renaissance Hotel, USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan stated that “We’re all here because we recognize that markets can be far more than places just to buy food. We’re looking at markets as venues for revitalizing their communities.”

These statements capture a sentiment that permeated the discussion at both of the conferences that PPS organized this fall: that reform—of transportation, food systems, and so many aspects of the way we live—is no longer about adding bike lanes or buying veggies from a local farmer; the time has come to re-focus on large-scale culture change. Advocates from different movements are reaching across aisles to form broader coalitions. While we all fight for different causes that stir our individual passions, many change agents are recognizing that it is the common ground we share—both physically and philosophically—that brings us together, reinforces the basic truths of our human rights, and engenders the sense of belonging and community that leads to true solidarity.

Even when we disagree with our neighbors, we still share at least one thing with them: place.  Our public spaces—from our parks to our markets to our streets—are where we learn about each other, and take part in the interactions, exchanges, and rituals that together comprise local culture. Speaking at PWPB, Copenhagenize.com founder Mikael Colville-Andersen made this point more poetically when he said that “The Little Mermaid statue isn’t Copenhagen’s best monument. I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.”

“I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.” / Photo: Spacing Magazine via Flickr

Our public spaces reflect the community that we live in, and are thus the best places for us to begin modeling a new way of thinking and living. We can all play a more active role in the cultural change that is starting to occur by making sure that our actions match our values—specifically those actions that we take in public places. At PWPB, April Economides offered a simple suggestion for softening business owners’ resistance to bicycle-friendly business districts: tell the proprietors of businesses that you frequent that you arrived on a bike. At another PWPB session on social media, Alissa Walker advocated for users of popular geo-locative social media platforms like FourSquare to start “treating buses and sidewalks as destinations,” and ‘checking in’ to let friends know that they’re out traveling the city by foot, and on transit.

And of course, when trying to change your behavior, you often need to change your frame of mind. At the Markets Conference, Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman recalled the efforts that were required to change the way that vendors at the West Side Market thought about their role within the local community when the market decided to remain open for more days each week. While many vendors didn’t need to be open extra days, Cimperman helped to re-frame things: “[I asked people to consider:] Who are we here for? We’re not here for ourselves. We’re here for the citizens of Cleveland.”

Individual action is invaluable, but when working to spark large-scale culture change, it is even more critical to develop an overarching strategy. Putting forth a constructive vision, along with clearly-stated goals that people can relate to, provides the framework that helps to guide the individual decisions that people within a movement make as they work to change the culture on the ground. To put public space at the heart of public discourse where it belongs, we should focus on changing the way that folks talk about the issue that’s already on everyone’s mind: the economy. Bikenomics blogger Elly Blue was succinct in her explanation of why tying culture change to economics is a particularly fruitful path in today’s adversarial political climate: “We can shift the paradigm of how we build our cities; thinking about economics is a great way to do that because it cuts through the political divide.”

Great places foster human interaction & economic opportunity / Photo: Fred Kent

Across the political spectrum most of us, after years of economic hardship (and decades of wayward leadership), have learned to react to things like “growth” and “job creation” with an automatic thumbs-up. We too rarely ask questions like “What are we growing into?” and “What kind of jobs are we creating?” This brings us to the concept of Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts. Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible. Strong networks of streets and destinations are better at fostering human interaction, leading to social networks that connect people with opportunities, and cities where economies match the skills and interests of the people who live there. Public spaces that are rich in Place Capital are where we see ourselves as co-creators of the most tangible elements of our shared social wealth, connecting us more directly with the decisions that shape our economic system.

At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community. Today’s economy is largely driven by products: the stuff we make, the ideas we trademark, the things that we buy (whether we need them or not). It’s a system that supports the status quo by funneling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands. Leadership in this system is exclusively top-down; even small business owners today must respond to shifts in global markets that serve only to grow financial capital for investors, without any connection to the communities where their customers actually live. (For evidence of this, consider the fact that food in the average American home travels an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to table, turning local droughts and floods into worldwide price fluctuations).

Through our own Placemaking work, we’ve found that public space projects and the governance structures that produce them tend to fall into one of four types of development, along a spectrum. On one end there are spaces that come out of project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership is often behind these projects, which value on-time, under-budget delivery above all else. Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires. Next, there are spaces created through a design-led process. These spaces are of higher quality and value, and are more photogenic, but their reliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places. More and more, we’re seeing people taking the third kind of approach: that which is place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.

Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards. They make sure that the sidewalks are clean, the gardens tended, and their neighbors in good spirits. They are involved meaningfully throughout the process—the key word here being “they,” plural. Place-led processes turn proximity into purpose, using the planning and management of shared public spaces into a group activity that builds social capital and reinforces local societal and cultural values.

After participating in the discussions at PWPB and the Markets Conference this fall, we believe that the concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general. If we re-build our communities around places that put us face-to-face with our neighbors more often, we are more likely to know each other, and to want to help each other to thrive.

“It’s because our public spaces got so bad that we have led the world in developing ways to make them great,” argued Eastern Market director Dan Carmody at the Markets Conference, explaining the surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades. We have momentum on our side; if we focus on creating Place Capital, we can continue to build on that forward motion, and bring together many different voices into a chorus.

Like capital attracts capital, people attract people. As Placemakers, we all need to be out in our communities modeling the kind of values that we want to re-build local culture around. Our actions in public space—everything from saying hello to our neighbors on the street to organizing large groups to advocate for major social changes—are investments in Place Capital. Great places and strong economies can only exist when people choose to participate in creating them; they are human-powered monuments. So let’s get to work.

The Long Beach Convention Center, site of Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2012 / Photo: PPS

It is hard to believe that it has already been six weeks since we convened Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2012. The conference inspired a multitude of ideas, forged new partnerships, and reinforced existing ones. The tone was mostly upbeat; however, owing to the frustration of those who have been calling for change for years if not decades, sometimes the messaging took out their frustrations on engineers and transportation professionals.

Reprinted below (with permission) is an email sent to me by Bryan Jones, one of the professional engineers in attendance at the conference, expressing his concerns over how some of the advocates who spoke at PWPB Pro Place engaged in what I would call engineer-bashing. After spending 40 years as a transportation engineer myself, I empathize with Bryan (who works, for the record, as the Deputy Director of the City of Carlsbad, California’s Transportation Department). As an engineer, I too have often borne the brunt of folks frustrated with the direction of transportation over the last 50 years.  

I felt that Bryan’s email was worth sharing, not so much in an effort to defend my profession, but because I know that Bryan is 100% correct in pointing out that when advocacy unleashes harsh and personal rhetoric, it not only distracts us from the path to change, it deepens the barrier that we have to cross to engage the transportation for change. Bryan’s remarks about the reaction in some quarters to our disappointment with MAP-21 also resonated with me. Stomping our feet over what could or should have been will do no good.

I hope you will enjoy Bryan’s observations as much as I did.  –Gary Toth

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Dear Gary;

I wanted to take a moment after Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place to share that I really enjoyed the conference. There were many great sessions and featured keynote speakers. For me, it was about connecting and reconnecting with people and fostering relationships. It was about hearing what others are doing in their organizations whether in advocacy, government, private business, or non-profits, at the local, regional, state, or national level. The 2012 organizers did a great job bringing the Pro Place theme into the conversations. I was fascinated and inspired by people from Project for Public Spaces like Fred & Ethan Kent, and advocates like Victor Dover. They brought a great new language and conversation to the Pro Walk/Pro Bike movement. Their messages resonated with me as their work results in creating streets, places, and communities where people want to be. And that means jobs, new businesses, and thriving and safe communities. The City of Long Beach and the host committee also did a fantastic job. Well done Charlie Gandy and team!

While the host committee reached out to organizations like the Institute for Transportation Engineers and AASHTO, there was an undertone throughout the conference that these organizations and their members along with a certain political party was to blame for society’s current problems. So the reach out was one step forward, but the undertone might have been two to five steps backwards. In fact, some of the speakers did not even make it an undertone. When speakers attack certain professions such as Traffic Engineering or political parties such as Republicans, it does not create partnerships or unity for a movement but furthers polarization and a greater divide. Most engineers at this conference felt unwelcome if they could not overcome or look past some of the speaker’s attacks.

The speakers were good, and their message could have been delivered without attacking or blaming. I heard it during keynote speeches and in break-out sessions. A good analogy would be a comedian’s or musician’s talents that get lost or unheard because of their curse language that prevents some from attending or listening. However, many of the speakers spoke to the choir and audience present rather than connecting with, welcoming, and reaching out to these new organizations which could be our partners now and in the future. In fact, I heard from many engineers that they felt unwelcome, which is definitely not a feeling we want them leaving with because we need them as partners and collaborators. I have been working closely with advocacy organizations for most of my career, and I feel my collaborative experiences with them have allowed me to be a better engineer and planner. I always encourage my colleagues in the engineering and planning professions to proactively engage advocacy organizations in a collaborative manner.

We can dwell on the perceived setback of MAP-21 and become victims. It is an easy position to take. However, our reality is in our thoughts and we can focus our thoughts on all the great successes that have been accomplished and how to foster more of these successes. We can focus on what we “CAN” do rather than what we “CAN’T” do. Blaming others or specific groups for our built environment accomplishes very little and, as I remember one of my mentors saying, when you point blame on others there are three fingers pointing back at you. We have to be careful throwing rocks in a glass house. We live in a democracy so our built environment is the responsibility of all of us…now and in the past and future. And it has caused unintended public health, environmental, and mobility costs to name just a few of the consequences.

I might suggest that we can focus on changing to a culture of Active Transportation by changing the language and conversations. We need to identify and LISTEN to what our allies’ and perceived enemies’ objectives are. We should not just be talking, but SHOWING how effective our alternatives are through implementation—even at a small scale—with consistency, which can build a lot of momentum. However this requires us to CONNECT PEOPLE. A title I might suggest for 2014–I heard this “connection” discussion in April Economides presentation about her team’s success in Long Beach with Bicycle Friendly Business Districts. She changed perceptions by changing the language and conversations with people that were against bikes. While her passion is green stuff, she understood the passion of many of the business owners was also “green” $tuff! She spoke with them about the pro$perity of welcoming bike riders into their business districts, and did a lot of listening to their concerns and objectives.

Just so you know a little about me, this was my first Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference…although I called it Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. I  am a Traffic Engineer, but also a Professional Transportation Planner; a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners; a League-Certified Instructor from the League of American Bicyclists; an advocate for Bicyclists and Pedestrians; a Complete and Livable Streets Implementer; and a local government public administrator/ leader. I have also had success with implementing Complete and Livable Streets in two jurisdictions (Fresno and Carlsbad) that were fairly automobile-focused when I started in their organization and community.

Neither of these communities has really been on the radar of most in the nation, as we didn’t accomplish change through policies and processes but rather through leadership, making connections, fostering relationships, and focusing on results. A lot of the success in these communities has come from aligning projects with community values and partnering with others like regional MPO’s, advocacy organizations, public health organizations, and our local business community. These two jurisdictions also both happen to be fairly conservative in political climate, so this movement does not have to be about one political party against another. These two communities might be great examples to further explore how political support was gained from a political party that is perceived by many as the enemy or surpressor of progress in transportation.

In my advocacy, I take time to encourage, empower, and enable engineers and planners to be leaders by evaluating and questioning their standards, policies and process and to determine if these standards align with community values and result in the outcomes where people want to walk and bike. We need bold transportation professionals that bring ingenuity and creativity to our profession; the world is ever-changing, and our profession must keep up. I want to also encourage the Pro Walk/Pro Bike organization to continue to utilize those of us in the transportation profession that “get it” and are your allies. We can help bridge the gap and create and foster the necessary relationships and connections with our fellow colleagues that might be slow to adopt the new active transportation system.

We have seen the innovation that has occurred in the telecommunication industry over the last fifty years. It started out with community phones with operators, then private phones, rotary phones to digital push button to wireless. Later the cellular phone was invented and first came with a briefcase size battery and as innovation occurred in the batteries and technology we went through flip phones, phones with keyboards, phone with lots of buttons and we now have the popular iPhone with one button. We are all waiting to see what comes next to help us connect with each other.

We have also seen a change in perspective with storm water regulations in California from quantity to quality. What would it be like if we experienced a change in perspective with transportation from quantity (freeways and wide thoroughfares with expectations of Level of Service C and D for peak hours) to quality.

However, change does not occur as quickly anymore from the Federal or State government. They are too big and remote to serve the people very efficiently and effectively or change course quickly. I am a firm believer that building quality streets, neighborhoods and communities starts with local governments. 85% of Americans lives within these cities. So in 2014…Pro Walk, Pro Bike, Pro Place, PRO PEOPLE! We could even add Pro Business and Pro Jobs! Or Pro Prosperity! or as this article suggests Pro Community Thrive! Just some thoughts on how the messaging could be better received by potential partners of tomorrow that maybe perceived by some as enemies of the movement today.

Bryan D. Jones, TE, PTP, AICP, MPA
Deputy Director
City Traffic Engineer
Transportation Department
City of Carlsbad

The right performance measures can make great streets for all users as ubiquitous as the American arterial highway / Photo: karmacamilleeon via Flickr

The new transportation bill, Moving Ahead with Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), became law in the US on July 6th. Since then, MAP-21 has spawned a series of mini-riots in cyberspace.  Every group of professionals and advocates seems to be able to find their reasons to gather up and start lobbing rocks at the metaphorical DOT riot police just trying to hold the line with what Congress gave them. Frustration is a natural and understandable reaction to a major change like this, but the fix is not to holler about the new Federal policy; now is the time to look inward and change what needs to be changed in our own cities and states. This doesn’t mean that we at PPS believe that MAP-21 is not problematic–just that we think it is now time to determine where the real problems are and start working with DOT and AASHTO to fix them.

For the next few days, we have an opportunity to stop throwing stones and participate in a constructive discussion about the future of transportation in the United States. The Department of Transportation has created a website for a National Dialogue on Transportation Performance Measures to inform the implementation of a performance-based system under MAP-21. The site will be accepting public input through this Sunday, September 30th. While some may be skeptical as to whether U.S. DOT will listen, at a minimum, this will allow the transportation reform movement to crowdsource priorities to be addressed.

Principal arterials like this one are currently evaluated mostly on Level of Service and Speed / Photo: Tony Case via Flickr

The Project for Public Spaces has long advocated for silo-busting, both within the transportation policy world and between transportation and other agencies. While the loss of certain dedicated funds, programs, and policies is surely unnerving, the move towards a more holistic transportation planning, design, and evaluation process should be the long term goal. MAP-21 can be seen as a stepping stone towards that future, because a move towards a performance-based system allows for a wide range of objectives and values to be seamlessly integrated into the decision making process. For example, instead of using dedicated funds for sidewalks and bike lanes to retrofit a dangerous roadway, the vision is that multimodal safety and accessibility metrics will lead to a balanced design in the first place.

FHWA has high hopes for performance measures, too:

“Under MAP-21, performance management will transform Federal highway programs and provide a means to more efficient investment of Federal transportation funds by focusing on national transportation goals, increasing the accountability and transparency of the Federal highway programs, and improving transportation investment decisionmaking through performance-based planning and programming.”

With the Sunday deadline fast approaching, the number of ideas has skyrocketed from 29 last Monday to 192 by Wednesday afternoon. The voting system gives each idea a score.  Voting for the idea adds one point to the score. Voting against subtracts one. You can retract and/or change your vote after the fact, as well.

The Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) currently has one of the top ideas with 90 votes.  They write:

“Performance measures should be defined and measured in ways that reflect all of the benefits of an integrated, comprehensive system based on the movement of people, not vehicles. In particular, this means performance and unit costs for passenger travel should include a mobility and accessibility component such as a passenger mile basis rather than solely a vehicle mile basis.”

However, commenter Dan Kaempff thinks that miles traveled isn’t a good enough metric, arguing that “[g]reater emphasis should be placed on better linking good land use decisions with transportation investments.”

Other comments run the gamut from detailed tracking of bicycle and pedestrian crash rates to indexes of pavement conditions to the spatial and temporal extent of transit coverage.

While numerous individuals have cited the general connection between land use and transportation, relatively absent from the discussion are the core concepts and principles of Placemaking. Streets are places–or at least they should be. Placemakers should be adding to this discussion to make sure that metrics for ensuring quality of place and community engagement get a fair shake. Tools already exist for street audits and evaluating the access and linkages to multi-use destinations. Could these be used to evaluate the national transportation system?

An understandably less popular comment from Sarah Lowery of the Washington State Department of Transportation highlights the fact that some agencies will face difficulty implementing the national measures due to budget constraints. However, Sarah’s point is an excellent one. It highlights just how important it is to make sure that the measures agreed upon in this go-round are useful in the long term so that the next transportation bill, set for two years from now, won’t have to impose a similar burden on local agencies. All the more reason for Placemakers to participate now.

Mayor Hsueh (left) poses with Jen Laurita of the League of American Bicyclists at BikeFest this past May. / Photo: Shing-Fu Hsueh

The Township of West Windsor in Mercer County, New Jersey is home to one of the busiest train stations in the country, US Route 1, and some seriously forward thinking bicycle and pedestrian development. The Township’s Mayor, Shing-Fu Hsueh, spoke with us about successes in making West Windsor more bicycle and pedestrian friendly, and efforts made by the community to bring together transportation, health, and sense of place. Here’s an example of local government practicing what it preaches, and exemplifying the goals of Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place.

The circulation element of West Windsor’s Master Plan includes a goal to:  “Create a pedestrian and bikeway system that makes walking and cycling a viable alternative to driving, and which improves bicyclist and pedestrian safety.” But isn’t West Windsor mostly suburban? Why emphasize biking and walking.

We can classify our community as a suburban community, so for people in West Windsor to enjoy all of our communities, walking and bicycling are very important. Our train station, Princeton Junction, is one of the ten busiest train stations in the New Jersey Transit system. On any given day more than 7,000 passengers board there, so  we are trying to bring high-density housing around the station, and encourage biking and walking in this area to minimize the use of vehicles. We are also in the process of developing a town center around the station.

Is there a relationship between Placemaking and land use, and biking and walking? Can either excel without the other?

The reason you have a sense of community and a sense of place is because of people. In West Windsor most of the future projects are private development, whether they be commercial or residential, and they’ll all be required to have a bicycle and pedestrian friendly design to get people out and about. This is what we are focusing on now, policy-wise, and so far we have been moving forward without any difficulty. The program has been received very well.

Can you describe some of the steps West Windsor has taken to improve its biking and walking infrastructure?

I think the first thing is that we have a Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, the primary emphasis of which is to facilitate transportation improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians. It is also included as part of the municipal master plan. In it we try to identify opportunities and new ideas for extending bicycle paths and sidewalks in different parts of the West Windsor community. Unfortunately, funding for implementation isn’t always readily available, but step-by-step we are getting there. Annually, we have around $200,000 for these projects, and we also look for funding from both the federal and state government. In the last ten years, we’ve met a lot of goals.

West Windsor was one of the early recipients of a bicycle planning grant from the NJ Department of Transportation. How important do you think it is for state and federal agencies to assist communities with creating walkable and bikeable communities?

We used that grant to develop the Bicycle Pedestrian Master Plan.  It’s very critical because without that kind of support it’s extremely difficult for local governments to influence people on the importance of bicycle and pedestrian friendly design. With this grant, new doors have opened up and people have been inspired to become more devoted and come up with new concepts and ideas. If you don’t have that kind of initiative from the state and federal government, at the local level you are not going to have change.

What other kinds of support (non funding) do communities trying to achieve Livability need from state and federal agencies? West Windsor has been working with several NJ state programs, is that correct? Can you describe your relationship with them?

Since the master plan, a group of people has come together to create a nonprofit called the West Winsdor Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance, and they have really opened up more opportunities to help the communities in our area. Also, for nine years running we have held the West Windsor Bike Festival; this year we had over 500 participants. I think seeing hundreds of people riding their bicycles really inspires a lot of people.

We also have a very good relationship with NJ DOT, which funded our bike/ped master plan was funded by NJDOT in 2003.

The Princeton Junction station serves as a transportation hub for thousands of commuters every day. / Photo: mtsofan via Flickr

Princeton Junction is one of the busiest train stations, yet there never seems to be enough parking! Can you describe your vision for increasing the viability of biking and walking to the station?

This is one of the reasons I wanted to do a transit  village around the station, for which we have already received official designation from the NJ DOT as the state’s 24^th Transit Village. This designation “recognizes and supports West Windsor’s mixed-use development within walking distance of NJ TRANSIT’s Princeton Junction train Station.” The transit bridge is actually the first to be built in a suburban community.

I think this will open up opportunities for turning the whole neighborhoods surrounding the train station (although a lot of people don’t like the terminology, this is the reality) into a new-urbanized area. You really need to encourage high density around a transportation center in order to reduce the use of motor vehicles. Over the past two years, we have already covered the area around the train station with bicycle and pedestrian paths, and one step at a time we are creating more connections in the West Windsor  community to these paths so one day more people can walk or bike to the station.

Have you worked on building connections between mobility and public health interests? Is West Windsor’s Health Department involved at all in your efforts to increase walking and bicycling?

No question about that!  I think that’s one of the problems we have with society: a lot of people living as close as two houses away from their destination choose to drive, and I’d like to change that kind of habit by showing the link between transportation and exercise. Every year, for example, our Health Department personnel  support programs with the Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance to encourage kids to walk to school.

Do you think it’s important for elected officials and municipal employees to attend conferences like Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place?

Yes. The topics being covered at the conference are very much in line with what I am working on right now. I try to build communities that rely less on personally owned vehicles, and can walk and bike to come together for more community events. One example is the annual National Night Out, which we host in our community park where organizations like the Bicycle and Pedestrian Alliance partake to provide the public with education. Last year we had over 2,000 people in attendance, and we expect that number to grow this year. We also have a farmers market which always has a stand to promote walking and biking. Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is an excellent example of community members and experts sharing the knowledge necessary to bring together sustainable transportation, health, and local development, which make towns and cities happier places to live.

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For those of you interested in learning more about how to foster great streets and communities, register today for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place, North America’s premier walking and bicycling conference, taking place September 10-13th, 2012 in Long Beach, CA. Join more than 1,000 planners, engineers, elected officials, health professionals, and advocates to gain the insights of national experts in the field, learn about practical solutions to getting bike and pedestrian infrastructure built, and meet peers from across the country.

"Whenever you see a corner, think of it as a square, because that puts that corner into the public realm, rather than into the traffic realm." / Photo: Cher Amio via Flickr

PPS President Fred Kent is featured as the guest on today’s episode of the cdmCyclist, a podcast hosted by Frank Peters in southern California, where we’re looking forward to hosting the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference this September 10-13. Fred not only talks about the important role that walking and bicycling play in successful places, he gives a bit of background on how he came to be involved in the Placemaking biz, and how active transportation advocates and Placemakers can strengthen each others’ efforts by working together. A short preview of Fred’s interview:

“It’s all woven together. It’s so naturally intuitive. We all share the same [desired] outcomes. Whether you’re an avid bicyclist, an avid walker, or just an avid playground user, we all want the same thing. So that’s why this conference that we’re all doing together in Long Beach in September is such a big shift away from isolating the biking and walking people, to integrating them into the broader community life and happiness that we all know happens when we create environments that are good places…

We see streets as public spaces; when they’re public spaces they’re meant to be for everyone. That starts to put into perspective the role that the automobile plays in a space because it’s only one of the users…Whenever you see a corner, think of it as a square, because that puts that corner into the public realm, rather than into the traffic realm. You can downsize or right-size or modify the role that the vehicle plays and enhance enormously the pedestrian and bicycle [uses]. Corners are where you start! That’s the hardest part, because that’s where the traffic engineer controls the outcomes more than any other place.”

Click here to visit Frank’s website and listen the full podcast of Fred’s interview.

Click here to learn more about Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place, and register for the event.

We’ll see you in Long Beach!

For the itinerant bicyclist: Are you always looking for somewhere new to go on your bike? Do you prefer to roll even when traveling just a couple of blocks, for the sheer joy of it? The folks behind WalkScore have just released BikeScore, a set of maps that show how “bikable” 10 major US cities are based on bike infrastructure, topography, and the density of attractions and amenities in various neighborhoods. Now, you can figure out exactly which parts of town are best for living life in the foam saddle.

For the thrifty bicyclist: This Wednesday, May 16th, marks the end of the earlybird registration period for September’s Pro Walk / Pro Bike conference in Long Beach, which will focus on the theme “Pro Place.” Over the course of the week, conference-goers will be able to learn about how to strengthen their cities by and network with other bicyclists (and pedestrians!) from around the country. You can save big on registration for one more day, so don’t dawdle!

For the activist bicyclist: Also on Wednesday, you can show solidarity with fallen bicyclists by taking part in the 10th Annual Ride of Silence. The Ride’s mission is to “HONOR those who have been injured or killed, RAISE AWARENESS that we are here, and ask that we all SHARE THE ROAD.” As far as bicycling has come in the past few years, it’s important to remember that hundreds of people are killed while riding in the US every year, and there is still important work to do to create safer streets for everyone.

For the workaday bicyclist: The League of American Bicyclists is promoting May 14-18 as “National Bike to Work Week,” with a big push toward Friday’s nationwide Bike to Work Day. So throw the dress shoes in a backpack, put on your sneakers, and grab a comb to counteract any instances of helmet hair: this is the week to bike to work! You can also find a full listing of events happening during May as part of the LAB’s Bike Month on their website.

The Village of Cheshire's master plan was developed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

I had the unique opportunity to participate in a “Smart Growth” bus tour of communities in North Carolina, organized last year by the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute and the Local Government Commission. We visited a variety of neighborhoods, from low-density to high, pre-car to newly developed, to learn how livable and sustainable principles can help a wide range of communities to adapt to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century.

Important lessons can be learned from each of the communities we visited. None were perfect, but as Joel Garreau pointed out in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, now-revered places like Venice and London were pieced together over centuries; flaws were frequently pointed out by critics, and fixed over time. Flaws in these places will be addressed over time as well. What is critical about each location is that they are testing out new ideas of what a sustainable future could look like. The neighborhoods that had the best sense of place were those that were created over a hundred years, and they serve as great models for how to take Traditional Neighborhood Development, Form Based Codes and other contemporary planning strategies to the next level.

My observations from the experience are below. You can click here to download my full report on the trip, which includes more detailed information on each of the communities that we visited across the state: Charlotte, Belmont, Kannapolis, Cornelius, Davidson, Black Mountain, and Asheville.

1.) Urbanism can be scaled to fit all types of development, from big city to rural: One of the major misconceptions holding back the acceptance of livability and sustainability policies across a broad spectrum of American communities is that urbanism is anti-suburb, and holds no answers for rural areas. The variety of communities seen on the North Carolina Smart Growth Tour proves otherwise. Urbanism has improved livability in communities ranging from small towns like Black Mountain; to once-rural villages like Cornelius, Belmont, and Kannapolis that are struggling to avoid losing their identity as they are being absorbed by modern auto-oriented development; all the way up to larger cities like Asheville and Charlotte that are looking to repair damage inflicted by post-WWII retrofits implemented to make way for cars.

Residential development at the Bland Street Station in Charlotte’s South End / Photo: Gary Toth

True, urbanism reaches is fullest value at higher densities. But the social benefits of having a small center where one can walk to eat breakfast, grab a quart of milk, or hang out and chat with others around a cup of coffee can be achieved even in application of urbanism principles in small – and new – rural villages. While residents of places like Black Mountain and Cornelius will probably not be able to ditch their cars entirely, these places have the potential to reduce the daily auto trip load from the average of 12-14 daily trips per household. While this may not seem significant, reducing daily trips from 14 to 12 represents a 14% decrease – a significant contraction.

The clustering around a center offered by Cornelius and Black Mountain also dramatically increases the feasibility of a transit provider offering service. Typical suburban communities are too spread out to make transit stops efficient. Even a town as small as Black Mountain creates a focal point for passengers waiting for transit service to hang out, grab a cup of coffee, and perhaps even do some business.

More importantly, creation of urbanist developments in these traditional rural areas creates a sense of place, a sense of community, and better livability.

2.) Placemaking, New Urbanism, and Smart Growth can help protect rural communities from losing their identity to suburbanism. Communities such as Davidson, Cornelius, Belmont and Kannapolis have recognized that the biggest threat to their rural landscapes is NOT livability and New Urbanism; it is business-as-usual suburban sprawl. The latter, by leading to formula-driven housing, commercial and office developments that look the same whether in New Mexico, New Jersey, or North Carolina, erodes the sense of community that preceded its arrival. Beginning in 1996, Belmont, Davidson and Cornelius adopted form based codes to help stem the tide of suburbanism emanating out from Charlotte as its metropolitan area boomed.

3.) The production line efficiency of stamping out off-the-rack buildings limits the value of New Urbanism. The Town of Belmont’s clustering of new development into small pods with connected, properly-sized streets and alleys is an important step in the right direction. However, when compared to the Antiquity at Cornelius development, where a series of building styles varies from building to building, Belmont pales. While Cornelius does not exhibit an infinite variety of architectural styles from house to house, even a mild variety in housing types here makes a dramatic difference in the sense of place. It chips away at the “Disney-esque” feeling that New Urbanism is sometimes accused of creating.

4.) Pods of New Urbanist residential development need to be within walking distance of activity centers. Not to pick on Belmont, but their dozen or so New Urbanist pods are isolated and are a mile or two from commercial activity. Belmont does have a quaint, mixed-use Main Street, but shopping options are limited and in tough competition with auto-oriented strip development located along State Route 74, with a particular concentration at the interchange with Interstate 85. Compare this to Antiquity at Cornelius, where a small town center is being built right in the midst of new residential neighborhoods; or Davidson, which has recognized the importance of its historic downtown, surrounded by hundreds of residential units adjacent to and within easy walking distance of downtown. Antiquity, Davidson and even Black Mountain offer the potential to eliminate at least one round trip a day by car. Isolated pods do not.

5.) Livable street design is equally important in all residential places, regardless of population density. Complete streets create the engineering foundation for a great street; Placemaking completes the job. On destination streets, multi-modal activity is fostered by triangulating multiple destinations within easy walking distance. Buildings are located to create the “walls” of an outdoor living room, and ground floor uses engage people on the street. This is as true in the two-story buildings in downtown Belmont as it is with the multi-story buildings on Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte. The street cross sections tame traffic and provide comfortable settings for activity; the speed of cars does not intimidate. A street does not need to have been created 100 years ago to establish the destination street feel, as the developers of Biltmore Park Town Square have proven.

6.) Malls don’t have to be totally auto-dependent, surrounded by seas of parking. Biltmore Park Town Square in Asheville proves that mall can move back towards a more sustainable form, centered on a Main Street and with office and residential mixed in.

7.) New development may need to age gracefully like a fine wine; Placemaking layered on top of modern planning can accelerate the creation of attractive patinas. New Urbanist principles such as Smart Codes, Form Based Codes, Complete Streets, and Mixed-Use Destinations create the bones for sustainable communities. However, while newly-created developments like Antiquity and Biltmore Square, there is some of that “Disney-esque” feel mentioned above. Older downtowns in Asheville and Davidson, by contrast, felt more natural and comfortable, the result of gradual informal Placemaking over the years.

Antiquity at Cornelius / Photo: Gary Toth

Click here to download the full report.

A street can be much more than just a route from Point A to Point B; indeed, streets can be truly great places when a variety of needs, uses, and modes are planned for. Fortunately, the Federal Highway Association (FHWA) has recognized that wider, straighter, faster planning strategies do not work for every road, leading to the creation of the Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) program, which aims to create thoroughfares that are more responsive to local needs.

From the FHWA’s website:

As citizens’ expectations for transportation projects have risen, so too has awareness of community needs among transportation planners and roadway designers. The question now becomes, “how do we create projects that are broadly supported and meet a range of needs?” The collaborative Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) approach is an answer to that question. With the CSS approach, interdisciplinary teams work with public and agency stakeholders to tailor solutions to the setting; preserve scenic, aesthetic, historic, and environmental resources; and maintain safety and mobility. The goal of FHWA’s CSS program is to deliver a program of transportation projects that is responsive to the unique character of the communities it serves. In short, CSS supports livable communities and sustainable transportation.

A team including our own Gary Toth and Aurash Khawarzad recently led a CSS team in re-thinking Denver’s Brighton Boulevard, which was chosen as one of four pilot sites in the CSS Champions program. Brighton Boulevard currently serves as a busy arterial connection between downtown Denver and its eastern suburbs. The road is surrounded mostly by industrial properties, and tensions have arisen as the city moves forward with plans to redevelop the corridor into a more walkable, livable area.

As the desire to create more multi-use neighborhoods becomes increasingly pervasive, more and more cities will be facing the same kinds of challenges that Denver is facing on Brighton Boulevard. Above is a new video, produced for PPS by Khawarzad, that illustrates how the CSS process works directly with local stakeholders to reconcile conflicting needs. If you think that your community could benefit from this approach, email gtoth@pps.org.

Photo: Mark Plotz / National Center for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW)

Govern + Invest is a theme that will be explored at Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. A question that will be examined is how bicycling and walking investments can add value to a community by creating economic activity, creating jobs, and improving quality of life.

Already we know that when it comes to jobs created per million dollars, bicycle facilities are one of the most efficient transportation investments. But once the paint dries and the asphalt cools, are there lasting economic effects? Can bicycle infrastructure build bicycle culture that will build a bicycle economy?

The answer seems to be yes — at least in the case of Long Beach, California. More than 20 new bicycle-related or bicycle-inspired businesses have opened at last count. I toured some of these business with Charlie Gandy and Melissa Balmer during a recent trip to Long Beach to meet these entrepreneurs, and prospect for locally-sourced goods and services for our conference. Twenty new businesses is a lot, especially in this economy, so you may be skeptical of these numbers (I was); but after meeting some impressive young people, I can assure you that it’s all real.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Yellow 108
A year-old business that recently relocated to Long Beach after being inspired by the city’s funky bicycle culture, Yellow 108 is a headwear company that produces its hats and accessories from salvaged and recycled materials. I met with co-founder Lauren Lilly, who has grown her business to ten employees and is now branching into bicycle accessories. What Lauren has already accomplished is impressive enough; watch Charlie Gandy’s interview with her, and you’ll see she’s destined for more.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Long Beach Pedaler Society
This pedicab upstart can be found plying the green sharrow lanes of Belmont Shores in search of fares. I spent part of a morning over coffee talking to Jesus Chavez and Joseph Bradley, co-founders of the Pedaler Society. These guys think big; they’re not afraid of risk; and they have clearly thrived thanks to the bike culture milieu in Long Beach. They are expanding into grocery delivery, and are even contemplating locally sourcing the manufacture of their vehicles as they expand their business. Building bikes in the United States? Sign me up. Look for the Pedalers when you make it to Long Beach.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

The Bicycle Stand
One of the newest businesses in Long Beach — and one of its friendliest — Evan Whitener’s shop specializes in refurbished vintage road bikes, and new city/commuter bikes. They were doing a very brisk bicycle restoration business when I stopped by. The Bicycle Stand is part bicycling museum, part fully functioning bike shop. If you worship lugged steel frames, you’ll like their Facebook page (linked above).

Photo: The Academy

The Academy
Have you ever tried to find affordable clothing that’s not made in a sweatshop? It’s nearly impossible; or at least I thought it was, until I walked into The Academy. They sell clothing designed to look good on the street and work well when you’re riding your bike. The Academy utilizes sustainable and reclaimed materials, and you can meet the person who sewed your clothes. If that’s not awesome enough, try the prices: shirts and kakis run about 43 bucks each. Stop by to meet Sam: he may lend you his bike for a roll around Long Beach.

And let’s not forget that Long Beach is also home to the original bicycle-related business: Bikestation!

There is hope and optimism in Long Beach; I hear it when talking to these brave, young entrepreneurs. Each cites Long Beach’s bicycling infrastructure investments, and its emergent bicycling culture as key to sparking, sustaining, and expanding their businesses.

Downtowns can be museums of economic development fads and crackpot schemes all designed to breathe economic life back into blighted areas. The pedestrian malls of the 70s; the aquariums of the 80s; the convention centers and stadiums of the 90s; the creative class coffee shops, wifi hot spots, and lifestyle centers of the 00s — these massive public/private expenditures may have provided an attraction, but they didn’t retain or attract the Laurens, the Jesuses, the Josephs, the Evans, and the Sams who will provide sustainable economic growth. There is a lesson in Long Beach. Let’s hope that walking, bicycling, and place become the new form of Economic Gardening.

See you in Long Beach!

Mark Plotz is the Conference Director for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. Registration for the conference is open now, and special rates apply until May 16, 11:59 pm Eastern. Large group discounts are available. Please contact Mark at (202) 223-3621 or mark@bikewalk.org for more info.

The issue of safety and older drivers is an important one. And we are grateful for the way the special needs of those drivers are highlighted in a new report called “Keeping Baby Boomers Mobile: Preserving the Mobility and Safety of Older Americans.” (You can download it here.) Unfortunately, the report, produced by AASHTO (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) in collaboration with TRIP, a national transportation research group representing contractors and engineering firms, continues to reinforce the “forgiving highways” orthodoxy that the transportation establishment has been promoting for too long now. (On the positive side, it also endorses a number of measures that AARP has been pressing for: better signs, retroreflective paint, brighter street lighting, etc.)

Drivers respond to their environment. Put them on a stretch of road that is wider, flatter, and straighter and they will drive faster. And on roads like these, speed causes crashes. Photo: Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America via Flickr.

It is time for AASHTO, TRIP, and other members of that establishment to recognize the limitations of “forgiving highways” principles. This approach, which aims to reduce crashes by designing roads to accommodate driver error, might work well for interstates, freeways, and rural highways. But it should not be applied to the rest of our nation’s roads. Evidence is mounting that not only does the “wider, straighter, and faster” philosophy fail to fix safety problems on urban and suburban arterials — it actually makes them worse. Let’s consider the issue of older drivers and safety from an engineering perspective. Engineering involves the practical application of science and math to solve problems, so we’ll take a closer look at the problem defined in the report and the applications suggested to address that problem.

On page 5, TRIP and AASHTO point out that left turns are of special concern because elderly people have more trouble making speed, distance, and gap judgments. These are all speed-related issues caused by cars going too fast through intersections. So what are the solutions proposed?

• Widening or adding left-turn lanes and increasing the length of merge or exit lanes
• Widening lanes and shoulders to reduce the consequence of driving mistakes
• Making roadway curves more gradual and easier to navigate

In other words, make the roads wider, straighter, and faster. How will this help?

AASHTO and TRIP suggest that wider lanes will allow drivers more room to maneuver, but this “countermeasure” only comes into play once the potential crash situation occurs. Nothing in the report addresses how to avoid the crash in the first place. And as the report clearly points out, such crashes are caused by speeds that are too high to allow drivers time to judge other cars’ speeds, their distance, and whether there is enough of a gap to make a turn (this doesn’t just affect older drivers, either).

Sadly, this kind of thinking is not surprising. It is exactly what the transportation industry has been doing since the 1960s. Buoyed by research on why interstate highways were so much safer than other roads, transportation experts convinced Congress during the 1966 Safety Hearings to apply the wider, straighter, and faster concepts to all American streets. As former career safety engineer Kenneth Stonex testified: “What we must do is to operate the 90% or more of our surface streets just as we do our freeways… [converting] the surface highway and street network to freeway road and roadside conditions.”

What is remarkable is how thoroughly and blindly the profession has adopted these principles.

We clear our roadsides of “fixed objects” such as trees, light poles, and other objects, creating “clear zones” to bring vehicles to controlled stops if and when they leave the roadway. We flatten curves, shave hills, and place guiderail and concrete barriers to redirect cars that stray. We install rumble strips to alert drivers when they are moving into an area that the engineer has placed off limits.

While the mission is accomplished for vehicles that do leave the roads, there is an unintended consequence: vehicular speeds go up. Paradoxically, more drivers do leave the road and there are more conflicts between drivers on the roads. And since speeds are higher, the consequences of crashes are far more severe.

Drivers respond to their environment. Put them on a stretch of road that is wider, flatter, and straighter and they will drive faster. Higher speeds may be okay on controlled-access freeways with no adjacent land uses or pedestrians, where sight distances are near infinite, curves are flat, and opposing roadways are separated by wide medians or center barriers. But those speeds don’t translate well to other environments.

We were so caught up in the idea that we were doing the right thing by building wider, straighter, and faster, that until recently we never stopped to check to see if we were getting the desired result. It is now clear from the evidence that higher speeds on all roads except freeways make us less safe. Research by Eric Dumbaugh [PDF] and evidence gleaned from the Netherlands Sustainable Safety program reveals that the key to safer non-freeway roads is slowing down traffic to speeds appropriate to context.

We understand that the concept that slower can be better is unpopular in a number of AASHTO’s member states. Rural and developing states incorrectly equate the idea of matching speeds to the context with “no more big roads to help us grow.” But if AASHTO wants to maintain its status as the “Voice of Transportation,” it needs to lead the industry into the 21^st century.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has already demonstrated this leadership. Its office of safety has produced a website to highlight proven countermeasures. Three of the top nine recommended measures involve approaches that either slow down vehicles and/or reduce the number of conflicts. None involve the 1960s approach of making roads wider, straighter, and faster. Similar recommendations are made on the FHWA Livability website.

There are other examples of respected members of the transportation industry acting proactively in the absence of leadership by AASHTO. In the “Smart Transportation Guide,” Pennsylvania and New Jersey DOTs provide guidance to their engineers on how to use design to slow down vehicles when appropriate for the context. The Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Congress for New Urbanism do likewise in their guide, “Context Sensitive Solutions in Designing Major Urban Thoroughfares for Walkable Communities.”

It is time for AASHTO to focus attention on the mounting evidence that arterials, collectors, and distributors need different solutions than freeways. High-speed roads in built-up areas not only decrease safety, they decimate the value of adjacent places, communities, and land use (as is so well said by Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns).

To address the needs of older drivers, AASHTO should be calling for design concepts that:

• When appropriate, slow down speeds to improve the ability of drivers to properly perceive speeds, distances, and gaps. See FHWA countermeasure for road diets and roundabouts.
• Eliminate the weaving and merging caused by multilane roads that are over capacity for all hours except perhaps the peak hour. See FHWA countermeasure for road diets.
• Eliminate the conflicts caused by a wide range of speeds created by road sections allowing some drivers to pass through at high design speeds in the same cross-section where others are slowing to enter or exit the roadway. See FHWA countermeasure for corridor access management.
• Eliminate the Safety Problems created by left turns on arterials, collectors and distributors. See FHWA countermeasure for roundabouts.

TRIP should embrace these solutions as well. Yes, it is an organization representing highway contractors and large engineering firms. But there will be as much money in building and designing roundabouts, road diets, and revamped access management as there would be in wider, straighter, and faster projects.

The end result would be truly 21^st-century roads that are safer for older drivers — and for everyone.

Photo: Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America via Flickr.

Yet when we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.

Credit: Andy Singer

Credit: Andy Singer

First, an explanation of what I call the “deadly duo”: travel projection models and Levels of Service (LOS) performance metrics.Travel projection models are computer programs that use assumptions about future growth in population, employment, and recreation to estimate how many new cars will be on roads 20 or 30 years into the future.

Models range from quite simplistic to incredibly complex and expensive. Simple models deal primarily with coarse movements of vehicles between cities, while complex models deal with the intricacies of what happens on the fine grid of urban areas. To be truly accurate, growth projection modeling can be expensive. Therefore, absent compelling reason to do otherwise, most growth projections tend to be done using less expensive techniques, which usually lead to overestimates.

Levels of Service (LOS) is a performance metric which flourished during the interstate- and freeway-building era that went from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using a scale of A to F, LOS attempts to create an objective formula to answer a subjective question: How much congestion are we willing to tolerate? As in grade school, “F” is a failing grade and “A” is perfect.

Engineers decided that LOS “C” was a good balance between overinvestment in perfection and underinvestment leading to congestion. In urban areas, a concession was made to accept LOS D, representing slightly more restricted but still free-flowing traffic. LOS is commonly (actually, almost always) calculated using travel projections for 20 to 30 years into the future.

Using basic traffic models and LOS C/D to plan and design the interstate system was a no-brainer in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. When deciding how many lanes to build on a freeway connecting major cities, a sensitivity of plus or minus 10,000 trips a day could be tolerated, and the incremental difference in cost to plow through undeveloped land was relatively insignificant.

Good approach, wrong setting

I’m not going to look back and quibble with the general philosophy of how the interstates and the associated high-speed freeways were planned and designed. On many levels, the approach made sense.

But it became increasingly less persuasive when applied to the rest of our road network. Unlike interstates and freeways, most roads exist not just to move traffic through the area, but also to serve the homes, businesses, and people along them. Yet in search of high LOS rankings, transportation professionals have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other inappropriate strategies. In ridding our communities of the weeds of congestion, we have also pulled out the very plants that made our “gardens” worthwhile in the first place.

It’s worth remembering, too, that not all congestion is bad. John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee and current CEO and President of the Congress for New Urbanism, suggests that congestion is like cholesterol: there is a good kind and a bad kind.

What makes the prevailing situation even more troubling is that there are no comprehensive requirements dictating the use of either LOS or travel modeling in transportation planning and project design. The “Green Book” from the Association of American State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) (more formally known as “A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets”) clearly states that these are guidelines to be applied with judgment — not mandates. So does the Federal Highway Administration’s “Highway Capacity Manual.”

The idea that we must rid our roads of  any and all traffic congestion is, in fact, a self-imposed requirement. As Eric Jaffe wrote in an article for Atlantic Cities in December, 2011:

Although cities aren’t required to abide LOS measures by law, over the years the measure hardened into convention. By the time cities recognized the need for balanced transportation systems, LOS was entrenched in the street engineering canon.

Worse yet, many designers size a road or intersection to be free-flowing for the worst hour of the day. Sized to accommodate cars during the highest peak hour, such streets will be “overdesigned” for the other 23 hours of the day and will always function poorly for the surrounding community.

If that isn’t troubling enough, LOS is often calculated using traffic predicted 20 years into the future, even in urban settings. Until the forecasted growth materializes, the roadway will be overdesigned, even during the peak hour. Overdesigned roadways encourage motorists to drive at higher speeds, making them difficult to cross and unpleasant to walk along. This degrades public spaces between the edges of the road and the adjacent buildings, encourages people to drive short distances, and generally unravels a community’s social fabric.

Let me repeat: Contrary to what you may hear, there is no national requirement or mandate to apply LOS standards and targets 20 years into the future for urban streets. This thinking is a remnant from 1960s era  policy for the interstate system, and has erroneously been passed down from generation to generation.

There is no national requirement or mandate to apply LOS standards and targets 20 years into the future for urban streets. Credit: Andy Singer

So what are the right approaches?

Asking the simple question, “Do you want congestion reduced at a particular location?” is a question out of context. It’s like asking you whether you want to never be stung by a bee again. Of course, the answer will be yes. But what if I told you that to in order to never suffer a sting again, every plant within a several mile radius would have to be destroyed — and that you could never leave the area of destruction?

You would have a completely different answer, I’m sure.

The question that needs to be asked in urban settings is not whether you ever want to sit in congestion again. Who does? The question is whether you want to eliminate congestion on your Main Street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year — knowing that the consequence would be a community with decimated economic and social value, increased reliance on car use, increased crashes, and, ultimately, more congestion.

Recognizing the need for balance, a number of entities are beginning to promote approaches sensitive to the context.

I was the New Jersey Department of Transportation’ s project manager for  the “Smart Transportation Guide” (STG), adopted jointly by the state DOTs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.   The STG directs DOT designers to consider the tradeoffs between vehicular LOS and “local service.” It goes on to say that if the street in question is not critical to regional movement, that LOS E or F could be acceptable — and that designers may actually need to design to slow down cars.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers, an “international association of transportation professionals responsible for meeting mobility and safety needs” also promoted this concept in its landmark “Context Sensitive Solutions Guidelines for Urban Thoroughfares.” Florida DOT has adopted multimodal LOS standards, and cities like Charlotte, N.C., have elevated pedestrian and bicycle LOS to the level of that for automobiles. We have a long way to go, but the door is opening.

Creating balanced standards for roadway design will benefit transportation as well. In the Netherlands, the “Livable Streets” policy led to a remarkable improvement in safety on their roadways. They started in the 1970s with a crash rate 15 percent higher than in the U.S., and now have a crash rate 60 percent lower.

Design with the community in mind

It’s time for communities and transportation professionals alike to accept that we have been using the wrong tools for the wrong job. LOS and travel modeling may be effective when sizing and locating high-speed freeways, but are totally inappropriate in every other setting. If travel modeling with high rates of growth is used to make street decisions, your community may be doomed to a series of roadway widenings or intersection expansions. If vehicular LOS C or D performance measures are adopted as non-negotiable targets, major road construction will be heading your way.

Village, suburban and city streets need to be designed with the community in mind using the PPS principle of Streets as Places to  create a vision for a great community and then plan your streets to support that vision.

Lets not be fooled by the appearance of science behind Levels of Service and Traffic Modeling. As I pointed out in an interview with Wayne Senville that was published in the November 2010 “Planning Commissioner’s Journal,” LOS standards are easy to understand — and that’s exactly what makes them so dangerous.

All images by Andy Singer.

PPS has already begun to support innovation and transportation reform at the community level. For instance, PPS is working in Chicago with the Metropolitan Planning Council to institutionalize placemaking and ensure that the local transportation agencies are a part of this process. Additionally, Gary Toth has worked in Hartford, Connecticut with the Hub of Hartford Committee. They are trying to influence Connecticut DOT to study replacement of an elevated Interstate freeway that runs through the city with a new facility that would both knit the redeveloping downtown back together and still address the transportation needs of regional and local I-84 traffic.

PPS is also continuing to support valuable vehicles for grassroots change such as Streetsblog and StreetFilms. These online tools grew out of the collaborative New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, which advocates for re-imagining New York City’s streets as lively public spaces.

To continue to foster local innovation at the local level, PPS will undertake the following activities:

• Through private funding, PPS will continue to provide assistance to selected communities in which a short intervention can help to support innovative projects and programs at the local community level. Ultimately, we envision creating a team of individuals who can help provide assistance in a number of areas. We will complete assignments in 3-4 communities as a test of this approach.
• PPS is seeking to collaborate with local community and family foundations in 4-6 cities to launch local campaigns around Streets as Places. The intent is to use these local communities as pilot programs and “communities of practice” that can serve as models for other cities as the campaign develops.

Project for Public Spaces’ Transportation projects have ranged from local streets to state arterials in all parts of the country and in all types of communities. Projects have consisted of everything from simple streetscape improvements, to analysis of complex intersections and major thoroughfares; from transit-station designs to transit-oriented downtown plans; from light-rail corridors, to mixed vehicle/transit streets, to plans for the street environments of entire downtowns and commercial districts.

Some recent examples of PPS project work making Places out of streets, roads and transit facilities are:

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