Month: August 2011

During the Institute of Transportation Enginers’ annual meeting in St. Louis last week, Heather Smith, program director for the Congress for the New Urbanism, hailed the response that a CNU-ITE manual — Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach — has generated. 

Smith says that the manual has been downloaded more than 1,500 times from the ITE website, and is being used by transportation planners, public works departments, city leaders, and community members. It’s helping them to “design better streets, mitigate traffic, spur economic growth, and act on public health concerns,” says an account posted on the CNU website.

In her dispatch about the conference, Smith also told about “several counterintuitive and overlooked points,” which were presented by John LaPlante, chief transportation planning engineer in the Chicago office of T.Y. Lin International. Those points, Smith says, were:

Designing wider roads means more time for pedestrians to cross, which in turn means more wait times for cars.

Designing more wait times for pedestrians means most cars will go 45 mph on major thoroughfares and stop for 2 minutes instead of going along at 30 mph with less stopping time.

In scenarios with narrower streets engineers can actually increase car capacity because there is less time for pedestrians to cross the street.

Mid-block crossings are safer for pedestrians because there is traffic coming from 2 directions instead of 4 at intersections.

LaPlante, Smith, and Jefferey Riegner of Whiteman, Requardt, and Associates discussed complete streets and multimodal level of service as part of a panel discussion at the conference. 

How can many roads be made safer? LaPlante said that installing signal countdown timers at intersections reduces the crash rate by 25 percent. The new MUTCD manual is requiring these signals.

Smith also reports:

LaPlante pointed out that completes streets are a must and showed the benefits of designing speeds to Level of Service D. LaPlante also pointed out that we need better ways to measure non-motorized travel. He referred to TRB’s latest Highway Capacity manual (due out in September) that contains more advanced methods of analyzing pedestrian level of service. 

Another session, presented by Jim Daisa and Brain Bochner, discussed two new case studies — one on Lancaster Boulevard in Fort Worth, the other on a transit-oriented development near the Pleasant Hill Bart Station in the San Francisco Bay Area.

To read more about Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares, click here.

Continue reading “Narrow roads often work better than wide ones”

"Whether to hit the officer or not, or to just get away, you’re still hitting another person with a car, a deadly weapon," said Brannan.
B’ Spokes: There is no doubt in my mind that police officers who use a bike as part of there job "get it." and those police officers who never received any training at all … well justice is not always on the side of the cyclists unless they work extra hard for it.
Continue reading “It’s just an "accident" unless it’s a police officer on the bike.”

Charles Marohn, New Urban Network
The American Society of Civil Engineers has just released a report that should be titled, "Pretending it is 1952." Like a broken record, ASCE is again painting a bleak picture of the future if American politicians — as if they need to be plied — won’t open up the checkbook for our noble engineers. And in a way that the Soviet Central Committee would have expected from Pravda, the media and blogger world is sounding the alarm. This feels more like a cult than a serious discussion on America’s future.
In the Long Depression of the 1870s, the railroads found they had over-invested in transportation capacity. Speculating on future growth and the returns on land development, they collectively built more rail lines than could be put to productive use. The result was a huge financial correction in which the private-sector railroads consolidated their routes, down-sized their unproductive infrastructure and put their reserve capacity into endeavors that had a higher rate of return. This was a painful, but necessary, correction.
The parallels to 2011 are obvious. We’ve built out the interstate highway system as it was originally envisioned — although we opted to go through cities instead of around as planned — and then we built some more. We poured money in highways, county roads and local streets. We have so much transportation infrastructure — a huge proportion of it with no productivity — that every level of government is now choking on maintenance costs.
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Continue reading “Pretending it is 1952”

In the linked article it says:
"Gov. Martin O’Malley said Sunday that the economic stimulus approved by Congress in 2009 didn’t go far enough and he called for new investments in infrastructure … to spur job growth."
1. If government spends money on anything it "spurs job growth" but that’s not the real point here is it?
2. NEW infrastructure zaps wealth, it does not create it. Emphasis on creating new over repair and maintenance of existing infrastructure is like buying new dishes instead of washing the old ones. It costs more money to always be buying new things so it must be good for the economy, right? As I said, new infrastructure zaps wealth, in this case it zaps money that would be better spent elsewhere.
3. Maryland with the 4th highest pedestrian fatality rate on roads that have little to no thought about pedestrian safety and the emphasis should be on building more unsafe roads like what we have? We should be spending money on getting our roads to safely accommodate everyone rather then "it’s good for the economy to be killing people on our roads so long as cars get to go really fast."
4. Letting roads go to such disrepair actually costs government more to fix them then if they kept them in good repair in the first place.
5. Roads in such disrepair damages the vehicles that use such poor roads. Costing each and every motor vehicle owner thousands (and I have quite a few broken spokes as well from pot holes.) But I guess maintaining poor roads "creates" wealth for someone else at your expense.
6. All this misplaced "need" for new roads when Americans are driving less and taking mass transit more (and even biking more) is just wrong. Report after report says there are more jobs per dollar spent if spent on bike facilities or even mass transit then building new roads. Even reports from O’Malley’s own state say this but is he even listening to his own state? Apparently this "stimulus" spending is not about new jobs after all.
Continue reading “O’Malley and McDonnell discuss economy”

Rebuttal from Commute by Bike by Ted Johnson
Every now and then I must relearn the lesson that doctors aren’t necessarily scientists.
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https://www.commutebybike.com/2011/08/17/cycling-over-50-the-benefits-just-dont-outweigh-the-potential-consequences/