Tag Archives: street design

closing streets to cars raised business sales by 68%

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This was during four Sundays of “open streets” (which means open to humans and closed to big, heavy motor vehicles) in a portion of Center City Philadelphia. But this works because people live nearby. People don’t really have to “walk to” the event because they live there. When cars are the only practical way to get around, most of the space has to be reserved for cars to maneuver and park (relatively) safely so you can’t have space for people too. It’s obvious, sure, but 100 years of oil-highway-car industry propaganda has brainwashed us to be blind to the realities of geometry. Take your red pills, people!

May 2024 in Review

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Just realizing I never did a May 2024 post. Here it is. I also made a range of political musings in May, which I have chosen not to include below, but they are on the record for anyone interested.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What a modern nuclear bomb would do to a large modern city. Do we already know this intellectually? Sure. Do we constantly need to be reminded and remind our elected leaders that this is absolutely unthinkable and must be avoided at any cost? Apparently.

Most hopeful story: The U.S. might manage to connect two large cities with true high speed rail, relatively soon and relatively cost effectively. The trick is that there is not much between these cities other than flat desert. The route will mostly follow an existing highway, and we should think about doing this more as autonomous vehicles very gradually start to reduce demand on our highways in coming decades.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Drone deliveries make some sense, but what we really need is infrastructure on the ground that lets all sorts of slow, light-weight vehicles zip around in our cities efficiently and safely. And this means separating them completely from those fast, heavy vehicles designed for highway travel.

the end of drone deliveries? long live drone deliveries!

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In an example of a bad headline, this article is headlined “Amazon ends California drone deliveries“. But in the first paragraph, you learn they are discontinuing them in one particular town where they have been pilot testing them. There could be any number of political or bureaucratic reasons for this. And in the third paragraph, you learn they are starting them elsewhere, in this case in a Phoenix suburb.

My take: Deliveries by small, light autonomous vehicles make a ton of sense. In my view though, we are considering flying drones because our ground-level transportation designs are about 50 years out of date. We need to evolve our thinking from “bike lanes” to dedicated lanes for all sorts of slow, light vehicles that aren’t going to cause serious injuries or damage if they run into things. They have to be completely separate from lanes designed for highway vehicles. They need to be separate from pedestrian walkways. They need their own signals (or maybe they don’t need signals at all, but only if they are nowhere near those deadly highway vehicles). They need to be well constructed, well maintained, and enforced. I would allow only zero-emission and quiet vehicles in these lanes. All of this should be cheaper and easier than continuing to feed the money pit that is our outdated transportation infrastructure system currently in place in urban areas.

Politically, at least where I live, this gets into the “green gentrification” debate, and we are losing that debate massively, having just elected a mayor who is openly hostile to anything that would reduce the amount of blood soaking our streets. This is irrational of course, when safe efficient street designs could help people of all incomes and backgrounds get to jobs and lead longer, healthier lives.

115 traffic deaths and counting for Philadelphia in 2023

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The Bicycle Coalition has a grim but nicely done map and infographic of traffic deaths in Philadelphia. 115 and counting, including 52 pedestrians, 2 scooter riders, 11 motorcyclists, and 9 bicyclists (but I believe there was a 10th since these numbers were updated.) This is the worst in 24 years, according to the site.

Public opinion tends to blame the victims – pedestrians to some extent, and certainly bicyclists and scooter riders. Public opinion thinks motorcycles are just awesome, despite how deadly they clearly are. I see a trend of people riding motorcycles without helmets, which is just taking a huge risk with absolutely no reward to go along with it. Public opinion tends to blame the police to some extent for lack of enforcement. And last but not least, drivers tend to blame other drivers, because of course every driver considers themselves well above average.

As an engineer, I blame ignorant, incompetent street design first and foremost. I blame the engineers who are not up to date on best practices, ignorant bureaucrats who constrain them even if they are, and ignorant politicians who constrain the bureaucrats and engineers. On the latter, the outgoing Philadelphia mayoral administration at least has a Vision Zero program on the books, massive failure though it has been. The incoming mayor is not known to be a friend of safe streets, and is a proponent of the corrupt “councilmanic prerogative” system that allows ignorant politicians to overrule competent planning and design decisions in our city. The poster child for the latter, Kenyatta Johnson, is set to become the leader of our city council, by most reports.

So I am keeping my hopes and expectations under control. If in some parallel universe the incoming mayor asked my opinion, I would advise her to bring in new management for our streets department (I have no personal knowledge or experience with our current streets department leadership, except to note that they have failed to design safe streets, maintain streets, or pick up garbage and recycling as effectively as other cities.) I would ask that new management to at least bring our street design standards up to the safest level our state transportation department allows. I would ask that new management to put a professional asset management program in place to keep those streets in the best state of repair possible with the funding available. I would give that new management challenging yet achievable metrics and deadlines, and hold them accountable. That’s the relatively easy stuff. The harder stuff is dealing with the police, dealing with the state legislature, and chipping away at public opinion. On the latter, if pictures of dead and suffering children in Gaza are upsetting to people, can we maybe learn something and focus on showing and telling more stories about the risk and suffering street violence is causing to our own children here at home?

September 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”

Most hopeful story: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.

autonomous vehicle brakes and gently bumps fire truck going through a red light on the wrong side of the street

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Every minor autonomous vehicle incident is headline news, while meanwhile we just accept 40,000 Americans (and something like a million human beings worldwide) per year dying in and around cars operated by human drivers. It’s not that we should accept the risk posed by autonomous vehicles, it’s that we should recognize that it something like an order of magnitude lower than the risk of human-operated vehicles, which is huge. Every time the news reports one of these incidents, they should tell us how many people, including children, were killed and gruesomely injured since the last time they reported such an incident. We also need safe street designs and we need to stop pretending vehicles designed to be safer in highway collisions are also safe in urban environments with pedestrians and bicyclists. Something like golf carts traveling 15-20 mph would be a much safer, cheaper, convenient, and less polluting way to get around in the city.

shoddy Chicago bike lanes

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I have gone through a number of emotional stages with Philadelphia’s bike lanes, from denial to anger to apathy. They are poorly designed, maintained, and almost completely unenforced. This article talks about the state of Chicago’s bike lanes, which sound and look about the same. No, this doesn’t make me feel better about Philadelphia. Two times as much poor design and children dying is twice as bad. But this article at least does have some ideas, some of which Chicago is at least trying on a limited time frame and in a limited area.

  • “install cameras on city vehicles and street poles in two pilot areas Downtown to identify parking violators and mail them a ticket” [If people knew there were cameras on every police car, bus, and other fleet vehicle, they would clean up their act in a hurry. You could forgive a first ticket for people who agree to put a camera on their cars. Citizens should be able to snap a picture and upload it too. And this seems like a great use of AI. Computers could process all the imagery, flag ones that look like likely violations, and then a police officer could review and issue the tickets.]
  • do something about “dangerous construction zones and poor maintenance of city streets” [Amen. These are not just bike issues, they are driver and pedestrian and human issues absolutely everybody should be able to get behind.]
  • Communication. [Yes, signage can be poor and sometimes drivers and delivery people legitimately do not understand they are doing something wrong.]
  • “Improve shoddy bike lanes.” [um, yes, it shouldn’t need to be said but this is the #1 thing. Just adopt the Dutch Street Design Manual now and be done with it. U.S. cities really need some kind of loading zone, delivery, and contractor parking solution though. The way streets are designed now, these 100% necessary activities are illegal and that doesn’t make any sense. My brightest idea is to have a 15-minute parking space (or whatever time frame makes sense) at the four corners of each intersection, have these be reservable through an app, consider charging for them, and strictly and/or automatically enforce time violations.]
  • “first-time violators and anyone ticketed within 30 days of a camera being installed will be given a 30-day warning”
  • Fines that scale with income. [I’m not sure about this, but charging commercial vehicles more could definitely make sense. Charging less for a first offense, or forgiving a first offense if someone takes a refresher course or agrees to become a snitch (i.e. install a camera on their car or house) could all make sense. Community service as an alternative to paying fines could make sense. Fines shouldn’t add up to the point where anybody goes to jail unless they have hurt someone. Penalties for drivers who hurt someone should be severe in my view though, and this should apply regardless of what the pedestrian or cyclist was doing. The moral weight has to fall on the operator of the larger, heavier vehicle.]

Adding an anecdote about a crushed toddler is a nice touch in this article. We are all against that right? Or do some of us only care about babies before they are born?

Sharrows

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Sharrows are just markings telling bicyclists it is okay to “take the lane”, and telling motorists they have let bicyclists take the lane. In my experience, this can actually work okay on very narrow city streets with very slow traffic. The reason is that speeds here are low. So even if a bicyclist gets hit, that person is unlikely to die. I bike in this way, by taking the lane on relatively low-traffic, relatively slow streets. Surprisingly, the vast majority of drivers will wait patiently or change lanes and pass if they can do that safely. A small handful of psychopathic assholes will lay on the horn, scream, throw things, or spit. I would not let my children ride this way, but I feel safe enough doing it when I really need to. Those same psychopathic assholes are the ones who will kill a child crossing the street legally on foot, so not being on a bike is not going to save you from them.

Now having said all that, I agree sharrows are bad. Speed kills. Twenty is plenty, and anything over 20 mph is simply not safe for the bicyclist to be out there at all. Under 20, the hope is that the bicyclist will suffer only non-lethal broken bones and organ damage. Even in slower traffic, nine out of ten bicyclists don’t understand or don’t feel comfortable taking the lane, so they ride on the edge. Almost all drivers, for some reason, will speed up to pass a bicyclist riding on the edge. There is no room for error in this situation. Anything unexpected like an open car door, the car swerving slightly, or a pedestrian/dog/scooter enthusiast, and the bicyclist is likely to get hit hard and likely killed. If the vehicle is something bigger than a car, as it often is, the bicyclist has even less chance.

So what we need is safe, modern, competent road and street design. That’s it. Safe designs exist. We just have to design them, build them, and maintain them.

But if I were feeling cynical I would say yeah, but this is America, and we can’t have nice things here.

solar sidewalks

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At first I thought this article was called Tampa tries sidewalk solar panels as backup power for traffic, but then I noticed it is just for traffic lights. This seems a bit underwhelming, but it’s something. Here in Philadelphia, the instant response to any idea involving sidewalks will be “yeah, but they’re private”. It’s a convenient excuse, just put the legal/financial responsibility for half the transportation system on the backs of private property owners and pretend that’s working. People can’t actually afford to maintain the sidewalks, and the government mostly doesn’t enforce the ordinance because that would be very bad politics. So aside from the occasional successful lawsuit, we get unmaintained sidewalks. So maybe if the sidewalks could generate a bit of revenue to help pay for their own maintenance, this could be a step forward. Just a thought – let the chorus of “yeah but” begin.

what to do about blocked bike lanes?

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Some cities are considering a “bounty”, where a person reporting a blocked bike lane would receive a portion of the ticket proceeds.

I’m not sure the bounty is necessary. Even having the option of submitting a photo of a vehicle blocking a bike lane, including its license plate, and knowing the owner will get a ticket might be enough to get many bicyclists to do this. (and just a reminder that most if not nearly all bicyclists are also drivers at least some of the time.)

Other ideas include providing more temporary loading and delivery zones in residential neighborhoods. To me this is not an alternative, but something that is almost a no-brainer. Poor, unimaginative and ignorant design is what creates a lot of these conflicts in the first place.

The Texas anti-abortion law allowing any private citizen to sue a doctor who provides an abortion made me think – now that we have opened this door a crack, what is to stop any state applying this approach to any law. For example, pass a law allowing any citizen to sue a driver for parking illegally or running a red light. This seems like less of a stretch than the abortion thing, because if you are in a position to take the photo, you are being put at risk by the activity and you should have a case.