"Priorities for Street Design" aka "60 years of Misguided Intent"

From the window in the TOIstudio office there is an intersection in Lakewood, Ohio on Detroit Ave. that ODOT required the removal of a traffic light. The intersection in question connects two aged residential towers to bus stops and the local full service grocery store. It also connects a Northern portion of the neighborhood to the local public high school (the only one) as well as marks an end of what is considered the Downtown Business District (as noticeable by adjacent wayfinding). The removal of the traffic light means that there is over 1/3 a mile between signaled cross walks which, in such proximity to assisted care living, can be quite a distance and burden. To counter the loss of pedestrian crossing signals the city installed flashing lights on adjacent telephone poles and a metal "break-away" sign in the middle of the street informing automotive drivers of the law (that they probably should be aware of in the first place) that they must yield to pedestrians crossing the street. Throughout the day I get to watch drivers ignore their responsibilities in operating their motorized vehicles almost plowing over children, the elderly and other law-abiding citizens. It is summed up quite nicely in a video report.

In 2010 I worked with the CUDC (a local non-profit planning organization) on a public charrette entitled "Connecting Downtown Cleveland - Beyond the Burnham Plan (here is the pdf report) that studied quite a few of the questions being raised by the planning on impending construction of the new Cleveland Convention Center. My group concentrated on Public Square and connection Tower City to the Mall. Our design, based up a sinkhole created in Public Square which shut down the interior intersection for a couple month some years prior, leaving the perimeter open to traffic, reflected on how grand Public Square felt and the ease to traverse it when the main intersection at Ontario St. and Superior Avenue were removed. Despite opinion that this was impossible it now seems that the city of Cleveland is on the verge of implementing complete streets plans and using a redesign of Public Square as the linchpin. During a presentation I was trying to explain the following article to public member with the familiarity of dealing with an unnamed municipal planning organization. After the presentation I began the long look for the following article and here it is, after 3 years or so of non-deliberate looking:

A while back I stumbled up a blog post by former municipal civil engineer tasked with infrastructure planning and design (roads, sewer pipe, water pipe, stormwater) and who states that "A fair percentage of my time was spent convincing people that, when it came to their road, I knew more than they did.".

This was not only due to this fellows education and position, but most importantly, his job consisted of following sets of established standards;

"In the engineering profession's version of defensive medicine, we can't recommend standards that are not in the manual. We can't use logic to vary from a standard that gives us 60 mph design speeds on roads with intersections every 200 feet. We can't question why two cars would need to travel at high speed in opposite directions on a city block, let alone why we would want them to. We can yield to public pressure and post a speed limit -- itself a hazard -- but we can't recommend a road section that is not in the highway manual. 

When the public and politicians tell engineers that their top priorities are safety and then cost, the engineer's brain hears something completely different. The engineer hears, "Once you set a design speed and handle the projected volume of traffic, safety is the top priority. Do what it takes to make the road safe, but do it as cheaply as you can." This is why engineers return projects with asinine "safety" features, like pedestrian bridges and tunnels that nobody will ever use, and costs that are astronomical. 

An engineer designing a street or road prioritizes the world in this way, no matter how they are instructed: 

1. Traffic speed
2. Traffic volume
3. Safety
4. Cost

The rest of the world generally would prioritize things differently, as follows: 

1. Safety
2. Cost
3. Traffic volume
4. Traffic speed

In other words, the engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a projected volume. Once those parameters are set, only then does an engineer look at mitigating for safety and, finally, how to reduce the overall cost (which at that point is nearly always ridiculously expensive)."

And while this reliance on extremely old standards are no longer accepted practice the problem remains that those in charge of municipal departments most likely studied under the old model and are therefore more apt to reinforce these outdated and disproven techniques that recent (early 90's) ACSE and APA guidelines have attempted to confront. 

In no way am I suggesting that street design is easy. There are a lot of complex issues that affect adjacent property owners, users and safety personnel, many with inherent contradictory needs. It becomes a question of balance and context, but most importantly it becomes an issue of having the ability to confront the status quo when it is quite obvious that accepted guidelines do not serve the community they are supposed to (I am allowing for the use of highways where appropriate, slicing through neighborhoods not being one of them). 

Another link to the referenced blog post:
Strong Towns "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer"

Which I rediscovered through this article:
Atlantic Cities "What Happens When a Town Puts People Before Cars"