The Walkable City book club will meet again this Wednesday at Lefty’s Taproom, 5610 Elvas Ave, in east Sacramento, 6:00PM to about 7:30PM. If you can’t arrive at the beginning, or need to leave sooner, that is fine, your presence is welcome for whatever you can make. Though some of the people in the book club group are ‘walkable city’ advocates, there are also people who are simply interested in making Sacramento more walkable, and more safe. Everyone is an expert when it comes to identifying what aspects of our transportation system don’t work for them personally, and the others are happy to fill you in on what we call the problems and possible solutions to those problems. We also celebrate the walkable nature of some places in Sacramento. Though many of us live in the City of Sacramento, we also discuss areas throughout the region. So please join us!

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save American, One Step at a Time, 10th Anniversary Edition, Jeff Speck. Sacramento County Library has one copy of the 10th edition, waitlisted, and one copy of the 2012 edition, available. It is of course also available from your local bookstore, though it may need to be ordered, and Amazon has Kindle, paper and hardback versions.

The Walkable City book club: Step 5: Protect the Pedestrian section has eight parts:

Size Matters: This is about block size. Sacramento central city grid is about 400 feet by 420 feet, though it varies somewhat. The streetcar suburbs to some degree follow this pattern, but are more likely to be interrupted. Beyond the streetcar suburbs there is only the half mile grid of arterials, and even it is interrupted. Railroads and rivers account for some interruption, most is the whim of developers. Sacramento is in the middle ground of block sizes for urban areas in the US. All new developments, if there are any, should re-establish a grid pattern, though if the grid is at one-eighth mile or better, some variation probably does not hurt. Speck also addresses the problem that bigger block sizes require multiple lanes per direction, which are always, always less safe than single lanes. One solution is four-to-three lane reallocations, one lane each direction, with a center turn lane. However, overuse of this pattern may be almost as damaging as the four lane or more roads.

A Turn to Far: Speck talks about how the provision of left hand turn lanes has removed parking where it was needed and used, in favor of long turn lanes that are often not needed. Beyond the grid, Sacramento is full of these. North and south Sacramento are especially afflicted with this, parking (and bike lanes) being dropped at intersections in favor of turn lanes. Dedicated turn lanes, whether right or left, should be the exception, not the rule, everywhere in urbanized areas.

Fat Lanes: This is about overly wide lanes. The city has finally reduced required lane widths from twelve feet or more to eleven feet, but is still unwilling to use ten foot lanes. Ten foot lanes are the standard throughout most of the world, except on freeways and expressways. The city should implement 10 foot lanes as the standard, with wider lanes possible in specific situations that may require them. Though buses can do OK with ten feet, transit drivers often appreciate a bit more. It should be noted that the city is still requiring streets much wider than are necessary, and of course the lanes are therefore wide enough to encourage speeding.

Keep It Complicated: Speck talks about the importance of street parking for slowing traffic, and where it is removed, speeds alway increase. He covers the topic of risk homeostasis, or risk compensation, the psychological imperative that as we make things safer, people will engage in more unsafe behavior, in order to keep the perceived risk at the same level. The answer, is of course, to make streets feel less safe for drivers so that they drive more slowly. Many of the streets in Sacramento with parallel parking leave a very wide area in the middle, which encourages speeding. The solution is to change one or both sides to diagonal parking, to narrow the roadway. Of course this should not be done on every street, or higher speed streets, but most streets in Sacramento could benefit from this treatment.

The Safety Apotheosis: Speck talks about how the removal of guidance for drivers, as provided by all the signs and stripes and signals, makes streets more safe because it causes drivers to pay more attention. For some streets, the removal of curbs also has a slowing effect (these are called woonerfs). Sacramento has far too many traffic signals, probably a quarter are completely unneeded, and perhaps half of the rest could be removed in favor of four-way stops. But the city loves to purchase and install very expensive traffic signals. This needs to stop. I would like to see a gradual program where every traffic signal must be justified, and removed if not justified. It would save a whole lot of money, and probably a whole lot of lives. See too many traffic signals?.

The One-Way Epidemic: In the 1960s, the same time as building were being torn down for ‘urban renewal’ in favor of huge developments and parking lots, many streets were turned from two-way to one-way. The intent was to ease and speed traffic flow, though there is little proof that they do so, since they also engender a lot of extra driving while trying to figure out how to get someplace. Ask any bicyclist whether one-ways patterns ease travel, the answer is no, and that is part of the reason you see bicyclists riding on sidewalks, because they would have to go blocks out of their way to reach their destination, if they did not use sidewalks. In the ongoing Central City Mobility Project, one street, 5th Street is scheduled for conversion from one-way to two-way. But every street in the grid should be studied for conversion, and most of them converted. The city makes conversion hard, by insisting on new traffic signals (not reusing existing equipment), even putting them in where they didn’t exist before. Use stop signs, much cheaper.

Sacred Sidewalks: Speck proposes that the width of a sidewalk is much less important than it being protected from traffic violence by parked cars and trees. People don’t want to walk next to speeding cars, and they should not have to. So retain or even increase curb parking (though with appropriate management so that there are free spaces, short term parking (green curbs), commercial loading and unloading (yellow), and passenger loading and unloading (white curbs).

Senseless Signals: Pedestrian buttons are biased. Long signal cycles are biased. Both should be prohibited. It took me several months of effort during the pandemic to get the city to set five (five!) pedestrian crossing signals to auto-recall, meaning the button doesn’t have to be pressed. But the city refused to change the ped button signage so that people would know. And they stopped at five, and refused to do any more. There is someone in Public Works who is defending ped buttons with their life. Fine, let them die. Again, many signals are not even needed. Speck’s primary solution is leading pedestrian intervals (LPIs), where the walk signal comes on at least three seconds before the green light, giving walkers a head start. Some people have criticized ped countdown signals, as they help drivers more than walkers. I’m still up in the air about this.

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I hope that you don’t read my summaries in lieu of reading the book. Speck is a much better and more entertaining writer than I, and provides a lot of examples.

In the 10th Anniversary Update section, Speck talks again about protecting walkers ‘Oversignalized’ (page 309) and ‘The Streets We Need’ (page 310), Don’t Let the Terrorists Design Your City’ (page 351), and many other locations.

One issue that Speck does not address in this section is enforcement. In general, I am against traffic enforcement by armed police, as the outcome is often much worse than the violation, and it serves to oppress people of color and low income. However, the almost complete lack of enforcement of two motor vehicles violations is a real problem:

Red Light Running: CVC 21453 The city has, in the entire city, eleven red light running cameras. I don’t have the time to look up the number of citations issued by police, but I can say that I have never in my thousands of hour observing traffic seen a citation. I also do not know how many automated citations are issued. More research for a future post. How may red light running cameras are needed? Enough to change driver behavior. See pandemic of red light running and red-light-running bullies and other posts.

Failure to Yield (to walkers): CVC 21950 This is another one that I have never seen enforced, and I know that from city crime reports it is rarely enforced. It is also more difficult to automate, as two cameras are required, one on the walker and another on the motor vehicles. But it can be done!

I believe these two issues explain most of the reluctance to walk on the part of city residents. If we enforced these, through automated means preferably, and through police if necessary, many more people would walk, and we’d cut walker deaths by about half. Is the city interested? It isn’t clear, but actions speak loud, and the lack of enforcement speaks very loudly.

I have written about every one of these issues at one time or another, but have linked only a few blog posts because I’d rather you read all of this one that go off into other posts. But of course I very much appreciate people reading all the posts, both old and new.