Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The long legal ordeal is finally over for Raquel Nelson, the mother who faced three years in prison after her four-year-old son was killed by an impaired driver in suburban Atlanta.

Raquel Nelson's long legal ordeal is finally over, but people around the country must still deal with the dangerous conditions that claimed her son's life. Image: T4A

Charges of vehicular homicide against Nelson — who was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when her son A.J. was struck and killed — were dropped yesterday in exchange for a guilty plea on jaywalking charges alone. She will pay a $200 fine, according to Transportation for America.

Nelson’s case gained national attention as an illustration of poor road design as a civil rights issue. The homicide charge was based on the idea that she was recklessly “jaywalking,” but Nelson was simply trying to get from the bus stop to her apartment, and the closest crosswalk was one-third of a mile away.

David Goldberg at Transportation for America says that while Nelson was finally cleared of the unjust charges, many other people around the country face the same kind of conditions that took the life of her son:

That particular ordeal is over for Raquel Nelson. But the underlying crime persists – not just in Cobb County, GA, but also in cities and inner-ring suburbs all over the country. Areas built since the 1950s to be automobile dependent now are home to many lower-income families who don’t have access to cars. Nevertheless, the busy roads around them typically have not been retrofitted with safety measures for people on foot, bicycle or getting to and from the bus. The situation is getting exponentially worse as low-wage workers and recent immigrants move to these areas for their more affordable housing.

Fortunately, Goldberg reports, some progress has come out of this case. Greater Atlanta is starting to change the way it approaches road design:

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Whenever street space is allocated for bicycling, someone will inevitably level the accusation that the city is waging a “war on cars.” But it turns out the people in those cars want separate space for bicycles too, according to surveys conducted in two major California metropolitan areas. Bike lanes make everyone feel safer — even drivers.

Far from constituting a war on cars, protected bike lanes are a big relief for drivers. Streetsblog SF

Rebecca Sanders is a doctoral candidate in transportation planning and urban design at the University of California-Berkeley. She’s spent a lot of time asking people — drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians — what kinds of street treatments would make them feel safer, giving them a list of safety improvements to choose from. Most drivers said their top priority was bike lanes. (In the Los Angeles area, the top choice was for improved pedestrian crossings, but bike lanes were a close second.)

Sanders began this research with Jill Cooper of Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, under the sponsorship of the state department of transportation (Caltrans). They interviewed drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists on major corridors in and around San Francisco and Los Angeles, asking drivers why they picked the mode they did, and asking everyone how they perceived safety issues, especially for biking. Then they asked what kinds of street treatments would make the street safer for them.

“What was interesting about that study was that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most requested item, across the board, was a bicycle lane on the corridor,” Sanders told Streetsblog. “It was the most requested item by drivers, it was the most requested item by pedestrians, and it was the most requested item by bicyclists. That was quite surprising to us.”

It’s no shock that cyclists asked for dedicated street space in overwhelming numbers, and it stands to reason that pedestrians want bicycles off the sidewalk. Perhaps it should be just as obvious that drivers would welcome dedicated bike infrastructure, too. They find that bike lanes help them be aware of cyclists and make cyclists’ behavior more predictable, according to Sanders’ research. In general, there’s less potential for conflict between drivers and cyclists when they each have their own space.

“We have not done a good job of recognizing and validating the concerns of drivers about predictability,” Sanders said. “For a long time, cyclists have been defensive; they’ve been fighting for space, and legitimately so. But in the process, some areas where we could really work together, I think, have fallen to the wayside. Everybody wants predictability on the roadway. Nobody wants to feel like they’re going to get hit or hit someone else and it’s going to be beyond their control.”

The results of Sanders’ San Francisco-area research are due to be published soon in the Transportation Research Record and are available now on the Berkeley website. Meanwhile, Sanders has continued to look into drivers’ attitudes toward bike lanes, making it the topic of her (as yet unpublished) dissertation. She has conducted focus groups and internet surveys to shed light on what drivers and cyclists need to feel safe.

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Gary Howe has been seeing things differently since he suffered a foot injury when he slipped on an icy patch of broken sidewalk in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, this winter.

Photo: Josh Koonce/Flickr

Since then, hobbling has replaced walking for Howe, who runs Network Blog My Wheels are Turning and lives car-lite in this northern Michigan city.

The injury has been an eye-opener, he explains, showing how difficult things are for people who move at a slower pace:

I’ve written about walking speeds and speeds at crosswalk before. Normally, I’m one of the faster ones and well within the 4-feet per second that most people cross a street. With this injury, I’m reduced to about half of my normal pace, around 2-feet per second, maybe a tad faster, sometimes a little slower. I really noticed it the other day when my pace tested the patience of an otherwise considerate driver. The driver stopped (as is city ordinance) and waved me to cross, only to lose patience as I proceeded and finally giving me a gesture from behind the windshield communicating something like, “WTF? Can’t you go faster?”

Before the injury, I was already aware of the need for streets/sidewalks and crosswalk times to be designed with a wider range of abilities and speeds. During the last two months I now have the empirical understanding of what it is like for people with injuries, disabilities, or just slower cadence than the majority of people to get around.

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It truly is a testament to the collective power of denial that Rust Belt city leaders still think highways are going to improve their economies. Decades of experience with sprawl and center city decline apparently haven’t put an end to the notion that prosperity is just one road widening away. In Cleveland, business leaders are clamoring for a new $350 million roadway they insist will revive manufacturing in some very poor, nearly-abandoned neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a bit further east on the Lake Erie coast, there’s a great example of how cities’ seemingly bottomless optimism about road and highway projects can end up putting them in a very bad position.

The blue denotes roadways built since 1990 in the Buffalo region. Image: Buffalo Rising

Since 1990, the Buffalo metro area has lost 5 percent of its population and built 525 miles of new roads. According to One Region Forward, a collaborative regional visioning project that major planning agencies are currently undertaking, that translates into roughly 1,043 new “lane miles,” at an average annual maintenance cost, per lane mile, of $25,328 in Erie County and $16,166 in Niagara County.

Looking at the Buffalo region alone, this means taxpayers have assumed $26 million more in maintenance costs each year, divided among fewer people. That works out to about $35 per person, per year, Buffalo Rising reports. But those costs are really just the tip of the iceberg:

The real cost associated with this new infrastructure is actually much greater. When we build new roads, we often need to expand our sewer, water, utility lines, etc.

In Buffalo Niagara, where we have been slowly losing population for forty years, this new infrastructure has been created with fewer people to contribute tax dollars to pay for it.

For instance, the New York State Department of Transportation in 2011 estimated that an additional $4.03 billion would be needed to bring the state system up to a state of good repair.

It’s a good thing the Buffalo region is finally beginning to critically examine its road spending with One Region Forward. Buffalo Rising mentions a handful of policy tools Buffalo could employ to get a handle on ballooning infrastructure costs — like creating new incentives for infill development and rural land preservation — though it remains to be seen whether the city will actually seize on any of them.

A new transportation plan put forward by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory will make it “almost impossible to find money for passenger trains, sidewalks, bicycles and regional transit,” according to the Raleigh News Observer.

Why is North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory trying to torpedo plans for transit in the "Golden Triangle?" Image: Wikipedia

McCrory’s Strategic Mobility Formula will clear the way for more spending on the state’s highway system, designating about 40 percent of the state’s transportation money for projects of statewide importance (big highways, airports and freight rail only). Another 30 percent will be divided between seven regions of the state. Projects eligible for this smaller pot of money would include “second-tier” highways and ferries, but no transit and no Amtrak, reports the News Observer’s “Road Worrier” Bruce Siceloff.

Siceloff adds that the governor’s plan might torpedo a rail “triangle” between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill:

It creates new barriers that appear likely to kill prospects for money to build greenways or upgrade Amtrak service.

Also in jeopardy are Triangle plans – endorsed by Durham and Orange residents who have voted to increase their local sales taxes – for light-rail lines and rush-hour commuter trains that could eventually reach beyond the region as far as Greensboro and Goldsboro.

McCrory — who helped secure funds for Charlotte’s Lynx light rail system when he served as mayor — has also obstructed the city’s streetcar plans.

It’s something of a mystery why McCrory has become such a dogged transit opponent. Jeff Wood at the Overhead Wire speculates that there are greater political rewards for McCrory in supporting sprawl, since certain individuals stand to profit from some $3 billion in road projects for the Charlotte region, and big-ticket transit projects are seen as competition.

According to the News Observer, state legislators will vote on McCrory’s plan “in the next week or so.”

There’s a proposal on the table in Boulder, Colorado, to preserve 25 acres in the heart of the city for agricultural purposes in perpetuity.

Space that could be used for people to live near high-frequency transit should not be permanently preserved for agriculture, says Zane Selvans. Image: Flat Iron Bike

The problem, says Zane Selvans at Flat Iron Bike, is that from a sustainability perspective there are better uses for such a big parcel of urban land. Selvans says the proposal — on a property known as Long’s Garden in North Boulder — is at odds with the city’s goal to become more walkable and livable for people.

The proposal is problematic on a number of levels, he says:

The opportunity cost of acquiring the land’s development rights is very high in terms of land outside the city’s growth boundary that could be preserved with the same amount of money. For example, the City purchased a conservation easement on the 243 acre Windhover Ranch in 1993 for $1M, about a fifth the cost of the proposed agricultural easement on Long’s Garden. Two decades of inflation make that equivalent to roughly $1.6M today. The easement on the 25 acre Long’s Garden parcel is proposed to cost $4.7M. This means that per acre preserved, Long’s Garden costs nearly 30 times as much as the Windhover ranch.

Long’s Garden is immediately adjacent to the Broadway high frequency transit corridor. Purchasing an agricultural easement on this property would permanently degrade the value of our investments in transit service along Broadway by unnecessarily reducing the number of households and businesses that the transit corridor can serve. The functionality and economic efficiency of transit depends heavily on land use patterns. We should not needlessly hinder transit’s ability to serve our community, further incentivizing driving as the dominant mode of travel.

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Perhaps no other city in the country has the reputation for sprawl that Phoenix does, and it is well deserved. This is a city built around the car — until 2008, sprawling suburban housing in Maricopa County was the driving force of the regional economy.

Phoenix has light rail, now there's the matter of having the right kind of development around it. Image: Treehugger

Phoenix got a rude awakening in 2008, when the housing crash came. That same year, however, two fateful events occurred: The city’s light rail system opened and Arizona State University started its School of Sustainability. And out of that symbiosis, Reinvent Phoenix was born.

Reinvent Phoenix is a planning process for five walkable, urban “districts” around the light rail system. Each district will have a plan oriented around form-based code and other incentives for walkable, infill development that is well served by transit.

The concept grew out of a partnership between the city of Phoenix, ASU’s School of Sustainability and St. Luke’s Medical Center Health Initiatives. In 2011, they received a $3 million grant from the federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities, via the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Curt Upton, a planner with the city of Phoenix, said the city wanted to demonstrate that urbanism was a viable option in the region. They hope these districts will help motivate additional private investment in compact development elsewhere in Phoenix.

“We already know Phoenix can provide me the big house and the swimming pool, but it can also provide me a walkable urban neighborhood,” he said.

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