Boulder’s Outdated Progressive-ism on Transportation and Land Use

By Dom Nozzi

February 28, 2018

Something occurred to me recently about Boulder, Colorado’s growth and development strategies.

It struck me that in the 1970s, many Boulder residents came to decide that the popular growth and development tactics of that time were so commonsensical and so progressive and effective that such tactics would forever be necessary. They had drunk the Koolaide of the 1970s, in other words, and had become hard headed zealots who would forever crusade for all eternity to “save” Boulder by holding fast to these strategies. Not holding tight to them would be an unforgivable compromise that would ruin Boulder.

The problem, though, is that today in the 21st Century, an overwhelming number of scholars and professional practitioners have come to realize that many of these 1970s tactics that are held so firmly by so many Boulderites are terribly outdated and quite counterproductive.

These 1970s tactics are outdated because they are pro-car, which makes them anti-city, anti-environment, anti-walkability, anti-transit, anti-bicycling, unsustainable, anti-affordability, anti-sociable, bad for city character, and bad for quality of life.

Here is a listing of such failed ideas that too many in Boulder fiercely and stubbornly continue to hold on to with all their allegedly progressive, enlightened, heroic might:

• Support for large building setbacks.
• Support for very low densities.
• Support for large lot single-family (residential-only) zoning for neighborhoods.
• Support for free-flowing car traffic.
• Support for zero population growth.
• Opposition to small lot sizes.
• Opposition to small homes.
• Opposition to buildings taller than 1-2 stories.
• Opposition to large numbers of people living in the same home.
• Support for requiring developers to provide abundant off-street parking.
• Support for using speed humps and stop signs.
• Support for one-way streets.

Each of these tactics have now been thoroughly discredited in recent decades.

Why are so many in Boulder so stubbornly holding on to these outdated ideas? My guess, at least in part, is that the 55,000 acre greenbelt the citizens taxed themselves to buy since the 1960s has been so successful in promoting quality of life that a lot of folks wrongly concluded that the entire bundle of growth and development strategies from that era remain valuable.

I’m sorry, but while the greenbelt idea remains as powerfully effective in the 1970s as it is today, the list of other 1970s strategies I mention above must be tossed out as failures that are inhibiting Boulder’s ability to retain and continue advancing toward a better future.

Another possible reason comes from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (citing Max Planck). Kuhn would note that many Boulderites who continue to cling to the outmoded 1970s tactics had invested so much of their lives and their efforts into those ideas that they are now unable to discard them despite overwhelming evidence. Such people, Kuhn would point out, are simply not able to accept the idea that they wasted so much of their lives and efforts promoting concepts that are now known to be wrong-headed. Many such people will go to their graves continuing to believe in the 1970s tactics (regardless of how overwhelming the counter-evidence grows), because it is too much of a terrible blow to admit they were so wrong on topics they had grown to accept as eternal iron laws.

Under this grim Kuhn scenario, Boulder’s best hope is that the Old Guard will, through attrition, grow smaller and smaller as they move from Boulder. Or die off.

The Need for Gainesville, Florida to Retain the Courthouse Downtown

By Dom Nozzi

January 15, 2001

The downtown is the fountainhead of civic pride for the community, and both keeping or building important civic buildings downtown is a vital way to achieve or retain pride.

When our significant government buildings are downtown, it sends a powerful message to residents and visitors that we are proud of our city. It is also an important way for our downtown to remain “relevant.” We need to encourage and retain a meaningful number of jobs, residences, and retail downtown. Sprawling, “Anywhere USA” cities (where “there is no there there”) have hemorrhaged their important “social condensers” (community gathering places and key symbols of government) to dispersed, outlying areas. We’ve already the main city post office move way out to the western fringe of the city, and this has been to the detriment of downtown. Fortunately, a post office remains downtown.

Keeping a county courthouse in the community downtown is an important way for a community to avert a “South Florida” future. It matters that we retain a sense of place. And a sense of community.

All this, by the way, is not to imply that I’m fully supportive of the current proposal for the downtown courthouse. I’m rather unhappy about many of its “downtown-hostile” design features. Some of these features try, in a juvenile way, to protect the building from a “Waco bombing.”

Other examples of design features that degrade the need for a welcoming, compact, walkable downtown is the incorporation of vast expanses of deadening asphalt parking.

Nevertheless, a downtown needs to retain its courthouse in the town center. Hopefully, in the case of the new Gainesville courthouse, surface parking will be incrementally replaced with active, downtown-friendly buildings.

Sadly, the old courthouse built in 1885 no longer exists (see photo below), and has been replaced by an unlovable modernist building (photo above).

Affordable Housing in Boulder, Colorado

By Dom Nozzi

February 20, 2017

I posted a quote on Facebook meant for the many people I know in Boulder who believe that as much as possible must be done to stop growth and development:

“The opposite to bad development is good development, not no development.” – Padriac Steinschneider

Someone replied by stating that “[n]o one said anything about no development and growth. This is discussion about affordability which is a separate issue. We can grow a lot and build mostly unaffordable housing, or we can grow less and preserve the affordable housing that we have and build mostly affordable new housing. Those are 2 very different affordability outcomes unrelated to growth.”

My response:

The underlying hope — and often the quite outspoken belief — for a great many in Boulder is no growth. I’ve lost track of how many times I see people in Boulder fight to raise development fees or call for more meetings for a proposed development plan (mostly for added opportunities to stop the development).

Or state that population growth is our number one threat.

Since fees are so very high in Boulder already ($11 million in fees paid by Solana, for example), and since added time is very expensive for developers, higher fees and more meetings is, for many who call for such things (if they are honest), an effort to prevent development.

For many in Boulder, Al Bartlett is a patron saint. Over and over again, he sounded the alarm that population growth is a huge threat (and implicitly, for many who hear his message, that population growth must be stopped in Boulder).

Since there is no humane or practical or constitutional way for Boulder to stop population growth, the next best thing has been to fight to slow it down as much as possible (while hoping that such efforts will eventually stop growth or at least push it to towns outside of Boulder).

One way to clearly see how stopping growth is the underlying objective is the extreme opposition to density increases in Boulder. Since Boulder cannot grow outwards beyond city limits (without great difficulty), or upwards due to severe height limits, fighting against density increases is another way to stop growth in the near future.

I don’t see how growing less preserves affordable housing, or how growing more removes affordable housing. Most people I know who support more compact, walkable growth and more housing are, like me, supporting the idea of making it easier to build such things as backyard cottages (or other forms of ADUs), co-ops, smaller houses/apartments, and converting some industrial and surface parking land to housing. Each of those tactics inherently provide more affordable housing.

By contrast, those pushing for slower growth or no growth often strongly oppose each of these options for more affordable housing.

It must be noted that growth in Boulder is already very slow when one considers how very desirable the quality of life is here, and the fact that we have had a very low maximum annual residential growth cap — I think that cap still exists.

Instead of supporting the affordable housing tactics I note above, many slower growth advocates call for heavy-handed local government market interventions, which I believe is unsustainable — in part because it leads to many unintended consequences. Slow growthers are forced to adopt such a “command economy” tactic because the idea of creating the new and relatively affordable housing I mention a few sentences back would mean more people, and for too many of the slower growthers, that is not in any way acceptable. Al Bartlett, after all.

I would love to see the slower growthers support building new housing that is affordable, as you say above, but all I see is opposition to such new housing. I see opposition to:

1. ADUs.
2. Co-ops.
3. Loss of parking – often as a way to create more housing.
4. Providing less parking for housing or unbundling the price of parking from housing (both of these are powerful ways to create more affordable housing because parking is extremely expensive).
5. Reducing the amount of parking that a developer must provide.
6. Smaller lots or smaller houses.
7. Buildings taller than 1-2 stories.
8. Adding smaller shops or offices into residential areas or incorporated into the same building.
9. Smaller building setbacks and smaller open space or landscaping requirements for new developments.

Personally, I would love to see in Boulder a big increase in smaller homes, without parking, that are an easy walk to shops and offices. I would love to buy such housing, as I’m sure a great many in Boulder would want to as well. But the supply of such walkable housing in Boulder is vanishingly small. And the demand is huge (and growing due to the fact that many Millennials seek such housing). That bids up the price of such inherently affordable housing artificially. Given the very loud opposition I hear from so many of the slower growthers (which I increasingly call the anti-city, anti-environment folks), I’m not optimistic that the supply of such greener, more sustainable, more affordable housing will grow much at all.

One cynical form of optimism on the affordable housing front is that since cities such as Boulder now have way more drivable suburban housing than the demand for such housing, we can expect that such housing will be relatively affordable in future decades, because supply will far exceed demand.

Most of Boulder was built during an era that put low-density, single-use-zoning, drivable suburbia on a pedestal (in part by adopted zoning regulations that make compact development illegal). In the coming decades, it will be the cities that are able to incrementally make such unsustainable places more walkable (and create new neighborhoods with such housing) that will have a future. That inevitably means more compact housing, which means a more affordable and greener lifestyle (because the huge expense of paying for car travel will decline and the huge per capita environmental impact of car travel will diminish). It also means more people living in neighborhoods, which is anathema to those who seek to retain a drivable lifestyle.

Christopher B. Leinberger, on Dec. 20^th, 2006, had this to say on the topic (he is the author of The Option of Urbanism):

“…walkable urbanity is entirely different than drivable suburbanism. The underlying financial and market principle of drivable development, aka sprawl, is that “more is less”; more development reduces the quality of life and financial returns, leading developers and their customers to perpetually go further and further to the fringe in a fruitless search for very things (open space, drivable convenience, perceived safety, etc.) this development promises. It is a downward spiral.

Walkable urbanity works under financial and market principles that “more is better”; as more dense development takes place with mixed-uses within walking distance and multiple transportation options to get there, the place gets better. Hence the environmental, fiscal (government tax base), community building AND project financial elements all become better. It is an upward spiral.”

And Vince Graham:

“If what you sell is the perception of privacy and exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the amenity. However, if what you sell is community, then every new house is an enhancement of the asset.”

 

Phoenix or Siena? Do We Reduce Environmental Impact by Stopping Growth? Or Ensuring Growth is Better?

By Dom Nozzi

February 13, 2018

Someone posted a rebuttal to the excellent guest opinion in the Boulder, Colorado newspaper by Zane Selvan’s about the environmental impacts of low density development in Boulder:

“There it is again: ‘per capita carbon footprint’. I’m concerned with Boulder’s ‘net’ carbon footprint. Density and infill proponents want to increase the population and increase the net carbon footprint in order to achieve a decrease in per capita carbon footprint. It’s the only way they can do it. It’s oxymoronic. Boulder will become a bigger, dirtier more crowded city overall in order to become slightly cleaner per individual. It’s a self defeating policy.”

My response: If Boulder’s 108,000 people were spread out over a lower density, more dispersed and car dependent pattern, the impact on the environment would be much more brutal and unsustainable. As it stands now, Boulder’s low-density pattern already fuels a huge amount of car travel and carbon emissions — way more than if that 108,000 people were in a more compact, human-scaled pattern.

For those, like me, who prefer a “small town character,” Boulder would feel much more like a small town if the city was much more compact, rather than dispersed. If our parking lots were smaller and more rare. If our roads and intersections were less massive. For me and many others, “small town ambiance” is much better achieved when we have a compact, human-scaled dimensioning of our neighborhoods and town centers and road infrastructure.

Small town character, for me, has far less to do with the number of people who live in Boulder.

There are hundreds of cities and towns in Europe that demonstrate this.

When I am at a monster huge Boulder intersection with a double-left turn lane and six or so through lanes, I feel like I am in Houston or Phoenix. I feel uncomfortable, exposed, unsafe, anxious to leave, and disappointed about what has been done. There is no sense of place whatsoever, and it feels “big city” even though I would often be about the only human at that intersection. By contrast, I can be in, say, Pearl Street Mall with hundreds of people, but the human-scaled dimensions create a small town sense of place and comfort and pride.

It is sometimes claimed that the only reason certain cities are compact and walkable is that they have convenient public transportation (and “my city does not have convenient transit”). But having convenient transit service is not simply a matter of citizens asking for it or elected officials providing it. Places like Phoenix and Houston and many neighborhoods in Boulder don’t have convenient transit because citizens have spent decades demanding…

• Low density
• Short suburban buildings
• A huge amount of free parking
• Wide, free-flowing, and free-to-use roads

Each of those elements make it extremely difficult if not impossible to provide convenient transit in a city. The fact that Siena and NYC and much of Boston and DC have convenient transit is that they opted to build densely and did not go hog wild in making cars happy. Why is transit not convenient in much of Boulder? Why is it so convenient in bigger US cities? Is it because they are smart and Boulder is stupid? I think not.

I prefer convenient transit and “small town ambiance,” which is why I regularly advocate compact, 2-5 story neighborhoods and town centers with scarce, priced parking and human-scaled streets. The fact that so many in Boulder fight to the death for low density, one-story subdivisions with abundant parking and wide roads largely explains why Boulder is losing its “small town ambiance.”

How ironic.

Notice in the photo set that in the “small town ambiance” places in Siena and Boulder, we are looking at places that have a relatively compact collection of people living, working, shopping, and playing. In other words, “small town ambiance” is often found when we have a relatively large population size. Also notice the taller buildings in the two “small town ambiance” images compared to the two “big city ambiance” images. In other words, “tall” buildings do not necessarily create a “big city ambiance.” Indeed, the opposite is often true.

Some people say that a larger number of people have a larger carbon footprint than a smaller number of people. Well yes, that is obviously true. But is there a practical way for us to halt population growth? After working academically and professionally in environmental science and town planning for 40 years, I know of no humane or constitutional way for us to stop population growth.

What some would like us to do is to nudge the growth toward other communities, but that does not reduce the carbon footprint. It just shifts it to less politically powerful or more affordable places. Such an effort also disperses human settlement rather than having human settlement be more compact, and that ramps up the overall carbon footprint.

The effective way to reduce overall carbon footprint, then, is to not waste our time trying to do the impossible (stopping human population increases) or being NIMBYs (by shunting the growth to politically weaker places).

The key is to work to have development occur in a more compact, sustainable way that promotes a healthy, happy city. When we do that, people are less likely to want to live in low-density, car-dependent places (because town center living is more enjoyable and enticing).

Boulder’s dispersed, low-density development pattern means we have plenty of infill development opportunities so that we can become more compact, safe, sociable, and walkable.

With compact, relatively gentle, context-sensitive infill (small condos, compact apartments, mixed use, small houses, row houses, small lot sizes, small or no setbacks, 2-5 story buildings, accessory dwelling units, co-ops, replacement of surface parking and suburban setbacks and sprawling industrial/warehouse areas with urban buildings) — not to mention the elimination of required parking — we substantially increase affordable housing opportunities. That would mean we’d have less people being forced — for financial reasons — to move to outlying, car-dependent places. Again, the overall carbon footprint would go down.

Despite the conventional wisdom we still hear too often in Boulder, it turns out that being pro-city is to be pro-environment. To be anti-city is to be anti-environment. Compactness is the new green.

Phoenix or Siena? I prefer the compactness of a Siena over the low-density Phoenix (or Orlando)…

 

A Conversation with a Graduate Student Regarding Transportation Planning and Complete Streets

By Dom Nozzi

November 22, 2012

A graduate student in transportation planning at the University of Florida contacted me with questions regarding Complete Streets on November 21, 2012.

She wanted to answer the research question that asked, “Would implementation of Complete Streets policies be feasible and beneficial in the Gainesville region?”

The following are her questions and my responses.
How would you define a complete street?

A Complete Street is safe, comfortable and convenient for travel by car, by walking, by bicycle, and by transit. The design of a Complete Street varies, however, based on the context (or location) of the street. In a town center, for example, a Complete Street tends to have car travel lanes, sidewalks, and bus stops/seating. In a suburban context, a Complete Street tends to have car travel lanes, in-street bike lanes, sidewalks, and bus pull-out lanes. In other words, Complete Streets is not a one-size-fits-all concept.

Do you support complete streets in general (not specific to Gainesville region)?

Complete Streets should be the default design, based on context, for all new and modified streets in the US. Doing so promotes travel choice, fairness, equity, sustainability, public health, affordability, civic pride, economic health, and public safety. Only when special studies determine that a Complete Street is not justified should an incomplete street be built. Note that the reverse is the case for nearly all American communities for the past century. That is, special studies are needed to determine that a Complete Street is justified and should be built.

What can you tell me about Gainesville’s transportation policies?

I was the lead planner and author of Gainesville’s long-range transportation plan that was adopted as part of the City’s Year 2000 Comprehensive Plan (the “Transportation Mobility” Element of the Plan). I am nearly certain that nearly all of the policies in the Year 2000 plan, as well as Gainesville’s overall traffic engineering, MTPO, City Commission, and other transportation-related goals, objectives and policies remain essentially the same today as they were in 2000 and when I left in October 2007. Those policies – many (most?) of which I was not personally or professionally supportive of – sought to promote free-flowing car traffic, convenience and low cost for traveling and parking by car, implicitly calls for the allocation of nearly all public transportation revenue to car-supportive infrastructure, promotes dispersal of development (i.e., suburban sprawl), calls for a level of service for cars that is too high, and calls for land use densities that were low enough to be conducive to convenient and free-flowing car travel.

For decades, the City has adopted Comprehensive Plan goals, objectives and policies that promote bicycling, walking, and transit use. However, these bicycling, walking, and transit policies have not been effective in promoting transportation choice (i.e., meaningfully higher levels of bicycling, walking, and transit) because the policies promoting car travel that I noted earlier have resulted in a significant suppression in bicycling, walking, and transit travel (due to inconvenience, high cost, and danger that the previously noted policies create for bicycling, walking, and transit). An important flaw in Gainesville’s transportation plans is that car mobility continues to be emphasized, rather than transportation accessibility, and car mobility is a zero-sum game. That is, the more the City promotes car mobility (via wider and wider free-flowing streets and abundant/free car parking), the less conducive the city becomes for bicycling, walking, and transit. Unfortunately, Gainesville continues to believe that transportation is a win-win situation, and I firmly disagree with that view.

Does the city council have complete streets goals in its comprehensive plan?

Gainesville did not have goals, objectives or policies in its comprehensive plan that explicitly called for Complete Streets as of October 2007 when I left the city. However, the year 2000 Comprehensive Plan implicitly called for Complete Streets in a great many goals, objectives and policies. I am sure this is also the case in the more recently adopted Comprehensive Plan. This is not to say that the existing goals, objectives and policies are adequately calling for Complete Streets. It is certain that the existing goals, objectives and policies can be revised to more clearly direct the City to create Complete Streets in the future.

Do you think that Gainesville’s current policies would accommodate complete streets or would there need to be extensive revisions?

As I noted above, Gainesville – like nearly all cities – has transportation policies that at least implicitly promote Complete Streets. But like most cities, those policies could benefit from substantial re-wording to make them more effective in achieving Complete Streets. Examples: (1) The policies could call for a substantial shift in public revenue allocation so that significantly more public transportation dollars are allocated to bicycling, walking, and transit. And substantially less allocation of dollars to car travel promotion (including revisions to the Capital Improvements Program Element); (2) The policies could call for a seamless integration of the Complete Streets policies with those found in the design manuals, implementation policies, bicycling and transit, construction/rehab/resurfacing checklists, and procedures used, for example, by the City and County Public Works/Traffic Engineering Departments, the MTPO policies, the FDOT, the City and County Offices of Management and Budgeting, the City and County Fire Departments, and the City and County Housing Departments; (3) The policies could include Complete Streets “performance measures” so that the City would know – quantitatively – whether it was making progress in achieving more complete streets over time; (4) The policies could call for opportunistically adding complete streets elements to streets which are undergoing modifications for such things as stormwater or restriping; and (5) Revising the scoring and prioritizing of City transportation projects so that walking, bicycling and transit score higher.

How could we implement complete streets into those streets which have already been developed without accounting for all users?

There are a number of tactics, depending on the street. For example, space for sidewalks or bike lanes can be created by narrowing travel or turn lanes (when restriping, for example), or removing turn lanes. Transit facilities can usually be retrofitted without any need for additional street right-of-way. Many streets have an excessive number of turn or travel lanes, and new space can be found on such streets by removing such excessive lanes. The “road diet” on Gainesville’s Main Street is an example of a tactic that can be used on a great many streets in Gainesville.

How do you think that Gainesville’s complete streets could be funded?

The point we often make at the Complete Streets workshops we conduct throughout the nation is that more complete streets can be achieved without any increase in revenue to the community. Many complete streets designs can be achieved in a cost-free manner (a restriping project could include bike lanes, for example). A community could also re-allocate its transportation dollars so that a higher percentage of such dollars are allocated to bicycling, walking or transit. Funding for a single purpose could be used for multiple purposes (stormwater funding might also be used to install a sidewalk, for example). If these approaches are not sufficient, there are many federal, state and local funding programs that can be tapped for complete streets design.

Do you think that investing in complete streets now would save transportation related costs in the future?

Absolutely. When done right, more durable methods and materials are used for street modification projects. When complete streets elements are included in the initial construction of the street modification project, both this and the more durable methods and materials reduce the need for – and cost of — retrofitting. There is a growing consensus that due to demographic, energy and other inevitable changes, Gainesville will see a shrinking number of motorists and a growing number of bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit users. By taking that into account with a Complete Streets program now, Gainesville will save substantial infrastructure costs that would otherwise be needed in the future to accommodate this new composition of travelers. Because it is inevitable that larger percentages of Gainesville travelers will be bicyclists, pedestrians and transit users, it is much less costly to acquire needed materials and right-of-way for such travelers now, rather than in the future, when such costs will be much higher.

How do you think that complete streets, if developed properly, would change the Gainesville community?

If Gainesville successfully creates a comprehensive set of policies, procedures, complete streets infrastructure, and the nine essential elements I list below, Gainesville would see a substantial increase in bicycling, walking and transit use. It would become more healthy, would see medical expenses go down, would see its taxes increase less rapidly, would see local government expenses drop substantially, would see more civic pride, would enjoy more “social capital,” would see less suburban sprawl, would see a more revitalized town center, would have cleaner air and water, would have healthier wildlife ecosystems, would have more affordable housing, would have less crime, would have less travel injuries and deaths, would have healthier locally-owned retail, would have better high-quality job growth, would have reduced noise pollution, would have less visual blight, and would have more stable property values.

Do you feel that Complete Streets policies would be beneficial and/or feasible to the Gainesville community? Why or why not?

Yes, for the reasons I list in a number of other answers I provide above and below. The most important obstacle to achieving the beneficial aspects of Complete Streets policy, as I point out below, is achieving sufficient will to do so. Political, citizen and staff will.

Summary

 In sum, while I believe that Gainesville would need (and benefit from) a substantial revision in its long-range plan goals, objectives and policies, its design manuals, its departmental procedures, and its funding formulas to better promote Complete Streets, doing so will also require substantial changes in other areas if Gainesville is to successfully create a successful Complete Streets program, as well as substantially shifting a large number of car trips to walking, bicycling and transit.

First and foremost, I do not believe that Gainesville has the political will, the staff will, or the citizen will to create complete streets and an overall environment rich in transportation choice. Like nearly all cities, Gainesville has had goals, objectives and policies that are quite supportive of complete streets. But such overwhelming support, on paper, is little more than paying lip service to complete streets and transportation choice – unless other essential elements are achieved. The main obstacles that will remain, even if Gainesville adopts high-quality Complete Streets policies, include:

• An almost complete lack in political, citizen or staff will to create complete streets and transportation choice.
• An excessive provision of free (and underpriced) car parking throughout the Gainesville urban area.
• Excessively wide streets throughout the Gainesville urban area. In general, streets wider than three lanes in the Traditional City town center and five lanes in suburban areas is excessive. Overly wide roads in Gainesville lead to even larger intersections, which are deadly to people walking and bicycling.
• A gas tax which is too low.
• An extremely dispersed, sprawling city geographic spread. A city that is over fifty five square miles in size (as well as the unincorporated urban area) creates distances that are far too excessive for regular travel by walking, bicycling or transit.
• A lack of tolling (pricing) of roads in Gainesville.
• A lack of a mixing of homes with offices, retail, civic, cultural, and job land uses.
• A lack of sufficiently high residential densities in appropriate locations.
• A lack of a parking cash-out program that provides financial (or other) incentives for commuting to work without a car.

Without achieving the nine items I mention above, even adopting the best Complete Streets policies will do very little to achieve Complete Streets or transportation choice in Gainesville. Furthermore, even if the City did create a citywide street infrastructure that provided complete streets comprehensively (all streets had sidewalks, were bike-friendly, and were transit-friendly), only a small shift in car travel to walking, bicycling or transit would occur because of the above nine items. As a friend and colleague has pointed out, meaningfully increasing the number of pedestrians, bicyclists or transit users is not about creating new bike lanes, sidewalks or transit facilities.

It is about taking away space, speed and subsidies that motorists now enjoy.

 

City Planners Don’t Plan Anymore

By Dom Nozzi

February 8, 2018

I lost the enthusiasm I once had about a professional planning in the latter part of my 20-years as a long-range city planner for Gainesville, Florida. After retiring from that job, I had no interest in returning to city planning. Even though I was only 47 years old.

When this nation went to use-based zoning several decades ago – a form of “planning” which primarily focuses on separating homes from offices, shops, and jobs — it turned over community design to lawyers and traffic engineers.

Planners lost their role as designers, and are now little more than glorified secretaries.

30th Street and Colorado Avenue Redesign: Boulder Colorado is Not Ready

By Dom Nozzi

February 8, 2018

Boulder established a Community Working Group in 2017 which was tasked with helping to redesign 30^th Street and Colorado Avenue.

The redesign effort was motivated a high level of crashes, low levels of bicycling, walking, and transit, poor aesthetics, and issues with residential and retail development along these roads.

Given this, my view was that the redesign of the roads should result in significant improvement in the health of small retail shops and homes. It should significantly improve safety for all users. It should beautify the corridor. It should be designed to ensure that land uses along the corridor produce sufficient taxes so that the street is financially self-sufficient (in its current state, it is a financial drain). It should, in other words, be a street and not a stroad.

The first and most powerful step in restoring a reasonable level of societal civility, safety, and urban financial health in American society is to put our “stroads” on a road diet (that is, to remove unnecessary travel lanes from over-sized roads). This is necessary in several instances for every city in America.

What is a “Stroad”?

A “stroad” is a delightful term coined by Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, and refers to those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They’re what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) is ruinously also designed to serve as a road (a high-speed route between productive places). They are enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive. They’re also very dangerous. And they are the futon of transportation” because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.

Greenville South Carolina illustrates the merits of this transformation quite clearly. Motorists are obligated to drive 15-25 mph smoothly on appropriately road dieted main street – a former stroad. This is contrasted with the 45-55 mph speeds motorists are allowed and enabled to drive on Greenville’s many stroads. Of course, on a stroad a motorist is not driving at those higher speeds smoothly. Instead, the stroad inevitably forces motorists to engage in “jackrabbit stop and go” travel, where motorists engage in short bursts of excessive speeds followed by frequently repeated stops and slowdowns.

Despite the fact that nearly everyone expects a slow-speed road to be frustrating and unpleasant to drive on (“WE ARE VERY BUSY AND NEED TO BE ABLE TO DRIVE FASTER!”), driving on main street in Greenville versus driving on the Greenville stroads leads to far better and more enjoyable motorist experiences.

On slow-speed main street, nearly all drivers are more courteous, more calm, more relaxed, more happy and smiling, more polite, more well-mannered, more patient, and filled with civic pride.

The drive, even though slow in speed, FEELS like it goes by relatively quickly. This is because the drive is more aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable. Some drivers don’t want the driving experience to end.

On higher speed stroads, by striking contrast, drivers are more hostile, angry, stressed, impatient, hot-tempered, and enraged at any fellow citizen who dares to get in the way by driving or turning too slowly, and ashamed to live in a city with such an oversized, strip-commercial roadway blight (this is exemplified by the fact that no one in Greenville takes their out-of-town guests to show off the higher speed stroad, whereas many show off main street to their guests).

The drive, even though higher in speed, feels like it takes a relatively long time. This is because the drive is ugly, frustrating, and stressful. Drivers can’t wait to get off the stroad.

The unpleasant, stressful, angering, impatient, hostile, uncivil, short-tempered emotions induced by stroads spills over into the stroad-driving motorist’s life beyond the unpleasant stroad experience and into the realm of family life, work life, social life, and interactions with fellow neighbors and other citizens.

In sum, converting stroads to streets is an effective way to substantially promote civility (and happiness!) in American society.

We start doing that by removing excessive numbers of lanes on stroads. In other words, treating the failing stroad with a life-giving road diet.

Getting Back to Boulder and Their Road Redesign

Most all the options for redesigning the two failing stroads in Boulder were window dressing options that did nothing to advance the important objectives I listed above.

The redesign effort emphasized mobility vs accessibility. These terms are vastly different and actually are in conflict with each other, but are often inappropriately equated to be the same thing — which leads to unsafe, vehicle-based design. In other words, promoting mobility worsens accessibility.

Mobility in transportation is promoted when motor vehicles find it fast and easy to drive to and park at a destination. Accessibility, by contrast, is promoted when all forms of travel – not just motor vehicles, but bicyclists, walkers, and transit users – find it safe and easy to reach a destination.

With regard to this redesign project, it became clear to me that the focus was heavily tilted toward mobility. Most of the design options, for example, would maintain the current configuration of a four-lane road.

Over the course of a great many meetings, the staff and consultant worked with the working group to come up with criteria to evaluate the ability of various design options to achieve various community objectives. Unfortunately, these evaluation criteria were flawed and were missing important measures.

For example, there was no evaluation of which design options will result in the highest average motorist speeds.

There was no evaluation of which design options will result in better accessibility rather than an over-emphasis on mobility.

There was no evaluation of which design options will result in the largest number of crashes.

There are four evaluation criteria which addressed safety, and I found it highly misleading that the evaluation scoring showed all six design options making safety “better.” This was highly misleading because it strongly implied that all six design options will be equally beneficial in improving safety. In my opinion, this was absolutely absurd, as the four options maintaining the four-lane roadway design would be far less safe.

There was no evaluation of which design options were most conducive to more compact, accessible, walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly retail and residential land use patterns.

There was no evaluation of which design options were most likely to promote an increase in walking or bicycling or transit travel.

There was no evaluation of which design options were most likely to advance Boulder air emissions and climate change goals.

There was no evaluation of which design options were most likely to advance the Boulder Vision Zero goal (i.e., no traffic deaths or serious injuries).

The four design options which proposed maintaining four-lane road design were exceptionally unsafe for at least three reasons: (1) They induce far higher average car speeds (on a four-lane road, the speeding driver sets the pace, rather than the prudent driver); (2) They induced frequent lane changing by cars, which is extremely dangerous at higher speeds; and (3) They induced more inattentive driving (due to the large width and relatively low level of “friction”). On the issue of speed, studies have found that the probability of death in a car crash at 20 mph is about 5 percent. At 30 mph, the probability is about 45 percent. At 40 mph, it is 85 percent.

It is now acknowledged by a large and growing number of American traffic engineers (including the US DOT) that a three-lane road (which is the configuration for two design options on 30th) carries about the same volume as a four-lane road. That, in addition to the rather large number of (and significant) benefits for converting from four-lane to three-lane roads, helped explain why City of Boulder staff supported the three-lane road design option a few years earlier for one of the roads being redesigned. The reason three lanes carry about the same as four lanes is that when there are many left turns not supported by a left-turn lane, the four-lane road behaves like a three-lane road because the inside lane of the four-lane road is regularly being used as a turn lane.

Some on the working group objected to the evaluation criterion of “reliable” travel times. The thinking of those who objected was that this did not capture the overwhelming objective held by most Boulder residents: That travel time not be increased by a design option.

I pointed out that we must first define what we mean by “increased travel time.” Is one additional second of travel time considered unacceptable (in exchange for far fewer car crashes)? Is five seconds unacceptable? How about three minutes? Without defining what we mean by an unacceptable increase in travel time, I don’t believe it is a good idea to change this criterion from “reliable” to an “increase in travel time,” as some working group members suggested.

Personally, I don’t believe it is possible for Boulder to come up with a community-wide, agreed upon definition for what is the unacceptable threshold for increased travel time. In part because there are so many trade-offs (safety, promoting bicycling, retail health, etc.).

In sum, of the six proposed design options, only the two road diet options (converting four-lane roads to three-lane) had any chance of achieving land use, transportation, climate change, or safety goals adopted by Boulder.

Besides the “No Build” option, the other three options which proposed four-lane roads were essentially also “No Build” options with window dressing such as added landscaping or wider bike lanes. In part, these three were “No Build” options because they do almost nothing to advance Boulder objectives.

In addition, as Charles Marohn has pointed out in his work for strongtowns.org, the four-lane road options impose a severe and unrelenting financial burden on Boulder because they induce high car crash and maintenance costs, as well as inducing land uses which do not produce taxes that are high enough to support the costs they impose.

It should be noted that in the scoring of the six design options by staff and the consultant, one of the road diet (four lanes to three) options scored far better than any of the other options. Curiously, at the January 22nd working group meeting, nearly all working group members indicated a preference for one of the three “No Build with Window Dressing” options (four-lane road).

Tellingly, even though these three “No Build with Window Dressing” options were by far the most popular among working group members in attendance, there seemed to be great reluctance for anyone to speak up and explain the benefits.

My speculation as to why the three “No Build with Window Dressing” options were preferred by most, then, is either that working group members were looking out for their own personal interests (despite being told up front that community interests should take precedence over personal interests), or that working group members were considering the reaction to the Folsom Street road diet project (which resulted in ferocious, years-long rage by many citizens) and decided that the political winds would not make road diet options viable in these projects.

As I have pointed out previously, in 2018 I did not believe Boulder was politically ready to adopt a design option for these roadways that will meaningfully achieve a great many important community objectives. I therefore believed that Boulder should suspend this project until such time as the residents of Boulder are politically willing to support a design that is effective in achieving community objectives.

Proceeding under existing political conditions wastes time, effort, and money.