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Maybe a Little Congestion Isn't the
Worst Thing That Can Happen
By R Walker, as posted on
Congress for the New Urbanism
Sometimes it helps
when the state department of transportation runs out of money.
That's what Allen
Biehler, secretary of transportation for the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, seemed to suggest Thursday morning. He was speaking as
part of the panel "Putting Traffic in Its Place: Using the New CNU/ITE
Manual," one of the NU 202 sessions.
"We've have trained
our citizens to expect that if there's congestion, we're going to
solve that congestion."
But maybe avoiding
congestion isn't the most important thing. And maybe the price for
keeping some local streets free of traffic is, in terms of livability
for the whole community, too. Sometimes a slight degradation in level
of service, on the other hand, may be offset by huge gains in
livability and aesthetics.
Mr. Biehler told of
his experience in 2003-2004: State transportation officials realized
they had $5 billion worth of transportation projects in the works for
which they had no way to pay.
On half of these
projects “we put our pencil down,” Biehler said. The other half they
scaled back to make them affordable somehow.
One of them was an
eight-mile stretch of highway due for a bypass. Three years later, the
project has been downsized. What started out to be a four-lane freeway
with three interchanges is now to be a four-lane arterial with a lower
speed limit and a parklike setting.
"Clearly it's not
the same carrying capacity, but it's affordable. And also, much more
important – is what it is going to mean for the future of that area."
"We’ve skewed the
system so badly in favor of high levels of service and less
livability," Walter Kulash of Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin Lopez
Rinehart observed later in the session. "The theme of what we’re
dealing with is conflict with entrenched paradigms" – about what
transportation systems are supposed to do and about what makes for
safe streets.
Eric Dumbaugh,
assistant professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at
Texas A & M University, made a strong case that traffic engineers
sometimes fail to understand the implications of their own accident
data.
He presented some
forceful statistics showing that while American rates of highway
fatalities have fallen significantly over the past 30 years or so,
they haven't fallen as fast as the rates in other advanced countries.
"We’ve fallen behind our first-world design peers."
The problem is that
American road builders' model for a safe road is an Interstate highway
– with limited access, wide lanes, and few turning options. The result
is that engineers try to turn every road into an Interstate, with
serious effects on aesthetics, and on safety too.
Dumbaugh argued that
there is another model for a safe road, and that is the local street
that is "dangerous by design." Its hazards – curbside trees, for
instance – are obvious. They force drivers to slow down, and that
makes for greater safety.
He showed a slide of
a stretch of road in Florida he had studied as part of a larger
investigation of car crash sites. This particular stretch is lined by
trees – the obstacle traffic engineers love to hate – on not just one
but both sides. But it was clear from the picture that this is part of
a real neighborhood – the kind of area where a driver instinctively
slows down.
The road runs
through the campus of Stetson University, an area with college
students, dorms, and bars. And yet during the five year period his
study covered, Dumbaugh said, there was not a single fatal crash
there.
Norman Garrick of
the University of Connecticut lamented that in most jurisdictions
nowadays, "nobody is professionally charged with developing the grid
of streets."
But streets are
"paramount in shaping our sense of place," he added, giving three
essential about good streets: They are built on a network, they need
to accommodate all users, and they need to be understood and designed
as places, not just conduits for traffic.
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