Tag: bicyclists

we are still doing it wrong

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Below is a graphic from the City of Sacramento 2040 General Plan (Chapter 8 Mobility Element, page 8-9). As a transportation advocate, I obviously have a bias, but I think this is the most important graphic, and the most important message in the entire general plan.

graphic of User Prioritization from City of Sacramento 2040 General Plan
User Prioritization from City of Sacramento 2040 General Plan

This is in complete contrast to the transportation system we have built. Below is the transportation system we have. One could argue endlessly about how this varies with parts of the city, and whether active transportation should be lumped together, but the graphic communicates the problem.

graphic of What We Have

I follow the city’s transportation projects, some in great detail, others only superficially. There are far too many for one person to cover, or even a group of people.

What I see in these projects is a very gradual shift from what we have to what we want. We might reduce general purpose (car) lanes, in number or width, but not always. We might add bicycle facilities. We might, occasionally, improve sidewalks for people walking and rolling (but not if we can get away with making property owners do it). We might make it easier for transit. Though the central city, and some neighborhoods outside the central city, have a reasonable tree canopy, north and south Sacramento are largely lacking a tree canopy, and every transportation project neglects solving this issue. We don’t plan in trees from the beginning, saying we’ll get to them later in the process, but at the end, they are usually missing.

We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in making things better for drivers and motor vehicles, and very, very little on anything else. It is time to almost completely reverse that, so spend nothing on drivers and motor vehicles, and almost everything on transit, active transportation, and trees.

Another way of exhibiting this is street cross-sections. These are from StreetMix (https://streetmix.net/), for an 80 foot right-of-way. Certainly not every street would be the same, context and surrounding land use are important, but it does show the necessary shift from a car-dominated place to a people-dominated place. The city is not proposing ‘what we want’ anywhere.

graphic of a street cross-section with narrow sidewalks, narrow sidewalk buffers, ample parking, ample lanes for motor vehicles
graphic of street cross-section with bus lane, two-way bikeway, and wide sidewalks and sidewalk buffers

Of note in ‘what we want’ is a one-lane, one-way street. They are far, far safer than multi-lane streets, and by reducing the amount of space devoted to motor vehicle through traffic, space is freed up for people, people walking, people bicycling, people eating and socializing, and people just hanging out. It is quiet. It is friendly. It not only feels safe, but feels welcoming. This reflects my axiom that we should design streets from the outside in, not from the inside out (street design from the outside in). Outside in preferences walkers and trees, inside out preference drivers and motor vehicles.

Reform NHTSA? Hmm…

Dan Allison1 Comment

Congratulations to Californian Steven Cliff on his appointment as interim administrator the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). See StreetsblogCal post Steven Cliff, from California Air Resources Board, Appointed Acting Head of National Highway and Traffic Safety for more information.

The agency has many areas of responsibility including vehicle safety and education. The agency mission is: “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is responsible for keeping people safe on America’s roadways.” The agency has for years (long predating Trump) seen its mission as making it safe for people inside vehicles, and has ignored any issues of safety for people outside vehicles. People have repeatedly asked that the agency address vehicle design that would make it safer for people outside, making it less likely that they would be hit by a driver, and more likely to survive if they were hit. Its education programs are rife with victim blaming and bias against walkers and bicyclists. Nearly everyone who is active in the walker and bicyclist safety profession rejects out of hand their educational materials as being so biased as to be unusable. Even though they have officially stopped using the discredited claim that driver behavior is responsible for 94% of crashes, they are still relaying and cheering on this garbage when other agencies and organizations use it.

NHTSA has promoted the ‘shared responsibility’ mythology, that all users of the road are equally responsible for safety, frequently seen along with the message that walkers and bicyclist must wear high visibility clothing, must carry lights, must never use cell phones, must be aware at all times of the hazard presented by motor vehicles and are responsible for avoiding those hazards. This is bullshit. Drivers of vehicles which are designed to be unsafe for people outside them, who think they own the road and that pedestrians and bicyclists should be somewhere else, should be responsible. These drivers are traveling along roadways that were designed to be unsafe for walkers and bicyclists by transportation agency engineers, who also should be responsible.

NHTSA does not have responsibility for roadway design, that lies with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). However, NHTSA has made no effort to work with FHWA to bring together concerns about the safety of vehicle design with the safety of roadway design. The agency view seems to be ‘not our problem’.

I encourage you to read Don Kostelec, who has been one of strongest voices highlighting the victim-blaming of agencies like NHTSA and the mis-design of roadways by engineers. He does a better job of this than I ever could.

20% of roadway fatalities in 2019 were what NHTSA calls ‘nonoccupant fatalities’, meaning people walking and bicycling. Or eating in cafes, or sleeping in their beds, or shopping in stores, or any number of other ways in which drivers kill people when departing the roadway. During the pandemic there has been a huge increase in poor (criminal) driver behavior, and after the pandemic there will be a large increase in vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In some places, vehicles miles traveled (VMT) has already increased nearly back to where it was before the pandemic, even though many people are taking few or no trips. Those who are taking trips have increased their motor vehicle use. This does not bode well. NHTSA does not directly contribute to this problem, but it has had a central role in absolving drivers of responsibility for crashes that kill and maim walkers and bicyclists, and for that, I hold them responsible.

7,338 walkers and bicyclist died on the roadways in 2019. The numbers will probably be similar in 2020, though some cities have seen huge increases. Ironically, the percentage of total fatalities may decrease since there has been such a huge increase, of about 1.5 times, in single vehicle crashes, mostly due to speeding. (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813054)

I don’t think that NHTSA can be reformed. The culture of windshield perspective and victim blaming is so deeply ingrained in the agency that, short of casting off all the administrators, department heads, and much of the employee base, no reform is possible. While other agencies and organizations at all government levels have shifted away from victim blaming and windshield bias, many kicking and screaming, NHTSA has not shifted. It is still stuck in the 1970s mindset that plagues transportation agencies, that the purpose of roadways is to move the maximum number of motor vehicles at the maximum possible speed.

So, Steven, I wish you the best of luck and professional success in this position, but I’m not holding my breath. The anti-safety culture is just too deeply embedded in NHTSA. Of that 7,338 people who died in 2019, I would guess that half of them would be alive today if NHTSA actually took its stated mission of roadway safety seriously.

confronting the stop sign myth

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

this bicyclist rode through a stop sign, past a right-turning car, rude and dangerous
this bicyclist rode past a right-turning car on the right side, without letting the car driver go first

I often see or hear the statement “bicyclists run stop signs all the time.” The person making the statement is not just making an observation, but trying to justify some attitude or action on their part, such as “bicyclists shouldn’t be on the road,” “bicyclists should be on the sidewalk,” “bicyclists should be thrown in jail,” “it is OK to intimidate or run over bicyclists,” or “we should not be spending any of our transportation money on bicycle facilities.”

I think that it is time for all of us to confront that statement and end its use. Yes, it is true that some to many bicyclists run stop signs. It is also true some to many motor vehicle drivers run stop signs. To refer back to my earlier posts on stop signs, stop signs are installed largely to reduce vehicle speeds and to get drivers to take turns at intersections. Bicyclists are rarely exceeding the speed limit, so that function is not served by the stop sign, nor by a bicyclist stopping. In the case of taking turns, the issue is taking turns, not the act of stopping. If a bicyclist does not stop at a stop sign, but no other vehicles are present which should go first, then the function of the stop sign to get people to take turns is intact, it has not been violated.

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What is a roundabout?

Dan Allison1 Comment

I have noticed a lot of confusion in Sacramento amongst both transportation professionals and citizens interested in traffic calming about roundabouts. If you live, work or play in downtown and midtown Sacramento, you’ve seen a lot of structures in the intersections which people call roundabouts, but which are not, they are traffic circles. So what is a roundabout?

intersection conflict points
intersection conflict points

A modern roundabout is a structure that allows a free flow of traffic without stop signs. Instead, they use yield signs and markings. They are most appropriately used at street intersections where both streets are fairly busy. The biggest advantage of a roundabout, for all users, is the reduction of conflict points in the intersection from thirty-two to four, as illustrated in the diagram at right!

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Pedestrian and Bicyclist Fatalities Up? More data flaws!

Dan Allison8 Comments

California Walks tweeted an LA Times articles entitled Highway deaths at lowest level since 1949; bike, truck fatalities rise. The misinformation and misunderstanding in the article includes:

The article misses that the Traffic Safety Fact: 2011 Motor Vehicle Crashes: Overview (TSF), linked from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) press release, also shows that the injury rate per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) has been flat for three years. What does this mean? It probably means that the number of crashes has not declined, just the likelihood of fatality in a crash. The rate per VMT is the only useful measure of traffic safety. Fatality counts and injury counts are a mis-measure because they are affected by the rate of driving and a number of other factors, rather than the safety of driving.

The TSF provides counts of pedestrian fatalities, up 3%, and bicyclists (the NHTSA uses the obscure term pedalcyclists), up 8.7%. To go with the counting game, this is an increase of 130 dead pedestrians and 54 dead bicyclists in just one year. No statistics are presented on the fatality rate per bicycle mile traveled. Why? I believe that it is because NHTSA is too lazy or too disinterested to compile information on bicycle miles traveled. Though pedestrian miles traveled would be difficult to compile, at least a rate could be developed per pedestrian trip, which would be a more accurate measure of the rate of fatalities. Again, the NHTSA can’t be bothered. I am certainly not the first to point out that pedestrian and bicyclist fatality counts are a mis-measure of safety, yet the federal, state, and local governments continue to ignore the issue.

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