How Engineering Suppresses Active Transportation & Skews Safety Data

by Don Kostelec
November 18, 2019

In June 2018, a traffic crash on I-84 in Boise resulted in the death of four people and a fire that damaged the Cloverdale Road overpass to the point it had to rebuilt. The old structure was a two-lane overpass with no sidewalks.

The Idaho Transportation Department and Ada County Highway District (ACHD) quickly put a design contract into action and rebuilt the bridge in a year’s time. The new bridge and the adjoining sections of Cloverdale Road now include 5 motor vehicle lanes, a raised bike lane on a portion of the road, and completed sidewalks on both sides.

Prior to the bridge rebuild, the one-mile section of Cloverdale between Overland and Franklin was mostly a three-lane section with sidewalks leading up to the old overpass. There was a traffic signal at the intersection with Emerson to help facilitate the movement of pedestrians to Spalding Elementary School and Sycamore Park.

The completion of a sidewalk network and construction of raised bike lanes (not fully protected, however; they are on what ACHD calls “mountable” curb or rolled curb) is normally a reason to celebrate in the world of active transportation advocacy.

But this project is having the opposite effect. It shows how it takes much more than the construction of a sidewalk and a bike lane to make a Complete Streets all users feel safe traveling upon and across.

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Don’t want Superstreets in your city? NCDOT will educate you into submission

By Don Kostelec
November 11, 2019

The licensed professional engineers at the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) are frustrated that people are rejecting their lust for plowing high-speed superstreets, continuous flow intersections, and other land-gobbling motorist level of service innovations through their neighborhoods.

An internal research proposal supplied by one of my NCDOT friends on the inside reveals the agency’s Traffic Management Unit wants to research a way to educate cities into submission on these engineering practices that are incompatible with everything that makes cities thrive.

A research proposal drafted by NCDOT in August 2019 is aimed at producing “a set of materials that the NCDOT can use during project planning and design stages to convince town officials, landowners, media, and the general public that an innovative corridor or intersection design can be compatible with, indeed be essential to, a great urban place.”

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A legal victory for Vision Zero. Sorta kinda maybe.

By Don Kostelec
November 8, 2019

While vulnerable road users get the bulk of attention in Vision Zero discussions, it’s important we not forget that motorists are just as exposed to engineering practices that compromise their safety.

My thinking on this has evolved a lot in the last year. When a motorist injures or kills another road user, safety professionals and advocates serious about Vision Zero should recognize that the driver was also put in an unsafe and unfair situation. A Vision Zero approach recognizes the slightest lapse in judgment or error by any road user is compounded by road design practices that are either contributory to the crash or make the crash more severe.

I point to the widespread application of Flashing Yellow Arrow (FYAs) traffic signals as influencing my evolution.

The latest advancement in my thinking came when I recently helped a Boise-area attorney succeed in getting charges reduced for her client who was determined to have caused a crash while maneuvering through the FYA phase of a traffic signal.

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