| | The Three Engineers: “New Street Manual for AASHTO” |
Transcript of Rick Hall, Rick Chellman, and Peter Swift‘s presentation to Council IV, (independently published), Santa Fe, NM
Transcription by Jason Miller
October 18, 2002
[View the pdf]
“…It will have “streets” in it; it will have “context” in it…”– Rick Hall, on a new street manual for AASHTO.
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
Bill Dennis:
You’ve heard of the Three Tenors; this is the Three Engineers, which we’ve been calling Rick, Rick, and Rick—except for one of them is named Peter! Take it away, guys.
Peter Swift:
You’re a great-looking crowd—you from out of town? Wonder if this will play in Peoria?
Rick Hall (I think):
We feel very privileged to be here. It’s an exciting trip that we have been on since Charleston, and we want to start some of the slides.
The message we have to bring is not a new one, but every day we go on, we begin to focus more and more on context leading the transportation.
Rick Chellman:
Actually, one second—if you go back to that, if you can—
Hall:
Yes.
Chellman:
Take note of the fact—I’m going to talk a little bit more about this—it’s not context-sensitive, it’s context-directed. You start talking about sensitivity in engineering fields…
[Laughter]
Need I say more?
Hall:
We had the good fortune of going to Washington, D.C., to sit down for five or six days to do some of our initial writing. There’s Peter and Rick, traipsing through the streets of Washington. And we want to extend a special thank you to a number of folks. The Knight Foundation—Knight [Program for Community Building], is supporting part of our work—thank you, Elizabeth and Chuck. The Seaside Institute is helping considerably; thanks to Phyllis Bleiweis and Lester Abberger. Haile Partners—Bob Kramer and Jeff Fleeman. Dhiru Thadani was an exceptional host in Washington; we were able to use his office to roost for quite a while; that was a great deal of help. And Bill Gietema, also, with Arcadia. So thank you for your support.
We had a good time. This is Dhiru’s office; his folks were kind and they gave us a sign, as a warning.
This is outside Dhiru’s office, on the streets of Washington. There’s Peter, with a cigar in his mouth. Typical scene! But we were immersed in that wonderful urbanism: I did not drive a car for seven days. It was wonderful. Three metro trips. Walking.
Swift:
We were all grateful.
Hall:
And Dhiru showed us some of the beautiful sights there in Washington.
There are other movements that are running parallel to what we’re involved in here. One of them is the Federal Highway Administration, [which is] sponsoring “context-sensitive design,” which is an initiative that five pilot states have undertaken (Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Utah). We see them as kind of “coming across the horizon” in our direction. They’re not very close yet, but they have had national conferences and training. Of course, there’s the CNU ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers) project, which Ellen and staff members in San Francisco are working on diligently, as a part of the transportation task force. And then there’s the CIA—the community impact analysis efforts in many departments of transportation across the nation. At one point, they had a program scheduled down in Tampa, that they called “CIA Pilot Training.”
[Laughter]
It got a lot of attention, but it was not as exciting as it sounded. But they are trying to do their environmental impact statements for major roadway corridors, and be much more sensitive to the context in which they find themselves.
And finally, a little plug for our transportation conference at Seaside, Nov. 6-9, coming up. It’s going to be a very exciting event, where we will bring in new urbanist designers of transportation; we will bring in DOT and Federal Highway representatives, and county engineers, and just have a good jam session on exactly what the differences are, and what the similarities are—where we can agree. I’d couch that as: It will either turn into a love fest or a food fight—I don’t know how exactly that’s going to turn out! Some of those programs—I’ll let you read this—Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky—they’re very, very actively trying to determine—what we’ve discovered, though, is the typical situation, Rick or Peter, is you hear a DOT person say, “Well, we’ve got these directives from the top of the department, and we’re going to get out there and do it.” And then they’ll say (hushed), “We don’t really know what we’re doing. We don’t really understand the context issues. But we sure need some help defining that.”
So they’re getting this top-down direction, and they’re trying very hard. I think it’s coming along very well.
“Context-directed street design.” Rick?
Chellman:
Many of you may have seen this slide before; you certainly recognize it as sprawl.
One of the issues that you’ll see with what we’ve done with the work we’re working on—and hopefully, we’ll have available really soon, not that a lot of it isn’t already done—is that the idea of this taxonomy to identify different parts of the built region into six, seven, or eight different classifications is a good first step, from a transportation perspective.
But in this one slide, I could pick out—depending how long I spent with it—probably 30 different street types that would be appropriate for the various contexts within the overarching context of basically being a suburban sprawl tier.
I would like to think that we could make it as neat as dividing the world up into a continuum of five or six different contexts, but in practice, what I’ve been finding for the last 15 to 25 years, depending on the context of my practice, which has varied over that time period, is more a jumble. You might find what we’re calling a C6 zone, adjacent to a C4, or a C4 adjacent to a C1.
For those of you who are having any difficulty with the translation, our context zones equate very closely with the transect zones. We find that terminology is an important issue in transportation. Terminology has destroyed many good projects by virtue of classifications imposed by AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) and others, in terms of giving you principle—three types of different streets in either rural or urban conditions. You have six words with which to address the language of transportation. If you try to think about having a conversation [about] anything, with six words, it’s not going to be very eloquent for very long.
Hall:
We knew that we had to bring you something brand-new. We knew that we could not sit here, and after six months, repeat exactly what we had said to you in Charleston!
More than other manuals that we see, that are available out there, our manual will adhere to the new urbanism principles that are found in the Charter. We’re going to adhere religiously to that. We consider that to be kind of the “New Testament,” I guess.
We’re taking the best theory from both the east and the west coast leadership in theory, that we have within the CNU. From the east coast, we gather this taxonometric system of—now we’re saying C1 through C6, instead of T1 through T6, because context is a whole lot easier for the generalist out there to pick up, than transect. We have the Lexicon definitions—the elegant definitions of street types: avenue, boulevard, street, lane. From the west coast, we’re picking up on the regional planning emphasis. Even at the MPO (Metropolitan Planning Organization) level, which is where the transportation people interact regionally.
And then there’s the hierarchy of transit system elements—
Unknown audience member:
What’s “MPO”?
Hall:
Metropolitan Planning Organization. It’s a forum for decision-making; it’s “continuing, comprehensive,” and—the third one is?
Swift:
Deadening.
[Laughter]
Hall:
The hierarchy of transit system. Peter Calthorpe, in his book, The Regional City, his latest book, talks about walkability and having feeder buses and main-line systems—all three. If you don’t have walkability, you can’t get to the bus; if you don’t have the bus, you can’t get to the main line. All three of those key elements of a transit system are necessary for success. If you don’t have a megalopolis, if you don’t have the larger city, you may leave off the main-line system, but you need walkability to and from the buses, or you feel like you’ve gotten off on the surface of the moon.
Principles—a select group of the new urbanism principles. Places of shared use, respect for the pedestrian, encouraging walking. They’re all in there, and a good re-reading of those helped us in directing the manual.
Again, how does this manual differ? We feel strongly about that diagram we showed you before, that we called the “DNA of Sprawl,” that contains all the information to create sprawl, because arterials are given this mobility function, and what they really mean is “motor vehicle mobility”; the pedestrians don’t survive well along those roadways.
Many of the other documents we’re seeing emerge are unwilling to take the major leap that we need to get to new urbanism. By that I mean there are manuals that try to cling to the term “arterial”; they try to cling to the term “collector.” And they say, “Well, [the term] is in general use out there; why don’t why go ahead and adapt that to our purposes?”
And it cannot be done effectively. We need to rid ourselves of the word “arterial” in the places where we want mixed use, walkable, good scale places.
Chellman:
If I could just say something also. Even on local streets, I’ve been in many of these discussions with the ITE and others. When you get a bunch of engineers in a room to try to develop a set of street standards, they don’t want to have anything other than a single chart. You’ve got a local street, so what should the dimensions of a local street be? If you think of all the variations of what we might consider to be a local street, as one type, the engineers will always default to the largest of the smallest that they think might be appropriate; it won’t be the smallest of the best that might also be appropriate under certain conditions. We’ll get more into that as we get further on to show you what we’ve done, but again, it’s a matter of vocabulary. You don’t need just six street types or even 12 street types. In order to do good urbanism, you need dozens.
Hall:
And speed, again, is the key. Speed is the key to safety. Speed is the key to walkability. We would like to limit arterials to rural areas and areas between TNDs, and even some of the suburban districts: Let the arterials be there until they are begging the code people to take them out of suburbia and get them into new urbanism.
And the last point—my wife’s an English major. It’s an adjective! “Arterial” is an adjective! All right? Arterial something. It’s not even a noun! Oh, well.
Chellman:
This and the next slide come from the table of contents of what we’ve done so far. There’s more work to be done, but we’re trying to—without getting into great detail—you can see that we’ve touched on the region, the corridor, and the community. Getting into the functional classification—there’s going to be quite a bit of text in here about our take on functional classification and how the current system just does not function, certainly in areas where we are trying to create good urbanism.
Swift:
One thing I think that’s important to recognize here is the chapters on the region and the corridor and the community. They’re related to the structural hierarchy of what we need to deal with as engineers. From the MPO regional level, MPOs will understand what’s being written in that portion. In the corridor, we’re dealing more with state DOTs and state DOT concerns. Finally, with the community portion of this, we’re dealing with municipal governments, municipal engineers, and traffic engineers on that level. We thought it was important to be able to structurally classify this (in a way) that would appeal to the three levels and the hierarchy of decision-making and transportation in that sense.
Hall:
Because each of the three of us can name friends of ours who work at those three levels—for their entire careers. I know many people who are just MPO-oriented; that’s all they ever do. They don’t know how to time a signal—they don’t need to. But we want this manual to have something about the new urbanism that relates to each of those three levels of transportation, engineering, and planning activity.
Unknown audience member (without mic):
[Unintelligible]
Chellman:
The title? The title of what—the work?
Unknown audience member:
The manual. [Unintelligible] This is the table of contents.
Chellman:
It will either be Streets: A Context-Directed Public Works Manual, or something along those lines. We haven’t decided, obviously.
[Laughter]
Hall:
It will have “streets” in it; it will have “context” in it.
Chellman:
But it’s going to get down to dimensional detail—not just philosophy, but all of the dimensional details that people have been asking for, based on our experience, which is rather embarrassingly large, given our collective ages!
Hall:
We’ve covered this a bit, but again: the region, the corridor, and the community, and some of the applications.
Stefanos Polyzoides (I think; without the mic):
You guys take questions? [unintelligible] In what communities [unintelligible] in the context of new urbanism? Neighborhood, district—
Chellman:
Yes? Well, the—
Hall:
Could you hit the next slide, please?
Swift:
When we’re dealing with engineers—this is my take on this—we’ve had some lengthy discussions about that, and using that word community—is that we know that we can deal with a TOD or a TND, we could deal with a neighborhood, we could deal with buildings and infill on half a block. We have all of these kinds of structural hierarchies in how we look at what we do. New urbanism applies to everything from the region to the building, obviously, so, instead of introducing another order of complexity to the engineers and trying to understand this in that sense, we want to be able to pull the community together as one thing. And then, in the body of the document, in the text, in the way that we illustrate these things to be done, we’re using the context zone specifically, and the relationships amongst them, in a way that engineers will understand it, while still introducing those elements of urban design, and building type, the use of buildings with these corridors, for example, without spooking them too much. That’s pretty much my take on it.
Chellman:
We’re trying to adapt terminology already in the profession, to new urbanist principles. And I think that, within community, we need to probably flesh that out a little bit more in terms of [unintelligible] corridor.
Hall:
We’re going with the regional land use tiers that are discussed in the SmartCode, the Lexicon, and in general discussion: rural preserve, rural reserve, cluster, TND, TOD, urban. These are evolving nicely as descriptors at the regional level, and we’re going to actually suggest in the manual, that if you are an MPO staff director, and you have a scope of work, and some of your elected officials want you to move in the new urbanist direction—in a smart growth direction—that [you] may want to pick up this manual and say, “Let’s first identify these tiers of character within the region for the existing condition.”
Then you pick it up and say, “How do you want this to be in 20 years?” Or, you can do an interim 10-year plan, but you start with the land use context, then you do the transportation system—instead of the way we do it now.
“The first step in the design process is to define the function that the facility is to serve” (AASHTO)—that function of any facility, all the way through roadway and transit. Those facilities must adhere to a function; we say that function is best defined by a pattern of land use development, which is its context.
Chellman:
This is the constraining language of AASHTO. This directs you to say you are either an arterial, a collector, or a local, on either an urban or rural condition. And from that, you must make your design decisions. We don’t agree with this premise. That is not to say that AASHTO is not applicable in some locations.
Swift:
This is an extremely important part, I think, of what we’re looking at, in terms of our functional hierarchies and what design approach deals with what. You’ll notice that on the right-hand side, we address the context-directed design work that we’re formulating, and AASHTO—the AASHTO Green Book is what that refers to—and what applies to what tier in a rural and urban context. There are some areas—can serve the state’s clusters in the rural context—that are not going to have any silver bullet, and where our work doesn’t really apply. Where the AASHTO work will mostly likely be the applicable document. However, there’s a bit more of a mix when we take a look at cluster types of developments, in context zones C1, C3, and C4. We break out C3, if you’ll recall, as the suburban zone, in two ways: [it] can be approached by AASHTO or context-directed design.
It’s important to differentiate, because if you take a look at a T3 or C3 zone, this could be established in a more appropriate fashion related to the transect, or it could be done in a typical suburban fashion. The rest, however, in the urban context, are clearly directed toward, and will be used by, the CDD documentation.
Hall:
Rick’s going to talk about this a little bit more, but: the level of service. You’ve heard of level of service measures for so much of the transportation design at all levels—regional, corridor—and this thing on the right is an example of the way some of the practitioners—the engineering practitioners—think of level of service for pedestrianism. They’re thinking of the pedestrians as little vehicles! So if you’re the only one out there, it’s “level of service A”: there’s nobody getting in your way. And “B,” well, there’s B. C. I mean, in “D,” you begin to be, maybe, slowed down by someone. And “E”—this is jammed in so bad, I can’t even see—I think somebody’s lying down there; I’m not sure!
But if you’re out there at 11:45—maybe 1:45 a.m., and it’s dark and raining, is that level of service A? Do you have any eyes on the street?
Chellman:
A-plus! A-plus! Nobody’s out there! Nobody’s on the sidewalk.
[Laughter]
Hall:
So the fewer pedestrians you have, the better the pedestrian level of service? So this is what we’re up against; that’s the reason this slide is up there, right?
Chellman:
Exactly. Go ahead to the next one; it’s better!
Hall:
Okay, I want you to memorize this; there will be a test!
[Laughter]
My friends—my very good friends—at Florida DOT are engaged in this. I’ve been out doing charrettes around the country; I haven’t been able to watch them there in Tallahassee!
Ped LOS = -1.2021 ln (Wol + Wl + fp x %OSP + FB x Wb + fsw x Ws) + 0.253 ln (Vol15/L) +0.0005 SPD (squared) + 5.3876
Where:
Wol = Width of outside lane (feet)
Wl = Width of shoulder or bike lane (feet)
Fp = On-street parking effect coefficient (=0.20)
Etc.
The pedestrian level of service is -1.2021 times the log of the width of the outside lane plus the width of the shoulder or the bike lane plus a pedestrian on-street factor, which mysteriously, is .2. I don’t know how they got that! Maybe it was a calibration factor. And then they have on-street parking percentage. And they have buffer width—I think the wider the buffer, the better—
Chellman:
The Sidewalk Presence Coalition.
[Laughter]
Hall:
And this is really good: There’s a buffer area coefficient, and it’s 5.37 for trees spaced at 20 feet on-center. Now what if they’re oaks, or what if they’re pines? Does the factor change? And I sympathize with them; this is what we were all taught to do in engineering school. By the third year of engineering school, we thought nothing of writing the entire first page—you write down your “givens.” And then the next 12 pages were your series of calculations you did to solve a particular problem. And this is what they’re following up with.
To calibrate this thing, they actually tested—they took 75 individuals out into Pensacola, Fla., and had them walk a prescribed path. And they graded every experience on each link as an A through F. You take a bunch of people out where they would normally never go, and you ask them to rate the thing, and then you develop the formula, and it works! But it says nothing about enclosure, it says nothing about window space for the commercial series, it says nothing about blank walls. It’s within the right of way entirely.
So they’re doing some good things. At least they’re looking at multimodal issues, but this is kind of what we’re up against.
Chellman:
It all goes back to a premise that came about in the scientific community, at the turn of the last century, where it was determined that, because of scientific principles that had been established, everything could be reduced to a correct answer, and, therefore, if you had a correct answer, there must necessarily be wrong answers. There’s a great book on it by F. David Peat, called Certainty to Uncertainty, just published this year, where we’ve come to realize more—and especially in the engineering profession, a few of us, anyway—that you cannot reduce everything to formulaic solution. And unfortunately, that Florida DOT example—those are well-intentioned folks, but they are so fundamentally flawed at the outset, that, you know, forget about it!
Hall:
It’s being published in the journals of the land.
Speed is vitally important, as I think most of you know. We’re saying, context-direction: The context of the area and its patterns of development should dictate the design speed of the facilities. And again, to remind you, we’re talking about very slow speeds.
We were driving up from Albuquerque—my wife was driving the rental car—and we were coming through some of these narrower streets near the square, and I was just about to say, “You know, you really should slow down a little bit”—I looked over, and she was going 25. It just felt fast in this environment, right? Nobody’s going to blow through there at 45. And it’s because of the context; it respects that context. So speed is very important.
Most of the other design elements that we wrestle with weekly, follow the design speed.
Unknown audience member:
[Unintelligible]
Hall:
Come again?
Chellman:
Free—what does “Free” mean?
Hall:
That’s a “free speed street.” That means you don’t have any limitations that are placed there through pre-determined traffic-calming by design, where you have a narrow street, you have trees, and parked cars. That means you have, generally, an 11- or 12-foot lane, and you’re free to wander. You don’t have to be as careful as you were.
Chellman:
As opposed to a street that’s narrow enough, with enough on-street parking or bump-outs, that people slow down as they approach these features, or, the next step is a yield street, where the street is so narrow, with on-street parked cars or whatever, and with two opposing cars, one has to wait for the other one to come by.
Hall:
Normally, level of service is determined by—you start here at zero speed—and you’re at F—and it just goes straight off the chart. And the faster you go, the better the level of service. But Peter: Explain what this—this is not a mountaintop of local origin around here.
Swift:
Yes, we’re taking a very, very different approach to establishing level of service in these corridors. This is one example of one type of street that we would identify level of service would be rated as. Notice that if you’re going 10 miles per hour, or five miles per hour between E and F, that’s too slow for the corridor; however, we’ve established a threshold. For example, in this case, the ideal speed is somewhere between 17 and 23 miles per hour. This may be a main-street corridor; this may be some other C6 environment. What happens then, if the vehicle speeds, the running speeds through the corridor pick up, then we get into more dangerous environment: a more dangerous environment for the pedestrian, it’s not particularly healthful for adjoining retail, and so, consequently then, the level of service must drop to F at very high speeds.
We know that in the highway capacity manual, their lowest form of arterial is a class form arterial in terms of speeds, that run between 25 and 35 miles per hour. Thirty-five miles per hour is way too fast for what we’re trying to look at here, for these types of designs. In our instance, 35 miles per hour is falling between E and F. So consequently, this change is something we’re going to introduce here for the various street types, that again, is a very radical departure from how level of service is. But we wanted to keep level of service nomenclature, familiar to the traffic engineer. We don’t want to say anymore that E is good, and F is good, and level of service D is good; we want to say level of service A is still good, as long as it’s defined in this way.
Unknown audience member (no mic):
What is the relationship between “running speed” and “design speed”?
Hall:
The running speed—let’s get the different opinions; this is a good question. The running speed, in my observation, is when you do not have a red signal facing you, and you do not have acceleration after you get the green, and you do not have deceleration upon approaching a red signal. So it’s green here, it’s green there, and this is the speed that you’re comfortable as you run along. It’s kind of like the cruising speed of your airplane. Is that—
Swift:
Yes, there are other kinds of ways, metrics that we can use for this, too. For example, the average speed through a corridor—we’ve got a couple miles of main street or something, and you begin and you end, and what kind of average speed did you have through here? The more important one, I think, the approach that Rick is describing here, because we don’t want mid-block hotshots, and we don’t want other problems occurring there.
The design speed, however, is: You design, physically, this corridor, so that people won’t exceed the speed thresholds that we are looking at.
Chellman:
And the type of streets we’re talking about—the type of streets you’re talking about—there’s a design premise that we should impose a threshold above design speed for posted speed, and then, from enforcement, there’s a threshold above that at which we begin to enforce. So: If you design at 25, you post at 30 and you start to arrest people at 40.
Now, this causes a very deep problem in a pedestrian environment, because this is the lethal threshold, right here.
Unknown audience member (no mic):
Wait—it’s the other way: You don’t design 25 and post at 30, you design at 30 and post at 25.
Chellman:
If you want to design at 20—you design it five miles above what you post it. Correct. I’m sorry, I misstated. But this multiplication effect still happens. And most police departments that I work with, say that it’s 10 (mph) above the posted speed before they even think about beginning to enforce it. So you design at 20, post at 25, and you end up much too fast. I said it again! I said it again! Design at 25, post at 20! That’s what I meant to say!
Unknown audience member (no mic):
[Unintelligible]
Hall:
Good points. What this does is—
Chellman:
One thing that will accompany this context—if you look at it just from the context of the vehicle, it’s the old level of service. We’re trying to look at the overall context, to define an overall context of the street.
Unknown audience member (no mic):
[Unintelligible]
Chellman:
Mm hmm (affirmative).
Swift:
You know, there are actually some things built into it. Particularly, let’s address bicyclists. We know that bicyclists can run up to 17 miles per hour comfortably, [and can merge] with traffic within that threshold, so there was some thought put into that accommodation with establishing these speed thresholds for vehicles, too.
Hall:
There’s a book that was written as a result of a committee study led by Colin Buchanan in the United Kingdom. He published this book in 1963—Jane Jacobs’ era. He had the most wonderful analysis of what is wrong with the traffic in towns, which was the name of the document—an extensive study. The problem was, his solutions were so modernist and so whacked out, that they gave us some of the new towns in Britain that we now do not enjoy, and that the people who live there do not enjoy. He had the idea that separation of the pedestrian and the motor vehicles was a great idea. We’ve since come to see that that’s not a very good idea. But I’d encourage anyone to look at Traffic in Towns, by Colin Buchanan. A very good book.
Any other questions on that particular—okay.
Swift:
Emergency access to narrow-yield streets is a major issue and a big problem. The way that we’re approaching this is kind of a three-prong attack.
The first one is, for example, this is an illustration of a 26-foot-wide yield street on a 500-foot-long block. The first point of attack is that a 26-foot-wide yield street is appropriate, even without alleys, under many circumstances, and that there is room to maneuver in there. That, as you move into a more urbanized condition and a denser condition, you’re going to have parking densities that increase. In chapter 9.2 of the Uniform Fire Code, adopted throughout the country, there is a requirement for what is called “20-foot clear”: twenty-foot clear for the fire trucks to operate and maneuver.
That is somewhat open to interpretation. Does that mean that if you have two cars on the block and it’s a 26-foot-wide street, that you’ve actually satisfied this requirement? A lot of people feel that you have; there are some fire marshals who feel accommodating enough to say that you have. But there are also a lot of fire marshals who don’t agree with that.
So the next thing that one would propose is alleys. Normally, we will see a 20-foot right of way, for example, with a structural surface. This exactly accommodates chapter 9.2 of the Uniform Fire Code, in providing a 20-foot clear. The argument that fire chiefs then propose is “Well, what if somebody parks kitty-corner in the alley? What if they don’t have enough room out there?”
Well, then, maybe the argument is that if you have one vehicle, you can pass it, you can set up, you can stage somewhere else. And if that argument fails, if they say it needs to be in the thoroughfare in the front of the structure, where they’re going to fight the fire, then we come up with alternate proposals for this, which is the least desirable of the three that I’m describing. [This is] to provide, for example, a mid-block, 40-foot-long, 20-foot-wide, clear zone. And this is with respect, especially to a 500-foot block, you’re within 125 feet, at least, of all the buildings. The Uniform Fire Code also says you need to be within 150 feet of the buildings, to be able to drag the hose from the apparatus to the structure fire, so it accommodates that particular portion of the code. It provides a staging area for the apparatus. It also provides staging areas in the intersections that are either red-zoned, or possibly bulbed out—less desirable options again—but having been, I think, the three of us, through many years of combat with fire chiefs and trying to get things accomplished, sometimes when you find a completely intractable situation, and you wind up with a compromise solution, we’re proposing that, perhaps, this is the compromise solution that we wind up with.
Unknown audience member (no mic):
Peter, I’m sorry: I’m just totally confused. What is the difference between the middle zone, the [unintelligible] zone in the middle, and the [unintelligible] street?
Swift:
Right. It’s related to parking density and access to the street itself.
Audience member (might be Neal Payton; with mic):
So there’s no parking allowed in the middle zone—is that the idea?
Swift:
That’s exactly right.
Payton:
Okay.
Swift:
And what that does is provide enough distance, a short enough distance to the structure fire, from a staging zone mid-block or end-block, for the firefighters to get to the structure fire.
Payton:
And is parking allowed on both sides of the street?
Swift:
Yes. Absolutely. Now, I would like to say this, however: The AASHTO Green Book—out of the thousand pages in the book there is one very clear section that actually recommends residential streets 26 feet wide, with parking both sides, and they call this a yield street. This is a remarkable piece of work to find in the Green Book itself; that’s why I’m using this example specifically.
Audience member (no mic):
So, I assume the green is the sidewalk?
Swift:
No, the green is green. Heh, heh, heh. Green stuff—okay, landscape architecture parlance! A tree lawn, a planting strip, and then below that—the white strip is the sidewalk, an offset sidewalk—the white in the center is, obviously, the street itself. Is that clear?
Hall:
The green is sometimes called a “grazing strip”—left over from the horses being tied up next to the street.
Swift:
And a lot of vegetarians in the community! Heh, heh.
Chip Kaufman (no mic):
Could you [unintelligible] explain this [unintelligible], please?
Hall:
Okay. Reverse, please?
Audience member:
How wide is the green?
Chellman:
That’s not relevant.
Swift:
It’s not relevant to this at all.
Hall:
That’ll be coming. That’ll be coming.
Chellman:
What did you want, Chip?
Audience member:
I think the common assumption is that fire chiefs are against skinny streets with parking on both sides, like this, because they can’t get their trucks through. But what you’re saying is, they could have parking on both sides, but as long as they have this clear, central staging area, where they could reach all of the houses to both ends of the street—it’s the staging area that they’re really trying to preserve?
Swift:
There are two different ways of approaching this. The way we approached this is number one: a 26-foot wide street is appropriate, especially with lower parking densities. You’ll have plenty of room on the street, not only to pass, but to set up and stage the ladder trucks and that kind of thing.
The second is to add an alley integral to being able to attack this from several different points. For example, if there was actually a burning vehicle in the middle of this block somewhere, and none of them could get through, they could go around through the alley, they could go around through the block—plenty of interconnectivity: extremely important.
But finally, you do bring up a good point. There are two things here: One is set-up of operations. “Operations” includes setting up a ladder truck and maintaining it, a firefighter with an oxygen tank on the back being able to get a ladder and its ladder mechanism off the side of the truck, getting the hose out of the truck—all this requires some space next to the truck. If another fire apparatus is going to pass it, if they’ve set themselves to one side—as they usually do when the defensive apparatus comes in—there’s enough room for them to pass. They close the doors on the truck, they move back a little bit, and the truck passes. This provides an opportunity for the defensive apparatus to be notified that maybe there’s some blockage there—come through the alley. Take a left, take your first right, come around the block, and you’re on the other side of the fire. Everything is just fine.
The yield street, particularly, without alleys, is troublesome with high parking densities, because of that reason. Without the interconnectivity, without the alleys, without other ways of getting there fairly quickly, that’s a major problem and we don’t recommend those kinds of yield streets for those reasons.
Audience member:
Couldn’t you set up, too, a minimum block perimeter, too, that would be acceptable—a minimum total block perimeter that would be acceptable with a yield street?
Swift:
We’re working on an existing condition in Isla Vista, Calif., where Dave Sargent—is he here? Yes—where they’ve got 1,200-foot-long blocks. And the proposal here is to set the staging areas at the third points in the block, to accommodate that. So it will change, depending on the block size that you’re dealing with.
Hall:
Chip (Kaufman) had a question about the splay in the intersection, meaning, the bulb-out area or—
Kaufman (no mic!):
[Unintelligible]
Hall:
Oh, the green?
Swift:
The dark green?
Kaufman (no mic!):
[Unintelligible]
Swift:
Oh, okay. That’s not really salient to the discussion but…a lot of times we like to chamfer that, when you have more confined conditions, to be able to establish signage or a utility box or something else that needs to go there. We don’t want to push them out toward the curb; we want to keep them back, so we chamfer the corners sometimes. That’s just one thing.
Chellman:
It’s also what happens when you show urban designers a diagram intended for fire folks!
[Laughter]
Hall:
Hey, you put too much on the diagram, man!
Chellman:
Yeah, really!
Hall:
This is just a reminder that, in addition to the capacity we’ve been chasing for 30 years, we must begin to have a clear understanding, and a design intent, for character of the road, as well as capacity. I have told stories before—I’ve put down so many pieces of tape on MPO plans, saying, “this has to be a six-laner, because it’s 36,000 telling me, coming out of the computer, per day. It just has to be six lanes. Next!”
I felt like I was spreading sprawl—like the guy from the Alabama Department of Highways, who said that kudzu is a good thing to cover the slopes of red clay in Alabama. So I was feeling kind of kudzu-like!
This is the DNA of sprawl, as far as we define it. Because the arterial—higher mobility. What they don’t say here, and what they mean, is vehicular mobility. Collectors are in between the locals. High degree of access. Try to tell Wal-Mart they can’t have this access on the arterials. This is the battle of the bulge: It goes this way and it goes that way. The state tries to push it this way; the private developers try to push it that way. Constant battle. Constant battle. We’re saying, “Take this thing and split it right down the middle, and have every facility you have be responsibility in some part for serving the adjacent land, and another part for total mobility: pedestrians, bikes, transit, and motor vehicles—all the way up.” And we’re going to stick to that.
[END OF TAPE]
[BEGINNING OF TAPE]
—do a wonderful job of those things. But it’s looking over the right-of-way line that the engineering community is not doing too well with.
This, again, is that same DNA of Sprawl diagram. This is what we would like to change it into: mobility for all modes, of course, across all of the proposed facility types, instead of just three.
Chellman:
It’s going to get a little more complex as we flesh it out.
Hall:
Rick, why don’t you hit the thoroughfare types issue?
Chellman:
This ties into the nomenclature question, and what I was talking about earlier in terms of terminology being so important.
These are some of the labels that we intend to use; these seemed to have good acceptance in the CNU. There will certainly be a number of different types of boulevards, a number of different types of avenues; indeed, a number of different types of main streets.
The sections—I guess we haven’t gotten to that—you will see we’ve proposed a base section sheet, which will have a lot of the explanation about what they are, but we intend to describe each of these based on their physical form, the functions they provide, and the context within which they are appropriate.
Hall:
This is a very good document that is in draft form, from a county in Florida. This is just one page.
Chellman:
It’s a slick document—I don’t know that it’s a good document.
Hall:
It’s a very slick document! They could not resist—or someone gave them some policy direction—that they must keep the word “arterial” as one of their corridor types. Even the drawing we know is not conducive to pedestrianism. So we say, “Keep the arterial out of town, out of the places where you want walkability.”
Chellman:
Out of our vocabulary.
Hall:
Let’s go ahead to the next slide. Rick, why don’t you take that.
Chellman:
Yes. Pay no attention to any of the details on this, it’s just basically a proposed format, borrowed in part from Dhiru Thadani—some of his work that he’s done on some campus planning, where we’ll have a series of tabs on the right-hand side, indicating the various context zones. We may expand to a few more. And those will be shaded, so that if you have the manual, you can just sort of pull the pages to the side; if you’re looking for a bunch of C4 and C5 streets, you can pop right to them. And then, the description below—that’s one reason I say don’t try to read it—it’s just literally letters, there’s no English or any other language there! But we’ll describe typical running speed, volumetric characteristics, street performance from the bicycle perspective, what the threshold gap is in mid-block (that’s where, as a pedestrian, you will feel safe to cross the street, given the oncoming traffic, based on its width and speed), and all other characteristics we can think of, so that you and anybody else who uses it will be as fully informed as if we were there, explaining it (almost!).
Hall:
So the other elements are the cross-section and the plan views; those will be shown very clearly.
Those are all the prepared slides. One additional thing I wanted to mention: On those street definitions, we feel that, based on the legal liability that the engineers have for signing and sealing construction plans, and the legal liability that cities and counties may incur, (it is) very important that, in any definition of any street type, the purpose is clearly stated; if you want pedestrianism, you must state that as one of the purposes for the corridor. If you fail to state that, then they will lapse back to the Green Book, which doesn’t say anything about pedestrians on that main street that you designed. So it has to be clear.
So. In the event that there is a crash and the survivors bring their attorneys to your door, you have to be able to hold up a document and say, “This was adopted by the city council. It says that—legislatively we’ve said that pedestrians are a key component of the movement on this street.” Otherwise, there is legal liability.
Swift:
And there are a few things—actually, there are a lot of things we didn’t mention. There are sections on roundabouts, on snow removal, and many, many other things, but to keep this brief this evening, you can see from the table of contents that there is actually quite a bit of substance to this thing, hopefully replicating all of the materials that have been covered by, and used by, traffic and civil engineers in the past.
Hall:
And we expect this to evolve sometime after the first of the year. That’s pretty open.
Payton (I think):
I want to ask about whether your context zones—they seem similar to, but I’m not sure they equate exactly with the transect classification system, and I’m concerned that if they don’t, if they’re close but not really the same, we’re going to get into some conceptual confusion. For example, the T4 is urban and the T3 is suburban in the transect, and I thought I heard C3 and C4 being a little different in your definitions. I’m concerned about that.
Chellman:
From that perspective they’re not different, but from a transportation perspective, “context” necessarily relates both to the immediate location on the street—and the higher the level of urbanism, that becomes more important—but also to the area outside its immediate context, in terms of what it’s providing—if anything—for regional movements or other through movements.
Swift (no mic):
Essentially, it is. It’s based on the Lexicon, it’s based on the transect in that sense. It’s translated a little differently, with language that engineers are going to understand.
Kaufman:
The issue of arterials or the word “arterial”: I have arterials in my body, and I’m kind of plugged into them. And I think that’s kind of a red flag to a lot of traffic regulators. Why not deal with the function instead of excommunicating the term. For instance, something that we’ve used for a long time is “integrator arterials,” which are the good ones, versus “divider arterials,” which are the divisive ones, so that you don’t have to cause a fight by trying to get rid of a major term that traffic engineers are used to.
Chellman:
One of the problems with the term is that it is so interwoven into funding mechanisms, state department of transportation policies, and others, that it automatically connotes a whole set of criteria that are viewed as immovable. So it’s really a problem from that perspective.
Hall:
Let me tell a really quick story. I was in Vicksburg, had a wonderful time—what a civil charrette! I was there and I took my trusty speed gun, went out in the neighborhood. In a 30-mile-per-hour zone I caught someone doing 50. In a 20-mile-per-hour zone I caught them doing 40. The police chief was doing 31 in a 20 zone. And I said, “you’ve got to have some traffic calming.”
I went to the Tallahassee government Web site to get the download for their traffic-calming program. There was a little link labeled “Why we can’t traffic-calm some of your streets.” I thought, that’s interesting, and clicked on it. The very first thing it said was, “Leon County and Tallahassee have adopted the functional classification system, defined by AASHTO and Federal Highway—” And then it had another link, where you could click on “functional classification.” I hit that: I was in Washington, D.C., looking at the DNA of sprawl—right there, within four minutes, I’m sitting in Vicksburg, Miss., and I was transported electronically to Washington, D.C. That’s the reason we cannot have “arterial” as a word. We don’t have the years that it would take to re-orient that word, “arterial.” We’re not killing the word, “arterial.” We’re just translocating it. We’re moving it. Andres does this all the time, right?
[Laughter]
He says, “There’s room for you—it’s just not in our walkable town.” “Arterial”? Fine. Out there.
Kaufman:
So you’re not removing it, you’re relocating it.
Hall:
I’m glad you asked that question, to allow us to clarify our thinking on that subject!
Unknown speaker:
I wondered if you guys were going to take on lighting standards, or signage, or guardrail standards, safety standards—things like that, which really have a direct impact on the physical environment.
Chellman:
We’re going to talk about lighting in the general sense. The electrical engineers, the International Lighting Engineers, have proposed standards that I was just dealing with in Los Alamos, last night. So, to the extent we can, we would like to get into that.
The siting of guardrails and other “fixed objects” near the curb line in urban areas: FHWA (Federal Highway Administration) is actually looking into that right now. There is recognition at the federal level that, as we get into more urban areas, this notion of a “clear zone,” which comes about from highway design, probably shouldn’t apply. So we’ll definitely talk about that; we already have some text in there about that.
Bob Czerniak:
Having worked with federal highways—at Federal Highway in D.C. for two years—I see you three guys with pillars behind you, with AASHTO on them, being burned at the stake! This is pretty amazing. I’ve never heard engineers talk like this—ever. God bless you.
[Laughter and applause]
I wish Dane Ismart was here to hear you three guys speak, but I have a question for you, and a comment.
The diagram that you showed on mobility and access, I’ve seen [it] used a number of times for access management. I’m wondering that if you change mobility and access from vehicular mobility and access to personal mobility and access, if you can still use that diagram. Is it still appropriate?
Hall:
If we can still use the one that has the curve in it?
Czerniak:
Yes, yes.
Hall:
No. That one, again, is translated out. We cannot use that reverse curve, what I call the DNA of sprawl, because it has the connotation that there are higher-order facilities that are for the motor vehicles, and you must respect that; therefore, you can’t traffic-calm, you can’t add pedestrian—
Czerniak:
No, but that’s my point. As long as you keep it in the context of the vehicle, it creates a problem. But if you talk about it in terms of personal mobility, then it changes the context of that graph entirely.
Hall:
Right.
Czerniak:
So we talk about high mobility for people, regardless of whether it’s a roadway or a bikeway or a sidewalk, and high access for people, in facilities that need high access.
Hall:
Yes, we’re talking about mobility for all modes: pedestrian, bike, transit, and motor vehicle.
Czerniak:
My point is, get rid of the modes entirely—just talk about people.
Chellman:
We understand—at least, I think I’m beginning to understand—your point about personal mobility. The overall context diagram that we had? Talking about a different level of service? That is trying to address personal mobility. So we would appreciate it on that other diagram as well.
Czerniak:
Okay.
Polyzoides:
I want to return to the question of the use of the word “community.” For two reasons: first, because from the nomenclature side, it’s a word that new urbanists have been trying to avoid for a heck of a long time, because it suggests that our work can bring about social calming, as opposed to simply enabling contact among human beings, over time. We’re not determining anything, we’re just setting up frameworks for interaction. So that word, “community,” is part of a whole other vocabulary of thinking about planning.
But most importantly, I think, the recent history of the new urbanism—the 10-year history—there’s been an enormous amount of work done in the area of neighborhoods, and the question of districts remains atrophied in the new urbanist literature. In fact, it is terribly important, in your work, to cover both of those in appropriate depth. Returning to this morning’s presentation, it seems to me from the perspective of both form, use, and density, the characteristics of that kind of place, are so extremely different from those of “neighborhood,” that they begin to address commensurate questions of traffic and parking fundamentally, that are at an entirely different order of consideration. I don’t think that the subjects of neighborhood and district can be included under the same consideration.
Chellman:
I think that, in keeping with our desire to adhere to the Charter, we will incorporate more of that language. I think the principles are in there, with our overriding tiers and contact zones, but we need to get the language straight.
Unknown speaker:
I agree that this is the DNA, but the DNA ultimately becomes an organism, and the organism is the thing that is actually when—primarily when rural land is converted to urban land. And that pattern of infrastructure, that pattern of streets, is put down, and it’s with us for a very, very, very long time.
You mentioned the 1,200-foot block. Is there anything in your work that specifies minimum/maximum block points? Because these things get converted into subdivision regulations, and you wind up with these ridiculous 1,800-foot-long, 75-acre blocks.
Chellman:
In some of the stuff that I’ve done personally, yes. But I would ask this group to help inform us with that. We have ideas, based on walking, but you guys have more experience with the actual laying out of blocks, and witnessing what you think works and doesn’t work. I encourage you to give us information, and anything you can give us in terms of examples—graphic examples, anything like that.
Unknown speaker (same as before; without mic):
[Unintelligible]
Chellman:
Clearly. Clearly. But also, typography ties into the block size.
Unknown speaker (same as before; without mic):
Well, yes, but they’re not, I mean—
Chellman:
So it’s not a simplistic notion. There’s an overriding principle. There’s a desired, probable size, but then certain conditions will make that not practical.
Unknown speaker (same as before; without mic):
Well, of course. That’s true with everything. But [unintelligible] the other thing has to do with the extent to which [unintelligible] we’re going to have to [unintelligible] subdivision regulations that are
(now with mic):
typically administered by public works departments, and zoning ordinances, which are typically administered through planning departments. You end up, oftentimes, with categories of lot frontages that do not aggregate up into blocks that make any sense, for example. And so, when you begin to look at section 9.2 of the Uniform Fire Code, where you’re looking at where you have those free zones, I think it’s important to have a check back, because 125 feet does not aggregate up into any kind of a buildable unit that may expand or contract over time, variable with use.
Swift:
Yes, if I may: There are a couple of things [about which] there may have been a misunderstanding. When I mentioned a 1,200-foot block, that was an existing condition; that was in the existing part of the town.
But let me address your other question, which is remarkably salient: That is something we are looking into. We’ve seen a block perimeter limit—2,000 feet or less; that kind of thing—and we’re definitely looking into that. I agree with you 100 percent that that absolutely has to be part of what we incorporate in terms of suggestions on the morphology of block structure.
Same unknown speaker:
The “distance to intersection” is another that goes directly to what you’re talking about.
Hall:
I’ve made quite a number of presentations where I do a Top Ten walkability list of features. Number one, to me, is always block size, because small block size enables a mix of uses, which enables a pedestrian path that’s efficient—it does a lot of things.
Kaufman:
It seems to me that the whole issue of walking is radically different from AASHTO and vehicles, and, instead of just mobility and land access, I should think it ought to include—I don’t know how to do it yet—stimulation, comfort and safety, fitness, legibility—the things that can actually hook a wider audience than just access. I should think that you guys can rise above what you’ve inherited from AASHTO, to advance that!
[Laughter]
Hall:
Good point. Let’s remember to enhance that “access” word, to get into the full depth.
Unknown speaker:
Question for Rick. I saw the—just quickly scanned—the definitions that you had there, and I saw “boulevard” and “avenue.” The definition for “avenue” was something like “an important street with monument buildings at the end of it.” And the boulevard actually had a planted median.
I know in the Lexicon, the boulevard is used very specifically, for roads that have frontage roads or parking lanes separated from the travel lanes—the sort of Champs Elysées model. And I would hate to see you lose that, because we are having a lot of difficulty—a lot more difficulty with the state highway department, than we are with city and county governments. We’re trying to bring buildings up to the highways, and one way that we’ve devised to do that is to consume some of their right of way with street trees, planting strips, parking lanes, sidewalks, so that by the time we get to the edge of the right of way, we can start building right away, instead of having a 150-foot setback. So it would be nice to see that model stay in there somehow.
Hall:
Yes, one of the more difficult things for us to tackle, in addition to moving the arterials to a different place in the city, is to resurrect the multi-way boulevard, as defined in the boulevard book. I, personally, think that is the high-capacity traffic-mover of the future, for walkable communities, because it has such a great pedestrian edge. It takes a lot of right of way, it takes a lot of pre-planning, and it has this issue of conflict points that the traffic engineers go crazy about. Camilo Cite went crazy about that, too. But we’re going to take a good run at that and do our best to get the multi-way boulevard included as one of the key elements for high mobility in the urban areas.
Chellman:
I think you’ll see that we haven’t lost anything from the Lexicon. You’re going to see additions—not deletions.
Geoffrey Ferrell:
I want to reinforce the idea about some of the issues of form, which, having worked with two of you guys, I know you’re in key with; you’re thinking about larger things: block size, overall interconnectedness, etc. Those things are very important. You’re doing—this is great work, you’re on a great track. Necessary work, as the previous group that presented, and I’d like to speak in glowing terms of how wonderful you are—for a change! And offer any assistance I can give.
Chellman:
Thank you!
Douglas Duany:
Yes, count me in also, as far as morphology. There is so much implication, because, you know, this “downstreams” to us.
In terms of the graphics, the fire hose and the yield street? Not only is that a model that will have tremendous implications for block size, but I would also recommend that you narrow it a little bit—a little bit like a pedestrian, and put a walk, as a pedestrian crosswalk. In other words, you can make your diagram richer in implications, without it muddying the verbiage. And perhaps not have it all straight—it’s possible to curve. Because that’s a good breaking point, you know.
There’s something that I missed, though—I have three points, I’m sorry: One of them is an old obsession, and there is a semi-new one. The old one is that you haven’t shown your traffic circles. And I’m finding myself at the receiving end of the new traffic circle orthodoxy.
Chellman:
The roundabouts?
D. Duany:
The roundabouts, yes, yes—sorry, that’s a nomenclature thing. What I would consider doing graphically is to start mixing the notion of a roundabout with the traffic calming idea, with the creation of public space. Do you see what I mean? Because what’s going to happen is that we’re just going to get a very tight type. If you can do that graphically, to somehow prove to the engineers that a traffic circle can also be a green—you know, slip that under the radar.
And the last comment is: At the beginning, when you conceded AASHTO to the rural preserve? There’s a type of road that you all three know extremely well—and I know that you haven’t filled in all the blanks of the road types that you’re going to be dealing with—but the road, the two-lane road, should already be in your preliminary scheme. The two-lane road type, through those three transect zones—but I didn’t see it up, so I’m worried.
Hall:
Okay. Good point. You know, I’ve talked to a number of public works engineers. And I say, “What about a two-lane road that goes between point A and point B, to kind of connect the grid here?” And one of the responses I get all too often is: “If I’m going to go out there and deal with the public and the environmentalists, I’m going to at least get four lanes of capacity out of this thing. I’m not going to do just a two-lane. I’m going to go all the way and get the big road.”
And I try to tell them, “That’s the reason it’s so hard for you to get the road!”
[Laughter and applause]
So I’m going to write a paper one of these days: “In Praise of the Lowly, Two-Lane Street.” Because they connect the grid; they’re wonderful places.
Sara Muir-Owen:
Streets have been used effectively and efficiently for moving cars, and now we’re talking about people, but what about the same approach to moving water? They’ve been very efficient at speedily moving water from the urban environment. I’m just wondering what the implications are in terms of land use, having to utilize, now, retention and detention ponds, at excessive cost, to mitigate storm water management, and whether your streets are looking at that issue as well, in urban environments: the mitigation of storm water.
Chellman:
Yes!
[Laughter]
The concept of drainage and how to deal with storm water has gotten a lot of very close focus in this country, in recent years. Notions of how to treat it: whether we should collect it, whether we should distribute it, disperse it—those are all things that come into play in street design. We have a section on drainage; we’re going to expand that section, talk about many of these concepts. Each street section will talk about how that street behaves—if it’s a closed section or an open section. Because that ties right into your question.
Unknown audience member (no mic):
[Illegible]
Swift:
One of the things we know—that’s extremely difficult to deal with—is the river morphology and its change and its characteristics and flow rates, erosional patterns, change in its horizontal locations—that are caused by detention ponds. Because you lack the peaks, you add peaks into the flood flows of the rivers—that’s just one element of some of the things that we’re going to address here, that we feel absolutely needs to be addressed.
One of the more important things, too, is that so many detention ponds are dug into our important public spaces: our little parks, our little playgrounds, and all these other areas within the community, that are completely becoming dysfunctional because of storm drainage. So we’re going to address that with respect to the civic uses of these spaces, too.
Chellman:
We can’t do all things for everything, but some of the principles—principles that relate to street design: drainage and whatnot, that adversely affect urbanism—that’s what we want to touch on. All of those aspects.
Joseph Readdy:
I’m curious in your types of streets related to the different classifications, if you are addressing who is responsible for the streets, who maintains them—the key area, it’s a little bit to me like the appliance and the plug issue, once again, because the people who maintain them are the ones who kind of “keep the character,” and the follow-up would be: what about updating? What happens when someone wants to widen streets? Is this report going to deal with that? And of course, we want to know when it’s going to be done, so we can use it!
Hall:
We have a phenomenon that’s called the “turnover.” And we run into it time and time again. At the edge or running through a new urbanist project, there is a state road. And the guys and gals in the district office of the DOT say, “If you want to do those kinds of things, we’ll do an overlay, we’ll get it in good shape, and we’ll turn it over to you.”
I talk to some people who are in the higher levels of, say, the Florida DOT, and they say, “There’s no reason that they have to say that.” They have the flexibility within AASHTO, they have the flexibility within their own design parameters, to actually continue to maintain a roadway that is very, very walkable and a very low-speed road. There’s no reason in the world why the Florida DOT, the Texas DOT, or Virginia or California, cannot maintain and operate a roadway that has a design speed of 20 miles per hour, and has lanes that are only 10 feet wide. What they’re trying to do is maximize the use of their funding dollars, and keep the maintenance costs down. And generally, you have a lot of nice vegetation along a walkable street. And they just don’t like the long-term costs. That’s one issue. Any other thoughts on this?
Chellman:
I’ve run into the maintenance question being addressed a number of ways. In some jurisdictions, they insist on public acceptance in operation of the streets; in others, they refuse public acceptance of a street that is anything less than 40 feet wide or whatever, and sort of a blend of the two, where the public agencies require the developer to establish a fund for the maintenance of features deemed important for that project.
I have two projects in New England, where the developers are looking at setting up management companies just to deal with all of the issues, because they don’t feel any private company can presently do it, the municipality refuses to do it, and they realize or believe—we’ll see if it’s true—that they’ll get a return on their investment by setting up this company to do this.
It’s not yet in there, it’s a good point; I think we need to add some text about it, but it’s a complicated tar baby.
Unknown speaker:
When will it be done?
Chellman:
As we said, we’re trying to have it completed by the end of the year. We hope to have a draft for a transportation summit in December.
Ellen Greenberg:
Oh, good segue! First, I think this is tremendous progress, so thank you for coming and showing this to us. It’s a huge step from where we were in Charleston.
I just have a quick comment about the two-lane street, because I think that Rick captured a lot of the attitude phenomenon on the part of the road-builders, but another part is that they think that if they build a two-lane street, they’re going to have to go in and widen it to four lanes five years later anyway, so this is just an efficiency, really, and we should all appreciate this.
So there’s something—it feeds right into questions about the overall network and the amount of connectivity and capacity in the network as a whole, and also feeds into the amount of commitment that we put into the planning, that says, “this is a two-lane street; that is its identity forever, and you’re going to let buildings be built close enough to the right of way so that you’re not going to be able to widen that street.” There is this sort of whole, I think, chain of planning and permissions and regulations that go along with establishing a two-lane street as a street that is going to remain that way over the long term. But they really think they’re doing us a big favor, just putting the four lanes in right now.
Chellman:
It’s because of the transportation land use disconnect. Really, it is.
Greenberg:
That’s one thing about the two-lane street. On the subject of the ownership and maintenance, I know a lot of you have already seen the CNU publication on state highways and main streets, but if you haven’t, you might want to have a look and get a copy. It addresses that issue to some extent.
And then, Rick just mentioned the transportation summit, so let me very briefly let everybody know that CNU is having a meeting for two days in December, in Oakland, Calif., to talk about transportation topics. Hopefully, we’re going to get together.
And now I have to explain the third thing. I’m very interested in talking with people who are here, who are interested in the topic of what the scope of that meeting should be. The idea is that these three guys, and others in the CNU who have been working on developing ideas and practices, come together, present their work, and really help develop it and advance it, in aid of both improving our own practices and having input that will move into this joint process that we’re involved in with the Institute of Transportation Engineers, which Rick Hall mentioned earlier.
So we have at the institutional level, this partnership that is just developing between CNU and ITE, and there is a joint meeting of people involved in that joint process, on December 9, which is why there are three days of transportation meeting festivities in the Bay Area, but the first meeting is with the ITE people and it’s for kind of a closed, negotiated group of participants—one from your side, one from our side, one from your side, one from our side—and then there are two days of this transportation meeting for CNU folks. So this work is going to get advanced into that process and kind of get presented, along with work that other members have done, who are working on addressing very similar issues with some other twists and other perspectives.
Dave Sargent:
I just had one tie-in—this sort of shows how inextricably linked land use planning and community and district planning are to transportation planning when you get into the block size conversation. It’s like, where do you quit?
In terms of your intersection spacing discussion, that’s what zaps us a lot of times, in trying to connect neighborhoods to what’s already there. You have the plan, it’s all working, and then you come up with these [unintelligible] with the maximum and minimum intersection space. Is that covered in some detail?
Chellman:
No, we haven’t yet specifically covered that. It’s a good point. What you’re facing is the concept of single spacing, single progression—
Sargent:
Yes. They’re always interested in minimums, and I’m more interested in maximums.
Chellman:
Right. Right. Well, we need to flesh out the area you’re talking about—the throughput of vehicles and where that becomes the overriding principle, versus it’s not an overriding principle, it’s a consideration.
Hall:
This takes us exactly back to the “arterial” term again, because the top of that reverse-curve diagram says, “Mobility for the automobiles must be maintained on the arterials.” So access management tries to make that diagram remain true, even though it fails many times because of the commercial access. We all know that when you time signals for a 35- to 45-mile-per-hour speed on the arterials, quarter-mile spacing of your signals is optimal. They can get progression going in both directions. And they love it. And we talk about a quarter-mile walk as our five-minute walk—you could actually use up your entire quarter-mile walk going to the nearest intersection to get across at the pedestrian phase, to get back to the mid-block where you were before! So it’s absolutely, totally unacceptable, and that’s another reason the arterials just have to go.
Peter Katz:
You might have covered this—I missed the first part of your presentation. The subject is bike lanes. This one’s an issue in my hometown of Alexandria, Va., where, as a citizen activist, I am beating my head against the wall. They are laying out a new street, “improving” Eisenhower Avenue, which runs right down the heart of a huge, new-growth area. I think it was Ian Lockwood, from Palm Beach, who was working with them initially, but somewhere along the line they looked at two alternatives: One had a bike lane running down the sidewalk—something they do in Denmark, apparently—and then the other proposal was to put a bike lane on the street, right next to where the cars park, so the bikes will all get doored. Eventually, what they ended up with was going with 11-foot lanes, having the bike lane, but not marking it as a bike lane. To my mind, that is something you absolutely NEVER do, which is create more capacity, ostensibly in the name of bicycle safety, but in fact, what you’re really doing is just upping the design speed, and no bicyclist in their right mind will go near the place.
So my question is, have you been in touch with the various—Bill Wilkerson, I think it is, with the Bicycle and Pedestrian group—and are you addressing these things?
Hall:
We’re going to address bicycle lanes. My personal practice is: If the design speed and the posted speed and the true speed that you can achieve based on enclosure and the other good things to manage the speed—if that’s all 25 (mph) or less, you need no bike lane. Because the bicyclists can survive in—the speed differential is the key safety factor—the differential in the vehicle and the bicycle and pedestrian speed. So you can survive in a bicycle at 25 or less. Thirty is the gray area. Thirty-five to 45—you need a bike lane. That’s why very few of our streets are going to be 45 and 35. So—
Unknown speaker (no mic):
[Unintelligible]
Hall:
Only if you have a roadway that is going to be posted and designed for 45, or even 40, would you want to add a bike lane adjacent to the edge of the roadway. When you have parked cars, the standards are that you have to have a wider bike lane, because of the door opening phenomenon. But again, we all know that if you have an eight-foot—and we’ve seen 10-foot parking bays, 10 feet wide—but if you have an eight-foot parking lane and you have a nine-foot bike lane, and then a 12-foot vehicle lane, you’ve got a 45- or 50-mile-per-hour street, because of the openness of the roadway.
Chellman:
Just quickly, Peter, if they’re not striping it and they’re providing the five extra feet of space that AASHTO talks about, that’s a total cop-out; it’s just increasing the vehicular lane.
Katz (no mic):
[Unintelligible] This is personal!
[Laughter]
Chellman (I think):
850.222.2227. [Unintelligible] phone numbers.
Bill Dennis:
Let’s take one more question, and then we can all retire to various bars and argue about it some more.
Kevin Klinkenberg:
How about two more questions? Mine will be quick. I’m glad Ellen mentioned that thing in December, with ITE. I’m wondering how much discussion, if any, you’ve had with the AASHTO folks or the ITE folks to date, and what those conversations have been like. Part of the reason I ask is because I think what you’re presenting here, really—and perhaps this is a way you can present this to them—is, this is sort of a last, best hope for the traffic engineering profession.
[Laughter]
It’s becoming so increasingly dismissed. One of the things that has fascinated me over the last couple of years especially is how the people who hire traffic engineers are more and more still hiring them, but just ignoring their recommendations completely. They just say, “Well, the engineers are always wrong.”
What you’re presenting is actually a new methodology that actually gives you [credibility in the eyes of] the rest of the world, so I’m wondering what, if any, conversations you’ve had.
Chellman:
I’ve been acting as liaison member for this group with Project for Public Spaces, and we’ve had one full-day meeting. They have very good ties to AASHTO, as some of you may or may not know. We’re trying to get our work incorporated into a PPS manual that they will be teaching to AASHTO and to state departments of transportation, with the idea being that each group taught must first agree to adopt the manual as an agency. It’s a big hope, but the preliminary discussions have been positive.
Unknown speaker (no mic):
[Unintelligible]
Swift:
One of the things, too, if I may mention—there are two things. One is that Rick Hall and I met with representatives from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration in Washington, while we were preparing the first draft. It was not only received exuberantly, but we received a call later on, a request to perhaps start a training program for them at FHWA, employing these techniques. So we’re getting some really, really excellent feedback.
But I’d also like to defer to the efforts at CNU and the excellent efforts of Ellen Greenberg and others within CNU administration, in trying to get together a correspondence and meetings with ITE and other major players within the community. We look forward to working with them in December.
Patrick Siegman:
One more? Great! I’ve been reading my bootleg copy of the draft you guys have been working on—probably not the latest one.
Swift:
Which he STOLE!
[Laughter]
Siegman:
And it’s wonderful—really some great work. Anything I can do to help, let me know. But a couple specific items came up. One is: In Charleston, Ray Gindroz talked about his urban assembly kit for rapidly developing the efforts of many professions into a really great Hope VI project, and talked about the street layer, the building layer, and so on. I think you can apply that to streets in the same way, in saying, “Okay, let’s create the transit layer,” and that lays on to certain streets in a community, and very rapidly, “Let’s create the bicycle layer,” and that overlays. You can start to see where—for example, what street is it that you want to have bicycles feel comfortable on, but you don’t really want the transit bus to be following the eight-year-old riding her bike at 13 miles per hour all the way down a mile-long street.
The other thing is: I think the best essays I ever read about the new urbanism initially, were the ones that compared and contrasted conventional suburban development and traditional neighborhood development, and what were the pieces of each, and why were they completely separate systems that both functioned in America. I think more of that in this manual would be helpful. Because what we can prove, in fact, is that in, say, Chico, Calif., there is Mangrove the arterial, which functions badly and is ugly, but it functions in the suburban mode; and the esplanade, which has 400-foot intersection spacing, has, in fact, less vehicle delay. We can prove both those things.
The last point was: I think “level of service” is such a bad concept that it should not be in the new urbanist language or literature. It is fundamentally an effort to say that all streets can be graded by A to F, and we can create a formula to do that. Right? And then we can go to city council and say, “This is A” and “This is F.” And that is failure. It’s just so bad that I think you just need to have “Desirable running speed is this. Desirable level of motor vehicle is this.” And just leave the “level of service” for the conventional suburban developers to use.
Chellman:
My first thought on that is I think we have to continue to use “level of service” and to show that a street that may have a vehicular level of service of E might be one of the most fantastic streets in your community, and in fact, it has an overall level of service of A. We’ll talk about it further—we’ve had very open discussions and some interesting debates—I’d like to see it stay in.
Swift:
One of the things about “level of service” is that it is so ingrained in the traffic parlance that I don’t know if we can get away from it. I think we’re just trying to morph it. But also, I remember back in Charleston, and talking to this layering, that you’re describing some of the best graphics I’ve seen was presented by Ray Gindroz. Just to reiterate what you’re saying, and if Ray’s around here and would volunteer to help us with some of that, we would just love him to death. Thanks.
Polyzoides (no mic):
Unintelligible.
Hall:
There are entire growth-management policies that are keyed on level of service. We’ll wrestle with it and get it done. Level of service is tough because of the complexity of the true urban environment, with all the modes and all the land use types.
One quick comment on the contrasting diagrams of suburban sprawl versus new urbanism, that you spoke of being—successfully—in the earlier documents. One of the principles that stood out very clearly to me—and I still remember it from planning courses that I took back at old Virginia Tech—that Charles Lindbloom had a theory he called the “Theory of Disjointed Incrementalism.” Disjointed incrementalism—he was trying to describe a public policy, decision-making process: the human nature of elected officials.
He said it has two parts: They move away from past ills, and they take very small steps when they do that. Now, we’re all trying to—in the traffic and transportation sense, and in the design sense—turn some ideas around. We’re after a new paradigm; we’re trying to get a change. And I think if we constantly focus on the ills that we’re trying to move away from—because that’s the human nature.
You might think, well, we should be positive and move toward some lofty goals. Well, you can do that all you want, but you’ll never get anybody’s attention. The mayor of the city council has to say, “Folks, we have a problem, and this is what we’re going to do about it: The first year we’re going to take this, and the second year we’re going to do that.”
I appreciate your reminding us of that guidance. We will try to contrast the old with the new, and our thought about the movement of the new urbanism overall is to clearly identify what we’re moving away from—to get to the objective of the “tipping point” for new urbanism.
Thank you very much.
[END OF TAPE] |
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