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.