Click to purchase from Powell’s

Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, is worth a read for its acerbic wit, alone. The author fits a remarkable collection of data and anecdotal evidence from his long career in urban design (which included a four-year stint at the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts’ design department) into a mere 260 pages while maintaining a tone that is both punchy and urgent. It’s not often that I’ve found people who can make the discussion of parking minimums entertaining, but Speck has a way with words.

Walkable City begins with Speck’s General Theory of Walkability, before proceeding on to an overview of the challenges facing our built environment today. The author’s deep understanding of the topic at hand thus becomes clear early on, and by the time the book launches into its meatiest section—a detailed breakdown of the Ten Steps of Walkability—the author-reader bond is already established. Barely a fifth of the way through the book, it is hard not to already feel engaged, like a comrade-in-arms.

But this is not the next great book on American cities; Speck says so himself in the prologue, arguing that “That book is not needed. An intellectual revolution is no longer necessary.” This struck me as odd, and it nagged at the back of my mind throughout what was otherwise a mostly enjoyable read. For, as Speck explains a mere paragraph after the line quoted above, “We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities—after forgetting for four—yet we’ve somehow not been able to pull it off.”

That “we’ve” is instructive; the book is seemingly intended for a mass audience, but I got the sense that I was part of a choir, being preached to with the church doors thrown open. While it is a very accessible book, Walkable City comes off feeling a bit more specific than it seems the author himself had hoped. There is a preoccupation with the physical cityscape that suggests the underlying assumption that the reader has some knowledge of and access to the proper channels to act on the information that’s being presented. But many (or even most, if the book is intended for a mass market) won’t.

Indeed, for a book about walkability, Walkable City seems much more concerned with cars and buildings than with people. “America will be finally ushered into ‘the urban century’ not by its few exceptions,” writes Speck, in wrapping up the prologue, “but by a collective movement among its everyday cities to do once again what cities do best, which is to bring people together—on foot.” Yet at the outset of the section titled The Useful Walk, he writes that “Cars are the lifeblood of the American city.” Are we to understand, then, that it is a collective movement among our cars that will create more walkable cities?

Of course not.  People are the lifeblood of cities, and if we’re going to pull off the feat of ushering America into the urban century, we have to show those people not only why walkability is important, but how their own actions and decisions can help to create more of it. [Of note, via PPS's transportation director Gary Toth: even AASHTO included the following line in the 1984 edition of the Green Book: “…it is extremely difficult to make adequate provisions for pedestrians.  Yet, this must be done, because pedestrians are the lifeblood of our urban areas…”]

“Specialists,” Speck writes in no uncertain terms, “are the enemy of the city, which is by definition a general enterprise.” Yet the urban designer seems not to heed his own advice. If he had, we may have seen a fifth category in the book’s General Theory of Walkability; alongside The Useful Walk, The Safe Walk, The Comfortable Walk, and The Interesting Walk, perhaps a section on The Considered Walk.

If we’re going to create more popular support for walkability in the US, we need people in auto-centric places to start thinking differently about the benefits of getting around on foot instead of by car: improved health, more time to spend with families, lower transportation costs, more unplanned social encounters, better sense of purpose and community. If you’ve lived your whole life in a landscape dominated by cars (as most Americans have), walkability may be far from the front of your mind. The idea that an intellectual revolution is no longer necessary assumes that everyone is already on the same page. They’re not.

For those of us who are already advocating for more walkable urban fabric, Walkable City offers a wealth of facts and figures with which we can load our cannons. But it also serves as a reminder that we have to keep working on how we present that information to broader constituencies. We’re getting there, but we’re still en route.

A colorful crosswalk scene / Photo: Alex E. Proimos via Flickr

For more, check out Brendan’s conversation on Walkable City with Next American City’s Brady Dale, part of the #NextCityBooks online book club series.

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 Urban-to-Rural Transect allows for a much wider variety of street types than many road design guides.

“Street design manuals and land use plans are the moulds that our cities come out of,” noted Ryan Snyder during a presentation on the Model Design Manual for Living Streets at the Congress for New Urbanism’s Transportation Summit, which took place last month in Long Beach, CA. “What we need to be asking right now is: What could our manuals give us? … Streets are the majority of our public space. Why do we only let the engineers design it?”

Snyder’s question was at the heart of a discussion that stretched across the back-to-back CNU Summit and Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference (PWPB). Among the hundreds of active transportation advocates, planners, designers, and enthusiasts gathered in Long Beach, there was a core group of engineers who were grappling with new federal legislation, shifting funding structures, and public trends—and how these rather dramatic changes would affect the future of their field. Within this group, everyone seemed to agree that design guides and tools like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO) Functional Classification System, Level of Services, and Green Book are being misused to block change rather than to build smarter, safer roads that serve their communities.

Fortunately, that’s getting more difficult in an era of fiscal constraint. As AASHTO director John Horsley explained during a panel at the CNU Summit, “We can’t build [roads] in the old way because we can’t afford [to build enough highway capacity to keep up with the] land use pattern of sprawl. My guys work for the governors. You can’t do it the same way anymore because if you look at a 10-year fiscal sustainability timeline, you just can’t get there from here.”

This is something that many people, both within and from outside of the transportation field, can no doubt understand and relate to. Economic recession and the resulting fiscal constraint are forcing people in every field—particularly those where the public sector is involved—to re-consider how they do what they do. We’re re-assessing our priorities, getting more creative about financing, and questioning our sacred cows. As many have already pointed out over the past few years, a recession, while undeniably painful, can be energizing in how it forces organizations and industries to innovate.

For Placemakers and New Urbanists (plenty of overlap there), in a way, the timing of this recession is fortuitous. Just as many Americans are waking up to the mounting problems arising from the way that we’ve built our cities over the past fifty years of auto-centric policy-making, the money for the capital-intensive model of yesteryear is disappearing. The Placemaking movement has grown significantly over the past few decades, and offers a robust model for tying citizens more directly to the decision-making process around the way their communities are shaped. Seen through this lens, public engagement isn’t a necessary evil that designers and engineers have to deal with on the way to pushing through new roads, but an opportunity for building a broad base of public support that can be leveraged to fund future solutions, many of which could avoid building costly infrastructure.

Now, as the money available shrinks and public awareness of the importance of Place grows, the time is ripe for the development of new design guides that offer more flexibility in the possible outcomes that they can produce, and for highlighting the flexibility that already exists in guides like the Green Book. As Snyder argued above, these guides play a crucial role in how our world is organized; streets are places, and they must be treated as such. This means involving many more people than just transportation officials in determining how to measure the success of a given roadway. “Traffic engineers are doing what the public has trained them to do for decades,” argued PPS’s Gary Toth during a discussion at PWPB. “They’re problem solvers, so if you want new solutions, give them new problems.”

Great streets are entirely within our reach--as long as we're asking engineers the right questions! / Photo: PPS

By necessity, transportation engineering is a hyper-professionalized field; we certainly don’t want average citizens in complete control of how roads are designed. But there is more room for people to work with engineers on the roads that do come through their neighborhoods. Current design guides oversimplify the types of communities that our roadways serve—the Functional Classification System goes so far as to divide all roads into two types: urban and rural. By contrast, the New Urbanist Urban-to-Rural Transect includes seven different types of land use patterns.

“Part of our problem,” Horsley stated, “is that we live in a siloed world. Our guys think of themselves as street, road, and highway designers, not [community builders]. The Placemaking concept that PPS advocates is an alien concept to them. Somebody needs to link what needs to be done at the community level to what our guys do when they plan the networks. Part of what we need to do is give permission to the transpo guys to look at a broader array of issues…We need different vocabulary for the same objectives.”

If the crowd at the CNU Summit and PWPB is any indication, that new vocabulary is evolving quickly. Guides like Snyder’s Model Design Manual for Living Streets, which was created to guide how roads are designed and built in the infamously auto-centric city of Los Angeles, explicitly builds people and Placemaking into the design process. “Our streets are public space, and they impact so many areas of our lives,” Snyder explained. “We wanted to look at equity, look at things for all ages, all modes, connectivity, traffic calming as part of the design; we wanted something that connects people.”

Connecting people is what roads have always done, in theory, but for too long we’ve been thinking of that connection purely across long distances. We connect from home to work, or from our neighborhood to our friends across town. Today that logic is clearly shifting. Our streets must be designed to encourage human connection within neighborhoods: out on the sidewalks, in the bike lanes, along leafy boulevards, and in public squares lined with lively local businesses. What should our design manuals give us? That’s a question that Placemakers—not just engineers—need to answer, and now.

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.

CNU's John Norquist

Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place keynote speaker John Norquist, who currently serves as the President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, spoke with us recently about the role and responsibility of decision makers, what urbanists need to learn, and what CNU’s 2012 Transportation Summit—immediately preceding Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place on September 9-10 in Long Beach—means for the conference this year. Before joining CNU, John served as the Mayor of Milwaukee, WI, from 1988-2004; in 1998, John was named one of Governing magazine’s Public Officials of the Year.

Following the interview, we’ve put together a list of related PWPB:PP panel discussions. This year’s conference will take place in Long Beach, CA, from September 10-13. Early registration rates are available through this Thursday, July 12th—so don’t delay!

How does biking and walking contribute to, and fit into a great street?

You can’t have a prosperous neighborhood where people can engage in social interaction and converse if they have to drive everywhere. If you can accommodate biking and walking, you’re much more likely to have social interaction, social equity, and a high performing real estate market — it all comes together. If you have a walkable environment, people that aren’t wealthy and those who are, actually end up in the same proximity. They interact, and it strengthens the culture, the economy, and the outcomes that you get.

Can you tell us some of what was happening when you were Mayor of Milwaukee?

The Functional Classification System needs to be entirely reevaluated. In certain rural contexts, it makes sense, but applying it to urban contexts doesn’t. For example, Greenwich Village is rated F (lowest) based on congestion. It’s congested with people who want to be there! They’re buying stuff, and creating jobs, and creating art. It’s a completely non-context sensitive classification that rates Greenwich Village an F. And that’s what gave rise to the CNU/ITE jointly-produced Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach. It’s a recommended practice that illustrates how to implement mixed-use streets.

As mayor, John pushed for the removal of Milwaukee's Park East freeway spur, which is now being re-developed as a mixed-use neighborhood / Photo: Paul Hohmann via Flickr

How can we help the development and real estate sectors recognize the return on investing in Active Living by Design?

Mixed-use walkable communities are performing much better in the real estate market right now than communities that are auto-centric. The return on value per acre is much higher in walkable urban environments. We have a lot of land in the United States, but land that’s convenient to where the people are is a limited commodity. For developers, it’s a natural fit for them to be able to have more intense development in urban real estate. If everyone’s relying on cars, you have to accommodate all those vehicles by using up land with parking facilities, and surface lots that are not only expensive, but ugly. Developers have a lot of reasons to embrace a more walkable development pattern but it’s hard for them because many government policies obstruct them.

The Functional Classification System that is still the core of the AASHTO Green Book and DOTs all over the country encourages oversized roads and auto-centricity. Then there are Federal policies including those issued by the Federal Housing Administration that are pushing separate use zoning through their mortgage and capital programs that assign high risk to buildings that include both housing and retail. [Editor's Note:  John notes that Shaun Donovan and HUD are aware of this and are trying to make changes.] That really undermines the ability of developers to produce the kind of urban walkable environment that people increasingly want. What can be done on a small scale to shift that? Make a case to local officials that neighborhoods with both housing and amenities such as retail create a stronger tax base for local governments. Compact, well-connected neighborhoods with sidewalks are great for bikers, and even those who don’t ride bikes benefit from stronger communities.

At Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place we are aiming to broaden how people think about biking and walking by bringing together architects, urbanists, and people in transportation. Can you talk about the collaboration between these disciplines and what you hope for the future?

Whether you’re an architect, engineer or designer, you should aim for the triple bottom line where you have environmental, economic, and social benefits. Block sizes and intersection density, these are some of the issues that have a profound effect on these benefits. If you have a well-connected grid of streets, you’ve created an environment where somebody who needs a job has a much better chance of connecting socially and economically; whether they’re working a great job, or marginal job, at least they’re around money.

But when you have a disconnected, auto-centric grid like the one they’ve created in Detroit over the last 60 years…you can see the outcome. The city’s transit system is almost nonexistent.  If you look at the poorest neighborhoods in NYC, in the Bronx, because of a fabulously well-connected city grid and transit system, someone living there can be at Wall Street, the district with the highest job density per acre in North America, in just 35 minutes for a $2.25 transit fare. The money’s in the middle instead of being dispersed out in enclaves, and that gives people chances. This type of street grid and transit also fosters walking and biking.

What do you think New Urbanists need to learn?

They need to embrace and appreciate bicycling more and more. Bicycling is an important catalyst to move communities toward an urbanism that is ecologically sound and economically productive. The bicyclists are the ones who often bring pressure for change in transportation the more they take over the more the good things happen. Those interested in cities need to appreciate them more as bicycling is very compatible with everything that is urban. We ought to promote it even more than we already do.

What is a message you’d like to promote at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place?

The Functional Classification System needs to be entirely reevaluated. In certain rural contexts, it makes sense, but applying it to urban contexts doesn’t. For example, Greenwich Village is rated F (lowest) based on congestion. It’s congested with people who want to be there! They’re buying stuff, and creating jobs, and creating art. It’s a completely non-context sensitive classification that rates Greenwich Village an F. And that’s what gave rise to the CNU/ITE jointly-produced Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach. It’s a recommended practice that illustrates how to implement mixed-use streets.

Some environmentalists blame the road lobby for selfishly seeking financial gain by supporting highway expenditures and opposing money for bicycle and transit infrastructure. Actually, all contractors have to be a little selfish, or they would go out of business. What the road lobby needs to realize is that can make money by building lots of streets, alleys and sidewalks. Did you know there are more miles of streets in metropolitan Chicagoland than the whole interstate system? The idea that somehow the road building industry should be appalled by being asked to design streets to include cyclists is strange. There’s a lot of pavement to be laid for bus and bike lanes. Pavement is ok as long as it adds value to the community where it’s placed. That’s what the road builders need to learn.

Can you tell us a little bit about the plans for CNU’s 2012 Transportation Summit this year?

We have some of the most forward thinking transportation experts who are really serious about challenging the norm in transportation. We’re not interested in talking about this stuff forever; we want to change the system now. It’s not about changing a legislature in Congress that changes a funding budget; the goal is to fundamentally change transportation so that it becomes about adding value instead of just moving vehicles.

I think the Summit being held at the same venue as PWPB:PP will lead to a really effective cross-fertilization that leads to a higher level of achievement. Our goals are to change the functional classification system, that’s too focused on creating capacity for motor vehicles. Any road built in a city should accommodate walking and biking. Period. We all need to raise our expectations, and demand more. We need to push, and we can win!  No more car right of ways in cities that don’t have accommodations for bikers and walkers!

Suggested PWPB:PP Panel Sessions:
(For the full list, click here)

Panel 1: Advocacy Campaigns for Better Bikeways

Learn how advocacy campaigns at Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are educating and organizing residents and allies to move bikeways projects forward

Panel 4: Innovative Public Engagement for Pedestrian and Bicycle Planning: Engaging the Community Using New Technologies, and Sustaining Momentum

Learn how to engage oft-underrepresented community members in the planning process, utilize cutting-edge engagement tools and mobile workshops, and foster public dialogue about the role of walking and bicycling in a community.

Panel 18: Times Change, People Change, Needs Change

Learn how designers must continue to update their conceptual approaches and their detailed designs to reflect current values, new techniques, and the discoveries of recent research.

Panel 21: Bikeway Design Details: Small Facilities, Large Issues

In this session, a qualified panel of experts will describe some of the unique problems they faced in bikeway design, their approach to finding solutions, and will share their knowledge and procedures with others.

Panel 42: The Power of the Performance Metric–Getting your Jurisdiction Back on Track

This session describes a collaborative effort to calculate new metrics for the City of Los Angeles. The process sheds light on how complicated and multidimensional the transportation system is, and on the power of outsiders to change it.

Panel 44: Congressional Action on Transportation: What it Means for You

Learn the latest developments in Congress on the transportation bill, the impact on bicycling and walking on the ground, and lessons learned about effectively communicating the benefits of bicycling and walking.

Mobile Workshop 68: Improving Bicycle and Pedestrian Access to Transit

This session will explore ways in which improved multi-modal access to transit has helped reshape communities regardless of their size or local economic conditions.

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For those of you interested in learning more about how to foster great streets, register 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. Register before Thursday, July 12th, to receive the discounted earlybird rate!

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.