- My name's Buff Brown. I am the president of BTOP, Bloomington Transportation Options for People. And
- we have brought our speaker in and a number of speakers for the last two years. And if you want to join
- BTOP, please sign the paper that's just outside the door over there. And actually, you don't have to
- join BTOP. If you put your name there, we will make sure you're on the
- the list so that you get announcements of future speakers as well. I want to thank our sponsors today.
- They are BTOP and the City of Bloomington also contributed to today's presentation.
- and Health by Design. Health by Design is an organization that started two years ago as a result of
- one of our speakers, Lawrence Frank. It's an organization that's housed, or its home is Indianapolis,
- and it relates the issues of health, as in obesity and air quality, things like that with how our environment
- is built, the built environment.
- I want to briefly introduce our speaker. I hope that he spends a little time telling you about himself
- because I don't have anything particularly prepared. But he is a consultant with a very well-known firm
- that includes people like Dan Burden.
- That consulting firm is Gladding Jackson in Orlando, Florida. He is a traffic engineer. He's well-known
- around the nation, speaks regularly all over the nation with regard to traffic engineering and it's
- in some new progressive thinking in that field. So, let me not...
- talk too long on this and introduce Walter Kulash, professional engineer from Gladding Jackson, Orlando,
- Florida. Thank you. Delighted to be here. I'm impressed with the crowd here given that it's big opening
- day of the football season. Although I understand from the point spread that
- Maybe it's not going to be a serious contest. Yeah, I am a traffic engineer. I love the smell of fresh
- laid asphalt on a fall morning. And designing and laying more asphalt was, in fact, the whole focus
- of my career for perhaps the first two decades of it. Everyone knew exactly what the problem was for
- us traffic engineers.
- traffic engineer, too much traffic, not enough capacity, what could be simpler, get out there and create
- more capacity, more vehicular capacity that is. And this was an enormously popular mandate too. It didn't
- matter red state, blue state, Republican, Democrat, it didn't matter. Everyone shared the same opinion
- about traffic which was that we need to keep the traffic moving almost
- nothing else matters. Starting somewhere in the 1990s through the influence of urbanist architects,
- a source of influence to several of us traffic engineers. Now, I developed a viewpoint that a number
- of other things matter besides simply moving as much traffic as fast as possible. So the idea that there
- are other users
- of the street or should be other users of the street, started to realize the importance of that.
- The notion, this comes straight from architects, that the street is the premier public space of our
- communities. This is the public face of our communities and therefore needs to reflect this. I started
- to grasp this kind of notion that others have long understood and believed in.
- And so that brings us to the situation today of myself and actually too many other engineers to count
- nationwide, who now embrace this notion of livable traffic or sustainable traffic or sensible traffic.
- It still lacks a good name, but the whole idea being that, yes, of course we will continue to move traffic,
- but not as though
- nothing else matters, but as though a great number of other things matter. The whole idea of what we're
- doing with roads goes back quite a while. This historical diagram here shortly after the invention of
- the wheel says we're going to need roads, lots of them, and that has persisted.
- transportation planning model that has gotten us where we are and that we think badly needs to be updated,
- at first glance looks to be admirably simple. It anticipates the need and more and more intelligently.
- So we look out at the projections of where people are going to live, how they're going to work,
- forecast the travel demand through travel demand forecasting models that are quite sophisticated and
- very interesting, and then accommodate the need, meaning accommodate the future traffic that's being
- projected. In actual practice though, we start to see some fundamental problems with this, what appears
- to be common sense,
- Model Here's here's yet another version of this ideal traffic planning The yellow line is traffic demand
- always goes up the capacity the purple areas capacity sooner or later on most roads and certainly any
- road that concerns us the Forecast or the actual traffic exceeds the capacity and so
- What do we do? We forecast out typically to a 20 or 30 year horizon, and we meet that forecast with
- a jump in capacity, almost always widening, and capacity meaning vehicular capacity only. And so if
- we subscribe to this simple model, shouldn't that have fixed the problem? And it does fix a lot of other
- problems. For example, if you project out
- to a stormwater runoff projection, for example, and meet that projection, build adequate size pipe or
- adequate size retention, you are in fact fixed, provided we don't have some sort of catastrophic weather
- change. So we widen the road. But what happens? Do we solve the problem for 20 years? No. Our original
- forecast, which was down here,
- Turns out not to be the case. We exceed that forecast. We have a new actual traffic. We've generated
- this additional traffic which we call, and incidentally the courts call now because this has reached
- the stage of litigation, induced traffic. Traffic that we had no idea at the time we were doing our
- planning was going to be there. This is traffic by and large that is created because of what we have
- done with the roads.
- And traffic and roads are the only publicly provided service or facility that seems to have this feature.
- Schools, for example, don't. If we predict the number of school-age students and bill for them adequately,
- and the projection holds true, simply because there's more school capacity, people don't start sending
- their kids to school
- basic education, 14, 15, 16 years, or the same with wastewater treatment, formerly known as surge. If
- we double the capacity of a system, provide excess capacity, we don't start going to the bathroom more
- just because the capacity is there. But roads seem to be the only service or product that has this induced
- traffic. So we experience the induced traffic then, as this diagram says.
- And we go through the same cycle again of clamoring about the congestion, having the road show up on
- the problem location for our long-range planning, programming and improvement, which generally means
- more. We are making some stride with our planning process, but the strides seem to be in the nature
- of doing the same
- getting better at doing the wrong thing, I think you might say. So yes, we're making strides
- with anticipating what's going to happen. We're getting better forecasts. Our travel demand models now
- are starting to primitively work in this feedback so that they can start to deal with what happens as
- people adjust their behavior because there's more travel capacity out there.
- The accommodation continues to be business as usual, accommodating our improved forecast of growth with
- simply more road capacity, giving us scenes like this. Well, anyhow, you saw the scene. So we end up
- at this stage, and what is becoming clear is that to have congestion or not have congestion
- doesn't appear to be our choice, that we are going to have congestion on our principal thoroughfares
- no matter what. That's not our choice. Our choice then is at what level of road and what level of domination
- by the car are we going to have the congestion. We don't see things like the current,
- tremendous run-up in gas price as having too much effect on this. A lot of people are looking forward
- to this meaning a big behavior change. The behavior change may be very big in terms of developing 100
- mile per gallon vehicle. The behavior change may be very big in terms of plug-in cars. We most likely
- will have a big reduction in greenhouse gases from automotive travel, but
- I think we can be pretty sure that we're going to be back to the same travel demand by automobile that
- we have now. I'm basing this experience on what happened after two previous oil shocks that we thought
- were going to make a big difference turned out not to make much difference. So the thing that concerns
- us here in BTOPs and similar organizations about the impact that this obsession with vehicular travel
- has had on our quality of life and on all of the modes of travel, that concern is probably going to
- remain almost unabated by what happens with the current fuel situation. And so we're going to continue
- to look at a paradigm like this of escalating through these cycles. Now, all good things must happen.
- All good things must end, of course. And that's definitely the case here. We obviously can't keep going
- through cycle after cycle of something as consumptive as this. This is that whole cycle put much more
- succinctly by a speaker we heard some years ago, and that's exactly what we're trying to do with traffic
- congestion. Our options run out. As we follow this paradigm further and further up, our options run out.
- For places like Bloomington, which still have an option about treating a lot of their suburban arterials
- or even their in-town ones, we're still at a point where we can make this decision between do we widen,
- do we widen without any concern for other modes of travel, or do we take this opportunity to make a
- choice about what trade-off we want between vehicular capacity
- and service. A lot of people are pointing out the unsustainability of what we're doing. Cartoonists,
- which are, this is the marvelous green cartoonist, Tom Tolles, formerly from Buffalo and now at the
- Washington Post. And is Tom really telling us here that, in fact, you know, it's interesting, his gigantic
- interchange is right over Indianapolis, isn't it?
- Down here in Florida, we're in the theme park parking. Is he really telling us, great job traffic engineers,
- bring on the 1,247 lane freeway? Of course not. Isn't this a viewpoint who's got their finger pretty
- well on the pulse of the public saying, isn't something out of hand here? Of course it is. In some instances,
- you physically cannot, quote, improve the road any further. This is frequently the end of the cycle in which
- The land cost or the environmental constraints or the budget constraints simply say you can't do it
- any further. There's surprising grassroots understanding of this issue. This is a case again where the
- public may be ahead of the technicians and the elected officials. This defeat of a referendum in Orlando,
- my hometown, a couple of years ago was not predicted by anybody. In fact, the opposite was predicted.
- This was a case of people
- telling the pollsters what they thought they were supposed to be saying that, yeah, yeah, we're for
- good roads. Yeah, let's fix the congestion. But when they actually voted, a thumping 54 to 46 defeat
- for a penny for good roads kind of thing. So interesting that a broad-based referendum would conclude
- that it's time to get off of this cycle.
- extremely thoughtful state policy. This was done for the Brookings Institution for the state of Pennsylvania
- and has been closely followed and implemented by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. And
- this very fine analysis points out that shouldn't the state get out of the business of subsidizing the
- exodus from Pennsylvania cities to its
- to its beautiful countryside through what they're doing with transportation dollars. Very interesting
- and forward-thinking kind of... State of New Jersey has withdrawn all of these projects and is replanting
- them as state highways, smart growth projects.
- These, by and large, were large widenings planned through or around small towns that they are rethinking.
- It'd be interesting, too. I know groups like BTOPS are perpetually concerned with how do things happen
- in other places and what makes them happen. And I can't tell you why, but I can just point you to the
- two neighboring states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey for some reason.
- have developed this advanced DOT thinking about what they should be doing. They've got huge bureaucracies
- to move and a long way to go, but the direction is very, very interesting. And it might be, you know,
- if any of the group is pursuing what are other places doing at a high level, at a state level, that
- would certainly be two most interesting states to look at.
- So the theme of all of these 15 projects is rebalancing almost invariably with a smaller, more kinder
- road and lots of attention to community values and community facilities and multimode transportation.
- One of the interesting things we're finding and we're in the infancy of understanding is that roads
- simply, traffic doesn't simply grow
- through our familiar traffic level of service, these are like school grades, you've probably heard them,
- level of service A, B, C, and D, and then hit the stone wall and fail, although the word fail is frequently
- used. I used to use it myself. And there's some kind of catastrophic gridlock beyond that point. Certain
- things do fail. A bridge fails. I mean, you overload a bridge too many times, like,
- in St. Paul, and yes indeed, it fails, and the word fail is clearly understood by everybody. What we're
- now understanding is that traffic doesn't fail, but a whole lot of other things are going on. So when
- you go through all our levels of service and pass through the dreaded level of service E, which means
- you're about to fail, and our models start saying, okay, we're going to have gridlock, we're going to
- have 30 and 40 minute delays, what happens? First of all, we find
- that just our measurement has got about 20 or 30% leeway in it. And we keep adjusting our official highway
- capacity numbers. We've adjusted upwards several times since 1985. And the reason being is just we were
- overly conservative. But then these interesting things start happening like the peak shifting or the
- network of roads in a gentle way flexing to absorb what we thought was going to be catastrophic traffic.
- And origins and destinations coming closer together almost double the capacity that we thought we had.
- And that's without even getting into transit. And then what we're discovering, or what everybody knows,
- when you make a quantum leap in transit, sort of the sky's the limit. So like all these light rail new
- start cities, like Charlotte, North Carolina, a very notable one,
- they're adjusting to the fact now that they've made this quantum leap in capacity. And for a lot of
- areas within Charlotte, they can sort of stop worrying about what's going to happen as they continue
- to develop and traffic continues to grow. There's an opposite viewpoint. This is paving the way to prosperity
- from American Road and Transportation Builders Association. But a minority viewpoint, I think less and
- less people now
- think that paving or road access has much to do with prosperity. Economists would have told you a long
- time ago that the roads themselves don't do anything except move around origins and destinations, and
- they don't create any new ones at all. For a long time,
- As areas were in competition with each other, yes, that made sense. Build more roads and suck the growth
- out of the city centers and located in the suburbs, but not so much an issue anymore. Part of the way
- we're looking at transportation differently is summarized in these diagrams. Our conventional way of
- looking at
- transportation was very vertical thinking. You might be familiar with a kind of a well-known book on
- thinking from a few years ago called Lateral Thinking, and it pointed out the difference between vertical
- thinking, which is very symptomatic, and lateral thinking. So vertical thinking is, for example, applied
- to a headache. It says, I've got a headache, take an aspirin, makes the symptoms and the pain go away,
- problem solved. Lateral thinking
- it concerns itself with what's causing the headache. Is it my job, who I'm living with, or whatever,
- and fix the root problem and make it go away. So our thinking was very vertical. It was move cars. Great
- popular mandate, we talked about that. And for the longest time, it was only one branch of that family
- tree. It was add more pavement, because this was where all the action was. Gigantic mileage of new interstates,
- the first flush of widening city streets from two lanes to four lanes, the suburban explosions. That's
- actually been tapering down. Our ability and our rate of, our ability to build new pavement and our
- rate of doing it has really tapered down more dramatically than most people think. For the last few
- years, we've been more concerned with squeezing more efficiency out of the roads we have through things
- like smart management of the roads and signal systems.
- But all of this is still in the nature of moving cars. With our approach to livable traffic, we're looking
- at all of these branches of the family tree, and just in some cases, just in the infancy of understanding
- them. So how about this branch, moving people, not cars? Pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean, isn't that
- why we were trying to move the cars? Because there was people in them, of course it was.
- And the reasons are very well understood. So this whole business about complete streets, our concern
- with a better walking environment is all pursuing this branch. How about addressing the quality of travel,
- not just its quantity? We're truly in the infancy here. So the idea that a street can be not only a
- good traffic moving conduit, but could be a
- mighty retail machine, for example, could be a centerpiece, a signature of a town, could be a competitive
- asset for a university that induces a student to come here instead of going to Wisconsin. All of that
- is something new to us as transportation engineers, and the idea that you can actually get those variables
- into a design mix is very intriguing to us.
- How about the conservation approach, moving less people, fewer miles? Possibly bad grammar, but I think
- you understand the thought. This was not even on the table a few years ago. The transportation engineers,
- traffic engineers, had the same mentality that power and utility engineers had before the first energy
- crunch, and that was that we are not here to try to tamper with the demand
- We are here to accept that demand, whatever the public's demanding, we accept that and we're here to
- accommodate it at a very high level of service. And it was interesting how quickly, for example, the
- electric utility viewpoint changed after the 1970s and they became very active partners for conservation
- frequently because it made such good business sense to chop off the peak power demand. What we're in
- the infancy of understanding that now with our transportation that
- Isn't it more effective to try to change the demand for travel through things like changing its pricing
- or more powerful than anything, change where people live and where they go to shop and work and send
- their kids to school? Can't that make more difference than adding more capacity? And the answer is,
- it's got enormous potential for doing that.
- Even some things that we had high hopes for that fizzled, like telecommuting, may still have a bigger
- potential than we thought. At first, when computers at home first came out and networks started being
- developed and all, the thought was there'll be a drastic reduction in work travel. People won't have
- to go to the office anymore. That turned out to be a big fizzle
- that very few were able to do that. But then, as the use of the computers at home got more sophisticated,
- something almost as good happened, which is great relief from the traditional peak hours of travel.
- People still going to work four or five days a week, but largely freed from having to go at a tightly
- prescribed time. I know our own firm at that time, about 140 people,
- In Orlando, we started FlexTime because people think Orlando's traffic is bad, our employees do, and
- it turned out to be an enormously popular fringe benefit. Aside from solving their issues with the travel,
- but the whole package of providing them, supporting their computer use at home and giving them flexibility,
- was just enormously popular. So it was kind of like win-win all around. Then finally, sort of the most
- lateral solution of all is the idea that, hey, we're not going to solve congestion. We are not going
- to continue to knock ourselves out making unlivable streets dedicated only to automobile traffic. But
- we just ain't going to do it. Kind of a radical idea
- Although it's parallel to say what's happened in the healthcare over the past decade or so where we
- realized, you know, we are not going to solve healthcare and people are not going to have the level
- of healthcare we once thought we were going to get at the price that we hoped we were going to get,
- but we can certainly manage it much better and we can increase the coverage and so forth. So I think
- we're realizing the same thing with sort of reduced expectations for traffic. The form is
- everything about livability, the form not only of the street, but the form of how we develop around
- the streets too. These two diagrams, the one you just saw, okay, this one here, the conventional suburban
- development, we say suburban, but it can happen anywhere. There's numerous instances of where this sprouted
- possibly in the 60s or 70s in Bloomington itself. Or you can have what we call the traditional town
- center, also a misleading name because this doesn't have to be a center of anything and it's not necessarily
- traditional. We are seeing all sorts of new development built in this form and we're seeing older development
- retrofitted. These two development styles shown here side by side
- tell an enormous story about livability of our streets. And it's only partly to do with the streets.
- I think you can see here that if you look at the different land use colors, the red for shopping, the
- employment yellow and so forth, that it's got to do with how these things are laid out. And yes, the
- streets are different here. The streets are different. Here we have the major arterial street with the
- land uses.
- in separate pods located along it. Here we have the same land uses. The same things are going on because
- as traffic engineers, the solution is not to try to get people to do less of the things that need travel.
- We're not espousing that people eat less or educate their kids less or visit their friends and relatives
- less. The whole issue is can we accommodate that with less consumptive destructive ways of travel?
- In our typical suburban format, here's what happens with our travel, and here's why it's so destructive.
- It's unthinkable that you would do anything except drive to a single destination at a time. So for example,
- the red is our driving trajectory. We drive to the school.
- The whole point is to walk as little as possible because this type of environment fosters a very negative
- walking environment. When we do get to the destination, which is typically a large parking lot, we naturally
- seek to minimize our amount of travel in it. We get back in the vehicle, destination number two, repeat
- the same thing, park as close as possible and walk as little as possible and so forth on and on.
- I think we all know what this does. It's a personal inconvenience, first of all, of course. All that
- driving and turning movements. The arterial street that accommodates all of this becomes hopeless very
- quickly. It becomes a hopeless traffic mess that we clamor for improving, and then it becomes a blighted.
- What's even worse, I think, is it becomes a blighted scene. This scene is exactly the same throughout the U.S.
- We have found nobody that likes it. It's a detriment to the daily quality of life. The opposite pattern,
- where we succeed in getting the land, getting the destinations into a town or walking environment, or
- as we called it here for this argument, a park once district, the driving pattern then becomes drive,
- park one time in any number of
- suitable, accessible parking destinations, and then walk to numerous destinations. Nothing very magic
- about this. This is what's been achieved in a kind of introverted fashion in shopping malls.
- Once you park, once you do this kind of walking tour to a number of destinations, unfortunately, in
- the case of a shopping mall, it is all in a very introverted
- kind of hostile environment itself, and it's never part of an external fabric. Seem to be repeating
- ourselves here. Okay, the whole walking is, this shows, this is indicative of 1994 was sort of when
- we, that was a,
- There's nothing precise about these dates, but in the 90s was this great realization is that, hey, there's
- something to do with our streets besides just as many vehicles as fast as possible. And this cartoon
- is from the New Orleans Times Picayune, very interesting, very observant. It was the anniversary of
- the moonwalk. You might not be able to read what the guy that walked down the street said. He said,
- I needed milk, so I went for it.
- This is interesting, this is the same cartoonist just a couple of years ago, 1999, man walks on moon
- and I don't know what the relevance of this is for livable transportation, but it's part of a series
- and for the sake of completeness, we'd like to show them. This is yet another description of that land
- form and transportation that we were just talking about.
- This diagram in the following one, these are classics. These were produced by Elizabeth Plater-Zeiberk
- and her partner, Andres Duane, sort of legendary names in livable communities of all sorts. And this
- describes in only a slightly cartoonish fashion what's happening with our land use and our transportation.
- So you can see these rigorously separated land uses
- apartments here, houses here, and then an unconnected street network connected only to the major arterial
- road. So this is kind of the source of almost all of our evils about livable transportation and incomplete
- streets. This street, by definition, this generally inherited from a former city street or county highway
- or state highway, almost has no chance for becoming a complete street and livable with the demands we put on it
- We're funneling all the traffic onto it, and we've made it into an unstoppable armature for strip commercial,
- almost no power on earth. Once we bundle all the traffic on here, almost no power on earth can stop
- that from being a strip commercial. The antithesis, which is the traditional way of laying things out,
- the way Bloomington was laid out, the way new towns are now being laid out, has the same uses.
- We agree that people need to do the same thing, shop, live, go to school. But they're laid out with
- proximity. They're not isolated into pods. And from a transportation point of view, they are serviced
- by a highly complete network of streets. And here's the difference it makes for transportation. Here's
- what the travel demand forecast model is essentially seeing as it assigns traffic. All the traffic under
- the conventional
- suburban layout, all the traffic is getting funneled onto the one available arterial highway. Tons of
- turning movements are being created. We've built a volume of traffic on that street that becomes a magnet
- for strip development. And then, conversely, the street has almost no chance to become a livable, balanced,
- complete street. The antithesis, where we have even a vestige of a network of streets and the right
- kind of landform,
- Many of the streets remain, many of the trips remain completely local. The school trip, for example,
- this is the blue trip, rather than being shunted onto the arterial street, is accommodated in the local
- streets. It raises the possibility, perhaps with a little progress on school sizing, that the trip might
- even be made by means other than motorized transportation. A lot of shopping trips happen within the
- community. About 70% of all travel is quite local in nature. It's destinations,
- that the traveler would like to be served as close as possible. And in fact, the market that serves
- them would be perfectly happy to serve them even closer than they do now. The reason they don't, things
- like grocery, home improvement and all, is they have no incentive to. We are providing them guarantees
- that go ahead and build a 200,000 square foot big box six miles out of the suburbs. We will guarantee
- you that through our policies and our actions that your market can get out.
- When that promise is withdrawn, we start seeing something very different about what happens. Network
- is very important. And network is not just an issue in new places that have no streets yet and are dealing
- with the whole challenge of planning new streets. Yes, it's certainly an issue there. But network is
- an issue everywhere.
- Cities are constantly faced with loss of network as people seek to abandon streets and expand things
- over them. A lot of places that don't have network of local streets should have it, and it should be
- obtained at the time of development. If it's not, that opportunity is lost forever. Why are we so keen
- on network? What's so great about it from a traffic point of view? And the answer is simply that
- The same number of lanes of traffic broken out into a network of smaller streets carries more traffic
- than the same number of lanes combined into large streets. This may fly in the face of conventional
- wisdom. A lot of people think isn't something bigger, more efficient, and that is true about a lot of
- facilities, a lot of infrastructure facilities, such as water treatment plants and power plants, not
- so with roads. And the reasons aren't too difficult to understand. The network simply gives a lot more
- places for turning movements to occur, and turning movements are one of the big drains on capacity of
- intersections. As the intersections get smaller, the clearance time for the signals gets dramatically
- smaller. And then mostly with smaller
- with networks of smaller streets, we're able to avoid multi-phase signals, green arrows so people can
- make protective left turns and so forth. As soon as we get to a four-lane street, we are almost losing
- the ability to do that now. The public is beginning to shy away from making an unprotected left turn
- at even a pretty ordinary intersection of four-lane streets and starting to demand protected left turns.
- These have a disastrous impact on both the
- the travel demand for vehicles and then the waiting time that pedestrians have to wait to cross the
- street as well as the appearance of the place as the left turn lanes are added and lengthened. So it
- starts working against us every which way. Our own trade organization, the Institute of Transportation
- Engineers, reported this very interesting research finding
- that we start losing efficiencies as the street gets bigger. This is the efficiency of an added lane,
- of a lane of traffic as the street gets bigger. So the efficiency per lane. And these are the diagrams
- of how the street's getting bigger and bigger. Two lanes with a turning lane, a left turn lane,
- four lanes, and so forth. And then the signal phasing becomes more and more complicated.
- And what this diagram is saying is that the ultimate efficient configuration is two lanes with a turning
- lane provided where we really need it, a left turn lane, not a right turn lane. Incidentally, right
- turn lanes have no place in an urban environment. And I was appalled to see several on our little drive
- through Bloomington. That's a rural design feature to get slow moving turning vehicles out of the stream
- of high speed traffic.
- They have almost no function in an urban area. We can talk about that later. So the most efficient
- configuration is the two-lane road with the turn lane, either continuous if you have a lot of people
- making left turns at driveways and so forth, or an intersection left turn lane at intersection locations
- if we don't have many mid-block locations. And then the efficiency of the street per lane added plunges
- after that.
- All of this by way of saying then that as we advocate for smaller more livable streets We are we are
- on very firm grounds technically for arguing that there is very little to be gained from the transition
- from a two or three lane street to a Almost always five lane is the next jump. Nobody goes to four lanes
- anymore. It's your choice is three to five and
- You typically don't add just a fourth lane without the continuous left turn lane. So there's very little
- to be gained for that in people's intuition that we don't seem to have gained very much for that. We
- didn't seem to be pressing the capacity of the old two lane very hard. It seems like just a turn lane
- here and there would have fixed it. That intuition is probably quite correct. This kind of network
- is showing up everywhere, not just in new development. These are the options for redoing the riverfront
- like a freeway as it's converted to a parkway in Trenton, New Jersey. And all of the options had to
- do with adding all sorts of new network in an existing city to the sparse network that was there, reclaiming
- old streets that were cul-de-sac,
- putting new ones through the big government campus where the streets used to be and they closed it off
- in the sort of 1960s super block mentality on and on and on. Very interesting redevelopment here in
- the beautifully managed city of Winter Park, Florida where this was a big featureless site with some
- scruffy industrial all in it and the solution
- endorsed by everybody, DOT, Citi, and everyone, was to create this whole network of streets within this
- area and don't concentrate on just widening of the major fronting arterial. Interesting, this is the
- New Jersey Pinelands as they're trying to equip the communities where they're going to permit growth
- within the Pinelands
- continue to grow while trying to preserve the rest of the pinelands. And the form that that growth,
- by unanimous kind of consent, the form of that growth is new networks of local streets, not big arterial
- and subdivision kind of plan. And again, even on the developing suburban edge, even out where there
- is nothing now and there's just a few county roads, this whole idea of being in
- very early with the idea of network is probably the best way to preclude what has happened in older
- parts where we have lost the livability of our streets and are concerned with trying to recreate complete
- streets coming from behind. And on a grand scale, this admittedly grander than anything we're going
- to ever be facing in Bloomington.
- The whole solution for that tangle of mess in Fort Washington Way in Cincinnati was to get rid of all
- the special purpose ramps and super blocks and features like that, and replace it with complete streets.
- These are streets with sidewalks, bicycle paths, beautiful landscaping on either side of the interstate,
- now depressed in the Channel. It was always depressed.
- The whole thing shrank to one-third the size, and then eight cross streets were reinstated, and the
- whole traffic plan became very much simple, much more simple. So instead of a myriad of special purpose
- ramps to the stadiums in downtown, the whole approach to downtown Cincinnati, and you've probably experienced
- this proximity, one decision to make, you get off on Fort Washington Way, and then you make all your
- decisions about
- going to the stadiums or downtown in a 35 mile an hour environment on these boulevards. Again, just
- another manifestation of network. There's no right or wrong pattern. Connectivity is what matters. So
- you can have classic looking street grid or very European looking free for all. It doesn't matter. The
- important thing is just are there many paths for vehicular and pedestrian traffic to take?
- and therefore dispersing the load over a number of streets. Is this an old idea we're talking about
- since street grid seems to have been around for a few thousand years? And the answer is about as old
- as your cellular telephone network. The predecessor to cell phone network
- the old 15450 band. Any of you in the construction or worked for DOT or city government might remember
- that miserable 15450 band. One tower, the service was bad. It was frequently jammed. One little lightning
- strike and the whole system was out. You had to share it with a bunch of people. The reason was all
- the traffic flowed through a single transmitter and there was no switching or network. Your cell phone
- system is a marvel
- of small, low-powered links, each link not having much capacity itself, but the network giving it tremendous
- amount of capacity. There's no telling how your call might be routed through this network,
- but the sophistication of the network compensates for the small size of the links, and this is exactly
- what we're understanding how traffic works. Options.
- Down at the very local level, as new development or redevelopment gets approved, as we start looking
- at older sites where the network never was or got lost, ideal is to have a complete connectivity.
- If not, at least connectivity out to major directions, connectivity around the perimeter, not as nice,
- but this is what hospitals and universities want.
- we can live with it, never ever single entry pods cul-de-sac, that kind of thing. So kind of a downward
- progression of connectivity. The street design, how about the street design principles that we've been
- neglecting or that we need to pay much more attention to? They're actually fairly simple. We like very much
- a simple classification of these things that the architectural writer Amos Rappaport wrote about several
- years ago. And we were exposed to these by an architect. And they make eminent good sense. And they
- have everything to do with the livability of the street. So the idea that the street is articulated,
- that lots of things about our building and street are detailed,
- Very good principle. We see this on some of the new buildings in Bloomington and they they're very much
- the better for it So articulation on the building articulation about our street system so that this
- you can There's a variety of little cross streets and ins and outs of things The idea that our street
- space is enclosed is good. Not bad I think for a while through the 50s and 60s the whole thing was
- Space is wonderful, big open spaces is great. Set the building back, building setbacks, you know, get
- that building away from the street. And we realize now how wrong that has been for livable traffic.
- It's an architectural principle, yes, but it's also a very important livable street when you cannot
- have this kind of street scene if it wasn't for that building being there. Again, space enclosed by
- what's along the street,
- and the design of the street itself, the street trees. Complexity is good, not bad. The idea that you
- strip a street clean so that everything is absolutely uniform, the building walls are nice and smooth
- and blank, that's bad, not good. Very bad for pedestrian travel. Again, for multiple reasons, too. We're
- getting more and more appreciative of the fact of how many levels these things work at. The complexity,
- for example, in these pictures is not only
- a source of satisfaction and quality of life for the pedestrians. It's enormous signal to the drivers
- that you are in a pedestrian environment and that anything much faster than 25 miles an hour here, even
- without any sign being posted, is all wrong as a driver. And the great majority of drivers immediately
- understand that. Complexity even about the street furniture. Nothing wrong with signs. We've had this
- phobia about signs because
- The typical suburban strip manifestation of them is so awful, but signs, well done, why not? Terminated,
- the idea that the view in the street is terminated, or like that lovely view of the campus gate looking
- from downtown into the UI campus. Classic termination, wonderful thing, again, for a couple of reasons,
- operating on all sorts of levels.
- It's a great amenity to pedestrians to have the view terminated. This becomes a real milestone
- for pedestrians. And again, for the motorists, it's one more of those traffic calming measures that
- greatly changes the behavior about whether this is a 45-mile-an-hour environment or a 25-mile-an-hour
- environment, terminated by features in the buildings themselves. Compact, great walking environments
- are highly unlikely to be much more than a quarter mile long. So we shouldn't worry about great extended
- walking environments, at least not at first. I think when we realize that you can have a wonderful walking
- environment of not much more than 1,400, 1,500 feet, it becomes a much more manageable kind of thing.
- Texture underfoot, again, for both pedestrians and motorists.
- And then texture overhead, all of these things again, item after item operating on these two levels
- of both pedestrians and motorists. And sequenced, the idea that things occur in a physical sequence
- or a time sequence that old buildings like this theater again appear not as a theater but
- second generation as a restaurant, and then third generation as a national retailer here, who is perfectly
- willing to go into this kind of environment. We think of this kind of entity as mall only, but given
- this kind of environment, they're more than willing to come into it. And then, again, by almost unanimous
- consent, the kind of environment we want, and the arrows pointing to all these features that are
- that are going on here, the texture underfoot overhead, the sense of enclosure, the termination by the
- tree here and so forth. So great scenes or even good scenes always have a handful, a fistful of these
- things all operating at once. Street design then is not just the street itself or the complete street.
- And this is something that we really need to understand because
- A lot of our thinking about streets is if we would just solve that street, if DOT would just give us
- a complete street with a sidewalk and let people walk on it, our worries would be over. The answer is
- not until we address not only the street, but its surrounding adjacent land uses, and even almost its
- land uses within pedestrian eye view. Not until we address all of those are we getting anywhere.
- So again, just some of the complete street things, not only what's under the street, not just the pavement,
- not just the pedestrian amenities here, and these are all the pedestrian amenities, but only when you
- start getting to the whole composite of what's in the street and what's along it do we start to have
- the basis for the complete street.
- This is something I think we're just starting to realize as we start getting some what we thought were
- great, complete streets, going to be great, complete streets, only to be sorely disappointed because
- they still sort of feel like strip blight. And then we form the realization that, wait a minute, we've
- got to get after the whole thing. It turns out, fortunately, that is one of the most doable things doing
- that we can do. This whole thing of building placement,
- is huge when it comes to livable streets. This again, we're just harping over and over again on this
- theme of it's not just the street folks, it's what you do along the street. In our typical suburban
- development format with the building set back deeply, we're doing sort of the antithesis of the building
- forward location. Same sorts of things are going on in the building.
- Here's what's really different about it. As a driver, your view of what's going on at the building,
- your view of the building is outside the normal safe driver's vision cone of 20 degrees. So the whole
- thing of what's along the street you're not even seeing with your normal vision cone. With the buildings
- up against the street, you can't keep it out of your vision cone. It's only two degrees. So world of
- difference. The theme is parking.
- What else, if you came in from Mars or something and saw what was going along our typical arterial street,
- you'd have to say the main business of this community seems to be parking vehicles. The theme otherwise
- is the frontage of what's along that street, the residents, the shopping, the university, whatever.
- The 90 degree distance from the street, important if we're ever gonna serve that street with transit,
- because people are gonna get off on the street and walk. The length of a football field, pretty far,
- 10 steps, if we locate buildings this way, the 90 degree distance from the sidewalk is likely to be
- 10 steps. The driver queue is an abstraction. The driver can't know what's going on here, so the driver
- has to depend on abstractions, such as a logo or something that the owner contrives to get as gaudy
- and obnoxious looking as possible to attract as much attention. The queue here
- is the actual building itself. So there's no need for that kind of display here. It is apparent what's
- going on in that, and the driver's aware. Now, why does all of this make such a difference to the livability
- of the street and the ability to have a complete street? The design speed, the speed at which a driver
- feels appropriate
- that feels appropriate to a driver in the absence of any regulation is likely to be 50 to 60 miles an
- hour in this kind of environment. Now, they'll go slower because it's posted 45 and there may be traffic,
- but the design speed, which is a speed that feels normal and natural, is likely to be 50 to 60 miles
- an hour. Almost impossible to have a pedestrian atmosphere in that kind of environment or any other
- kind of bicycle or
- even transit atmosphere. Under this arrangement, the design speed is likely to be 20 to 30 miles an
- hour, just purely from the queues that are out there on the street. We see this in downtown Bloomington
- now. There's a normal observance, even with the one-way streets providing ample opportunity to overtake.
- There is still, and even with a student population, I might add, there's still a pretty good observance of
- of a low design speed. Not surprising. Can we really locate things like that? Does the home improvement
- store have to be like this? Or can it be like this? Do grocery stores have to be behind a sea of parking?
- Or can they be like this? This is on a real street. Where do people go with their shopping carts? They
- cross the street with their shopping carts on the raised brick sidewalk.
- Or like this even, really the sexy in town grocery store. Does fast food always have to be like this?
- Or can fast food be a citizen of the street? This is a heavily used fast food in a hospital district.
- People actually coming in a front door from a street. I saw it with my own eyes. How about really awful
- uses like storage?
- Does storage have to be like this? Or can it be like this? This is the same chain. This is a sure,
- what is it, a sure guard storage place. Two stories. Why are these things like this? What has made all
- these contrasting uses be in this kind of form that is abetting a livable, walkable street as opposed
- to the opposite? Form-based codes is what's doing it. Local codes that say,
- Yes, you can have your home improvement store there. You're entitled to it. You can have your 220 parking
- spaces. But here's where the building has to be on the site. And here's where the parking can go. So
- no infringement in their right to use the site as they say fit. Nothing that they can show up in court
- with about detrimental to their business. We've gone through this, for example, like the parking spaces.
- How much of a detriment is it
- The parking spaces can no longer be located in front of the building, have to be located around back.
- And the answer is, you fall so far short of impairing the ability of that property owner to use the
- property as they otherwise could have, that you'll never hear about it. You'll never hear a legal challenge
- about it, despite some protesting that you will when these things first get implemented.
- So enormously, this is one of the biggest areas for converting unlivable environments to livable or
- for creating new ones or for retrofitting battered unlivable strips. And I think as we can see here,
- it's not just the design of the street. In fact, the design of the street may be a relatively minor
- factor. It's the design of what goes along the street.
- I guess there's still more the example that we had a catalog of every imaginable land use drugstore
- like this or drugstore like this. This is on a six lane street that what the city has done
- now has transformed this whole curve now is lined with with walkable buildings like that. And there
- are people walking now. And again, just a hammer again for the for the third or fourth time on the theme,
- we can do all the things you could possibly want with the street.
- the sidewalks, the planting, rebuilding the street. But it's not until we start getting through land
- development regulation, because that's about the only way you can achieve it, this kind of building
- placement that we eventually end up with the atmosphere that we're talking about. Here's retrofit within a city
- Here's these principles being applied to the typical battered arterial you can see the piece this is
- what we're trying to get away from the parking in front of the buildings and the retrofit Parking behind
- still an open Plaza here a Walkable environment everywhere this new development touches and
- And again, just sort of a sequential view of, again, the kind of underdeveloped, rather battered arterial
- street. State DOT or the city department can do all sorts of things to try to make it nicer. But until
- you start intervening in how the street front development looks, you're really not getting any place.
- And then once you intervene in that, you have, in fact, created the kind of
- pedestrian atmosphere that we're talking about, the complete street, the livable street. Parking changes
- radically as we develop this kind of land use pattern. So instead of having a parking demand that is
- simply everybody's needs stacked up on top of each other, everybody's seasonal peak, what happens with
- our parking now typically as you look at the mass of parking along our arterial street is those destinations
- are all essentially providing for their seasonal peak.
- So it's something that peaks in the summer, they're providing for their summer peak. If it's somebody
- who peaks the day after Thanksgiving, like the Christmas shopping, they're trying to provide for that.
- And the needs just stack up on top of each other. Typically, five and a half to six spaces per thousand
- square feet, which gives you this kind of appearance. Sea of parking, which never appears to be used
- fully. Always a paradox. People always say, is that lot ever full? And that's because it's essentially
- sized for a seasonal peak.
- Once you get the form of development into this walkable environment, no longer dominated by parking,
- but with the parking shared, which becomes easier once you get the form you want, then you start dovetailing
- these uses. These numbers are from an actual project in Knoxville that we were working on. And obvious
- things happen, like the entertainment movie, in this case,
- peak that happens in the evening is completely complementary to the office peak. No one's left in the
- office anymore at that point, except maybe the occasional architect or consultant. And so all that office
- parking space is available for entertainment, parking, movie parking. Why can't you do that? Well, typically,
- there's no insurance reason why not. There's no liability reason.
- The reason we can't do it is they're usually not in any kind of proximity that can be negotiated with
- a reasonable, attractive, safe walking route. And so they are, in essence, unusable. The need can shrink
- down to around two-thirds almost with even a modest amount of success.
- Much to our amazement, the industry, the development industry themselves are very amenable to this.
- So rather than having to be talked into this, they're very likely, once they see the kind of environment
- that's evolving, are quite pleased to reduce the amount of parking proportionally. When you get parking
- down to that level due to joint parking, you can then start to mask the parking completely with the
- development that generates the need for the parking. So on this,
- excellent plan now all built on a former naval base. The grocery store and all the things that go with
- the grocery store. Grocery store up on the street, not unusual anymore. The grocery store, the cleaners,
- the bank, the drug store also on the corner. And all these residences are meeting the parking need from
- the parking that's all enclosed inside, leaving the streets completely open for the pedestrian environment
- that we're seeking, a pedestrian environment not contaminated by walking alongside large amounts of
- parking. And here's the two diagrams side by side, no sharing and sharing throughout the time of day.
- This whole idea that the balance has tipped too far is not all that recent. Dr. Larson was Federal Highway
- Administrator
- I think back in the Nixon administration or shortly thereafter and even then the awareness that shouldn't
- we be doing something differently? A lot of our concept about street design now is flowing from the
- idea of let's look at what the setting is before we even talk about the street. Is it rural or urban
- or something in between?
- this whole concept of the transect that we've heard so much about the past few years, is very interesting
- basis for street design. Before we jump into a street design, let's consider what the setting of that
- street is. The whole process for designing
- should involve scenes like this, stakeholders walking sort of every inch of the proposed layout to get
- a feel for what's going on, to discuss it, to react personally with the providers of the road, the DOT
- or the city staff or whoever. And scenes like this should be the rule, not the exception, as a street
- design is proceeding.
- some innovative There there are innovative ways to move traffic that we're watching very closely this
- so-called Kelthorpe design named after Peter Kelthorpe interesting way for two one-way streets to cross
- major streets to cross these are the streets creating nine parcels of highly valuable development land
- and carrying a huge amount of traffic and
- None of them being any bigger than three lanes, therefore yielding the possibility of a superior pedestrian
- environment. A few of these have been developed on the West Coast. Interesting ideas for grade separations.
- This is a grade-separated interchange, but instead of ramps, what would have been ramps are lined with
- usable commercial properties except
- where there's some wetlands preserved. This is in Charleston, South Carolina, with the interesting innovation
- here being, who says a ramp? There's nothing in any design that says a ramp has to be this isolated,
- non-usable piece of land. It does on an interstate freeway, but in-town ramps can be something entirely
- different. And then finally, this age-old question that we're still wrestling with
- of how do you answer the question, if we are deliberately talking to the providers of transportation,
- highway departments and city staff, who are convinced, or even the public, it doesn't have to be staff,
- even the public who's convinced that more capacity is the answer and that our streets can't achieve
- a new balance point between livability and capacity. We have to keep on doing what we're doing. How
- do you answer that question of, you know,
- But where will the traffic go, that kind of sputtering, indignant idea that how dare you talk about
- moving less traffic on the street so that we have a bike lane or a transit lane or a wider sidewalk?
- One of the answers is, plain old supply and demand kicks in. Right now, we are trying to provide
- transportation at zero cost in terms of delay. So our policies and our level of service guidelines about traffic
- are all striving to provide delay-free traffic. And delay is the only cost that the motorist experiences
- that accrues from the street system. We can't do anything about gas price or anything like that, but
- we can strive to give a delay-free experience. But what happens with a low or zero-priced commodity?
- People consume more of it, obviously. So we're down to this point now on the supply and demand curve.
- We're demanding huge amounts of travel because the price is so cheap.
- What happens when the price goes up, i.e. more congestion? We settle on new price points. Big surprise.
- Isn't this what happens with every single purchase that is made? New price point. And what does that
- mean then in physical terms? People change their travel time. How bad of a thing is that? That people,
- we've already talked about it being a popular fringe benefit
- at my employer, I was in downtown Pittsburgh a couple of years ago and found much to my delight that
- the bookstore, the Barnes and Noble, was open at 7 o'clock. And I got talking to the clerk about it,
- about it being rather unusual that Barnes and Noble was open at this time. And she said, well, you know,
- Pittsburgh is so congested, downtown Pittsburgh, and people for years have been coming in early. A lot
- of people come in early, and so we saw
- Barnes and Noble opens their store at seven in the morning. I got thinking, okay, here's something caused
- by congestion. Who's the victim? Not Barnes and Noble, who's achieved the retailer's dream of 18-hour
- day, not the lady that had the job, not the landlord that's renting the store. The only victim I could
- find was me, who left $24 there.
- sort of a victimless, kind of a victimless consequence of congestion. And we see this over and over
- again. The idea that you're going to dump traffic, if you do something to one road to make it livable,
- road A here in the red, if you do something that you're going to dump all this traffic on some sort
- of poor, unwitting nearby road, doesn't happen. And our own models, the same traffic models that frequently
- Give us a lot of heartburn are very good about saying this this won't happen, too in fact what they'll
- say is that the impact of a big change on one roads capacity is feathered out in the very minute little
- parcels over the whole network provided you have some semblance of a network and That you don't just
- dump what happens is some some traffic on Road B was about ready to get another route anyhow and
- And when the increment from road A shifts, they go someplace else and on and on, not everybody of course,
- but on and on throughout the network to where it becomes hard to ever find any sort of major impact
- of what we thought was gonna be a major decision. And our own traffic models can show this too. We're
- starting to learn how to use traffic models to prove this kind of impact. That map goes with this quote
- from Sherlock Holmes.
- Sir Arthur Conan Dial says, when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable
- must be the truth. So when we have eliminated the possibility of paving our way out of congestion, when
- we accept that that's impossible, then whatever remains, and for example,
- that transit new starts since 1984, the light rail new starts throughout the US. Whatever remains must
- be the truth, no matter how improbable. So even if we think transit use is highly improbable now, once
- we start to adjust to the reality of not building our way, not paving our way out of congestion, what
- seemed to be improbable can all of a sudden seem to be very truthful.
- Another consequence of accepting congestion is people staying in place and reinvesting in their homes
- rather than abandoning those homes essentially for more distant suburban tract housing, giving you scenes
- like this revitalization neighborhood, bad thing or good thing. I think almost anybody associated with
- a city would say good thing. This whole idea that retail
- retail villains, the same ones we thought were causing all this kind of strip commercial and attendant
- congestion. The idea that they become part of the solution is becoming pretty clear now that this can
- happen. So this is not good architecture. We certainly see much better ones. But the idea that these
- formerly monstrous, large retailers know how to do quarter-size and half-size community shopping
- is enormously, enormously interesting. Where do they do it? Our grocery chain in Florida, the
- very well-managed Publix chain, has sprouted a lot of 28,000 square foot stores. This is around half-size
- store. They're marvelous little things. Where do they do it? They're our clients, so we have an insight
- into this. They do it where congestion is bad. They do it where they cannot get the demographic they
- need into their 44,000 square foot store.
- So do they abandon the market then to Elberson or Kroger? No, they come back with a product that they
- are uniquely able to do, which is sort of the half-size store moved closer to the market. Very interesting
- response. How about school sizing? The idea that we rethink the idea of what constitutes a good school, thereby
- greatly decreasing the amount of travel and evading the woes of congestion. Most people would agree
- reinvesting in something like this is a good idea. We really like this. This was a quote, verbatim quote,
- from Carl, state traffic engineer in Minnesota, who was concerned when we were talking about reducing
- the Olson Highway out of downtown Minneapolis from six lanes to four.
- So that it would make a walkable livable street through the near north neighborhood and Carl being state
- traffic engineer was very concerned telling us people will get sick and tired of congestion and Carl's
- getting ready to really lay it on us and and what girl and move into the city and
- And so everybody had a laugh, Carl included. And we all decided, you know, this really isn't a very
- bad consequence of reducing the Olson Highway in size if this is all that's gonna happen. And the Minneapolis
- folks thought it was a very fine idea indeed. And in fact, this is moving back into the city. This is
- not Minneapolis, but this is, of all places, Orlando, Florida, that didn't have a downtown apartment
- to its name a few years ago and has now sprouted
- hundreds and hundreds of these things. Because we seem to have gone in reverse here. Or we're just about
- through, but that was no reason to go in reverse here. What's that? Okay.
- Okay. We're starting to understand that the chain of impacts starts producing unintended consequences.
- So when we widen the road and we reduce the delay and reduce the cost, that sounds good, wonderful impacts.
- But then they start sprouting these unintended second and third order impacts. So we reduce the delay,
- we just start ranging further for things. And then, for example, we range further to
- bizarre forms of retailing fostered by all this road capacity. And then the converse is true.
- Being engineers, we believe in the converse, that if you do the unthinkable and say, okay, we're going
- to deliberately accept congestion because we, or we're going to accept more congestion because we have
- better uses for some of the street than moving traffic, the first order consequences seem to be untenable.
- We're increasing the delay or we're increasing the cost. Who wants that?
- That leads to using alternative modes, for example, main revitalization of main street shopping. So
- as we go down the chain of impacts, they start to appear more and more favorable. And we're really starting
- to understand now that we have for years been in a paradigm that is in fact producing unintended
- consequences. And I think most of us here realize the very fact that you're in this kind of group dealing
- with this kind of thing, that this paradigm that we're showing here
- is probably the correct one, and that our longer-term solution, when we get things going in the right
- direction, we will start seeing exactly this kind of thing going on. So we've looked at... We'd like
- to get back to this. We'd like to get back to this happy. This was... I almost ran off the road when
- I saw this. We'd like to get back to this. This is in Salisbury, North Carolina,
- And you could have guessed the date of the cornerstone, but I went up and looked at it anyhow, and sure
- enough, 1955, and that's how we thought about things then. We would like to get back to where we named
- churches after our highways or streets. And to just emphasize the importance of this whole thing about
- it's not just the road itself, its form, this quote,
- from Will Rogers in 1936 was amazingly, amazingly accurate, where he said, America conceived of many
- odd inventions for getting somewhere. And our current road system is, in fact, and history is going
- to say it was a very odd invention for getting somewhere, but could think of nothing to do when they
- got there. And the challenge, I think, is not only to let's get the odd inventions under control,
- Let's work equally hard on what it is we're gonna do when we get there with the form of what's along
- these roads. Certainly appreciated your patience through this long lecture, but I heard you were a very
- attentive audience and could grasp all of this and like to take the opportunity to answer questions
- or discuss local issues such as, I can understand them from a quick pass through with Buff this afternoon.
- Thank you. This is a, what do you call it, a born again engineer. So if you have any questions, please
- 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
- on the, this is being recorded.
- So please step up and ask questions. I'm Laurel Cornell. I know you've talked a lot about congestion,
- and congestion is a bugaboo that appears all kinds of different places. People complain about the congestion
- when it's 5 p.m. in Bloomington and other amazing things. But is there a word that we can use
- But we don't have any word for talking about the opposite of congestion where we have streets that are
- full of lots and lots of interesting activities and people participating in very many different modes
- of transport. Is there some word like that that we could use as the opposite of congestion to talk about
- streets that are full of traffic of all variety of different modes?
- Not that I know of. That's a very good question. I think it's the, just a manifestation of the old thing
- is we're quick to have a good word for something we perceive as negative, and very slow to have a good
- word for something positive. The only words that come together, the only words that come to mind, and
- these only nip around at the corner, the complete streets, but that's not a real satisfying title, and
- then complete streets folks themselves,
- admirably have limited their focus to the street itself too. So they are not getting at this vibrancy
- thing at all. Vibrant is a good term. A terrific architect that I work with claims that there's no easy
- way to categorize pictures of a great place that you're talking about.
- He's got scenes like that that he shows, and he said he never knows where to put them. He says, is this
- a great shopping? Is this a great shopping armature? Is this a great landscaping example? And he said,
- a sign of a great place is that it's very hard to categorize as one single thing. And he's starting
- to develop that as a criteria that if you don't know where to put the picture, it's probably a great street.
- Great streets is a word, but that connotes majestic things along the street, like cathedrals and all,
- and the most humblest of neighborhood street can be great. It needs a wordsmith on it. That's a good
- question. Vibrant, maybe? Any ideas from the... You know, one of the things that
- Walter and I talked about today was level of service is that that the description for cars is defined
- very strictly You know how many what's the capacity of a road and how close is it to that capacity and
- We were saying that there isn't the same type of thing for pedestrian level of service or transit level
- of service or
- a bicycle level of service and that if we could create those definitions that it would be much easier
- for us to demand a specific level for a particular mode of transportation. Walter, I know you had some
- things to say about that. You wanna, can I? There's room for a lot of progress about how we define them
- so we can make a lot more
- we can make some quick headway in the measures of success, the individual measures of success, like
- simple things like just simply the amount of blank uninteresting space, or let's put the positive spin
- on it, the amount of interesting articulated space that you pass by, the percentage would be a terrific
- measure of vibrancy. So if you're going by interesting shop windows and sidewalk cafes,
- and students sitting on walls and things like that, high entertainment value. On the contrary, if you're
- going past blank walls, the score falls to zero. But there is not a single good measure. It badly needs
- one. And that's why traffic has such an unfair advantage, is it's got these clean, simple measure
- that can be reproduced precisely regardless of the observer. So if I calculated the level of service
- on the street, our engineer could come on from California, sight unseen, and come up with precisely
- the same level of service. Yeah. Which is the segue into my question. It's my understanding, well, in
- terms of trying to evoke some of these kinds of designs with
- either city or state issues in terms of street design. We are told by traffic engineers that the AASHTO
- and Federal Highway Guidelines require that lanes be so wide and everything is very formulaic and very
- Prescriptive and and you have to do it this way. Otherwise, we won't get any funding And so it's my
- understanding that there is a push or a movement to change those guidelines Several things are happening
- on that front the one of the more Highly publicized things that's gone on over the past few years is
- that a joint
- effort by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Congress for the New Urbanism has been working
- on guidelines for major thoroughfares that comply with the AASHTO guidelines, but they direct you toward
- kinder, gentler solutions. That has not yet reached
- That has not yet reached full acceptance yet, and so you can't wave that around in front of a Babaki
- local official saying, look, the Institute of Transportation Engineers endorses this completely. Do
- you have any idea when that might be accepted? No, I don't. In fact, I thought, until this evening,
- I thought that it had been finalized. I think I was probably mistaken because the draft was apparently
- produced in a very polished form, like a softbound book, and I think I just jumped to the conclusion
- that it has been accepted. The problem is, though, even with that endorsed fully by the Institute of
- Transportation Engineers, it undoubtedly will still be a voluntary thing on the part of the balky local
- official that is the problem.
- I think things other than just documentary ammunition, things beyond that are going to be needed. Bear
- in mind, the famous or infamous, as the case may be, AASHTO Green Book, American Association of State
- Highway and Transportation Officials, is actually a very flexible document. Most of the important design
- variables like the curvature and the sight distance, the things that determine how well a road sits
- on the land, they provide a great deal of flexibility depending on what speed you want to design it
- for. And they array these things very nicely in some surprisingly simple tables. What happens though,
- in the hands of local technicians or even state DOT technicians,
- without any intervening input from people who think a street should do other things besides just move
- as much traffic as fast as possible. In their hands, they gravitate toward the highest possible design
- speed. The highest affordable one is typically the criteria. And that gives us these unlivable designs,
- particularly in suburban and urban areas. The Astro Green Book right now is fully
- is fully accommodating of much lower design speeds with very greatly reduced footprints. But the problem
- is persuading a local technician to accept that. And that persuasion usually needs big political legs
- under it, typically with a strong elected official input saying, you know, this is our main street.
- 25 miles an hour is fine here, things like that. I have one follow-up question in terms of pushback
- from public safety officials for wider streets for better access for fire trucks and ambulances. Is
- there any data to use against that? The insertion of particularly fire safety, fire rescue
- The requirement that we now see them making on streets has hit us so suddenly that we're reeling from
- it still. Say as early as, or as recently as say mid-90s when we would be agitating for smaller streets
- and very small local streets and all, we always regarded the input from fire departments
- as friendly and supportive. And they typically had this can-do attitude. You know, we're the fire department.
- We've got through streets that size for years. We can get anywhere. There was like a pride on, you know,
- we can get anywhere. We can get the job done. And I don't know if it was because of 9-11, you know,
- our whole phobia about security now, or whether it was bunches of older chiefs retiring and younger
- academy-trained ones coming in. I'm not sure.
- Just in the past five or six years, there's been this, fire safety has become one of the biggest obstacles
- to livable streets, and we're still grappling with how to deal with it. There's a simply wrong-headed
- NFPA requirement that gets bandied all over the place that you have to have 20 feet clear in the street,
- and so any amount of parking
- or any other kind of the use of the street that reduces it to less than 20 feet is unacceptable and
- 20 feet clear. And we went all the way to the legal office of the National Fire Protection Association
- because the regulation that's quoted all the time appears to be for suburban, new suburban development
- and the legal counsel for NFPA said that's exactly what it is. This is a requirement for new
- development, which so often has only one way in and one way out that we are specifying that 20 feet,
- not for public streets. And then he went on to say, he volunteered. He said that the NFPA does not promulgate
- for public streets at all, that we are very careful not to promulgate for public streets. So this huge
- amount of misinformation. But we hear that over and over again that it has to be 20 feet clear.
- We did, just wanted to be right with you. In a slightly happier time, we were making great progress
- with a chief in Bluffton, South Carolina, kinda down near Hilton Head, and he had gone along with essentially
- everything we wanted. It was a new town, and he was gonna allow parking on both sides and all, and we
- finally just pressing him, but he said he really didn't need 12 feet, though. He didn't need a 12 feet
- clear, and so we pressed him.
- meeting was sort of over, and we were pressing him, why do you need the 12 feet? And he said, well,
- he said, you know, our equipment lockers are on the side of the truck. And he said, you know, we have
- to kind of squeeze in there and get our stuff out, and 12 feet is a minimum. And I said, we already
- made several concessions about equipment to him and everything. He said, to tell you what we're going
- to do, Chief, we'll send you and your men to Weight Watchers.
- And his famous response to us was, this is South Carolina now, his famous response was, you've done
- gone too far now. Yes sir. Has your team ever assessed the impact or have you ever come across any studies
- that do so that assess the peripheral impact on traffic fatalities and accidents for making streets
- more livable?
- or fuel usage and fuel consumption, and these are just categories that I thought of while I was sitting
- there. The economic impact of accidents, fuel consumption, and things like weight storm water runoff
- due to the streets becoming more livable.
- What was the first part, the first relationship you had, the first trade-off you made? I was wondering
- if you'd come across any studies that looked at the impact of making streets more livable on traffic
- fatality, things like traffic fatalities, fuel usage, or storm water. There's a lot of good data that,
- I think you'd have to call it,
- Indirect data there's there's very few studies that directly look at a street before and after and that
- would not be too conclusive anyhow But there's there's really good Indirect data that with with a little
- bit of interpretation and manipulation goes a long way for example the the unassailable data that shows
- that the severity of pedestrian accidents the severity to the pedestrian of
- of a crash goes up logarithmically so that by the time you, that I think it's 40 miles an hour is like
- twice as high a probability of hospitalization as 30 and then 50 miles an hour, which isn't even double,
- has like six or seven times the rate of hospitalization. This is unassailable. It's from Federal Highways
- Administration. So that kind of data in conjunction with the
- in conjunction with the reduction in vehicular speeds that you would get from a given application, further
- compounded, because these things get compounded, further compounded by the reduced time that pedestrians
- are in the path of a moving vehicle, like if you're removing lanes. When you compound all these things
- together, and then further compounded by the increased size of gap between vehicles,
- as they're traveling slower, you start to get these huge swings in safety, for example, with small amounts
- of street design change. But you sort of have to do the math yourself and everything. But it becomes
- very compelling. We never get any argument when we build things up like that. And then things like stormwater
- retention is such an established field now that, again,
- People don't typically cite numbers by the street, but by the square yard of impervious, you can quickly
- do your own calculations and all. There's no need to be shy about this kind of calculation and all.
- We've found that even if it's not our field to just wade right in,
- And we volunteer things now about the municipal bonding cost of things. And I know next to nothing about
- municipal bonding, but I know how to look up the payback at 4.5% over 30 years and things like that.
- And it's quite compelling if you're just a little bit careful about arithmetic. So the quick answer
- is direct sources that look at this kind of street, very few indirect sources
- a lot of good ones out there. And then, we're very intrigued by this research coming out of
- Texas Transportation Institute, TTI, that is doing wonderful things with roadside safety and just turning
- that on its head. So that's something to watch out for. The author's name is...
- unfortunate name is Eric Dumbaw, D-U-M-B-A-U-G-H. But the research is brilliant and it's already finding
- its way into court and things like that. And it gets after a lot of these things that were formerly
- thought to be roadside hazards, like parked vehicles, street trees and all, and is simply turning it
- on the head saying, no, these are safety. These are actually increasing safety and
- There's quite a bit of empirical research in there, too. I have an observation, maybe more than a question.
- But it seems like when we talk about congestion, level of service, and traffic speeds, we're actually
- talking about streets that aren't complete. If I had reason to stop there, park there, walk there, all
- of those issues become beneficial to slow them down instead of speed them up. Absolutely.
- Absolutely. Sometimes we think that getting after that reason to be there is the more powerful avenue
- toward a complete street. Once the reason to be there is evident, a lot of the problems, a lot of the
- opposition you would get to making the street complete simply evaporates or gets overwhelmed. If you
- have a vibrant retail atmosphere or students walking all over the street,
- and high occupancy and all, it becomes a much simpler matter to prevail on, you know, this street needs
- its on-street parking restored. It also seems like it's business opportunities. Congestion means people.
- It's still a very tough thing to sell, though. If you knew of some soundbite way to
- convince people that congestion is okay. We grapple with this all the time and we just can't get the
- compelling sound bite answer that gets city council heads nodding. I was fascinated when you pointed
- out that New Jersey and Pennsylvania's DOT is turning their heads around and looking at things differently
- and canceling their highways. And as we struggle with INDOT,
- I'm wondering if you can tell me what was it that changed things in New Jersey and Pennsylvania? Was
- it people coming to the legislature? Was it somebody at the head of PennDOT and New JerseyDOT that just
- woke up one day? We're still trying to get to the, we're still trying to understand it itself. It clearly
- was top down that
- Apparently, the Governor Rendell administration, for example, commissioned the Brookings Institution
- to do this beautifully written back to prosperity, which dealt with transportation quite a bit. So that
- was top down. The respective secretaries of the DOTs in those states
- were very much on board this, but how they got that way, I'm not sure. The states are severely financially
- strapped, and that helps. The idea that you have a lot of, as one of the secretaries said, we've got
- a lot of quarter-billion dollar projects, $250 million dollar projects on the books, and that for decades,
- state DOTs
- all over, and I'm sure just in Indiana is the case too. They were well aware that they probably would
- never get to all these projects, but it was still credible to spend planning and design and even acquisition
- money on them. And I think some of these more financially strapped Northeastern states are quicker to
- finally bite the bullet saying, look, we are never gonna build these quarter billion dollar projects.
- There is real need in these places.
- But the need is not for six lane bypasses, freeway bypasses. The need is for a third lane or
- even community-based thing. So top down, the lower level staffs seem to be peppered with sympathetic
- staff too. And we spent a lot of time kind of probing around as how did you end up at the DOT or how
- did you get this viewpoint?
- And we never really, I wish we knew the formula. The biggest question around is not what should we do.
- There's a high level of understanding now about what we should do and what we shouldn't do. But there's
- this, we're in some sort of infancy about understanding how does it happen. We even went looking for
- literature, like has there been books from behavioral science about
- paradigm changing or something, and never found anything conclusively. Went out with great hopes and
- just brought the recently released book titled Simplexity, which is dealing with simple things that
- are really complex and vice versa, and oh, worthless if I may give a real review. So I don't know. It's
- a behavioral science thing. You know, it could be something that
- Somebody who's been through political battles has an intuitive feel for like, you know, people that
- have waged political campaigns, even long shot ones. How did they do it? Other great big movements must
- have some relevance in them like, you know, the whole, the radical change about the appropriateness
- of smoking that going into it 20 or 30 years ago, you would have said we would never
- have reached the transformation we have now. The evaporation of the Soviet Union, you know, how did
- that happen? And I don't know. I wish we knew. We would bottle the formula and ship it everywhere.
- Great talk, Mr. Kulesh. I just wanted to point out something. We've got a good representation from our
- city planning staff here tonight. Yeah.
- My question is does anybody see anybody from public works tonight engineering department Has there been
- anybody here from the mayor's office tonight That's great. I know there was a one City Council person
- here for a while too. That's great I'm just disappointed in our public works department. Thank you
- You said you were disappointed to see so many right turn lanes in urban areas, so can you explain the
- difficulty with right turn lanes in urban areas? I'm a walker, so I think I probably know what the difficulty
- is, but. It's one of these, they're one of these traffic accommodating features that has an exceptionally
- low payback in the urban area. Their safety benefit is not needed at lower speeds. Their safety benefit is
- a cruise at higher speed environments where you want to get the decelerating vehicle out of the moving
- traffic lane, i.e. rural environment. In town, the safety aspect is diminished or nonexistent, and the
- capacity impact is miniscule. If you ran a highway capacity analysis through the standard totally objective
- methodology, with and without that right turn lane, undoubtedly you would get a minuscule difference
- in capacity. The price, though, is very high. When you consider that you seldom have just a right turn
- lane itself without extending the pavement widening to the far side of the intersection, so you in effect
- have jumped from a three lane to a five lane
- cross-section, and so this whole sequence of pedestrian things, this whole compounded sequence starts
- to kick in. You have longer pedestrian crossing times, higher vehicular speeds, more pedestrians in
- the path of a moving vehicle, and the time you compound all of those things together, you're paying
- a big price in pedestrian safety. It's also an appearance thing. It's a distinctly
- un-urban, un-town-like physical appearance. Interesting things, too. A lot of our safety... We're still
- doing things for safety that may be quite out of date. For example, the avoidance of the rear-end accident
- used to be a very high priority. The dreaded whiplash injury used to be a very real concern.
- I'm not sure all our fellow engineers understand now that the rear end collision is now one of the least
- injury producing of all types of collision and due to neck restraints, airbags, on and on and on. So
- what used to be the dreaded paralyzed for life whiplash injury that maybe you would have put right turn
- lanes in the urban area then, that has now, that's off the table as a serious injury.
- And so even more reason why it's not worth the price of having these things in an urban environment.
- And then all the other things to do with just runoff heat reflection and everything else from the additional
- yards and yards of pavement kick in. That breaks the continuity of the sidewalk too. You cannot have
- an urban type sidewalk
- fascinated with the idea of breaking up the Walmarts or any kind of big super stores and having them
- in smaller sizes, kind of spread out across town. I can't quite picture half of a Walmart
- how much would that cover, or a quarter of a Walmart, would that still fit into a city block? Would
- that be something that could be covered by the form-based regulation? That's what's compelling. That's
- almost always a factor where you see this smaller sized store. For example, the essentially half-sized
- grocery store, probably a more common example,
- 28, 30,000 square foot grocery store, which feels, when you get inside of it, feels marvelously like
- a old fashioned neighborhood grocery store. That and its own, even without any shared parking, fits
- within a small city block. When forced to have line or buildings along the frontage,
- which is a typical model now, the form-based codes require them to screen their parking with liner buildings,
- the typical usual kinds of things, coffee shop, hairdresser, fast food, that kind of thing. The parking
- of the liner buildings and the grocery store is all contained within a small block. And then a lot of
- things, a lot of what we thought were
- big problems are far more tractable than we thought. For example, the large tractor-trailer truck loading
- for the grocery store, just observing how it happens or helping them work it out, they simply, for all
- their maneuvering, they use the drive aisles of the parking. They adjust the schedule so that they're there
- during the less busy times of the day. Not hard to do, since those times are five to seven in the evening.
- So a lot of things just seem to work themselves out very nicely. Is it more expensive to the grocery
- store? Noticeably so. That's the interesting thing. Like the Publix chain was telling us when we were
- talking about this, they said that we have to man seven stations full-time in a grocery store.
- The entire the entire time the stores open and they said even on a big store most of that manning goes
- down to one person During a lot of hours of the day, you know, it's it's a service desk manager meat
- that kind of thing And so he said we're essentially duplicating these entire seven manned departments
- with these smaller stores But apparently they've made the business decision that it's undoubtedly it's
- undoubtedly Worth it and paying off
- But the other question is, is it just half of a store? It's half of a grocery store. The typical big,
- the typical super Walmart is pushing 200,000 square feet. That would not fit in a block. And we would
- be talking about something more like a quarter of that size.
- Ladies and gentlemen, it is nine o'clock. Walter, thank you very much. I think our community has really
- benefited from you coming here. Certainly enjoyed the opportunity of being here. And we will run with
- all of your ideas, I hope.
- I'm no longer surprised, if I may just add one more comment. At a lecture in Idaho, we showed pictures,
- this was in the early days of just discovering the difference of buildings being up on the street, and
- we showed pictures, and the term form-based coding wasn't even in use, but we talked about it, and we're
- out there for an entirely different piece of business about six or seven years,
- later, and here's this Elberson's grocery store done in wonderful Western, old West style with boardwalks
- and stuff right up on the street. And I commented to the host, in Haley actually, Haley, I don't know,
- commented to the host, wow, this is really something. And he said, well, he said, you shouldn't be surprised.
- He said, we did it after your talk. We went and did it after your talk six years ago. Come back in five
- years and we'll see what's happened.