Transportation Comments in Advance of My Leaving for a Trip to Europe

By Dom Nozzi

May 2, 2017

My girlfriend and I would be enjoying a few weeks in the bicycling and walking paradise of Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Belgium. That meant that I would need to miss my monthly Transportation Advisory Board meeting here in Boulder CO.

As is done each month, Boulder staff had provided a staff summary of each of our agenda items. Not one to lose an opportunity to offer my critique on items before the Board, I opted to email them to fellow members before departing.

East Arapahoe Avenue Transportation Plan

Traffic growth projections (0% to 20% growth by 2040) will be strongly influenced by the design of East Arapahoe Avenue. If Boulder chooses to (1) not reduce car-carrying capacity (or increases it by, for example, expanding the size of intersections); (2) not establish more compact, mixed-use land use patterns along the corridor; and/or (3) not substantially reform car parking by reducing the high levels of required parking, parking cash-out along the corridor, and requiring a substantial increase in priced parking, the growth of car travel will be much higher than it would be otherwise.

I therefore believe it is very important that Boulder reduce car-carrying capacity, promote compact development patterns, and better manage parking to reduce excess parking problems along East Arapahoe Avenue. Note that walkable, compact land use patterns will only be induced along the corridor if car-carrying capacity is reduced.

Improving bus service along the corridor, as proposed by the draft plan, will only be cost-effective (i.e., able to induce sufficiently high transit ridership) if these three items (capacity, land use patterns, and managed parking) are implemented.

Enhanced bicycle and pedestrian safety along the corridor can only be achieved if car-carrying capacity is reduced.

The term “…LOS will be degraded…” is biased terminology. It is more objective to state that “…LOS will be such that fewer car trips can be accommodated…” Using the conventional A through F level-of-service metric is biased toward car travel, as such a metric only measures motorist delay and ignores the quality of service for other forms of travel.

It should be noted that lower LOS for car travel will induce more desirable, compact land use patterns along the corridor. Maintaining or increasing LOS for car travel will lead to less desirable, more dispersed land use patterns, more car trips, and less safety. Failing to reduce car LOS will therefore undercut several important objectives of the East Arapahoe Avenue plan.

One of the options provided by staff is for Center-running Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). This option will be more difficult for transit users to walk to and from transit stops to the BRT (because of the need to cross several high-speed travel lanes). Given this problem, center-running BRT will create substantial problems for transit users, although removing car travel lanes in both directions can reduce that problem somewhat.

There is strong evidence from the transportation research literature that enhanced bus service leading to increased bus ridership will NOT reduce car trips. Much of the literature finds that increased transit ridership induces new car trips (latent demand) due to the new road capacity created by those shifting from car to transit. Reduced car trips, according to much of the literature, will only occur if car capacity is reduced, land use is more compact, and parking is reformed.

Future presentations of the East Arapahoe design options and plan need to show how the various design options will influence land use and travel. For example, No Build and other options that either retain or increase car-carrying capacity need to show how these options will result in more dispersed land use patterns, higher levels of car travel, and a reduced ability of the City meeting its objectives for this corridor.

Conversely, less car-carrying capacity will advance City efforts to achieve such objectives.

I strongly support the design option which repurposes/removes car travel lanes to a BRT-dedicated lane (I believe that would be “Alternative 3”). That option should also be shown to include land use and parking reforms.

Note that while this option is my preference of the options given, my preferred option would be to remove a travel lane in each direction and have the new curb lane be a mix of BRT and cars so that the new cross section is four and five lanes. The current cross section of six or more lanes is far too many lanes for a corridor that we seek to make more compact with future land use.

Capital Improvement Program (CIP) projects

I do not believe that the large sum of money (over $1 million?) to be spent by the City of Boulder on the 30th Street and Colorado Avenue underpass provides enough bang for the buck to be an appropriate project. I believe those dollars can be much more cost-effectively spent on other projects to promote non-car travel and promote pedestrian and bicycling safety.

The need for underpasses and overpasses are a signal that a road or intersection has grown too large for an urban location. In addition, an underpass puts off the inevitable day when the City must get around to shrinking this intersection from a suburban size to an urban size.

 

Fighting Against What Is Wanted

 

By Dom Nozzi

April 26, 2017

Many in Boulder CO hold contradictory views.

On the one hand, one hears a lot of folks saying they hate sprawl and cars (at least those driven by others) and the high cost of housing in Boulder.

On the other hand, many of these same people hate the things that would most cost-effectively reduce those problems: compact development, accessory dwellings, increasing the number of adults who can live in a home, buildings over one or two stories, smaller setbacks, less private open space, traffic calming, restricted/priced/managed parking, and shrinking oversized roads.

Oops.

Effective Education Tactics for Sustainable Transportation

By Dom Nozzi

April 19, 2017

A Boulder transportation planner asked me if I knew of any effective education tactics Boulder could use.

Of course I do. I’m happy to offer my thoughts and suggestions.

I’m a cultural materialist, I told him, which means that I generally only see material conditions as effective levers in changing behavior or values. If we want to effectively educate people to change their behavior or values, the tools need to be exclusively or predominantly focused on price signals, changes in our transportation infrastructure, and changes in our land use patterns.

Conventional education campaigns such as media ads or signage tend to be utterly overwhelmed, subverted, and ignored in the face of the tidal wave of societal, infrastructure, and price signals. We can, for example, run ads or put up signs that urge people to bicycle or walk or use transit more, but that “education” is completely drowned out by counter messages in our world: Roads are too wide and too high speed, destinations are too far apart, and huge subsidies are granted to you if you drive a car everywhere.

Throughout every day, we are pounded with these pro-car, pro-speeding, pro-distracted-driving “education” messages. Even if Boulder spent billions to run thousands of “ride a bike for your health and for the environment” ads every hour of every day, the counter messages (material conditions) are so vast and so powerful that nearly all people realize it is completely rational to drive everywhere (and to do so at high speeds while on a cell phone).

Using the media to “educate” people to behave in a more desirable way is so temptingly easy for local governments. It is so easy, politically, because there is little or no opposition. No one is inconvenienced or forced to pay more to continue to do what they are doing.

It is also very cheap, financially. It creates the (false) impression that government is “doing something” about a problem.

The ease of education campaigns explains why governments have been engaging in such campaigns over and over again for centuries. But one must wonder: given the appalling track record in achieving meaningful results with such campaigns, are such campaigns not a form of insanity? (a common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results)

Indeed, I consider conventional education ads such as public service announcements and other media campaigns to be so utterly ineffective that when we opt to use them, we are essentially saying we are not going to do anything about the problem – except pay lip service.

In sum, I suggest the following education campaigns: priced parking, tolled roads, attentive instead of forgiving street design, higher gas taxes, unbundled parking, road diets, compact and mixed use land use patterns, location-efficient mortgages, traffic calming, converting one-way streets back to two-way, pay-at-the-pump car insurance, a land value tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax), adopting the “Idaho Law” for intersections, elimination of car level-of-service standards, elimination of street hierarchies, much higher street connectivity, elimination of required parking land development regulations, stop synchronizing traffic lights for motorist speeds, reduce the size of service vehicles, reduced pedestrian crossing distances, reduced building setbacks, and required parking cash-out for all future employers.

Yes, each of these education tactics are nearly impossible, politically, in Boulder (which shows the surprising backwardness of Boulder in transportation policy). But being effective is important if we want to do meaningful things, and there are quite a few meaningful things Boulder needs to do very soon, given all the enormous problems we face. This will require leadership. It will require courage.

Is Boulder up to the task?

The Deadly Stew of Transportation

 

By Dom Nozzi

April 18, 2017

American society mixes together a deadly stew in transportation: We combine forgiving road design (which forgives motorists for not paying attention) with very busy lives (which inevitably induces an epidemic of motorist speeding), sleep deprivation (which inevitably leads to falling asleep at the wheel), and a car-dependent community design (which obligates most of us to drive for all our trips — and putting all those huge, heavy, high-speed metal boxes on our roads inevitably creates frustration because all the boxes of our fellow citizens are always congesting roads).

Instead of continuing our century-long, single-minded effort to maximize the speed of cars (and therefore condition motorists to expect high-speed driving), we need to more universally design our street system to obligate slower and more attentive driving (thereby conditioning motorists to expect slower speed driving — at least in cities).

Forgiving street design is not the ONLY cause of distracted, high-speed, angry driving, but I believe it counterproductively amplifies existing societal problems, such as the desire to live in dispersed, car-dependent living arrangements. Forgiving street design makes dangerous driving more frequent.

We have ramped up education and enforcement efforts every few years since the 1920s to fight dangerous driving, yet we probably have more distracted, speeding, angry driving than ever before. Even if those levels are not the highest ever, they are certainly unacceptably high today.

No-Growthers and the Double Standard

By Dom Nozzi

April 14, 2017

American communities, for several decades, have suffered from being the home of a great many citizens with two toxic beliefs: No-growthers, who oppose nearly all proposed developments, and the Double Standard crowd.

A shocking number of Americans (including nearly everyone in Boulder CO, where I live) hold two incompatible, all-about-me views at the same time: “I MUST OWN AND USE A CAR FOR ALL MY TRIPS, AND MY CAR MUST BE HEAVILY PAMPERED AND SUBSIDIZED BY SOCIETY!”

The second view, which is held by the very same people (especially in Boulder): “I HATE THAT OTHER PEOPLE OWN AND USE CARS AND WE MUST STOP DEVELOPMENT OR MINIMIZE DENSITY SO THAT WE KEEP THOSE CARS FROM CONGESTING ‘MY’ STREETS AND ‘MY’ PARKING LOTS!”

No growthism, and applying double standards when it comes to acceptable behavior, are a recipe for a grim future. Neither attitude is in any way sustainable.

And it appears that there is little hope we will see much change in this regard.

Are Cell Phones the Main Cause of a Recent Increase in Traffic Fatalities?

 

By Dom Nozzi

April 1, 2017

It is surprisingly difficult to isolate causes of crash/fatality trends in driving. One source has made the persuasive case a while back that the only good correlation we can find is based on the health of the national economy, of all things.

In any event, pointing to something like cell phones is a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” method that distracts people from a major cause of crashes: our roads are shockingly dangerous in how they are designed. And this follows over 100 years of annual campaigns to make roads safer. Talk about a failed track record. Talk about a need to change course on our efforts to improve safety…

The US has seen over 30,000 people die on the roads EACH YEAR since the 1940s. Cell phones did not arrive until the 80s or 90s. The number of annual deaths is a crazy high number and should be utterly unacceptable to any civilized society. Given the American love of the death penalty, our failure to adopt universal health care, our 240 years of being a Warrior Nation, and our abusive criminal justice system, a great case can be made that the good old USA is one of the most uncivilized nations in human history (probably at least partly due, ironically, to our high level of religious belief – which is infamous for inspiring hatred, violence, and intolerance).

I agree that cell phones (and many other distractors) are very dangerous for a driver to engage in while driving. But we need to keep our eye on the ball. We’ve had over 100 years of failed efforts to make driving safe.

In sum, if no driver ever used a cell phone again, we’d STILL be seeing over 30,000 traffic fatalities in the US each year.

In my view, successfully reducing the number of drivers distracted by cell phone use is unlikely to produce the safety benefits we expect. Efforts to point to cell phones as a silver bullet solution to making our roads significantly safer is quite likely to distract us from the much more important, pressing fact that our car-happy transportation system is inherently deadly (largely due to car-happy, “forgiving” road design and a dispersed land use pattern that requires us to drive everywhere — and at high speeds).

 

Suggestions for Running a Smooth, Productive Public Workshop Centering on Street Redesign

By Dom Nozzi

March 31, 2017

A staff member from a college town transportation department learned that I would not be able to attend the first meeting of a citizen workshop pertaining to the redesign of a street on the eastern periphery of the urbanized portion of the town.

Because I was serving on the city transportation advisory board, the staff person thought it would be helpful for me to suggest ways the first meeting could run more smoothly and productively.

The following is my response.

In my 31 years of experience at public workshops as both a citizen and a professional, the two most important lessons I have learned in getting a group to operate smoothly and productively is that the process must start by having a skilled, non-threatening professional expert provide a summary of design principles.

That summary should describe what is known from research about the impacts and effectiveness of various design treatments, what might work locally, and lessons learned from other communities – in other words, the typical way to start a design charrette.

Without this upfront education, group members tend to be coming from vastly different perspectives and lack of knowledge that significantly increases the likelihood that differences of opinion cannot be resolved (and that there will be so much frustration about not being on the same page that hostility arises). A lack of knowledge on the part of some/all of the group members also amplifies an enormous problem in public meetings: The LESS someone knows about a topic, the MORE CERTAIN they are about the thought that they are right.

Two tools that are very helpful in providing quick, informed awareness, and meaningful input, for a non-professional group: (1) maximize the use of easy-to-understand graphics that visually show conditions, issues, and design principles (such graphics must be very simple and minimize the amount of irrelevant engineering clutter that distracts from the important issues that need to be conveyed). (2) Use real-time visual preference (and other) surveys to assess group preferences during the meeting. The use of clickers to do real-time surveys of a group was extremely effective and useful at the traffic mitigation workshop the City sponsored a few weeks ago by the City.

I would also note, with regard to that traffic mitigation meeting, that I found it very useful to clearly point out at the beginning of the meeting that people need to LISTEN to others and be RESPECTFUL of others.

Overall, it is essential that the group start off with a clear understanding of the overall land use and transportation objectives for the corridor. If the objective is to, say, create another strip commercial corridor, the street to be redesigned at the workshop will need to have a higher speed design that makes free-flowing car traffic the imperative. If, on the other hand, the objective is to support safe, walkable, smaller scale retail, office and residential, the street under analysis will need to have a slower speed design that supports transportation choice and making the pedestrian the design imperative.

The staff person also asked me to imagine that, at the end of the day, I didn’t get everything I wanted for the street being analyzed, but I found myself really pleased with the process.  I was, in other words, able to say that it was both credible and meaningful.  What would have happened, this staff person asked?

I told her that given the high level of contentious hostility and ridiculing we were seeing at public meetings in this town, it would be essential that meetings are designed to make it safe for all viewpoints to be expressed – even those viewpoints that are relatively controversial – and that even those who are relatively timid in expressing their views feel comfortable in expressing their views. The use of the real-time clicker surveys is a good way to do that, as are a few other methods (such as allowing people to submit written ideas).

For me to feel as if the meeting was credible and meaningful, it is also essential that the group be provided with upfront education as I mentioned above. Without that, the group is likely to be little more than an uninformed, emotional mob with axes to grind. As a result, too many expressed citizen objectives end up being a random free-for-all of personal, parochial bias that ignores community objectives.

Another important way for me to feel that the meeting was meaningful comes from a feeling that the group has fully expressed their hopes and dreams (their visions). Too often in public workshops these days, I have a strong sense that attendees are either overly bashful about expressing their visions, or are not even aware that certain visions they may have are even feasible. This bashfulness or lack of awareness is another important reason why upfront education from a professional design expert is important, as doing so makes it much more likely that attendees will be less bashful or more aware of the full range of possible visions.