Category: Active Transportation

Continuing construction woes

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Construction projects all over the city of Sacramento continue to bias motor vehicle travel over walkers and bicyclists. This has been going on for a long time, and it has not gotten any better. A few construction projects handle it appropriately, most do not.

One issue that I ran into yesterday is particularly galling because of the long detour it takes to bypass the construction site at the corner of J Street and 4th Street, at the California Fruit Building (not sure if it will have the same name after reconstruction). From the southeast corner of J Street & 3rd Street to the southeast corner of J Street & 4th Street is 380 feet, along a sidewalk which has been closed by construction. The detour is 785 feet, but the important issue is not the distance but the time. The detour requires pressing five beg buttons and using five crosswalks, a walk of 7.25 minutes, most of that time waiting for the pedestrian signal to change. A direct route would be just over a minute.

J Street south side, eastbound past 3rd

This map (Google) shows the detour.

What are the alternatives? One is that a travel lane could be removed from J Street. Both a pedestrian walkway and a bicycle lane could be temporarily installed in this section past the construction. Another is to install a crosswalk on the east leg of the J Street & 3rd Street intersection. Pedestrian crossing is currently prohibited (by signing and guard rail) at this location, but the prohibition is solely for the flow of motor vehicle traffic and the convenience of drivers, it has nothing to do with pedestrian safety. The crosswalk need not be temporary, it could be a permanent installation. Of course this crosswalk would require two crossings, but two is better than five.

Short of these two real fixes, the signing could be better. In the photo below, there is an unobvious sign indicating a detour to the west, but it doesn’t say which sidewalk. I did not understand what it meant until I had walked down to the construction fence. On the sidewalk that is closed, there is no indication until reaching the construction fence that the sidewalk is closed. There should be some indication of how long, or how many crossings, for the detour. A person might decide to turn around and head south to L Street, or to the access points to K Street, if they had more information. This photo also shows the pedestrian prohibition established for traffic flow rather than pedestrians safety.

In the westbound direction, there is even less information. The sign says sidewalk closed, and there is a vandalised construction arrow, which might or might not indicate the detour route.

J Street south side, westbound at 4th

I don’t blame most of this type of issue on the construction companies. The construction company has to get a permit from the city, which includes a traffic plan. The city is accepting, and in some cases encouraging, traffic plans with no, or insufficient, accommodation for pedestrians and bicyclists, and insufficient signing. Of course the construction company wishes to minimize the work and the signing, but it should be the city’s responsibility to ensure good traffic plans. It rarely does. I will remind readers again that the city employee who supervises this permitting process said that pedestrians and bicyclists would be accommodated if it did not interfere with traffic flow.

Since I have time on my hands, I’ve been walking a lot more in downtown/midtown, with social distancing of course, so I hope to add additional posts on this topic.

Don’t touch that button!

Dan Allison2 Comments

Here in the city of Sacramento, most signalized intersections have beg buttons, the button you press to get the pedestrian crossing. Some of these are on auto-recall, which is what it is called when the pedestrian crossing (the white walker symbol) comes on every cycle. Most of them are not; the pedestrian crossing will never change unless you press the button. A few of them won’t ever change because the beg button is broken. You would think that the city would label the buttons with their function: is it required, is it not required, does it only affect the disability audible signal? Who knows. The city can’t be bothered to tell people walking how it works.

This is a huge frustration for walkers ALL the time, but now it is more, it is a public health hazard. Is there corona virus on that button? Probably yes. Is the city cleaning the buttons? Certainly no. So the city is allowing and encouraging a public health hazard by requiring walkers to use the buttons in order to cross the street. This must stop now! The city must set all pedestrian crossings to auto-recall, at least until the end of the pandemic, and hopefully forever.

I have been going on two long walks a day, or sometimes a bike ride, since self-isolating (no, I’m not sick). The only thing I have to touch in the outside world, other than my door knob when exiting and my door knob when returning, is beg buttons. Of course I don’t touch them. I cross when it is safe; I don’t waste my time waiting to see if this is one of those required, or simply decorative buttons. Because I won’t touch the button, I have to assume that every signalized intersection is broken, not accessible to pedestrians, and I therefore have a right to cross during gaps in traffic, no matter what the pedestrian signal says.

Fix this, city. Now.

Corona virus? Your guess.

bike/scooter share enforcement

Dan Allison1 Comment

From the City of Sacramento City Express blog: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2019/11/18/traffic-and-parking-enforcement-begins-for-shared-e-scooters-e-bikes-on-nov-19/.

The city will be enforcing both parking and traffic for the electric assist bike share JUMP, and the JUMP and Lime electric scooters. Many people are still riding the scooters on sidewalks, so I would expect citations for that. Under state law, not Sacramento law, scooters must be ridden on the street. The amount of parking that endangers or impedes walkers has fallen off over time, so there should be much less of that, but it will be interesting to see how exactly that will be enforced. The city still does not have sufficient bike parking, particularly in neighborhoods but even in commercial and mixed areas, and though it has installed a few bicycle and scooter corrals, they are far from enough.

Safe Routes to School Community Meeting Nov 12 (Sutterville)

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From Councilmember Steve Hansen’s newsletter: 

Please join Councilmember Hansen, SCUSD Trustee Lisa Murawski, Sacramento Police Department, and City employees for a community discussion where the main topics include traffic safety and traffic enforcement. Our office will provide pizza and water (while supplies last). Please RSVP through the Eventbrite link pasted below. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Please click here to RSVP for the Community Meeting. 

If you have any questions, please contact our office and ask for Morris Thomas (916) 808-7004.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/safe-routes-to-school-community-meeting-tickets-79253157327

Motherload: Cargo Bike Documentary is coming to Sacramento!

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Mark your calendars for October 26th. The award-winning, inspirational, crowd-sourced cargo bike documentary is screening in Sacramento at the Hacker Lab (2533 R st. Ste 120, Sacramento, CA 95816)!

We’ll have bike valet parking thanks SABA and a discussion panel after. Bring your cargo bikes to show off! Sacramento Kidical Mass is hosting a bike ride to the event from the Coloma Community Center (meet at the playground around the back of the building at 1pm, rollout happens at 1:30pm). A huge thank you goes out to the Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen for funding this event!

Please share this event with your bicycle community, as well as anyone who needs a little inspiration to get into biking for transportation or wants to learn more about cargo bikes and family biking. Reach out with any questions: (916)320-7825, tinyhelmets@gmail.com.
Hope to see you there!

from Elle Steele

JUMP update

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Here is the story, as best I understand it. The JUMP app and the Uber app use the same login database. If you have or have ever had an Uber login, it is linked to a specific telephone number, and it assumes that you want those login credentials. There is no way to bypass this by using an email, it is phone number only. So, I had a JUMP account with a phone number and an email, and had at one time an Uber account with the same phone number and a different email. The JUMP app logged me into the Uber account, with which I of course had no credit and no membership.

Tech support walked me through over several days, with many back-and-forths, how to get back my credit and membership. It involved merging the two accounts. The user cannot accomplish all the steps, it requires tech support action at one or more points in the process.

So, if you have the same issue as I did, you will need to contact tech support to get it straightened out. Hopefully you will get one of the competent tech support people, which I did. I have been using the JUMP app for about a week now, and it correctly handles my membership and credits. Though I can’t see how much credit I have in the app, I can go to http://app.jumpbikes.com to see it.

When I look at the online portal, I notice that I am now a member of every single bike and scooter program that JUMP offers, both those I had joined before (San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles) and all the others.

On a related topic, the new JUMP app has some issues. It is very slow to zoom in and zoom out, and sometimes but less often slow to scroll. On the other hand, it seems to work better than the Uber app, even though they are both the same underlying technology. Last evening I was talking to a group of people frustrated by their inability to rent available bikes through the Uber app. They had been trying for quite a while, on a number of bikes. I suggested the try the JUMP app. They had it downloaded and were riding within a minute. I’ve come across a number of other people cussing at the Uber app. I think having cars in the mix messes things up, as the app is alway trying to move you to a car rather than bike or scooter. After trying the Uber app for a while, I deleted it.

When you are zoomed way out in the JUMP app, the Sacramento area is replaced by an icon, the ziggurat. For San Francisco, it is the Golden Gate Bridge, for Santa Cruz the lighthouse, for Los Angeles (Santa Monica) the ferris wheel from Santa Monica Pier, for San Diego a paraglider. The Tower Bridge would be a better icon for Sacramento, but that might lead to confusion with the Golden Gate Bridge.

Walkable Sacramento wrap-up

Dan Allison3 Comments

I hope that you found the series of posts on Walkable Sacramento useful. The posts received some comments, but not as many as I’d hoped. I’d ask you to go back to them and make comments. Though comments are few, I know that this blog is read by a number of transportation professionals and a few politicians, who could have a major impact in making Sacramento more walkable. Many of them don’t or can’t comment because of their job position, but they do read the posts and do read your comments, so your comments are valuable. The ideas and comments will also be considered as advocacy groups in the city and region develop their own, most likely milder, recommendations for policies and action to enhance walkability and safety for walkers.

I did not address bicyclist concerns and bikeability. That is not because it is not important to me. I bicycle a lot in the city, and do want to improve our streets for bicycling. Though the data is not in yet, I suspect that bike share has increased the rate of bicycling far above that for walking and other modes in the central city. However, the city has done better on providing bicycling facilities, and addressing specific areas of concern, for bicycling, relative to walking. I am also not unconcerned with the safety of people in motor vehicles, but there are plenty of people to advocate for that. As always, the greatest need for improvement in our transportation system is in the low-income neighborhoods which have been traditionally underinvested, and continue to be so.

So, get out there walking, and get out there advocating. Our streets will not get safer unless we all work to force the government to make them safer. The drivers will not help us, except for those more enlightened ones who remember that they walk also, and that the value of a place is determined by its walkability and not its driveability.

one-lane one-way SLO

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

As you may have read here before, I am opposed to one-way streets, and feel that all or nearly all should be converted back into two-way streets. One way streets exist to speed the flow of car traffic. They do not exist to promote walkability or safety, and in fact are a significant detriment. Multiple-lane one-way streets encourage the multi-lane threat, where a driver in one lane stops, the pedestrian proceeds, and is hit by a driver in the other lane(s) who does not stop. I think one-way streets in Sacramento should be converted. Ironically, so does the city, but it has been reluctant to do so for fear of blowback from the cars-first commuters that use the one-way streets as traffic sewers to and from the freeways.

When there is discussion of one-way streets on the Internet, someone always puts up an example of a one-lane one-way street, either accidentally or purposively not understanding that it is multiple-lane one-way streets that are being talked about. But there are examples of one-way streets that work, if they are one-lane.

I was in San Luis Obispo (SLO) this last weekend for contra dancing, and had a chance to look again at many of the traffic calming features of that town. SLO has several one-lane one-way streets. Below is Pismo Street, which has a general purpose lane, a bike lane, and parking lanes on each side. The width is probably 28 feet, though I did not have a tape measure with me. I watched this street, a residential street, off and on over a period of three days. I did not ever seen anyone speeding on this street. When crossing the street walking, I had to only look in one direction, not two, and not multiple lanes. Judging from the pavement paint, and my memory of the last 10 years or so, I think this configuration has been in place for some while.

Pismo St, San Luis Obispo; one-lane one-way

This street configuration does not exist in the Sacramento region, so far as I know. The street width of 28 feet is also somewhat unusual. Most streets range upward from 32 feet.

SLO has also recently implemented a traffic calming one-lane one-way on Garden Street. This is a much fancier installation, involving decorative pavement, curb extensions, wider sidewalks, and other features. The drainage channel with different pavement does clearly separate travel from parking, and the handicapped spot is extra wide for loading and unloading from either side. I did not observe this street over a long period of time, but I did not see any speeding. Though the street does not have a posted speed limit, other than the general 25 mph, most vehicles were going well below that. I also saw people comfortably crossing the street mid-block, and drivers yielding to them. This is clearly a street that says ‘slow down’ and ‘stop to enjoy the restaurants and other businesses’, as it should, given the location in the walkable, destination-rich downtown area.

Garden St, San Luis Obispo; one-lane one-way

San Luis Obispo is not a walking paradise. There are multiple-lane one-way streets in the same area, where speeding does occur (note the one-way Marsh Street in the photo above, where speeding certainly does occur on a two-lane one-way street). Once out of the central city and old neighborhoods, it looks just like any place else in California, with wide residential streets and super-wide arterial roads. But it is a good model for the traffic calming that it has done well.

Dangerous by Design 2019

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Smart Growth America has released its ‘Dangerous by Design 2019‘ report for 2019. Pedestrian (walker) fatalities have increased 35% over the last decade, becoming a bigger percentage of roadway fatalities, now at 16%. Sacramento (the Sacramento-Roseville-Arden-Arcade Metropolitan Statistical Area MSA) ranks 46 of 100 on the list of most dangerous areas for pedestrians, and the danger increased 4.9% from 2016 (year of the first report they did) to 2019. California ranks 16th on the list of states, and had an increase of 3.8%.

The National Complete Streets Coalition is part of Smart Growth America, so it is expected that the report emphasizes complete streets and roadway design. However, by focusing mostly on that, it misses some important issues. The report acknowledges, on page 7, that the design of vehicles, particularly the explosion of pedestrian-killer SUVs, is important, but then fails to list a significant action related to it. If these vehicles are 2-3 times more likely to cause fatalities, as research indicates, then that could explain more of the increase than many other factors.

Another issue that the report does not even mention is driver behavior. Though an increase in the number of poorly designed roadways could explain part of the overall increase in pedestrian fatalities, I doubt that it could account for all of it. Though most of our roadways are dangerous by design, we are building fewer of the most dangerous ones, and have fixed some of the worst of the worst. I will speculate, without research backing but with anecdotal and direct experience, that a precipitous decline in driver behavior is a significant cause. More pedestrians are being killed because more drivers are killing them. Yes, roadway design is responsible, and is the easier problem to solve in the long run (than human behavior), but if behavior, violation of the law, is in fact a significant contributor, we miss the boat by only talking about design.

Though ultimately, the redesign of our roadways is the best solution, in the meanwhile we need to prevent fatalities, and addressing driver behavior is part of that. This is not a minor issue. This morning, while using a clearly marked crosswalk, I was nearly hit by a driver who passed through the crosswalk without even slowing down. If I had not jumped back, I would not be here writing this post right now.

The report uses the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) as data for the number of people walking, and says there has actually been a decline in walking over four years and a slight increase over ten years. However, the NHTS only counts commute trips, and assigns all commute trips to the category of the longest leg. Therefore, a transit and walking commute would be classified as transit only. Data about overall walking rates is lacking, and Smart Growth America can hardly be blamed for that. California performed one broad-based survey in 2013, and the results varied significantly from the NHTS data. I realize that Smart Growth America is a nonprofit with limited resources, but at least a small sample analysis using other sources of data would really help illuminate the cause of the increase in fatalities. We can’t adequately assign fatality rates if we don’t really know the rate of walking. It would seem to me that one of the key actions at the federal, state and local level would be better pedestrian trip data, but that does not show up in the report.

As I have said many, many times, here and other places, the model complete streets policies that Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition promote do not give sufficient weight to the frequency of safe crossings. As a result, most local policies fail to address this issue at all. If we end up with a national policy that continues this weakness, we won’t really be solving the problem. So I can’t, at this time, support the recommendation, on page 7, for a national complete streets policy. NCSC needs to clean up its act before asking others to clean up their act.