Stop, Drop and Roll

02 April 2008 | Alameda Community Development Forum, Transportation Commission | John Knox White

Should we encourage bad habits through street design?

So I’m not sure if you saw this article in the SF Chronicle “Traffic engineers stalled“ by Arrol Gellner a couple of weeks ago. Gellner is an architect from Emeryville (gasp!).

The two sentence synopsis (from the article itself:

It may not seem odd that traffic engineers should be preoccupied with cars. But the word “traffic,” it’s good to remember, doesn’t refer to automobiles by default - it refers to the movement of people and goods.

You’d never guess as much judging by contemporary usage, because the central and practically sole concern of traffic engineers across America has to do with moving cars around at the expense of all else.

This issue (generally) arose again at last Wednesday night’s Transportation Commission meeting, when an “information only” report was presented regarding the Fernside Bikeway project that is heading towards construction. The plan, an overall exciting one that will connect the Bay Farm Bike Bridge with a separated bike path to Lincoln Middle School, thus removing “safety” from the list of reasons kids don’t bike to middle school anymore.

What was pointed out at the meeting, by commissioner Schatmeier, was that the current designs do not accommodate users of the bike bridge who are not traveling to the school. Cyclists who are traveling south along Fernside Blvd, are expected to get off their bikes and use the crosswalk at San Jose to enter the bike bridge.

This isn’t much of a solution for bike commuters and riders who aren’t going to Lincoln Middle School and I can guarantee that it’s not what riders will do, no matter what the designers expect. It’s like expecting drivers to get out of their cars to push the pedestrian walk signal to get the light to change so that they can drive across the intersection. (this is the Mr. Bean tie-in if I’m being to obtuse in this early morning).

So the question about how this new pathway connects to the Aeolian Yacht Club entrance and Fernside came up (I’d post a link to the drawings, but they are not online or available). The answer is: “It doesn’t and we don’t want people to do that.”

Which brings us back to the Chronicle piece. The traffic engineers who designed this bike path, didn’t even look at the traffic patterns and usage of Southbound Fernside to see if there were changes that could be made at the yacht club entrance that would accommodate both club users arriving by car and cyclists approaching the bridge.

The assumption: “We have to accommodate queuing (engineering speak for cars waiting for a stop light) in two-lanes instead of one.” Why? The answer is “trust us, we’re experts.” Now actually the answer was quite that blunt, but in the end, staff didn’t even look to see how the traffic queues up at rush hour and whether or not the 2 lanes at that section are needed or even used. They relied on their training, which for decades has taught “build more” and “more is better.” And since we already had “more” there is no reason to look at minimizing “more” to what “what we actually need.”

So some people asked politely (it was an “information” item after all, no official action could be taken without breaking state open-government laws) that staff relook at this issue. Something that they will hopefully do.

At some point, we will need to ask ourselves the question, do we need to continue to build “more” in order to accommodate 30-60 minutes of daily congestion? Especially if the remaining 23-plus hours of the day, that increase in roadways will lead to higher traffic speeds in residential and retail areas, increased traffic volume, and more disconnected neighborhoods? Shouldn’t we be using our public spaces to benefit everyone at all times of the day?