WEBVTT 00:00:10.146 --> 00:00:17.981 - My name's Buff Brown. I am the president of BTOP, Bloomington Transportation Options for People. And 00:00:17.981 --> 00:00:26.048 - we have brought our speaker in and a number of speakers for the last two years. And if you want to join 00:00:26.048 --> 00:00:33.883 - BTOP, please sign the paper that's just outside the door over there. And actually, you don't have to 00:00:33.883 --> 00:00:39.390 - join BTOP. If you put your name there, we will make sure you're on the 00:00:39.522 --> 00:00:50.289 - the list so that you get announcements of future speakers as well. I want to thank our sponsors today. 00:00:50.289 --> 00:00:59.070 - They are BTOP and the City of Bloomington also contributed to today's presentation. 00:00:59.266 --> 00:01:07.483 - and Health by Design. Health by Design is an organization that started two years ago as a result of 00:01:07.483 --> 00:01:15.864 - one of our speakers, Lawrence Frank. It's an organization that's housed, or its home is Indianapolis, 00:01:15.864 --> 00:01:24.902 - and it relates the issues of health, as in obesity and air quality, things like that with how our environment 00:01:24.902 --> 00:01:27.614 - is built, the built environment. 00:01:29.666 --> 00:01:41.032 - I want to briefly introduce our speaker. I hope that he spends a little time telling you about himself 00:01:41.032 --> 00:01:52.509 - because I don't have anything particularly prepared. But he is a consultant with a very well-known firm 00:01:52.509 --> 00:01:56.702 - that includes people like Dan Burden. 00:01:58.050 --> 00:02:08.883 - That consulting firm is Gladding Jackson in Orlando, Florida. He is a traffic engineer. He's well-known 00:02:08.883 --> 00:02:19.299 - around the nation, speaks regularly all over the nation with regard to traffic engineering and it's 00:02:19.299 --> 00:02:26.174 - in some new progressive thinking in that field. So, let me not... 00:02:27.042 --> 00:02:37.238 - talk too long on this and introduce Walter Kulash, professional engineer from Gladding Jackson, Orlando, 00:02:37.238 --> 00:02:47.337 - Florida. Thank you. Delighted to be here. I'm impressed with the crowd here given that it's big opening 00:02:47.337 --> 00:02:54.814 - day of the football season. Although I understand from the point spread that 00:02:55.426 --> 00:03:04.817 - Maybe it's not going to be a serious contest. Yeah, I am a traffic engineer. I love the smell of fresh 00:03:04.817 --> 00:03:13.935 - laid asphalt on a fall morning. And designing and laying more asphalt was, in fact, the whole focus 00:03:13.935 --> 00:03:23.144 - of my career for perhaps the first two decades of it. Everyone knew exactly what the problem was for 00:03:23.144 --> 00:03:25.150 - us traffic engineers. 00:03:25.250 --> 00:03:33.217 - traffic engineer, too much traffic, not enough capacity, what could be simpler, get out there and create 00:03:33.217 --> 00:03:41.260 - more capacity, more vehicular capacity that is. And this was an enormously popular mandate too. It didn't 00:03:41.260 --> 00:03:49.075 - matter red state, blue state, Republican, Democrat, it didn't matter. Everyone shared the same opinion 00:03:49.075 --> 00:03:54.462 - about traffic which was that we need to keep the traffic moving almost 00:03:54.594 --> 00:04:03.815 - nothing else matters. Starting somewhere in the 1990s through the influence of urbanist architects, 00:04:03.815 --> 00:04:13.128 - a source of influence to several of us traffic engineers. Now, I developed a viewpoint that a number 00:04:13.128 --> 00:04:22.811 - of other things matter besides simply moving as much traffic as fast as possible. So the idea that there 00:04:22.811 --> 00:04:24.286 - are other users 00:04:24.418 --> 00:04:31.968 - of the street or should be other users of the street, started to realize the importance of that. 00:04:31.968 --> 00:04:39.752 - The notion, this comes straight from architects, that the street is the premier public space of our 00:04:39.752 --> 00:04:47.769 - communities. This is the public face of our communities and therefore needs to reflect this. I started 00:04:47.769 --> 00:04:53.918 - to grasp this kind of notion that others have long understood and believed in. 00:04:54.626 --> 00:05:03.480 - And so that brings us to the situation today of myself and actually too many other engineers to count 00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:12.421 - nationwide, who now embrace this notion of livable traffic or sustainable traffic or sensible traffic. 00:05:12.421 --> 00:05:21.796 - It still lacks a good name, but the whole idea being that, yes, of course we will continue to move traffic, 00:05:21.796 --> 00:05:23.358 - but not as though 00:05:23.586 --> 00:05:32.789 - nothing else matters, but as though a great number of other things matter. The whole idea of what we're 00:05:32.789 --> 00:05:41.815 - doing with roads goes back quite a while. This historical diagram here shortly after the invention of 00:05:41.815 --> 00:05:48.894 - the wheel says we're going to need roads, lots of them, and that has persisted. 00:05:49.954 --> 00:05:59.710 - transportation planning model that has gotten us where we are and that we think badly needs to be updated, 00:05:59.710 --> 00:06:09.101 - at first glance looks to be admirably simple. It anticipates the need and more and more intelligently. 00:06:09.101 --> 00:06:17.854 - So we look out at the projections of where people are going to live, how they're going to work, 00:06:17.986 --> 00:06:27.165 - forecast the travel demand through travel demand forecasting models that are quite sophisticated and 00:06:27.165 --> 00:06:36.344 - very interesting, and then accommodate the need, meaning accommodate the future traffic that's being 00:06:36.344 --> 00:06:45.796 - projected. In actual practice though, we start to see some fundamental problems with this, what appears 00:06:45.796 --> 00:06:47.614 - to be common sense, 00:06:47.906 --> 00:06:58.111 - Model Here's here's yet another version of this ideal traffic planning The yellow line is traffic demand 00:06:58.111 --> 00:07:08.025 - always goes up the capacity the purple areas capacity sooner or later on most roads and certainly any 00:07:08.025 --> 00:07:16.286 - road that concerns us the Forecast or the actual traffic exceeds the capacity and so 00:07:18.178 --> 00:07:26.347 - What do we do? We forecast out typically to a 20 or 30 year horizon, and we meet that forecast with 00:07:26.347 --> 00:07:34.517 - a jump in capacity, almost always widening, and capacity meaning vehicular capacity only. And so if 00:07:34.517 --> 00:07:43.095 - we subscribe to this simple model, shouldn't that have fixed the problem? And it does fix a lot of other 00:07:43.095 --> 00:07:46.526 - problems. For example, if you project out 00:07:47.234 --> 00:07:55.484 - to a stormwater runoff projection, for example, and meet that projection, build adequate size pipe or 00:07:55.484 --> 00:08:03.976 - adequate size retention, you are in fact fixed, provided we don't have some sort of catastrophic weather 00:08:03.976 --> 00:08:12.307 - change. So we widen the road. But what happens? Do we solve the problem for 20 years? No. Our original 00:08:12.307 --> 00:08:14.814 - forecast, which was down here, 00:08:14.978 --> 00:08:21.944 - Turns out not to be the case. We exceed that forecast. We have a new actual traffic. We've generated 00:08:21.944 --> 00:08:28.910 - this additional traffic which we call, and incidentally the courts call now because this has reached 00:08:28.910 --> 00:08:35.807 - the stage of litigation, induced traffic. Traffic that we had no idea at the time we were doing our 00:08:35.807 --> 00:08:42.774 - planning was going to be there. This is traffic by and large that is created because of what we have 00:08:42.774 --> 00:08:44.222 - done with the roads. 00:08:44.418 --> 00:08:53.697 - And traffic and roads are the only publicly provided service or facility that seems to have this feature. 00:08:53.697 --> 00:09:03.063 - Schools, for example, don't. If we predict the number of school-age students and bill for them adequately, 00:09:03.063 --> 00:09:12.080 - and the projection holds true, simply because there's more school capacity, people don't start sending 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:13.918 - their kids to school 00:09:14.178 --> 00:09:21.889 - basic education, 14, 15, 16 years, or the same with wastewater treatment, formerly known as surge. If 00:09:21.889 --> 00:09:29.675 - we double the capacity of a system, provide excess capacity, we don't start going to the bathroom more 00:09:29.675 --> 00:09:37.764 - just because the capacity is there. But roads seem to be the only service or product that has this induced 00:09:37.764 --> 00:09:43.358 - traffic. So we experience the induced traffic then, as this diagram says. 00:09:44.066 --> 00:09:52.710 - And we go through the same cycle again of clamoring about the congestion, having the road show up on 00:09:52.710 --> 00:10:01.355 - the problem location for our long-range planning, programming and improvement, which generally means 00:10:01.355 --> 00:10:09.913 - more. We are making some stride with our planning process, but the strides seem to be in the nature 00:10:09.913 --> 00:10:11.454 - of doing the same 00:10:11.810 --> 00:10:18.293 - getting better at doing the wrong thing, I think you might say. So yes, we're making strides 00:10:18.293 --> 00:10:25.473 - with anticipating what's going to happen. We're getting better forecasts. Our travel demand models now 00:10:25.473 --> 00:10:32.583 - are starting to primitively work in this feedback so that they can start to deal with what happens as 00:10:32.583 --> 00:10:37.950 - people adjust their behavior because there's more travel capacity out there. 00:10:38.274 --> 00:10:48.660 - The accommodation continues to be business as usual, accommodating our improved forecast of growth with 00:10:48.660 --> 00:10:58.746 - simply more road capacity, giving us scenes like this. Well, anyhow, you saw the scene. So we end up 00:10:58.746 --> 00:11:07.934 - at this stage, and what is becoming clear is that to have congestion or not have congestion 00:11:08.386 --> 00:11:17.240 - doesn't appear to be our choice, that we are going to have congestion on our principal thoroughfares 00:11:17.240 --> 00:11:26.795 - no matter what. That's not our choice. Our choice then is at what level of road and what level of domination 00:11:26.795 --> 00:11:34.334 - by the car are we going to have the congestion. We don't see things like the current, 00:11:34.594 --> 00:11:42.066 - tremendous run-up in gas price as having too much effect on this. A lot of people are looking forward 00:11:42.066 --> 00:11:49.538 - to this meaning a big behavior change. The behavior change may be very big in terms of developing 100 00:11:49.538 --> 00:11:57.009 - mile per gallon vehicle. The behavior change may be very big in terms of plug-in cars. We most likely 00:11:57.009 --> 00:12:02.430 - will have a big reduction in greenhouse gases from automotive travel, but 00:12:03.522 --> 00:12:11.019 - I think we can be pretty sure that we're going to be back to the same travel demand by automobile that 00:12:11.019 --> 00:12:18.516 - we have now. I'm basing this experience on what happened after two previous oil shocks that we thought 00:12:18.516 --> 00:12:26.014 - were going to make a big difference turned out not to make much difference. So the thing that concerns 00:12:26.014 --> 00:12:33.438 - us here in BTOPs and similar organizations about the impact that this obsession with vehicular travel 00:12:33.698 --> 00:12:40.942 - has had on our quality of life and on all of the modes of travel, that concern is probably going to 00:12:40.942 --> 00:12:48.403 - remain almost unabated by what happens with the current fuel situation. And so we're going to continue 00:12:48.403 --> 00:12:55.792 - to look at a paradigm like this of escalating through these cycles. Now, all good things must happen. 00:12:55.792 --> 00:13:03.326 - All good things must end, of course. And that's definitely the case here. We obviously can't keep going 00:13:03.554 --> 00:13:13.219 - through cycle after cycle of something as consumptive as this. This is that whole cycle put much more 00:13:13.219 --> 00:13:23.169 - succinctly by a speaker we heard some years ago, and that's exactly what we're trying to do with traffic 00:13:23.169 --> 00:13:33.118 - congestion. Our options run out. As we follow this paradigm further and further up, our options run out. 00:13:33.346 --> 00:13:41.564 - For places like Bloomington, which still have an option about treating a lot of their suburban arterials 00:13:41.564 --> 00:13:49.704 - or even their in-town ones, we're still at a point where we can make this decision between do we widen, 00:13:49.704 --> 00:13:57.531 - do we widen without any concern for other modes of travel, or do we take this opportunity to make a 00:13:57.531 --> 00:14:02.462 - choice about what trade-off we want between vehicular capacity 00:14:02.626 --> 00:14:10.588 - and service. A lot of people are pointing out the unsustainability of what we're doing. Cartoonists, 00:14:10.588 --> 00:14:18.470 - which are, this is the marvelous green cartoonist, Tom Tolles, formerly from Buffalo and now at the 00:14:18.470 --> 00:14:26.905 - Washington Post. And is Tom really telling us here that, in fact, you know, it's interesting, his gigantic 00:14:26.905 --> 00:14:30.846 - interchange is right over Indianapolis, isn't it? 00:14:31.106 --> 00:14:38.447 - Down here in Florida, we're in the theme park parking. Is he really telling us, great job traffic engineers, 00:14:38.447 --> 00:14:45.249 - bring on the 1,247 lane freeway? Of course not. Isn't this a viewpoint who's got their finger pretty 00:14:45.249 --> 00:14:52.657 - well on the pulse of the public saying, isn't something out of hand here? Of course it is. In some instances, 00:14:52.657 --> 00:14:59.998 - you physically cannot, quote, improve the road any further. This is frequently the end of the cycle in which 00:15:00.098 --> 00:15:06.490 - The land cost or the environmental constraints or the budget constraints simply say you can't do it 00:15:06.490 --> 00:15:13.073 - any further. There's surprising grassroots understanding of this issue. This is a case again where the 00:15:13.073 --> 00:15:19.849 - public may be ahead of the technicians and the elected officials. This defeat of a referendum in Orlando, 00:15:19.849 --> 00:15:26.368 - my hometown, a couple of years ago was not predicted by anybody. In fact, the opposite was predicted. 00:15:26.368 --> 00:15:28.030 - This was a case of people 00:15:28.514 --> 00:15:35.694 - telling the pollsters what they thought they were supposed to be saying that, yeah, yeah, we're for 00:15:35.694 --> 00:15:42.946 - good roads. Yeah, let's fix the congestion. But when they actually voted, a thumping 54 to 46 defeat 00:15:42.946 --> 00:15:50.270 - for a penny for good roads kind of thing. So interesting that a broad-based referendum would conclude 00:15:50.270 --> 00:15:53.214 - that it's time to get off of this cycle. 00:15:53.442 --> 00:16:02.523 - extremely thoughtful state policy. This was done for the Brookings Institution for the state of Pennsylvania 00:16:02.523 --> 00:16:10.855 - and has been closely followed and implemented by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. And 00:16:10.855 --> 00:16:19.437 - this very fine analysis points out that shouldn't the state get out of the business of subsidizing the 00:16:19.437 --> 00:16:22.686 - exodus from Pennsylvania cities to its 00:16:23.010 --> 00:16:33.184 - to its beautiful countryside through what they're doing with transportation dollars. Very interesting 00:16:33.184 --> 00:16:43.758 - and forward-thinking kind of... State of New Jersey has withdrawn all of these projects and is replanting 00:16:43.758 --> 00:16:48.446 - them as state highways, smart growth projects. 00:16:49.186 --> 00:16:57.168 - These, by and large, were large widenings planned through or around small towns that they are rethinking. 00:16:57.168 --> 00:17:04.923 - It'd be interesting, too. I know groups like BTOPS are perpetually concerned with how do things happen 00:17:04.923 --> 00:17:12.604 - in other places and what makes them happen. And I can't tell you why, but I can just point you to the 00:17:12.604 --> 00:17:17.950 - two neighboring states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey for some reason. 00:17:18.338 --> 00:17:26.720 - have developed this advanced DOT thinking about what they should be doing. They've got huge bureaucracies 00:17:26.720 --> 00:17:34.785 - to move and a long way to go, but the direction is very, very interesting. And it might be, you know, 00:17:34.785 --> 00:17:42.693 - if any of the group is pursuing what are other places doing at a high level, at a state level, that 00:17:42.693 --> 00:17:47.358 - would certainly be two most interesting states to look at. 00:17:48.098 --> 00:17:56.228 - So the theme of all of these 15 projects is rebalancing almost invariably with a smaller, more kinder 00:17:56.228 --> 00:18:04.358 - road and lots of attention to community values and community facilities and multimode transportation. 00:18:04.358 --> 00:18:12.329 - One of the interesting things we're finding and we're in the infancy of understanding is that roads 00:18:12.329 --> 00:18:15.198 - simply, traffic doesn't simply grow 00:18:16.130 --> 00:18:23.442 - through our familiar traffic level of service, these are like school grades, you've probably heard them, 00:18:23.442 --> 00:18:30.964 - level of service A, B, C, and D, and then hit the stone wall and fail, although the word fail is frequently 00:18:30.964 --> 00:18:38.276 - used. I used to use it myself. And there's some kind of catastrophic gridlock beyond that point. Certain 00:18:38.276 --> 00:18:44.126 - things do fail. A bridge fails. I mean, you overload a bridge too many times, like, 00:18:44.386 --> 00:18:50.713 - in St. Paul, and yes indeed, it fails, and the word fail is clearly understood by everybody. What we're 00:18:50.713 --> 00:18:56.917 - now understanding is that traffic doesn't fail, but a whole lot of other things are going on. So when 00:18:56.917 --> 00:19:03.122 - you go through all our levels of service and pass through the dreaded level of service E, which means 00:19:03.122 --> 00:19:09.327 - you're about to fail, and our models start saying, okay, we're going to have gridlock, we're going to 00:19:09.327 --> 00:19:13.342 - have 30 and 40 minute delays, what happens? First of all, we find 00:19:13.986 --> 00:19:21.670 - that just our measurement has got about 20 or 30% leeway in it. And we keep adjusting our official highway 00:19:21.670 --> 00:19:29.140 - capacity numbers. We've adjusted upwards several times since 1985. And the reason being is just we were 00:19:29.140 --> 00:19:36.393 - overly conservative. But then these interesting things start happening like the peak shifting or the 00:19:36.393 --> 00:19:43.934 - network of roads in a gentle way flexing to absorb what we thought was going to be catastrophic traffic. 00:19:44.450 --> 00:19:51.541 - And origins and destinations coming closer together almost double the capacity that we thought we had. 00:19:51.541 --> 00:19:58.700 - And that's without even getting into transit. And then what we're discovering, or what everybody knows, 00:19:58.700 --> 00:20:05.791 - when you make a quantum leap in transit, sort of the sky's the limit. So like all these light rail new 00:20:05.791 --> 00:20:10.334 - start cities, like Charlotte, North Carolina, a very notable one, 00:20:10.498 --> 00:20:17.172 - they're adjusting to the fact now that they've made this quantum leap in capacity. And for a lot of 00:20:17.172 --> 00:20:23.914 - areas within Charlotte, they can sort of stop worrying about what's going to happen as they continue 00:20:23.914 --> 00:20:31.255 - to develop and traffic continues to grow. There's an opposite viewpoint. This is paving the way to prosperity 00:20:31.255 --> 00:20:38.130 - from American Road and Transportation Builders Association. But a minority viewpoint, I think less and 00:20:38.130 --> 00:20:39.198 - less people now 00:20:40.002 --> 00:20:48.285 - think that paving or road access has much to do with prosperity. Economists would have told you a long 00:20:48.285 --> 00:20:56.487 - time ago that the roads themselves don't do anything except move around origins and destinations, and 00:20:56.487 --> 00:21:00.990 - they don't create any new ones at all. For a long time, 00:21:01.634 --> 00:21:09.796 - As areas were in competition with each other, yes, that made sense. Build more roads and suck the growth 00:21:09.796 --> 00:21:17.724 - out of the city centers and located in the suburbs, but not so much an issue anymore. Part of the way 00:21:17.724 --> 00:21:25.575 - we're looking at transportation differently is summarized in these diagrams. Our conventional way of 00:21:25.575 --> 00:21:26.430 - looking at 00:21:27.170 --> 00:21:33.128 - transportation was very vertical thinking. You might be familiar with a kind of a well-known book on 00:21:33.128 --> 00:21:39.381 - thinking from a few years ago called Lateral Thinking, and it pointed out the difference between vertical 00:21:39.381 --> 00:21:45.575 - thinking, which is very symptomatic, and lateral thinking. So vertical thinking is, for example, applied 00:21:45.575 --> 00:21:51.651 - to a headache. It says, I've got a headache, take an aspirin, makes the symptoms and the pain go away, 00:21:51.651 --> 00:21:53.598 - problem solved. Lateral thinking 00:21:54.306 --> 00:22:00.907 - it concerns itself with what's causing the headache. Is it my job, who I'm living with, or whatever, 00:22:00.907 --> 00:22:07.770 - and fix the root problem and make it go away. So our thinking was very vertical. It was move cars. Great 00:22:07.770 --> 00:22:14.502 - popular mandate, we talked about that. And for the longest time, it was only one branch of that family 00:22:14.502 --> 00:22:21.822 - tree. It was add more pavement, because this was where all the action was. Gigantic mileage of new interstates, 00:22:21.922 --> 00:22:28.213 - the first flush of widening city streets from two lanes to four lanes, the suburban explosions. That's 00:22:28.213 --> 00:22:34.322 - actually been tapering down. Our ability and our rate of, our ability to build new pavement and our 00:22:34.322 --> 00:22:40.430 - rate of doing it has really tapered down more dramatically than most people think. For the last few 00:22:40.430 --> 00:22:46.782 - years, we've been more concerned with squeezing more efficiency out of the roads we have through things 00:22:46.782 --> 00:22:50.142 - like smart management of the roads and signal systems. 00:22:50.690 --> 00:22:57.656 - But all of this is still in the nature of moving cars. With our approach to livable traffic, we're looking 00:22:57.656 --> 00:23:04.556 - at all of these branches of the family tree, and just in some cases, just in the infancy of understanding 00:23:04.556 --> 00:23:11.196 - them. So how about this branch, moving people, not cars? Pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean, isn't that 00:23:11.196 --> 00:23:16.990 - why we were trying to move the cars? Because there was people in them, of course it was. 00:23:17.442 --> 00:23:25.760 - And the reasons are very well understood. So this whole business about complete streets, our concern 00:23:25.760 --> 00:23:34.571 - with a better walking environment is all pursuing this branch. How about addressing the quality of travel, 00:23:34.571 --> 00:23:42.806 - not just its quantity? We're truly in the infancy here. So the idea that a street can be not only a 00:23:42.806 --> 00:23:46.430 - good traffic moving conduit, but could be a 00:23:46.626 --> 00:23:55.232 - mighty retail machine, for example, could be a centerpiece, a signature of a town, could be a competitive 00:23:55.232 --> 00:24:03.514 - asset for a university that induces a student to come here instead of going to Wisconsin. All of that 00:24:03.514 --> 00:24:12.202 - is something new to us as transportation engineers, and the idea that you can actually get those variables 00:24:12.202 --> 00:24:15.774 - into a design mix is very intriguing to us. 00:24:16.386 --> 00:24:24.345 - How about the conservation approach, moving less people, fewer miles? Possibly bad grammar, but I think 00:24:24.345 --> 00:24:32.456 - you understand the thought. This was not even on the table a few years ago. The transportation engineers, 00:24:32.456 --> 00:24:40.339 - traffic engineers, had the same mentality that power and utility engineers had before the first energy 00:24:40.339 --> 00:24:46.078 - crunch, and that was that we are not here to try to tamper with the demand 00:24:46.242 --> 00:24:52.406 - We are here to accept that demand, whatever the public's demanding, we accept that and we're here to 00:24:52.406 --> 00:24:58.570 - accommodate it at a very high level of service. And it was interesting how quickly, for example, the 00:24:58.570 --> 00:25:04.977 - electric utility viewpoint changed after the 1970s and they became very active partners for conservation 00:25:04.977 --> 00:25:11.141 - frequently because it made such good business sense to chop off the peak power demand. What we're in 00:25:11.141 --> 00:25:15.230 - the infancy of understanding that now with our transportation that 00:25:15.618 --> 00:25:23.455 - Isn't it more effective to try to change the demand for travel through things like changing its pricing 00:25:23.455 --> 00:25:31.066 - or more powerful than anything, change where people live and where they go to shop and work and send 00:25:31.066 --> 00:25:38.602 - their kids to school? Can't that make more difference than adding more capacity? And the answer is, 00:25:38.602 --> 00:25:41.918 - it's got enormous potential for doing that. 00:25:42.178 --> 00:25:49.890 - Even some things that we had high hopes for that fizzled, like telecommuting, may still have a bigger 00:25:49.890 --> 00:25:57.602 - potential than we thought. At first, when computers at home first came out and networks started being 00:25:57.602 --> 00:26:05.239 - developed and all, the thought was there'll be a drastic reduction in work travel. People won't have 00:26:05.239 --> 00:26:10.078 - to go to the office anymore. That turned out to be a big fizzle 00:26:10.242 --> 00:26:18.051 - that very few were able to do that. But then, as the use of the computers at home got more sophisticated, 00:26:18.051 --> 00:26:25.417 - something almost as good happened, which is great relief from the traditional peak hours of travel. 00:26:25.417 --> 00:26:32.931 - People still going to work four or five days a week, but largely freed from having to go at a tightly 00:26:32.931 --> 00:26:38.014 - prescribed time. I know our own firm at that time, about 140 people, 00:26:38.210 --> 00:26:46.790 - In Orlando, we started FlexTime because people think Orlando's traffic is bad, our employees do, and 00:26:46.790 --> 00:26:55.879 - it turned out to be an enormously popular fringe benefit. Aside from solving their issues with the travel, 00:26:55.879 --> 00:27:05.054 - but the whole package of providing them, supporting their computer use at home and giving them flexibility, 00:27:05.218 --> 00:27:12.415 - was just enormously popular. So it was kind of like win-win all around. Then finally, sort of the most 00:27:12.415 --> 00:27:19.472 - lateral solution of all is the idea that, hey, we're not going to solve congestion. We are not going 00:27:19.472 --> 00:27:26.599 - to continue to knock ourselves out making unlivable streets dedicated only to automobile traffic. But 00:27:26.599 --> 00:27:30.302 - we just ain't going to do it. Kind of a radical idea 00:27:31.298 --> 00:27:37.189 - Although it's parallel to say what's happened in the healthcare over the past decade or so where we 00:27:37.189 --> 00:27:43.080 - realized, you know, we are not going to solve healthcare and people are not going to have the level 00:27:43.080 --> 00:27:48.971 - of healthcare we once thought we were going to get at the price that we hoped we were going to get, 00:27:48.971 --> 00:27:54.920 - but we can certainly manage it much better and we can increase the coverage and so forth. So I think 00:27:54.920 --> 00:28:00.222 - we're realizing the same thing with sort of reduced expectations for traffic. The form is 00:28:00.418 --> 00:28:09.497 - everything about livability, the form not only of the street, but the form of how we develop around 00:28:09.497 --> 00:28:19.121 - the streets too. These two diagrams, the one you just saw, okay, this one here, the conventional suburban 00:28:19.121 --> 00:28:28.926 - development, we say suburban, but it can happen anywhere. There's numerous instances of where this sprouted 00:28:29.026 --> 00:28:36.356 - possibly in the 60s or 70s in Bloomington itself. Or you can have what we call the traditional town 00:28:36.356 --> 00:28:44.345 - center, also a misleading name because this doesn't have to be a center of anything and it's not necessarily 00:28:44.345 --> 00:28:52.408 - traditional. We are seeing all sorts of new development built in this form and we're seeing older development 00:28:52.408 --> 00:28:57.246 - retrofitted. These two development styles shown here side by side 00:28:57.730 --> 00:29:04.935 - tell an enormous story about livability of our streets. And it's only partly to do with the streets. 00:29:04.935 --> 00:29:12.212 - I think you can see here that if you look at the different land use colors, the red for shopping, the 00:29:12.212 --> 00:29:19.417 - employment yellow and so forth, that it's got to do with how these things are laid out. And yes, the 00:29:19.417 --> 00:29:26.765 - streets are different here. The streets are different. Here we have the major arterial street with the 00:29:26.765 --> 00:29:27.550 - land uses. 00:29:27.650 --> 00:29:35.162 - in separate pods located along it. Here we have the same land uses. The same things are going on because 00:29:35.162 --> 00:29:42.746 - as traffic engineers, the solution is not to try to get people to do less of the things that need travel. 00:29:42.746 --> 00:29:50.259 - We're not espousing that people eat less or educate their kids less or visit their friends and relatives 00:29:50.259 --> 00:29:57.342 - less. The whole issue is can we accommodate that with less consumptive destructive ways of travel? 00:29:59.906 --> 00:30:10.652 - In our typical suburban format, here's what happens with our travel, and here's why it's so destructive. 00:30:10.652 --> 00:30:21.704 - It's unthinkable that you would do anything except drive to a single destination at a time. So for example, 00:30:21.704 --> 00:30:27.742 - the red is our driving trajectory. We drive to the school. 00:30:28.162 --> 00:30:35.434 - The whole point is to walk as little as possible because this type of environment fosters a very negative 00:30:35.434 --> 00:30:42.912 - walking environment. When we do get to the destination, which is typically a large parking lot, we naturally 00:30:42.912 --> 00:30:50.047 - seek to minimize our amount of travel in it. We get back in the vehicle, destination number two, repeat 00:30:50.047 --> 00:30:56.702 - the same thing, park as close as possible and walk as little as possible and so forth on and on. 00:30:58.434 --> 00:31:05.173 - I think we all know what this does. It's a personal inconvenience, first of all, of course. All that 00:31:05.173 --> 00:31:12.046 - driving and turning movements. The arterial street that accommodates all of this becomes hopeless very 00:31:12.046 --> 00:31:19.119 - quickly. It becomes a hopeless traffic mess that we clamor for improving, and then it becomes a blighted. 00:31:19.119 --> 00:31:26.526 - What's even worse, I think, is it becomes a blighted scene. This scene is exactly the same throughout the U.S. 00:31:26.978 --> 00:31:36.118 - We have found nobody that likes it. It's a detriment to the daily quality of life. The opposite pattern, 00:31:36.118 --> 00:31:44.997 - where we succeed in getting the land, getting the destinations into a town or walking environment, or 00:31:44.997 --> 00:31:53.876 - as we called it here for this argument, a park once district, the driving pattern then becomes drive, 00:31:53.876 --> 00:31:56.574 - park one time in any number of 00:31:57.122 --> 00:32:05.024 - suitable, accessible parking destinations, and then walk to numerous destinations. Nothing very magic 00:32:05.024 --> 00:32:12.229 - about this. This is what's been achieved in a kind of introverted fashion in shopping malls. 00:32:12.229 --> 00:32:19.976 - Once you park, once you do this kind of walking tour to a number of destinations, unfortunately, in 00:32:19.976 --> 00:32:24.702 - the case of a shopping mall, it is all in a very introverted 00:32:24.930 --> 00:32:37.654 - kind of hostile environment itself, and it's never part of an external fabric. Seem to be repeating 00:32:37.654 --> 00:32:50.378 - ourselves here. Okay, the whole walking is, this shows, this is indicative of 1994 was sort of when 00:32:50.378 --> 00:32:52.414 - we, that was a, 00:32:52.770 --> 00:32:59.112 - There's nothing precise about these dates, but in the 90s was this great realization is that, hey, there's 00:32:59.112 --> 00:33:05.099 - something to do with our streets besides just as many vehicles as fast as possible. And this cartoon 00:33:05.099 --> 00:33:11.027 - is from the New Orleans Times Picayune, very interesting, very observant. It was the anniversary of 00:33:11.027 --> 00:33:16.954 - the moonwalk. You might not be able to read what the guy that walked down the street said. He said, 00:33:16.954 --> 00:33:18.910 - I needed milk, so I went for it. 00:33:22.274 --> 00:33:30.201 - This is interesting, this is the same cartoonist just a couple of years ago, 1999, man walks on moon 00:33:30.201 --> 00:33:38.128 - and I don't know what the relevance of this is for livable transportation, but it's part of a series 00:33:38.128 --> 00:33:46.212 - and for the sake of completeness, we'd like to show them. This is yet another description of that land 00:33:46.212 --> 00:33:50.686 - form and transportation that we were just talking about. 00:33:50.882 --> 00:33:58.962 - This diagram in the following one, these are classics. These were produced by Elizabeth Plater-Zeiberk 00:33:58.962 --> 00:34:06.885 - and her partner, Andres Duane, sort of legendary names in livable communities of all sorts. And this 00:34:06.885 --> 00:34:15.279 - describes in only a slightly cartoonish fashion what's happening with our land use and our transportation. 00:34:15.279 --> 00:34:19.358 - So you can see these rigorously separated land uses 00:34:19.906 --> 00:34:27.027 - apartments here, houses here, and then an unconnected street network connected only to the major arterial 00:34:27.027 --> 00:34:34.216 - road. So this is kind of the source of almost all of our evils about livable transportation and incomplete 00:34:34.216 --> 00:34:41.337 - streets. This street, by definition, this generally inherited from a former city street or county highway 00:34:41.337 --> 00:34:48.862 - or state highway, almost has no chance for becoming a complete street and livable with the demands we put on it 00:34:48.962 --> 00:34:56.527 - We're funneling all the traffic onto it, and we've made it into an unstoppable armature for strip commercial, 00:34:56.527 --> 00:35:03.405 - almost no power on earth. Once we bundle all the traffic on here, almost no power on earth can stop 00:35:03.405 --> 00:35:10.488 - that from being a strip commercial. The antithesis, which is the traditional way of laying things out, 00:35:10.488 --> 00:35:17.022 - the way Bloomington was laid out, the way new towns are now being laid out, has the same uses. 00:35:17.794 --> 00:35:24.605 - We agree that people need to do the same thing, shop, live, go to school. But they're laid out with 00:35:24.605 --> 00:35:31.553 - proximity. They're not isolated into pods. And from a transportation point of view, they are serviced 00:35:31.553 --> 00:35:38.568 - by a highly complete network of streets. And here's the difference it makes for transportation. Here's 00:35:38.568 --> 00:35:45.720 - what the travel demand forecast model is essentially seeing as it assigns traffic. All the traffic under 00:35:45.720 --> 00:35:46.878 - the conventional 00:35:47.106 --> 00:35:54.084 - suburban layout, all the traffic is getting funneled onto the one available arterial highway. Tons of 00:35:54.084 --> 00:36:01.336 - turning movements are being created. We've built a volume of traffic on that street that becomes a magnet 00:36:01.336 --> 00:36:08.725 - for strip development. And then, conversely, the street has almost no chance to become a livable, balanced, 00:36:08.725 --> 00:36:15.567 - complete street. The antithesis, where we have even a vestige of a network of streets and the right 00:36:15.567 --> 00:36:16.798 - kind of landform, 00:36:16.898 --> 00:36:23.065 - Many of the streets remain, many of the trips remain completely local. The school trip, for example, 00:36:23.065 --> 00:36:29.415 - this is the blue trip, rather than being shunted onto the arterial street, is accommodated in the local 00:36:29.415 --> 00:36:35.826 - streets. It raises the possibility, perhaps with a little progress on school sizing, that the trip might 00:36:35.826 --> 00:36:41.993 - even be made by means other than motorized transportation. A lot of shopping trips happen within the 00:36:41.993 --> 00:36:46.878 - community. About 70% of all travel is quite local in nature. It's destinations, 00:36:47.010 --> 00:36:52.749 - that the traveler would like to be served as close as possible. And in fact, the market that serves 00:36:52.749 --> 00:36:58.718 - them would be perfectly happy to serve them even closer than they do now. The reason they don't, things 00:36:58.718 --> 00:37:04.630 - like grocery, home improvement and all, is they have no incentive to. We are providing them guarantees 00:37:04.630 --> 00:37:10.484 - that go ahead and build a 200,000 square foot big box six miles out of the suburbs. We will guarantee 00:37:10.484 --> 00:37:14.846 - you that through our policies and our actions that your market can get out. 00:37:15.138 --> 00:37:22.629 - When that promise is withdrawn, we start seeing something very different about what happens. Network 00:37:22.629 --> 00:37:30.565 - is very important. And network is not just an issue in new places that have no streets yet and are dealing 00:37:30.565 --> 00:37:38.056 - with the whole challenge of planning new streets. Yes, it's certainly an issue there. But network is 00:37:38.056 --> 00:37:39.614 - an issue everywhere. 00:37:40.930 --> 00:37:48.446 - Cities are constantly faced with loss of network as people seek to abandon streets and expand things 00:37:48.446 --> 00:37:55.962 - over them. A lot of places that don't have network of local streets should have it, and it should be 00:37:55.962 --> 00:38:03.627 - obtained at the time of development. If it's not, that opportunity is lost forever. Why are we so keen 00:38:03.627 --> 00:38:10.846 - on network? What's so great about it from a traffic point of view? And the answer is simply that 00:38:11.138 --> 00:38:18.942 - The same number of lanes of traffic broken out into a network of smaller streets carries more traffic 00:38:18.942 --> 00:38:26.594 - than the same number of lanes combined into large streets. This may fly in the face of conventional 00:38:26.594 --> 00:38:34.398 - wisdom. A lot of people think isn't something bigger, more efficient, and that is true about a lot of 00:38:34.690 --> 00:38:41.313 - facilities, a lot of infrastructure facilities, such as water treatment plants and power plants, not 00:38:41.313 --> 00:38:48.066 - so with roads. And the reasons aren't too difficult to understand. The network simply gives a lot more 00:38:48.066 --> 00:38:54.754 - places for turning movements to occur, and turning movements are one of the big drains on capacity of 00:38:54.754 --> 00:39:01.442 - intersections. As the intersections get smaller, the clearance time for the signals gets dramatically 00:39:01.442 --> 00:39:03.934 - smaller. And then mostly with smaller 00:39:04.226 --> 00:39:10.753 - with networks of smaller streets, we're able to avoid multi-phase signals, green arrows so people can 00:39:10.753 --> 00:39:17.344 - make protective left turns and so forth. As soon as we get to a four-lane street, we are almost losing 00:39:17.344 --> 00:39:23.807 - the ability to do that now. The public is beginning to shy away from making an unprotected left turn 00:39:23.807 --> 00:39:30.526 - at even a pretty ordinary intersection of four-lane streets and starting to demand protected left turns. 00:39:30.526 --> 00:39:33.278 - These have a disastrous impact on both the 00:39:33.666 --> 00:39:41.802 - the travel demand for vehicles and then the waiting time that pedestrians have to wait to cross the 00:39:41.802 --> 00:39:50.018 - street as well as the appearance of the place as the left turn lanes are added and lengthened. So it 00:39:50.018 --> 00:39:58.398 - starts working against us every which way. Our own trade organization, the Institute of Transportation 00:39:58.398 --> 00:40:03.198 - Engineers, reported this very interesting research finding 00:40:06.754 --> 00:40:14.494 - that we start losing efficiencies as the street gets bigger. This is the efficiency of an added lane, 00:40:14.494 --> 00:40:22.311 - of a lane of traffic as the street gets bigger. So the efficiency per lane. And these are the diagrams 00:40:22.311 --> 00:40:29.596 - of how the street's getting bigger and bigger. Two lanes with a turning lane, a left turn lane, 00:40:29.596 --> 00:40:36.350 - four lanes, and so forth. And then the signal phasing becomes more and more complicated. 00:40:37.538 --> 00:40:44.257 - And what this diagram is saying is that the ultimate efficient configuration is two lanes with a turning 00:40:44.257 --> 00:40:50.656 - lane provided where we really need it, a left turn lane, not a right turn lane. Incidentally, right 00:40:50.656 --> 00:40:57.311 - turn lanes have no place in an urban environment. And I was appalled to see several on our little drive 00:40:57.311 --> 00:41:04.030 - through Bloomington. That's a rural design feature to get slow moving turning vehicles out of the stream 00:41:04.030 --> 00:41:05.502 - of high speed traffic. 00:41:05.858 --> 00:41:12.742 - They have almost no function in an urban area. We can talk about that later. So the most efficient 00:41:12.742 --> 00:41:19.766 - configuration is the two-lane road with the turn lane, either continuous if you have a lot of people 00:41:19.766 --> 00:41:27.067 - making left turns at driveways and so forth, or an intersection left turn lane at intersection locations 00:41:27.067 --> 00:41:34.300 - if we don't have many mid-block locations. And then the efficiency of the street per lane added plunges 00:41:34.300 --> 00:41:35.134 - after that. 00:41:35.714 --> 00:41:43.263 - All of this by way of saying then that as we advocate for smaller more livable streets We are we are 00:41:43.263 --> 00:41:51.037 - on very firm grounds technically for arguing that there is very little to be gained from the transition 00:41:51.037 --> 00:41:58.885 - from a two or three lane street to a Almost always five lane is the next jump. Nobody goes to four lanes 00:41:58.885 --> 00:42:02.398 - anymore. It's your choice is three to five and 00:42:03.074 --> 00:42:10.396 - You typically don't add just a fourth lane without the continuous left turn lane. So there's very little 00:42:10.396 --> 00:42:17.438 - to be gained for that in people's intuition that we don't seem to have gained very much for that. We 00:42:17.438 --> 00:42:24.551 - didn't seem to be pressing the capacity of the old two lane very hard. It seems like just a turn lane 00:42:24.551 --> 00:42:31.454 - here and there would have fixed it. That intuition is probably quite correct. This kind of network 00:42:31.586 --> 00:42:39.296 - is showing up everywhere, not just in new development. These are the options for redoing the riverfront 00:42:39.296 --> 00:42:46.709 - like a freeway as it's converted to a parkway in Trenton, New Jersey. And all of the options had to 00:42:46.709 --> 00:42:54.789 - do with adding all sorts of new network in an existing city to the sparse network that was there, reclaiming 00:42:54.789 --> 00:42:57.310 - old streets that were cul-de-sac, 00:42:57.442 --> 00:43:05.728 - putting new ones through the big government campus where the streets used to be and they closed it off 00:43:05.728 --> 00:43:13.772 - in the sort of 1960s super block mentality on and on and on. Very interesting redevelopment here in 00:43:13.772 --> 00:43:21.897 - the beautifully managed city of Winter Park, Florida where this was a big featureless site with some 00:43:21.897 --> 00:43:25.598 - scruffy industrial all in it and the solution 00:43:25.698 --> 00:43:35.111 - endorsed by everybody, DOT, Citi, and everyone, was to create this whole network of streets within this 00:43:35.111 --> 00:43:44.252 - area and don't concentrate on just widening of the major fronting arterial. Interesting, this is the 00:43:44.252 --> 00:43:53.393 - New Jersey Pinelands as they're trying to equip the communities where they're going to permit growth 00:43:53.393 --> 00:43:55.294 - within the Pinelands 00:43:55.746 --> 00:44:02.968 - continue to grow while trying to preserve the rest of the pinelands. And the form that that growth, 00:44:02.968 --> 00:44:10.551 - by unanimous kind of consent, the form of that growth is new networks of local streets, not big arterial 00:44:10.551 --> 00:44:17.773 - and subdivision kind of plan. And again, even on the developing suburban edge, even out where there 00:44:17.773 --> 00:44:23.550 - is nothing now and there's just a few county roads, this whole idea of being in 00:44:23.650 --> 00:44:31.432 - very early with the idea of network is probably the best way to preclude what has happened in older 00:44:31.432 --> 00:44:39.682 - parts where we have lost the livability of our streets and are concerned with trying to recreate complete 00:44:39.682 --> 00:44:47.464 - streets coming from behind. And on a grand scale, this admittedly grander than anything we're going 00:44:47.464 --> 00:44:50.110 - to ever be facing in Bloomington. 00:44:50.306 --> 00:44:58.096 - The whole solution for that tangle of mess in Fort Washington Way in Cincinnati was to get rid of all 00:44:58.096 --> 00:45:06.115 - the special purpose ramps and super blocks and features like that, and replace it with complete streets. 00:45:06.115 --> 00:45:14.134 - These are streets with sidewalks, bicycle paths, beautiful landscaping on either side of the interstate, 00:45:14.134 --> 00:45:18.334 - now depressed in the Channel. It was always depressed. 00:45:18.466 --> 00:45:24.746 - The whole thing shrank to one-third the size, and then eight cross streets were reinstated, and the 00:45:24.746 --> 00:45:31.278 - whole traffic plan became very much simple, much more simple. So instead of a myriad of special purpose 00:45:31.278 --> 00:45:38.186 - ramps to the stadiums in downtown, the whole approach to downtown Cincinnati, and you've probably experienced 00:45:38.186 --> 00:45:44.529 - this proximity, one decision to make, you get off on Fort Washington Way, and then you make all your 00:45:44.529 --> 00:45:45.534 - decisions about 00:45:45.762 --> 00:45:52.581 - going to the stadiums or downtown in a 35 mile an hour environment on these boulevards. Again, just 00:45:52.581 --> 00:45:59.537 - another manifestation of network. There's no right or wrong pattern. Connectivity is what matters. So 00:45:59.537 --> 00:46:06.561 - you can have classic looking street grid or very European looking free for all. It doesn't matter. The 00:46:06.561 --> 00:46:12.766 - important thing is just are there many paths for vehicular and pedestrian traffic to take? 00:46:13.026 --> 00:46:20.681 - and therefore dispersing the load over a number of streets. Is this an old idea we're talking about 00:46:20.681 --> 00:46:28.413 - since street grid seems to have been around for a few thousand years? And the answer is about as old 00:46:28.413 --> 00:46:34.078 - as your cellular telephone network. The predecessor to cell phone network 00:46:34.978 --> 00:46:42.120 - the old 15450 band. Any of you in the construction or worked for DOT or city government might remember 00:46:42.120 --> 00:46:49.469 - that miserable 15450 band. One tower, the service was bad. It was frequently jammed. One little lightning 00:46:49.469 --> 00:46:56.403 - strike and the whole system was out. You had to share it with a bunch of people. The reason was all 00:46:56.403 --> 00:47:03.545 - the traffic flowed through a single transmitter and there was no switching or network. Your cell phone 00:47:03.545 --> 00:47:04.862 - system is a marvel 00:47:05.218 --> 00:47:13.966 - of small, low-powered links, each link not having much capacity itself, but the network giving it tremendous 00:47:13.966 --> 00:47:21.270 - amount of capacity. There's no telling how your call might be routed through this network, 00:47:21.270 --> 00:47:29.536 - but the sophistication of the network compensates for the small size of the links, and this is exactly 00:47:29.536 --> 00:47:33.790 - what we're understanding how traffic works. Options. 00:47:34.114 --> 00:47:41.761 - Down at the very local level, as new development or redevelopment gets approved, as we start looking 00:47:41.761 --> 00:47:49.181 - at older sites where the network never was or got lost, ideal is to have a complete connectivity. 00:47:49.181 --> 00:47:56.980 - If not, at least connectivity out to major directions, connectivity around the perimeter, not as nice, 00:47:56.980 --> 00:48:00.766 - but this is what hospitals and universities want. 00:48:00.898 --> 00:48:10.796 - we can live with it, never ever single entry pods cul-de-sac, that kind of thing. So kind of a downward 00:48:10.796 --> 00:48:20.599 - progression of connectivity. The street design, how about the street design principles that we've been 00:48:20.599 --> 00:48:30.878 - neglecting or that we need to pay much more attention to? They're actually fairly simple. We like very much 00:48:31.138 --> 00:48:38.856 - a simple classification of these things that the architectural writer Amos Rappaport wrote about several 00:48:38.856 --> 00:48:46.206 - years ago. And we were exposed to these by an architect. And they make eminent good sense. And they 00:48:46.206 --> 00:48:53.630 - have everything to do with the livability of the street. So the idea that the street is articulated, 00:48:53.630 --> 00:48:58.334 - that lots of things about our building and street are detailed, 00:48:58.434 --> 00:49:05.171 - Very good principle. We see this on some of the new buildings in Bloomington and they they're very much 00:49:05.171 --> 00:49:11.649 - the better for it So articulation on the building articulation about our street system so that this 00:49:11.649 --> 00:49:18.257 - you can There's a variety of little cross streets and ins and outs of things The idea that our street 00:49:18.257 --> 00:49:24.670 - space is enclosed is good. Not bad I think for a while through the 50s and 60s the whole thing was 00:49:24.930 --> 00:49:32.076 - Space is wonderful, big open spaces is great. Set the building back, building setbacks, you know, get 00:49:32.076 --> 00:49:39.082 - that building away from the street. And we realize now how wrong that has been for livable traffic. 00:49:39.082 --> 00:49:46.088 - It's an architectural principle, yes, but it's also a very important livable street when you cannot 00:49:46.088 --> 00:49:53.094 - have this kind of street scene if it wasn't for that building being there. Again, space enclosed by 00:49:53.094 --> 00:49:54.846 - what's along the street, 00:49:54.946 --> 00:50:01.559 - and the design of the street itself, the street trees. Complexity is good, not bad. The idea that you 00:50:01.559 --> 00:50:08.172 - strip a street clean so that everything is absolutely uniform, the building walls are nice and smooth 00:50:08.172 --> 00:50:14.980 - and blank, that's bad, not good. Very bad for pedestrian travel. Again, for multiple reasons, too. We're 00:50:14.980 --> 00:50:21.722 - getting more and more appreciative of the fact of how many levels these things work at. The complexity, 00:50:21.722 --> 00:50:24.510 - for example, in these pictures is not only 00:50:24.610 --> 00:50:31.271 - a source of satisfaction and quality of life for the pedestrians. It's enormous signal to the drivers 00:50:31.271 --> 00:50:38.063 - that you are in a pedestrian environment and that anything much faster than 25 miles an hour here, even 00:50:38.063 --> 00:50:44.790 - without any sign being posted, is all wrong as a driver. And the great majority of drivers immediately 00:50:44.790 --> 00:50:51.451 - understand that. Complexity even about the street furniture. Nothing wrong with signs. We've had this 00:50:51.451 --> 00:50:53.214 - phobia about signs because 00:50:53.570 --> 00:51:02.080 - The typical suburban strip manifestation of them is so awful, but signs, well done, why not? Terminated, 00:51:02.080 --> 00:51:10.509 - the idea that the view in the street is terminated, or like that lovely view of the campus gate looking 00:51:10.509 --> 00:51:18.938 - from downtown into the UI campus. Classic termination, wonderful thing, again, for a couple of reasons, 00:51:18.938 --> 00:51:21.694 - operating on all sorts of levels. 00:51:21.826 --> 00:51:28.570 - It's a great amenity to pedestrians to have the view terminated. This becomes a real milestone 00:51:28.570 --> 00:51:35.668 - for pedestrians. And again, for the motorists, it's one more of those traffic calming measures that 00:51:35.668 --> 00:51:42.909 - greatly changes the behavior about whether this is a 45-mile-an-hour environment or a 25-mile-an-hour 00:51:42.909 --> 00:51:50.078 - environment, terminated by features in the buildings themselves. Compact, great walking environments 00:51:50.306 --> 00:51:58.321 - are highly unlikely to be much more than a quarter mile long. So we shouldn't worry about great extended 00:51:58.321 --> 00:52:06.488 - walking environments, at least not at first. I think when we realize that you can have a wonderful walking 00:52:06.488 --> 00:52:14.274 - environment of not much more than 1,400, 1,500 feet, it becomes a much more manageable kind of thing. 00:52:14.274 --> 00:52:19.006 - Texture underfoot, again, for both pedestrians and motorists. 00:52:19.330 --> 00:52:28.896 - And then texture overhead, all of these things again, item after item operating on these two levels 00:52:28.896 --> 00:52:38.461 - of both pedestrians and motorists. And sequenced, the idea that things occur in a physical sequence 00:52:38.461 --> 00:52:47.070 - or a time sequence that old buildings like this theater again appear not as a theater but 00:52:47.298 --> 00:52:54.728 - second generation as a restaurant, and then third generation as a national retailer here, who is perfectly 00:52:54.728 --> 00:53:01.742 - willing to go into this kind of environment. We think of this kind of entity as mall only, but given 00:53:01.742 --> 00:53:09.102 - this kind of environment, they're more than willing to come into it. And then, again, by almost unanimous 00:53:09.102 --> 00:53:15.838 - consent, the kind of environment we want, and the arrows pointing to all these features that are 00:53:16.002 --> 00:53:24.108 - that are going on here, the texture underfoot overhead, the sense of enclosure, the termination by the 00:53:24.108 --> 00:53:32.135 - tree here and so forth. So great scenes or even good scenes always have a handful, a fistful of these 00:53:32.135 --> 00:53:40.241 - things all operating at once. Street design then is not just the street itself or the complete street. 00:53:40.241 --> 00:53:45.278 - And this is something that we really need to understand because 00:53:45.442 --> 00:53:52.387 - A lot of our thinking about streets is if we would just solve that street, if DOT would just give us 00:53:52.387 --> 00:53:59.402 - a complete street with a sidewalk and let people walk on it, our worries would be over. The answer is 00:53:59.402 --> 00:54:06.416 - not until we address not only the street, but its surrounding adjacent land uses, and even almost its 00:54:06.416 --> 00:54:13.086 - land uses within pedestrian eye view. Not until we address all of those are we getting anywhere. 00:54:14.562 --> 00:54:22.631 - So again, just some of the complete street things, not only what's under the street, not just the pavement, 00:54:22.631 --> 00:54:30.253 - not just the pedestrian amenities here, and these are all the pedestrian amenities, but only when you 00:54:30.253 --> 00:54:37.799 - start getting to the whole composite of what's in the street and what's along it do we start to have 00:54:37.799 --> 00:54:40.414 - the basis for the complete street. 00:54:42.850 --> 00:54:49.244 - This is something I think we're just starting to realize as we start getting some what we thought were 00:54:49.244 --> 00:54:55.514 - great, complete streets, going to be great, complete streets, only to be sorely disappointed because 00:54:55.514 --> 00:55:01.908 - they still sort of feel like strip blight. And then we form the realization that, wait a minute, we've 00:55:01.908 --> 00:55:08.426 - got to get after the whole thing. It turns out, fortunately, that is one of the most doable things doing 00:55:08.426 --> 00:55:11.902 - that we can do. This whole thing of building placement, 00:55:12.674 --> 00:55:20.499 - is huge when it comes to livable streets. This again, we're just harping over and over again on this 00:55:20.499 --> 00:55:28.246 - theme of it's not just the street folks, it's what you do along the street. In our typical suburban 00:55:28.246 --> 00:55:36.380 - development format with the building set back deeply, we're doing sort of the antithesis of the building 00:55:36.380 --> 00:55:41.726 - forward location. Same sorts of things are going on in the building. 00:55:41.826 --> 00:55:48.247 - Here's what's really different about it. As a driver, your view of what's going on at the building, 00:55:48.247 --> 00:55:54.796 - your view of the building is outside the normal safe driver's vision cone of 20 degrees. So the whole 00:55:54.796 --> 00:56:01.538 - thing of what's along the street you're not even seeing with your normal vision cone. With the buildings 00:56:01.538 --> 00:56:08.023 - up against the street, you can't keep it out of your vision cone. It's only two degrees. So world of 00:56:08.023 --> 00:56:10.206 - difference. The theme is parking. 00:56:10.530 --> 00:56:16.704 - What else, if you came in from Mars or something and saw what was going along our typical arterial street, 00:56:16.704 --> 00:56:22.706 - you'd have to say the main business of this community seems to be parking vehicles. The theme otherwise 00:56:22.706 --> 00:56:28.476 - is the frontage of what's along that street, the residents, the shopping, the university, whatever. 00:56:28.476 --> 00:56:34.362 - The 90 degree distance from the street, important if we're ever gonna serve that street with transit, 00:56:34.362 --> 00:56:40.190 - because people are gonna get off on the street and walk. The length of a football field, pretty far, 00:56:41.122 --> 00:56:48.022 - 10 steps, if we locate buildings this way, the 90 degree distance from the sidewalk is likely to be 00:56:48.022 --> 00:56:55.199 - 10 steps. The driver queue is an abstraction. The driver can't know what's going on here, so the driver 00:56:55.199 --> 00:57:02.099 - has to depend on abstractions, such as a logo or something that the owner contrives to get as gaudy 00:57:02.099 --> 00:57:07.550 - and obnoxious looking as possible to attract as much attention. The queue here 00:57:08.002 --> 00:57:15.256 - is the actual building itself. So there's no need for that kind of display here. It is apparent what's 00:57:15.256 --> 00:57:22.932 - going on in that, and the driver's aware. Now, why does all of this make such a difference to the livability 00:57:22.932 --> 00:57:30.186 - of the street and the ability to have a complete street? The design speed, the speed at which a driver 00:57:30.186 --> 00:57:31.454 - feels appropriate 00:57:31.714 --> 00:57:38.836 - that feels appropriate to a driver in the absence of any regulation is likely to be 50 to 60 miles an 00:57:38.836 --> 00:57:46.237 - hour in this kind of environment. Now, they'll go slower because it's posted 45 and there may be traffic, 00:57:46.237 --> 00:57:53.289 - but the design speed, which is a speed that feels normal and natural, is likely to be 50 to 60 miles 00:57:53.289 --> 00:58:00.271 - an hour. Almost impossible to have a pedestrian atmosphere in that kind of environment or any other 00:58:00.271 --> 00:58:01.598 - kind of bicycle or 00:58:01.794 --> 00:58:08.755 - even transit atmosphere. Under this arrangement, the design speed is likely to be 20 to 30 miles an 00:58:08.755 --> 00:58:15.994 - hour, just purely from the queues that are out there on the street. We see this in downtown Bloomington 00:58:15.994 --> 00:58:23.302 - now. There's a normal observance, even with the one-way streets providing ample opportunity to overtake. 00:58:23.302 --> 00:58:30.750 - There is still, and even with a student population, I might add, there's still a pretty good observance of 00:58:31.138 --> 00:58:38.793 - of a low design speed. Not surprising. Can we really locate things like that? Does the home improvement 00:58:38.793 --> 00:58:46.595 - store have to be like this? Or can it be like this? Do grocery stores have to be behind a sea of parking? 00:58:46.595 --> 00:58:54.177 - Or can they be like this? This is on a real street. Where do people go with their shopping carts? They 00:58:54.177 --> 00:58:59.550 - cross the street with their shopping carts on the raised brick sidewalk. 00:59:00.418 --> 00:59:09.161 - Or like this even, really the sexy in town grocery store. Does fast food always have to be like this? 00:59:09.161 --> 00:59:17.903 - Or can fast food be a citizen of the street? This is a heavily used fast food in a hospital district. 00:59:17.903 --> 00:59:26.817 - People actually coming in a front door from a street. I saw it with my own eyes. How about really awful 00:59:26.817 --> 00:59:28.446 - uses like storage? 00:59:28.802 --> 00:59:36.571 - Does storage have to be like this? Or can it be like this? This is the same chain. This is a sure, 00:59:36.571 --> 00:59:44.654 - what is it, a sure guard storage place. Two stories. Why are these things like this? What has made all 00:59:44.654 --> 00:59:52.658 - these contrasting uses be in this kind of form that is abetting a livable, walkable street as opposed 00:59:52.658 --> 00:59:58.622 - to the opposite? Form-based codes is what's doing it. Local codes that say, 00:59:59.138 --> 01:00:05.624 - Yes, you can have your home improvement store there. You're entitled to it. You can have your 220 parking 01:00:05.624 --> 01:00:11.804 - spaces. But here's where the building has to be on the site. And here's where the parking can go. So 01:00:11.804 --> 01:00:18.106 - no infringement in their right to use the site as they say fit. Nothing that they can show up in court 01:00:18.106 --> 01:00:24.530 - with about detrimental to their business. We've gone through this, for example, like the parking spaces. 01:00:24.530 --> 01:00:26.366 - How much of a detriment is it 01:00:27.330 --> 01:00:34.503 - The parking spaces can no longer be located in front of the building, have to be located around back. 01:00:34.503 --> 01:00:41.536 - And the answer is, you fall so far short of impairing the ability of that property owner to use the 01:00:41.536 --> 01:00:49.131 - property as they otherwise could have, that you'll never hear about it. You'll never hear a legal challenge 01:00:49.131 --> 01:00:55.390 - about it, despite some protesting that you will when these things first get implemented. 01:00:55.490 --> 01:01:03.327 - So enormously, this is one of the biggest areas for converting unlivable environments to livable or 01:01:03.327 --> 01:01:11.243 - for creating new ones or for retrofitting battered unlivable strips. And I think as we can see here, 01:01:11.243 --> 01:01:19.080 - it's not just the design of the street. In fact, the design of the street may be a relatively minor 01:01:19.080 --> 01:01:23.390 - factor. It's the design of what goes along the street. 01:01:25.474 --> 01:01:31.666 - I guess there's still more the example that we had a catalog of every imaginable land use drugstore 01:01:31.666 --> 01:01:37.300 - like this or drugstore like this. This is on a six lane street that what the city has done 01:01:37.300 --> 01:01:43.492 - now has transformed this whole curve now is lined with with walkable buildings like that. And there 01:01:43.492 --> 01:01:50.055 - are people walking now. And again, just a hammer again for the for the third or fourth time on the theme, 01:01:50.055 --> 01:01:54.142 - we can do all the things you could possibly want with the street. 01:01:54.626 --> 01:02:03.412 - the sidewalks, the planting, rebuilding the street. But it's not until we start getting through land 01:02:03.412 --> 01:02:12.111 - development regulation, because that's about the only way you can achieve it, this kind of building 01:02:12.111 --> 01:02:21.854 - placement that we eventually end up with the atmosphere that we're talking about. Here's retrofit within a city 01:02:23.106 --> 01:02:31.228 - Here's these principles being applied to the typical battered arterial you can see the piece this is 01:02:31.228 --> 01:02:39.672 - what we're trying to get away from the parking in front of the buildings and the retrofit Parking behind 01:02:39.672 --> 01:02:47.070 - still an open Plaza here a Walkable environment everywhere this new development touches and 01:02:50.114 --> 01:02:58.273 - And again, just sort of a sequential view of, again, the kind of underdeveloped, rather battered arterial 01:02:58.273 --> 01:03:06.201 - street. State DOT or the city department can do all sorts of things to try to make it nicer. But until 01:03:06.201 --> 01:03:14.052 - you start intervening in how the street front development looks, you're really not getting any place. 01:03:14.052 --> 01:03:19.902 - And then once you intervene in that, you have, in fact, created the kind of 01:03:20.002 --> 01:03:26.380 - pedestrian atmosphere that we're talking about, the complete street, the livable street. Parking changes 01:03:26.380 --> 01:03:32.515 - radically as we develop this kind of land use pattern. So instead of having a parking demand that is 01:03:32.515 --> 01:03:38.772 - simply everybody's needs stacked up on top of each other, everybody's seasonal peak, what happens with 01:03:38.772 --> 01:03:45.393 - our parking now typically as you look at the mass of parking along our arterial street is those destinations 01:03:45.393 --> 01:03:48.734 - are all essentially providing for their seasonal peak. 01:03:49.154 --> 01:03:54.418 - So it's something that peaks in the summer, they're providing for their summer peak. If it's somebody 01:03:54.418 --> 01:03:59.734 - who peaks the day after Thanksgiving, like the Christmas shopping, they're trying to provide for that. 01:03:59.734 --> 01:04:05.101 - And the needs just stack up on top of each other. Typically, five and a half to six spaces per thousand 01:04:05.101 --> 01:04:10.313 - square feet, which gives you this kind of appearance. Sea of parking, which never appears to be used 01:04:10.313 --> 01:04:15.629 - fully. Always a paradox. People always say, is that lot ever full? And that's because it's essentially 01:04:15.629 --> 01:04:17.022 - sized for a seasonal peak. 01:04:18.242 --> 01:04:26.217 - Once you get the form of development into this walkable environment, no longer dominated by parking, 01:04:26.217 --> 01:04:34.823 - but with the parking shared, which becomes easier once you get the form you want, then you start dovetailing 01:04:34.823 --> 01:04:42.956 - these uses. These numbers are from an actual project in Knoxville that we were working on. And obvious 01:04:42.956 --> 01:04:47.614 - things happen, like the entertainment movie, in this case, 01:04:47.746 --> 01:04:55.590 - peak that happens in the evening is completely complementary to the office peak. No one's left in the 01:04:55.590 --> 01:05:03.742 - office anymore at that point, except maybe the occasional architect or consultant. And so all that office 01:05:03.742 --> 01:05:12.202 - parking space is available for entertainment, parking, movie parking. Why can't you do that? Well, typically, 01:05:12.202 --> 01:05:17.278 - there's no insurance reason why not. There's no liability reason. 01:05:17.378 --> 01:05:25.724 - The reason we can't do it is they're usually not in any kind of proximity that can be negotiated with 01:05:25.724 --> 01:05:34.316 - a reasonable, attractive, safe walking route. And so they are, in essence, unusable. The need can shrink 01:05:34.316 --> 01:05:40.126 - down to around two-thirds almost with even a modest amount of success. 01:05:40.322 --> 01:05:46.384 - Much to our amazement, the industry, the development industry themselves are very amenable to this. 01:05:46.384 --> 01:05:52.748 - So rather than having to be talked into this, they're very likely, once they see the kind of environment 01:05:52.748 --> 01:05:59.052 - that's evolving, are quite pleased to reduce the amount of parking proportionally. When you get parking 01:05:59.052 --> 01:06:05.114 - down to that level due to joint parking, you can then start to mask the parking completely with the 01:06:05.114 --> 01:06:09.054 - development that generates the need for the parking. So on this, 01:06:09.570 --> 01:06:15.996 - excellent plan now all built on a former naval base. The grocery store and all the things that go with 01:06:15.996 --> 01:06:22.546 - the grocery store. Grocery store up on the street, not unusual anymore. The grocery store, the cleaners, 01:06:22.546 --> 01:06:29.035 - the bank, the drug store also on the corner. And all these residences are meeting the parking need from 01:06:29.035 --> 01:06:35.710 - the parking that's all enclosed inside, leaving the streets completely open for the pedestrian environment 01:06:35.810 --> 01:06:45.072 - that we're seeking, a pedestrian environment not contaminated by walking alongside large amounts of 01:06:45.072 --> 01:06:54.519 - parking. And here's the two diagrams side by side, no sharing and sharing throughout the time of day. 01:06:54.519 --> 01:07:04.429 - This whole idea that the balance has tipped too far is not all that recent. Dr. Larson was Federal Highway 01:07:04.429 --> 01:07:05.726 - Administrator 01:07:06.082 --> 01:07:15.204 - I think back in the Nixon administration or shortly thereafter and even then the awareness that shouldn't 01:07:15.204 --> 01:07:23.810 - we be doing something differently? A lot of our concept about street design now is flowing from the 01:07:23.810 --> 01:07:32.502 - idea of let's look at what the setting is before we even talk about the street. Is it rural or urban 01:07:32.502 --> 01:07:34.654 - or something in between? 01:07:34.754 --> 01:07:44.415 - this whole concept of the transect that we've heard so much about the past few years, is very interesting 01:07:44.415 --> 01:07:53.711 - basis for street design. Before we jump into a street design, let's consider what the setting of that 01:07:53.711 --> 01:07:57.630 - street is. The whole process for designing 01:07:58.338 --> 01:08:07.695 - should involve scenes like this, stakeholders walking sort of every inch of the proposed layout to get 01:08:07.695 --> 01:08:17.053 - a feel for what's going on, to discuss it, to react personally with the providers of the road, the DOT 01:08:17.053 --> 01:08:26.319 - or the city staff or whoever. And scenes like this should be the rule, not the exception, as a street 01:08:26.319 --> 01:08:28.318 - design is proceeding. 01:08:31.778 --> 01:08:39.848 - some innovative There there are innovative ways to move traffic that we're watching very closely this 01:08:39.848 --> 01:08:48.077 - so-called Kelthorpe design named after Peter Kelthorpe interesting way for two one-way streets to cross 01:08:48.077 --> 01:08:56.227 - major streets to cross these are the streets creating nine parcels of highly valuable development land 01:08:56.227 --> 01:08:59.550 - and carrying a huge amount of traffic and 01:08:59.874 --> 01:09:08.177 - None of them being any bigger than three lanes, therefore yielding the possibility of a superior pedestrian 01:09:08.177 --> 01:09:16.480 - environment. A few of these have been developed on the West Coast. Interesting ideas for grade separations. 01:09:16.480 --> 01:09:24.398 - This is a grade-separated interchange, but instead of ramps, what would have been ramps are lined with 01:09:24.398 --> 01:09:27.166 - usable commercial properties except 01:09:27.778 --> 01:09:34.941 - where there's some wetlands preserved. This is in Charleston, South Carolina, with the interesting innovation 01:09:34.941 --> 01:09:41.517 - here being, who says a ramp? There's nothing in any design that says a ramp has to be this isolated, 01:09:41.517 --> 01:09:48.289 - non-usable piece of land. It does on an interstate freeway, but in-town ramps can be something entirely 01:09:48.289 --> 01:09:53.694 - different. And then finally, this age-old question that we're still wrestling with 01:09:55.106 --> 01:10:01.298 - of how do you answer the question, if we are deliberately talking to the providers of transportation, 01:10:01.298 --> 01:10:07.611 - highway departments and city staff, who are convinced, or even the public, it doesn't have to be staff, 01:10:07.611 --> 01:10:13.682 - even the public who's convinced that more capacity is the answer and that our streets can't achieve 01:10:13.682 --> 01:10:19.752 - a new balance point between livability and capacity. We have to keep on doing what we're doing. How 01:10:19.752 --> 01:10:22.302 - do you answer that question of, you know, 01:10:22.530 --> 01:10:29.638 - But where will the traffic go, that kind of sputtering, indignant idea that how dare you talk about 01:10:29.638 --> 01:10:36.816 - moving less traffic on the street so that we have a bike lane or a transit lane or a wider sidewalk? 01:10:36.816 --> 01:10:43.710 - One of the answers is, plain old supply and demand kicks in. Right now, we are trying to provide 01:10:43.710 --> 01:10:51.742 - transportation at zero cost in terms of delay. So our policies and our level of service guidelines about traffic 01:10:52.162 --> 01:10:58.727 - are all striving to provide delay-free traffic. And delay is the only cost that the motorist experiences 01:10:58.727 --> 01:11:05.042 - that accrues from the street system. We can't do anything about gas price or anything like that, but 01:11:05.042 --> 01:11:11.356 - we can strive to give a delay-free experience. But what happens with a low or zero-priced commodity? 01:11:11.356 --> 01:11:17.733 - People consume more of it, obviously. So we're down to this point now on the supply and demand curve. 01:11:17.733 --> 01:11:22.110 - We're demanding huge amounts of travel because the price is so cheap. 01:11:22.306 --> 01:11:30.395 - What happens when the price goes up, i.e. more congestion? We settle on new price points. Big surprise. 01:11:30.395 --> 01:11:38.250 - Isn't this what happens with every single purchase that is made? New price point. And what does that 01:11:38.250 --> 01:11:46.262 - mean then in physical terms? People change their travel time. How bad of a thing is that? That people, 01:11:46.262 --> 01:11:51.006 - we've already talked about it being a popular fringe benefit 01:11:51.106 --> 01:11:57.447 - at my employer, I was in downtown Pittsburgh a couple of years ago and found much to my delight that 01:11:57.447 --> 01:12:03.787 - the bookstore, the Barnes and Noble, was open at 7 o'clock. And I got talking to the clerk about it, 01:12:03.787 --> 01:12:10.379 - about it being rather unusual that Barnes and Noble was open at this time. And she said, well, you know, 01:12:10.379 --> 01:12:16.846 - Pittsburgh is so congested, downtown Pittsburgh, and people for years have been coming in early. A lot 01:12:16.846 --> 01:12:19.294 - of people come in early, and so we saw 01:12:19.426 --> 01:12:27.392 - Barnes and Noble opens their store at seven in the morning. I got thinking, okay, here's something caused 01:12:27.392 --> 01:12:35.057 - by congestion. Who's the victim? Not Barnes and Noble, who's achieved the retailer's dream of 18-hour 01:12:35.057 --> 01:12:42.798 - day, not the lady that had the job, not the landlord that's renting the store. The only victim I could 01:12:42.798 --> 01:12:45.278 - find was me, who left $24 there. 01:12:45.474 --> 01:12:51.928 - sort of a victimless, kind of a victimless consequence of congestion. And we see this over and over 01:12:51.928 --> 01:12:58.575 - again. The idea that you're going to dump traffic, if you do something to one road to make it livable, 01:12:58.575 --> 01:13:05.028 - road A here in the red, if you do something that you're going to dump all this traffic on some sort 01:13:05.028 --> 01:13:11.998 - of poor, unwitting nearby road, doesn't happen. And our own models, the same traffic models that frequently 01:13:12.226 --> 01:13:19.590 - Give us a lot of heartburn are very good about saying this this won't happen, too in fact what they'll 01:13:19.590 --> 01:13:27.026 - say is that the impact of a big change on one roads capacity is feathered out in the very minute little 01:13:27.026 --> 01:13:34.247 - parcels over the whole network provided you have some semblance of a network and That you don't just 01:13:34.247 --> 01:13:41.182 - dump what happens is some some traffic on Road B was about ready to get another route anyhow and 01:13:41.794 --> 01:13:48.944 - And when the increment from road A shifts, they go someplace else and on and on, not everybody of course, 01:13:48.944 --> 01:13:55.690 - but on and on throughout the network to where it becomes hard to ever find any sort of major impact 01:13:55.690 --> 01:14:02.571 - of what we thought was gonna be a major decision. And our own traffic models can show this too. We're 01:14:02.571 --> 01:14:09.586 - starting to learn how to use traffic models to prove this kind of impact. That map goes with this quote 01:14:09.586 --> 01:14:11.070 - from Sherlock Holmes. 01:14:11.842 --> 01:14:20.739 - Sir Arthur Conan Dial says, when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable 01:14:20.739 --> 01:14:29.636 - must be the truth. So when we have eliminated the possibility of paving our way out of congestion, when 01:14:29.636 --> 01:14:35.966 - we accept that that's impossible, then whatever remains, and for example, 01:14:36.194 --> 01:14:43.482 - that transit new starts since 1984, the light rail new starts throughout the US. Whatever remains must 01:14:43.482 --> 01:14:50.771 - be the truth, no matter how improbable. So even if we think transit use is highly improbable now, once 01:14:50.771 --> 01:14:57.989 - we start to adjust to the reality of not building our way, not paving our way out of congestion, what 01:14:57.989 --> 01:15:02.942 - seemed to be improbable can all of a sudden seem to be very truthful. 01:15:06.018 --> 01:15:14.124 - Another consequence of accepting congestion is people staying in place and reinvesting in their homes 01:15:14.124 --> 01:15:22.547 - rather than abandoning those homes essentially for more distant suburban tract housing, giving you scenes 01:15:22.547 --> 01:15:30.732 - like this revitalization neighborhood, bad thing or good thing. I think almost anybody associated with 01:15:30.732 --> 01:15:35.262 - a city would say good thing. This whole idea that retail 01:15:36.674 --> 01:15:44.091 - retail villains, the same ones we thought were causing all this kind of strip commercial and attendant 01:15:44.091 --> 01:15:51.436 - congestion. The idea that they become part of the solution is becoming pretty clear now that this can 01:15:51.436 --> 01:15:58.709 - happen. So this is not good architecture. We certainly see much better ones. But the idea that these 01:15:58.709 --> 01:16:05.694 - formerly monstrous, large retailers know how to do quarter-size and half-size community shopping 01:16:06.018 --> 01:16:11.932 - is enormously, enormously interesting. Where do they do it? Our grocery chain in Florida, the 01:16:11.932 --> 01:16:18.601 - very well-managed Publix chain, has sprouted a lot of 28,000 square foot stores. This is around half-size 01:16:18.601 --> 01:16:25.145 - store. They're marvelous little things. Where do they do it? They're our clients, so we have an insight 01:16:25.145 --> 01:16:31.499 - into this. They do it where congestion is bad. They do it where they cannot get the demographic they 01:16:31.499 --> 01:16:34.142 - need into their 44,000 square foot store. 01:16:34.306 --> 01:16:43.049 - So do they abandon the market then to Elberson or Kroger? No, they come back with a product that they 01:16:43.049 --> 01:16:52.221 - are uniquely able to do, which is sort of the half-size store moved closer to the market. Very interesting 01:16:52.221 --> 01:17:01.822 - response. How about school sizing? The idea that we rethink the idea of what constitutes a good school, thereby 01:17:03.362 --> 01:17:11.115 - greatly decreasing the amount of travel and evading the woes of congestion. Most people would agree 01:17:11.115 --> 01:17:19.334 - reinvesting in something like this is a good idea. We really like this. This was a quote, verbatim quote, 01:17:19.334 --> 01:17:27.243 - from Carl, state traffic engineer in Minnesota, who was concerned when we were talking about reducing 01:17:27.243 --> 01:17:32.670 - the Olson Highway out of downtown Minneapolis from six lanes to four. 01:17:32.962 --> 01:17:39.182 - So that it would make a walkable livable street through the near north neighborhood and Carl being state 01:17:39.182 --> 01:17:45.284 - traffic engineer was very concerned telling us people will get sick and tired of congestion and Carl's 01:17:45.284 --> 01:17:50.142 - getting ready to really lay it on us and and what girl and move into the city and 01:17:50.722 --> 01:17:57.093 - And so everybody had a laugh, Carl included. And we all decided, you know, this really isn't a very 01:17:57.093 --> 01:18:04.102 - bad consequence of reducing the Olson Highway in size if this is all that's gonna happen. And the Minneapolis 01:18:04.102 --> 01:18:10.601 - folks thought it was a very fine idea indeed. And in fact, this is moving back into the city. This is 01:18:10.601 --> 01:18:17.036 - not Minneapolis, but this is, of all places, Orlando, Florida, that didn't have a downtown apartment 01:18:17.036 --> 01:18:20.158 - to its name a few years ago and has now sprouted 01:18:20.386 --> 01:18:36.470 - hundreds and hundreds of these things. Because we seem to have gone in reverse here. Or we're just about 01:18:36.470 --> 01:18:47.806 - through, but that was no reason to go in reverse here. What's that? Okay. 01:18:51.042 --> 01:18:58.525 - Okay. We're starting to understand that the chain of impacts starts producing unintended consequences. 01:18:58.525 --> 01:19:06.371 - So when we widen the road and we reduce the delay and reduce the cost, that sounds good, wonderful impacts. 01:19:06.371 --> 01:19:13.855 - But then they start sprouting these unintended second and third order impacts. So we reduce the delay, 01:19:13.855 --> 01:19:20.030 - we just start ranging further for things. And then, for example, we range further to 01:19:20.162 --> 01:19:25.845 - bizarre forms of retailing fostered by all this road capacity. And then the converse is true. 01:19:25.845 --> 01:19:32.072 - Being engineers, we believe in the converse, that if you do the unthinkable and say, okay, we're going 01:19:32.072 --> 01:19:38.299 - to deliberately accept congestion because we, or we're going to accept more congestion because we have 01:19:38.299 --> 01:19:44.769 - better uses for some of the street than moving traffic, the first order consequences seem to be untenable. 01:19:44.769 --> 01:19:49.182 - We're increasing the delay or we're increasing the cost. Who wants that? 01:19:49.410 --> 01:19:55.375 - That leads to using alternative modes, for example, main revitalization of main street shopping. So 01:19:55.375 --> 01:20:01.817 - as we go down the chain of impacts, they start to appear more and more favorable. And we're really starting 01:20:01.817 --> 01:20:07.603 - to understand now that we have for years been in a paradigm that is in fact producing unintended 01:20:07.603 --> 01:20:13.926 - consequences. And I think most of us here realize the very fact that you're in this kind of group dealing 01:20:13.926 --> 01:20:17.982 - with this kind of thing, that this paradigm that we're showing here 01:20:18.562 --> 01:20:26.225 - is probably the correct one, and that our longer-term solution, when we get things going in the right 01:20:26.225 --> 01:20:33.813 - direction, we will start seeing exactly this kind of thing going on. So we've looked at... We'd like 01:20:33.813 --> 01:20:41.401 - to get back to this. We'd like to get back to this happy. This was... I almost ran off the road when 01:20:41.401 --> 01:20:47.486 - I saw this. We'd like to get back to this. This is in Salisbury, North Carolina, 01:20:47.810 --> 01:20:55.813 - And you could have guessed the date of the cornerstone, but I went up and looked at it anyhow, and sure 01:20:55.813 --> 01:21:03.738 - enough, 1955, and that's how we thought about things then. We would like to get back to where we named 01:21:03.738 --> 01:21:11.664 - churches after our highways or streets. And to just emphasize the importance of this whole thing about 01:21:11.664 --> 01:21:15.742 - it's not just the road itself, its form, this quote, 01:21:15.906 --> 01:21:22.377 - from Will Rogers in 1936 was amazingly, amazingly accurate, where he said, America conceived of many 01:21:22.377 --> 01:21:28.784 - odd inventions for getting somewhere. And our current road system is, in fact, and history is going 01:21:28.784 --> 01:21:35.255 - to say it was a very odd invention for getting somewhere, but could think of nothing to do when they 01:21:35.255 --> 01:21:41.534 - got there. And the challenge, I think, is not only to let's get the odd inventions under control, 01:21:41.986 --> 01:21:49.233 - Let's work equally hard on what it is we're gonna do when we get there with the form of what's along 01:21:49.233 --> 01:21:56.696 - these roads. Certainly appreciated your patience through this long lecture, but I heard you were a very 01:21:56.696 --> 01:22:03.872 - attentive audience and could grasp all of this and like to take the opportunity to answer questions 01:22:03.872 --> 01:22:11.550 - or discuss local issues such as, I can understand them from a quick pass through with Buff this afternoon. 01:22:11.906 --> 01:22:24.288 - Thank you. This is a, what do you call it, a born again engineer. So if you have any questions, please 01:22:24.288 --> 01:22:37.271 - step up to this mic or maybe the mic over on that side if it's closer and so that we can hear your question 01:22:37.271 --> 01:22:41.118 - on the, this is being recorded. 01:22:41.602 --> 01:22:49.477 - So please step up and ask questions. I'm Laurel Cornell. I know you've talked a lot about congestion, 01:22:49.477 --> 01:22:57.893 - and congestion is a bugaboo that appears all kinds of different places. People complain about the congestion 01:22:57.893 --> 01:23:05.150 - when it's 5 p.m. in Bloomington and other amazing things. But is there a word that we can use 01:23:05.538 --> 01:23:12.408 - But we don't have any word for talking about the opposite of congestion where we have streets that are 01:23:12.408 --> 01:23:19.211 - full of lots and lots of interesting activities and people participating in very many different modes 01:23:19.211 --> 01:23:26.215 - of transport. Is there some word like that that we could use as the opposite of congestion to talk about 01:23:26.215 --> 01:23:30.750 - streets that are full of traffic of all variety of different modes? 01:23:32.578 --> 01:23:39.282 - Not that I know of. That's a very good question. I think it's the, just a manifestation of the old thing 01:23:39.282 --> 01:23:45.859 - is we're quick to have a good word for something we perceive as negative, and very slow to have a good 01:23:45.859 --> 01:23:52.371 - word for something positive. The only words that come together, the only words that come to mind, and 01:23:52.371 --> 01:23:58.948 - these only nip around at the corner, the complete streets, but that's not a real satisfying title, and 01:23:58.948 --> 01:24:01.502 - then complete streets folks themselves, 01:24:01.922 --> 01:24:11.748 - admirably have limited their focus to the street itself too. So they are not getting at this vibrancy 01:24:11.748 --> 01:24:21.766 - thing at all. Vibrant is a good term. A terrific architect that I work with claims that there's no easy 01:24:21.766 --> 01:24:28.606 - way to categorize pictures of a great place that you're talking about. 01:24:28.706 --> 01:24:35.137 - He's got scenes like that that he shows, and he said he never knows where to put them. He says, is this 01:24:35.137 --> 01:24:41.506 - a great shopping? Is this a great shopping armature? Is this a great landscaping example? And he said, 01:24:41.506 --> 01:24:47.690 - a sign of a great place is that it's very hard to categorize as one single thing. And he's starting 01:24:47.690 --> 01:24:54.430 - to develop that as a criteria that if you don't know where to put the picture, it's probably a great street. 01:24:54.786 --> 01:25:04.473 - Great streets is a word, but that connotes majestic things along the street, like cathedrals and all, 01:25:04.473 --> 01:25:14.065 - and the most humblest of neighborhood street can be great. It needs a wordsmith on it. That's a good 01:25:14.065 --> 01:25:21.758 - question. Vibrant, maybe? Any ideas from the... You know, one of the things that 01:25:21.858 --> 01:25:31.012 - Walter and I talked about today was level of service is that that the description for cars is defined 01:25:31.012 --> 01:25:40.256 - very strictly You know how many what's the capacity of a road and how close is it to that capacity and 01:25:40.256 --> 01:25:49.590 - We were saying that there isn't the same type of thing for pedestrian level of service or transit level 01:25:49.590 --> 01:25:50.846 - of service or 01:25:50.978 --> 01:25:59.405 - a bicycle level of service and that if we could create those definitions that it would be much easier 01:25:59.405 --> 01:26:07.914 - for us to demand a specific level for a particular mode of transportation. Walter, I know you had some 01:26:07.914 --> 01:26:16.506 - things to say about that. You wanna, can I? There's room for a lot of progress about how we define them 01:26:16.506 --> 01:26:18.654 - so we can make a lot more 01:26:19.522 --> 01:26:26.796 - we can make some quick headway in the measures of success, the individual measures of success, like 01:26:26.796 --> 01:26:34.288 - simple things like just simply the amount of blank uninteresting space, or let's put the positive spin 01:26:34.288 --> 01:26:41.853 - on it, the amount of interesting articulated space that you pass by, the percentage would be a terrific 01:26:41.853 --> 01:26:48.254 - measure of vibrancy. So if you're going by interesting shop windows and sidewalk cafes, 01:26:48.578 --> 01:26:58.580 - and students sitting on walls and things like that, high entertainment value. On the contrary, if you're 01:26:58.580 --> 01:27:08.487 - going past blank walls, the score falls to zero. But there is not a single good measure. It badly needs 01:27:08.487 --> 01:27:17.822 - one. And that's why traffic has such an unfair advantage, is it's got these clean, simple measure 01:27:18.562 --> 01:27:26.454 - that can be reproduced precisely regardless of the observer. So if I calculated the level of service 01:27:26.454 --> 01:27:34.269 - on the street, our engineer could come on from California, sight unseen, and come up with precisely 01:27:34.269 --> 01:27:42.239 - the same level of service. Yeah. Which is the segue into my question. It's my understanding, well, in 01:27:42.239 --> 01:27:47.006 - terms of trying to evoke some of these kinds of designs with 01:27:47.234 --> 01:27:58.229 - either city or state issues in terms of street design. We are told by traffic engineers that the AASHTO 01:27:58.229 --> 01:28:09.118 - and Federal Highway Guidelines require that lanes be so wide and everything is very formulaic and very 01:28:09.442 --> 01:28:17.837 - Prescriptive and and you have to do it this way. Otherwise, we won't get any funding And so it's my 01:28:17.837 --> 01:28:26.652 - understanding that there is a push or a movement to change those guidelines Several things are happening 01:28:26.652 --> 01:28:35.131 - on that front the one of the more Highly publicized things that's gone on over the past few years is 01:28:35.131 --> 01:28:36.222 - that a joint 01:28:36.546 --> 01:28:44.728 - effort by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Congress for the New Urbanism has been working 01:28:44.728 --> 01:28:52.758 - on guidelines for major thoroughfares that comply with the AASHTO guidelines, but they direct you toward 01:28:52.758 --> 01:28:56.734 - kinder, gentler solutions. That has not yet reached 01:28:56.962 --> 01:29:04.225 - That has not yet reached full acceptance yet, and so you can't wave that around in front of a Babaki 01:29:04.225 --> 01:29:11.416 - local official saying, look, the Institute of Transportation Engineers endorses this completely. Do 01:29:11.416 --> 01:29:18.607 - you have any idea when that might be accepted? No, I don't. In fact, I thought, until this evening, 01:29:18.607 --> 01:29:26.014 - I thought that it had been finalized. I think I was probably mistaken because the draft was apparently 01:29:26.114 --> 01:29:34.376 - produced in a very polished form, like a softbound book, and I think I just jumped to the conclusion 01:29:34.376 --> 01:29:42.637 - that it has been accepted. The problem is, though, even with that endorsed fully by the Institute of 01:29:42.637 --> 01:29:51.144 - Transportation Engineers, it undoubtedly will still be a voluntary thing on the part of the balky local 01:29:51.144 --> 01:29:53.598 - official that is the problem. 01:29:54.626 --> 01:30:03.864 - I think things other than just documentary ammunition, things beyond that are going to be needed. Bear 01:30:03.864 --> 01:30:13.013 - in mind, the famous or infamous, as the case may be, AASHTO Green Book, American Association of State 01:30:13.013 --> 01:30:22.430 - Highway and Transportation Officials, is actually a very flexible document. Most of the important design 01:30:22.658 --> 01:30:30.687 - variables like the curvature and the sight distance, the things that determine how well a road sits 01:30:30.687 --> 01:30:38.717 - on the land, they provide a great deal of flexibility depending on what speed you want to design it 01:30:38.717 --> 01:30:46.907 - for. And they array these things very nicely in some surprisingly simple tables. What happens though, 01:30:46.907 --> 01:30:52.126 - in the hands of local technicians or even state DOT technicians, 01:30:52.482 --> 01:30:59.894 - without any intervening input from people who think a street should do other things besides just move 01:30:59.894 --> 01:31:07.378 - as much traffic as fast as possible. In their hands, they gravitate toward the highest possible design 01:31:07.378 --> 01:31:14.935 - speed. The highest affordable one is typically the criteria. And that gives us these unlivable designs, 01:31:14.935 --> 01:31:20.894 - particularly in suburban and urban areas. The Astro Green Book right now is fully 01:31:21.090 --> 01:31:31.191 - is fully accommodating of much lower design speeds with very greatly reduced footprints. But the problem 01:31:31.191 --> 01:31:41.002 - is persuading a local technician to accept that. And that persuasion usually needs big political legs 01:31:41.002 --> 01:31:50.622 - under it, typically with a strong elected official input saying, you know, this is our main street. 01:31:51.874 --> 01:32:01.825 - 25 miles an hour is fine here, things like that. I have one follow-up question in terms of pushback 01:32:01.825 --> 01:32:11.775 - from public safety officials for wider streets for better access for fire trucks and ambulances. Is 01:32:11.775 --> 01:32:20.830 - there any data to use against that? The insertion of particularly fire safety, fire rescue 01:32:21.090 --> 01:32:30.305 - The requirement that we now see them making on streets has hit us so suddenly that we're reeling from 01:32:30.305 --> 01:32:39.701 - it still. Say as early as, or as recently as say mid-90s when we would be agitating for smaller streets 01:32:39.701 --> 01:32:47.742 - and very small local streets and all, we always regarded the input from fire departments 01:32:48.034 --> 01:32:55.073 - as friendly and supportive. And they typically had this can-do attitude. You know, we're the fire department. 01:32:55.073 --> 01:33:01.792 - We've got through streets that size for years. We can get anywhere. There was like a pride on, you know, 01:33:01.792 --> 01:33:08.191 - we can get anywhere. We can get the job done. And I don't know if it was because of 9-11, you know, 01:33:08.191 --> 01:33:14.590 - our whole phobia about security now, or whether it was bunches of older chiefs retiring and younger 01:33:14.590 --> 01:33:17.534 - academy-trained ones coming in. I'm not sure. 01:33:18.274 --> 01:33:26.688 - Just in the past five or six years, there's been this, fire safety has become one of the biggest obstacles 01:33:26.688 --> 01:33:34.709 - to livable streets, and we're still grappling with how to deal with it. There's a simply wrong-headed 01:33:34.709 --> 01:33:42.966 - NFPA requirement that gets bandied all over the place that you have to have 20 feet clear in the street, 01:33:42.966 --> 01:33:45.246 - and so any amount of parking 01:33:46.210 --> 01:33:53.724 - or any other kind of the use of the street that reduces it to less than 20 feet is unacceptable and 01:33:53.724 --> 01:34:01.463 - 20 feet clear. And we went all the way to the legal office of the National Fire Protection Association 01:34:01.463 --> 01:34:09.202 - because the regulation that's quoted all the time appears to be for suburban, new suburban development 01:34:09.202 --> 01:34:16.190 - and the legal counsel for NFPA said that's exactly what it is. This is a requirement for new 01:34:16.322 --> 01:34:23.360 - development, which so often has only one way in and one way out that we are specifying that 20 feet, 01:34:23.360 --> 01:34:31.026 - not for public streets. And then he went on to say, he volunteered. He said that the NFPA does not promulgate 01:34:31.026 --> 01:34:38.204 - for public streets at all, that we are very careful not to promulgate for public streets. So this huge 01:34:38.204 --> 01:34:44.894 - amount of misinformation. But we hear that over and over again that it has to be 20 feet clear. 01:34:46.626 --> 01:34:53.306 - We did, just wanted to be right with you. In a slightly happier time, we were making great progress 01:34:53.306 --> 01:35:00.653 - with a chief in Bluffton, South Carolina, kinda down near Hilton Head, and he had gone along with essentially 01:35:00.653 --> 01:35:07.466 - everything we wanted. It was a new town, and he was gonna allow parking on both sides and all, and we 01:35:07.466 --> 01:35:14.346 - finally just pressing him, but he said he really didn't need 12 feet, though. He didn't need a 12 feet 01:35:14.346 --> 01:35:16.350 - clear, and so we pressed him. 01:35:16.642 --> 01:35:21.331 - meeting was sort of over, and we were pressing him, why do you need the 12 feet? And he said, well, 01:35:21.331 --> 01:35:26.114 - he said, you know, our equipment lockers are on the side of the truck. And he said, you know, we have 01:35:26.114 --> 01:35:30.804 - to kind of squeeze in there and get our stuff out, and 12 feet is a minimum. And I said, we already 01:35:30.804 --> 01:35:35.587 - made several concessions about equipment to him and everything. He said, to tell you what we're going 01:35:35.587 --> 01:35:38.494 - to do, Chief, we'll send you and your men to Weight Watchers. 01:35:38.594 --> 01:35:46.697 - And his famous response to us was, this is South Carolina now, his famous response was, you've done 01:35:46.697 --> 01:35:55.368 - gone too far now. Yes sir. Has your team ever assessed the impact or have you ever come across any studies 01:35:55.368 --> 01:36:03.472 - that do so that assess the peripheral impact on traffic fatalities and accidents for making streets 01:36:03.472 --> 01:36:04.606 - more livable? 01:36:04.770 --> 01:36:12.394 - or fuel usage and fuel consumption, and these are just categories that I thought of while I was sitting 01:36:12.394 --> 01:36:19.799 - there. The economic impact of accidents, fuel consumption, and things like weight storm water runoff 01:36:19.799 --> 01:36:22.878 - due to the streets becoming more livable. 01:36:23.842 --> 01:36:31.681 - What was the first part, the first relationship you had, the first trade-off you made? I was wondering 01:36:31.681 --> 01:36:39.368 - if you'd come across any studies that looked at the impact of making streets more livable on traffic 01:36:39.368 --> 01:36:47.207 - fatality, things like traffic fatalities, fuel usage, or storm water. There's a lot of good data that, 01:36:47.207 --> 01:36:49.566 - I think you'd have to call it, 01:36:49.954 --> 01:36:57.884 - Indirect data there's there's very few studies that directly look at a street before and after and that 01:36:57.884 --> 01:37:05.890 - would not be too conclusive anyhow But there's there's really good Indirect data that with with a little 01:37:05.890 --> 01:37:13.819 - bit of interpretation and manipulation goes a long way for example the the unassailable data that shows 01:37:13.819 --> 01:37:19.614 - that the severity of pedestrian accidents the severity to the pedestrian of 01:37:19.714 --> 01:37:27.834 - of a crash goes up logarithmically so that by the time you, that I think it's 40 miles an hour is like 01:37:27.834 --> 01:37:36.112 - twice as high a probability of hospitalization as 30 and then 50 miles an hour, which isn't even double, 01:37:36.112 --> 01:37:44.469 - has like six or seven times the rate of hospitalization. This is unassailable. It's from Federal Highways 01:37:44.469 --> 01:37:49.278 - Administration. So that kind of data in conjunction with the 01:37:50.082 --> 01:37:57.143 - in conjunction with the reduction in vehicular speeds that you would get from a given application, further 01:37:57.143 --> 01:38:04.072 - compounded, because these things get compounded, further compounded by the reduced time that pedestrians 01:38:04.072 --> 01:38:10.869 - are in the path of a moving vehicle, like if you're removing lanes. When you compound all these things 01:38:10.869 --> 01:38:16.478 - together, and then further compounded by the increased size of gap between vehicles, 01:38:16.578 --> 01:38:24.981 - as they're traveling slower, you start to get these huge swings in safety, for example, with small amounts 01:38:24.981 --> 01:38:32.913 - of street design change. But you sort of have to do the math yourself and everything. But it becomes 01:38:32.913 --> 01:38:41.552 - very compelling. We never get any argument when we build things up like that. And then things like stormwater 01:38:41.552 --> 01:38:45.950 - retention is such an established field now that, again, 01:38:47.202 --> 01:38:56.638 - People don't typically cite numbers by the street, but by the square yard of impervious, you can quickly 01:38:56.638 --> 01:39:05.625 - do your own calculations and all. There's no need to be shy about this kind of calculation and all. 01:39:05.625 --> 01:39:11.646 - We've found that even if it's not our field to just wade right in, 01:39:11.970 --> 01:39:19.468 - And we volunteer things now about the municipal bonding cost of things. And I know next to nothing about 01:39:19.468 --> 01:39:26.680 - municipal bonding, but I know how to look up the payback at 4.5% over 30 years and things like that. 01:39:26.680 --> 01:39:33.820 - And it's quite compelling if you're just a little bit careful about arithmetic. So the quick answer 01:39:33.820 --> 01:39:39.390 - is direct sources that look at this kind of street, very few indirect sources 01:39:40.482 --> 01:39:49.524 - a lot of good ones out there. And then, we're very intrigued by this research coming out of 01:39:49.524 --> 01:39:59.943 - Texas Transportation Institute, TTI, that is doing wonderful things with roadside safety and just turning 01:39:59.943 --> 01:40:07.806 - that on its head. So that's something to watch out for. The author's name is... 01:40:08.162 --> 01:40:15.883 - unfortunate name is Eric Dumbaw, D-U-M-B-A-U-G-H. But the research is brilliant and it's already finding 01:40:15.883 --> 01:40:23.236 - its way into court and things like that. And it gets after a lot of these things that were formerly 01:40:23.236 --> 01:40:30.663 - thought to be roadside hazards, like parked vehicles, street trees and all, and is simply turning it 01:40:30.663 --> 01:40:36.766 - on the head saying, no, these are safety. These are actually increasing safety and 01:40:37.090 --> 01:40:44.884 - There's quite a bit of empirical research in there, too. I have an observation, maybe more than a question. 01:40:44.884 --> 01:40:52.245 - But it seems like when we talk about congestion, level of service, and traffic speeds, we're actually 01:40:52.245 --> 01:40:59.679 - talking about streets that aren't complete. If I had reason to stop there, park there, walk there, all 01:40:59.679 --> 01:41:06.174 - of those issues become beneficial to slow them down instead of speed them up. Absolutely. 01:41:06.370 --> 01:41:14.404 - Absolutely. Sometimes we think that getting after that reason to be there is the more powerful avenue 01:41:14.404 --> 01:41:22.438 - toward a complete street. Once the reason to be there is evident, a lot of the problems, a lot of the 01:41:22.438 --> 01:41:30.393 - opposition you would get to making the street complete simply evaporates or gets overwhelmed. If you 01:41:30.393 --> 01:41:36.222 - have a vibrant retail atmosphere or students walking all over the street, 01:41:36.354 --> 01:41:44.281 - and high occupancy and all, it becomes a much simpler matter to prevail on, you know, this street needs 01:41:44.281 --> 01:41:52.284 - its on-street parking restored. It also seems like it's business opportunities. Congestion means people. 01:41:52.284 --> 01:41:58.686 - It's still a very tough thing to sell, though. If you knew of some soundbite way to 01:41:58.786 --> 01:42:06.507 - convince people that congestion is okay. We grapple with this all the time and we just can't get the 01:42:06.507 --> 01:42:14.228 - compelling sound bite answer that gets city council heads nodding. I was fascinated when you pointed 01:42:14.228 --> 01:42:22.407 - out that New Jersey and Pennsylvania's DOT is turning their heads around and looking at things differently 01:42:22.407 --> 01:42:27.070 - and canceling their highways. And as we struggle with INDOT, 01:42:27.234 --> 01:42:36.025 - I'm wondering if you can tell me what was it that changed things in New Jersey and Pennsylvania? Was 01:42:36.025 --> 01:42:45.077 - it people coming to the legislature? Was it somebody at the head of PennDOT and New JerseyDOT that just 01:42:45.077 --> 01:42:54.303 - woke up one day? We're still trying to get to the, we're still trying to understand it itself. It clearly 01:42:54.303 --> 01:42:55.870 - was top down that 01:42:57.666 --> 01:43:08.469 - Apparently, the Governor Rendell administration, for example, commissioned the Brookings Institution 01:43:08.469 --> 01:43:19.594 - to do this beautifully written back to prosperity, which dealt with transportation quite a bit. So that 01:43:19.594 --> 01:43:26.974 - was top down. The respective secretaries of the DOTs in those states 01:43:27.842 --> 01:43:36.852 - were very much on board this, but how they got that way, I'm not sure. The states are severely financially 01:43:36.852 --> 01:43:45.357 - strapped, and that helps. The idea that you have a lot of, as one of the secretaries said, we've got 01:43:45.357 --> 01:43:54.368 - a lot of quarter-billion dollar projects, $250 million dollar projects on the books, and that for decades, 01:43:54.368 --> 01:43:55.294 - state DOTs 01:43:55.490 --> 01:44:02.263 - all over, and I'm sure just in Indiana is the case too. They were well aware that they probably would 01:44:02.263 --> 01:44:09.501 - never get to all these projects, but it was still credible to spend planning and design and even acquisition 01:44:09.501 --> 01:44:16.274 - money on them. And I think some of these more financially strapped Northeastern states are quicker to 01:44:16.274 --> 01:44:23.047 - finally bite the bullet saying, look, we are never gonna build these quarter billion dollar projects. 01:44:23.047 --> 01:44:25.438 - There is real need in these places. 01:44:26.114 --> 01:44:34.654 - But the need is not for six lane bypasses, freeway bypasses. The need is for a third lane or 01:44:34.654 --> 01:44:43.928 - even community-based thing. So top down, the lower level staffs seem to be peppered with sympathetic 01:44:43.928 --> 01:44:53.203 - staff too. And we spent a lot of time kind of probing around as how did you end up at the DOT or how 01:44:53.203 --> 01:44:55.774 - did you get this viewpoint? 01:44:55.906 --> 01:45:03.724 - And we never really, I wish we knew the formula. The biggest question around is not what should we do. 01:45:03.724 --> 01:45:11.618 - There's a high level of understanding now about what we should do and what we shouldn't do. But there's 01:45:11.618 --> 01:45:19.285 - this, we're in some sort of infancy about understanding how does it happen. We even went looking for 01:45:19.285 --> 01:45:24.446 - literature, like has there been books from behavioral science about 01:45:24.578 --> 01:45:32.395 - paradigm changing or something, and never found anything conclusively. Went out with great hopes and 01:45:32.395 --> 01:45:40.134 - just brought the recently released book titled Simplexity, which is dealing with simple things that 01:45:40.134 --> 01:45:48.183 - are really complex and vice versa, and oh, worthless if I may give a real review. So I don't know. It's 01:45:48.183 --> 01:45:53.214 - a behavioral science thing. You know, it could be something that 01:45:53.826 --> 01:46:01.508 - Somebody who's been through political battles has an intuitive feel for like, you know, people that 01:46:01.508 --> 01:46:09.498 - have waged political campaigns, even long shot ones. How did they do it? Other great big movements must 01:46:09.498 --> 01:46:17.180 - have some relevance in them like, you know, the whole, the radical change about the appropriateness 01:46:17.180 --> 01:46:23.710 - of smoking that going into it 20 or 30 years ago, you would have said we would never 01:46:24.034 --> 01:46:32.398 - have reached the transformation we have now. The evaporation of the Soviet Union, you know, how did 01:46:32.398 --> 01:46:40.678 - that happen? And I don't know. I wish we knew. We would bottle the formula and ship it everywhere. 01:46:40.678 --> 01:46:49.293 - Great talk, Mr. Kulesh. I just wanted to point out something. We've got a good representation from our 01:46:49.293 --> 01:46:52.638 - city planning staff here tonight. Yeah. 01:46:53.218 --> 01:47:01.346 - My question is does anybody see anybody from public works tonight engineering department Has there been 01:47:01.346 --> 01:47:09.317 - anybody here from the mayor's office tonight That's great. I know there was a one City Council person 01:47:09.317 --> 01:47:17.054 - here for a while too. That's great I'm just disappointed in our public works department. Thank you 01:47:21.826 --> 01:47:28.868 - You said you were disappointed to see so many right turn lanes in urban areas, so can you explain the 01:47:28.868 --> 01:47:36.461 - difficulty with right turn lanes in urban areas? I'm a walker, so I think I probably know what the difficulty 01:47:36.461 --> 01:47:43.779 - is, but. It's one of these, they're one of these traffic accommodating features that has an exceptionally 01:47:43.779 --> 01:47:51.166 - low payback in the urban area. Their safety benefit is not needed at lower speeds. Their safety benefit is 01:47:51.874 --> 01:48:01.351 - a cruise at higher speed environments where you want to get the decelerating vehicle out of the moving 01:48:01.351 --> 01:48:10.829 - traffic lane, i.e. rural environment. In town, the safety aspect is diminished or nonexistent, and the 01:48:10.829 --> 01:48:20.766 - capacity impact is miniscule. If you ran a highway capacity analysis through the standard totally objective 01:48:21.090 --> 01:48:29.465 - methodology, with and without that right turn lane, undoubtedly you would get a minuscule difference 01:48:29.465 --> 01:48:38.005 - in capacity. The price, though, is very high. When you consider that you seldom have just a right turn 01:48:38.005 --> 01:48:46.795 - lane itself without extending the pavement widening to the far side of the intersection, so you in effect 01:48:46.795 --> 01:48:50.526 - have jumped from a three lane to a five lane 01:48:50.818 --> 01:48:58.481 - cross-section, and so this whole sequence of pedestrian things, this whole compounded sequence starts 01:48:58.481 --> 01:49:05.994 - to kick in. You have longer pedestrian crossing times, higher vehicular speeds, more pedestrians in 01:49:05.994 --> 01:49:13.506 - the path of a moving vehicle, and the time you compound all of those things together, you're paying 01:49:13.506 --> 01:49:19.742 - a big price in pedestrian safety. It's also an appearance thing. It's a distinctly 01:49:20.162 --> 01:49:29.488 - un-urban, un-town-like physical appearance. Interesting things, too. A lot of our safety... We're still 01:49:29.488 --> 01:49:39.083 - doing things for safety that may be quite out of date. For example, the avoidance of the rear-end accident 01:49:39.083 --> 01:49:47.422 - used to be a very high priority. The dreaded whiplash injury used to be a very real concern. 01:49:48.386 --> 01:49:55.733 - I'm not sure all our fellow engineers understand now that the rear end collision is now one of the least 01:49:55.733 --> 01:50:02.800 - injury producing of all types of collision and due to neck restraints, airbags, on and on and on. So 01:50:02.800 --> 01:50:10.077 - what used to be the dreaded paralyzed for life whiplash injury that maybe you would have put right turn 01:50:10.077 --> 01:50:16.094 - lanes in the urban area then, that has now, that's off the table as a serious injury. 01:50:16.674 --> 01:50:24.085 - And so even more reason why it's not worth the price of having these things in an urban environment. 01:50:24.085 --> 01:50:32.083 - And then all the other things to do with just runoff heat reflection and everything else from the additional 01:50:32.083 --> 01:50:39.494 - yards and yards of pavement kick in. That breaks the continuity of the sidewalk too. You cannot have 01:50:39.494 --> 01:50:41.182 - an urban type sidewalk 01:50:46.562 --> 01:50:56.340 - fascinated with the idea of breaking up the Walmarts or any kind of big super stores and having them 01:50:56.340 --> 01:51:05.054 - in smaller sizes, kind of spread out across town. I can't quite picture half of a Walmart 01:51:05.282 --> 01:51:13.512 - how much would that cover, or a quarter of a Walmart, would that still fit into a city block? Would 01:51:13.512 --> 01:51:21.989 - that be something that could be covered by the form-based regulation? That's what's compelling. That's 01:51:21.989 --> 01:51:30.466 - almost always a factor where you see this smaller sized store. For example, the essentially half-sized 01:51:30.466 --> 01:51:34.334 - grocery store, probably a more common example, 01:51:35.010 --> 01:51:44.479 - 28, 30,000 square foot grocery store, which feels, when you get inside of it, feels marvelously like 01:51:44.479 --> 01:51:53.853 - a old fashioned neighborhood grocery store. That and its own, even without any shared parking, fits 01:51:53.853 --> 01:52:01.822 - within a small city block. When forced to have line or buildings along the frontage, 01:52:02.530 --> 01:52:11.846 - which is a typical model now, the form-based codes require them to screen their parking with liner buildings, 01:52:11.846 --> 01:52:20.654 - the typical usual kinds of things, coffee shop, hairdresser, fast food, that kind of thing. The parking 01:52:20.654 --> 01:52:29.292 - of the liner buildings and the grocery store is all contained within a small block. And then a lot of 01:52:29.292 --> 01:52:32.510 - things, a lot of what we thought were 01:52:33.602 --> 01:52:42.717 - big problems are far more tractable than we thought. For example, the large tractor-trailer truck loading 01:52:42.717 --> 01:52:51.575 - for the grocery store, just observing how it happens or helping them work it out, they simply, for all 01:52:51.575 --> 01:53:00.862 - their maneuvering, they use the drive aisles of the parking. They adjust the schedule so that they're there 01:53:00.994 --> 01:53:08.500 - during the less busy times of the day. Not hard to do, since those times are five to seven in the evening. 01:53:08.500 --> 01:53:15.586 - So a lot of things just seem to work themselves out very nicely. Is it more expensive to the grocery 01:53:15.586 --> 01:53:22.741 - store? Noticeably so. That's the interesting thing. Like the Publix chain was telling us when we were 01:53:22.741 --> 01:53:29.406 - talking about this, they said that we have to man seven stations full-time in a grocery store. 01:53:29.634 --> 01:53:36.529 - The entire the entire time the stores open and they said even on a big store most of that manning goes 01:53:36.529 --> 01:53:43.290 - down to one person During a lot of hours of the day, you know, it's it's a service desk manager meat 01:53:43.290 --> 01:53:50.117 - that kind of thing And so he said we're essentially duplicating these entire seven manned departments 01:53:50.117 --> 01:53:57.012 - with these smaller stores But apparently they've made the business decision that it's undoubtedly it's 01:53:57.012 --> 01:53:59.422 - undoubtedly Worth it and paying off 01:54:01.890 --> 01:54:12.075 - But the other question is, is it just half of a store? It's half of a grocery store. The typical big, 01:54:12.075 --> 01:54:22.259 - the typical super Walmart is pushing 200,000 square feet. That would not fit in a block. And we would 01:54:22.259 --> 01:54:28.350 - be talking about something more like a quarter of that size. 01:54:33.378 --> 01:54:44.903 - Ladies and gentlemen, it is nine o'clock. Walter, thank you very much. I think our community has really 01:54:44.903 --> 01:54:56.206 - benefited from you coming here. Certainly enjoyed the opportunity of being here. And we will run with 01:54:56.206 --> 01:54:59.198 - all of your ideas, I hope. 01:55:00.226 --> 01:55:06.966 - I'm no longer surprised, if I may just add one more comment. At a lecture in Idaho, we showed pictures, 01:55:06.966 --> 01:55:13.641 - this was in the early days of just discovering the difference of buildings being up on the street, and 01:55:13.641 --> 01:55:20.446 - we showed pictures, and the term form-based coding wasn't even in use, but we talked about it, and we're 01:55:20.446 --> 01:55:25.630 - out there for an entirely different piece of business about six or seven years, 01:55:25.730 --> 01:55:32.631 - later, and here's this Elberson's grocery store done in wonderful Western, old West style with boardwalks 01:55:32.631 --> 01:55:39.337 - and stuff right up on the street. And I commented to the host, in Haley actually, Haley, I don't know, 01:55:39.337 --> 01:55:46.498 - commented to the host, wow, this is really something. And he said, well, he said, you shouldn't be surprised. 01:55:46.498 --> 01:55:53.269 - He said, we did it after your talk. We went and did it after your talk six years ago. Come back in five 01:55:53.269 --> 01:55:55.678 - years and we'll see what's happened.