The 12 Days of Safety Myths December 21, 2018 By Don Kostelec
“Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on givin’ the whole year!” – Cousin Eddie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
New pedestrian safety campaigns are like Clark finding out about that Jelly of the Month Club membership: You really expect something useful and change-inducing from your highway agency, then you find out all you’re getting is a jar of toe jam.
The tip for pedestrians to make eye contact might seem like common sense to someone like Fred Estrian. In reality, they reflect the Fred Flintstone era of thinking by DOTs about what actually happens when people try to cross. Streetsblog Denver said in response to one of Cousin Freddie’s videos, “It’s a shame you hate clichés so much, Fred, because you are one.”
The 12 Days of Safety Myths December 20, 2018 By Don Kostelec
The idea for the 12 Days of Safety Myths came to me a few weeks ago while I was riding my bike home along the Boise River Greenbelt. The goal was to debunk the common statements heard in the transportation world that serve to limit progress on safer infrastructure for walking and bicycling.
FHWA portrayed bicycles as a Stone Age contraption in this 1974 publication.
The 10th day is a potpourri of items illustrating how the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a misunderstood organization, by both transportation agencies that look up to them and the public who advocates for safer walking and bicycling investments.
Centralized Road Authorities & “Highways” The great irony in the active transportation world’s frustration with the Federal Highway Administration is that our active transportation forebears helped create it. James Longhurst’s book Bike Battles is a great publication that chronicles the history of the bicycling world’s efforts at transportation legitimacy stemming from their early organizing efforts in the 1800s.
Roads outside of cities were maintained primarily by farmers at that time. They got around to grading them when their work schedule or seasonal conditions permitted. The bicyclists who desired to escape the cities for recreational riding found a mishmash of conditions on these muddy, rutted rural routes.
In their push for paving of these rural routes along with pursuing rights to operate in the road, bicyclists were a leading group organized to advocate for centralized road authorities. These authorities would bring about more consistent conditions and construct “high ways,” or routes purposely engineered to sit higher than the surface level of the land, thus facilitating easy drainage, a weather-resistent surface, and movement of water to the sides of them.
Longhurst’s book notes that the “high way in English tradition was a road or path on which travelers were permitted free and unencumbered passage across property that was owned or controlled by others.”
Longhurst’s book, Bike Battles, chronicles the early days of bicycling’s advocacy efforts in the United States.
How many times have your heard someone say, “It’s a highway, not a bike way! Highways are for cars!” We’ve completely bastardized the definition of a highway over the years.
If we take the modern definition of a highway as being a traveled route purposely engineered to withstand a variety of weather conditions, and combine it with the traditional English definition, then we easily discern that any traveled way–a sidewalk, a greenway, a protected bike lane–is by definition a highway.
Federal Highway Administration Now that it’s clear that FHWA, by historical definition, is there to help promote safe movements on highways, let’s address how it’s misunderstood.
Just as AASHTO publishes “guidance” rather than “standards,” so does FHWA. It’s nearly impossible to find the words “shall” or “must” in FHWA’s published reports. The word “should” is prevalent across the wide spectrum of their transportation literature.
As we already know, it’s certainly not interpreted as being so flexible when it comes to transportation departments using FHWA’s publications and supported efforts to justify wider roads for cars at the expense of safety for people who walk and bike.
However, if you look closely, you’ll find ample support from FHWA for things like veering away from strictly applying the 85th percentile rule to set speed limits. They also provide a lot of documentation to support equitable treatment of people who walk and bike. They state that any sidewalk or bicycle project built with federal funds should be maintained during snowstorms and other weather to the same degree as the adjacent road. In all, FHWA isn’t the bad guy, here. We just have to learn how to use them to our advantage.
State-Level FHWA Offices Did you know FHWA has an office in each of the 50 states, as well as in DC and Puerto Rico? FHWA calls them “Federal-aid Division Offices.”
“These division offices provide front line Federal-aid program delivery assistance to partners and customers in highway transportation and safety services, including but not limited to, planning and research, preliminary engineering, technology transfer, right-of-way, bridge, highway safety, traffic operations, environment, civil rights, design construction and maintenance, engineering coordination, highway beautification, and administration.”
These Division Offices are a mixed bag, depending on how overt your state DOT is in ramrodding projects through the system. While I was in North Carolina I tried working through FHWA’s North Carolina office to prompt them to intervene when NCDOT’s was not complying with Americans with Disabilities Act requirements or not following their own policies for walking and bicycling infrastructure on federal aid projects. The response I got from one person in FHWA’s NC office was, “We are here to serve at the pleasure of the state DOT.” Gee, thanks.
That response told me that NC’s personnel were not really there to be of assistance to the people of the state; rather they considered NCDOT to be their only “partners and customers in highway transportation and safety services.”
It’s a little different in Idaho. The FHWA office here is responsive, isn’t afraid to intervene on projects, and will return your calls and emails. I sense in discussions with them that their role is still limited in terms of what they’re actually willing to do to enforce things, but I can respect that position given their other actions suggest they care enough to help out the citizens of Idaho.
I tell those two stories because your mileage may vary with FHWA state offices. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them if you have a concern on a project. Each office typically has someone with a decent working knowledge of active transportation. You’ll probably surprise them by knowing they actually exist, which can be a good thing for you since they are largely an unknown entity.
FHWA says so!Yes, they do! Now this post takes a turn you probably weren’t expecting. We had a term growing up in the south called “Bible thumpers.” These were people who liked reciting the Bible and thumped it while forcibly telling you what was in The Word. The joke was “They may thump their Bible, but it’s obvious they haven’t read it.” I refer to highway and traffic engineers as “FHWA thumpers.”
While FHWA is oftentimes used as a convenient excuse to deny better considerations for vulnerable road users, their actual publications suggest otherwise. I could write a book chapter on each of these topics (and soon will), but I’ll leave the rest of this post as a reference for you to help counter those who thump what FHWA publishes but never both to actually read it.
Vehicle Level of Service: “We have a constrained right of way and FHWA requires us to follow their level of service requirements to widen this road for cars. That’s whey we can’t accommodate your desire for bike lanes or buffered sidewalks.”
Baloney, says FHWA. In May 2016, FHWA issued this memorandum that says so:
“FHWA does not have regulations or policies that require specific minimum LOS values for projects on the National Highway System. The recommended values in the Green Book are regarded by FHWA as guidance only. Traffic forecasts are just one factor to consider when planning and designing projects.”
Quick, create a PDF of that memo before it’s taken off the site, which is something that appears to be happening with regularity under the current administration.
Snow Removal on Sidewalks and Bike Lanes: “Well, our local policies state that we don’t have to plow sidewalks or bike lanes. Shovel it yourself!”
While I don’t have a magic bullet for you for all sidewalks and bike lanes, I can turn you onto the glory of United States Code, specifically 23 U.S.C. §116 as well as the Code of Federal Regulations 28 CFR § 35.133 on accessibility.
FHWA defines maintenance, on page 8 of this document, as ” the preservation of the entire highway, including surface, shoulders, roadsides, structures, and such traffic-control devices as are necessary for safe and efficient utilization of the highway.”
They don’t single out vehicle travel lanes or motorists as the only road users subject to maintenance requirements in federal code.
“A public agency must maintain its walkways in an accessible condition for all pedestrians, including persons with disabilities, with only isolated or temporary interruptions in accessibility. Part of this maintenance obligation includes reasonable snow removal efforts. “
The same is true for bike lanes and shared used pathways that were subject to federal funding (certainly anything paid for with TAP). And don’t just take this as meaning it applies only if bike lanes or pathways were built with federal funds. In Boise, our local highway agency routinely uses federal funds on overlay projects that include bike lanes. Once that happens, it trips the requirement to keep the bike lanes in the same condition as the adjacent road when snow falls. FHWA says so!
85th Percentile Rule to Set Speed Limits: The traffic engineering establishment is kicking and screaming after the National Transportation Safety Board called out the 85th percentile rule, saying “there is not strong evidence that the 85th percentile speed within a given traffic flow equates to the speed with the lowest crash involvement rate for all road types” (page X of the Executive Summary) and citing research that called the 85th percentile rule “dated research” that “may not be valid under scrutiny” (page 24).
In its takedown of the 85th percentile rule, NTSB said:
“Alternative approaches and expert systems for setting speed limits are available, which incorporate factors such as crash history and the presence of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians” (page X of the Executive Summary).
In that publication, FHWA’s uses the term “expert systems” numerous times and identifies four methods for helping determine speed limits based on a variety of road and road users characteristics. Considering the needs of vulnerable road users is prevalent in the document, such as under the “Optimal Speed” method where FHWA states:
“It is recognized that individual drivers, in most instances, do not consider the risks imposed on others by their choice of driving speeds, or on the cumulative effects of their speed choice on the environment… This method of setting speed limits seems particularly useful in situations where pedestrians, cyclists, and motorized traffic share the road, and motorists may not be fully aware of the externalities of their speed on other road users—in particular, the harm borne by pedestrians and cyclists when struck by a motor vehicle moving at a rapid speed.”
Search that PDF for “pedestrian” and “cyclist” to see the many references and considerations FHWA gives for setting speed limits in consideration of those modes.
FHWA identifies a variety of ways to set speed limits, many of which incorporate the needs of people who walk and bike.
Protected Bike Lanes: You, at a public meeting, “Hey, I saw this great guide called NACTO and they have these protected bike lanes. They would make it possible for my entire family to ride to the park on this road project you’re proposing.”
Them, in response, “Oh, so sorry, the best we can give you is a murderstrip or sharrow. Protected bike lanes aren’t in AASHTO or MUTCD, FHWA say so.”
“While not directly referenced in the AASHTO Bike Guide, many of the treatments in the NACTO Guide are compatible with the AASHTO Bike Guide and demonstrate new and innovative solutions for the varied urban settings across the country…The vast majority of treatments illustrated in the NACTO Guide are either allowed or not precluded by the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD).”
The FHWA page on Bicycle Facilities and the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices offers more support for protected bike lanes. It states most NACTO elements as allowable under MUTCD and notes other “treatments that are not traffic control devices, so no MUTCD restriction on their use.” These include separated bikeways (protected bike lanes) and median/refuge islands for bikeway crossings.
Previous posts in the 12 Days of Safety Myths Series:
When we try to plug them into our communities, the results are the same as Clark’s: A massive build-up, great presentations, heightened expectations, drumroll, please…DRUMROLL…
The widening of US Highway 421 in Boone, North Carolina, was touted by NCDOT as a Complete Streets success story that “the project highlights an example of collaboration between stakeholders to support complete streets improvements.” It’s nothing more than a bike lane and sidewalk slapped alongside a deadly road.
Doink.
I’m tired of the false promises. I’m tired of being strung along by the engineering profession, telling us that whatever their latest wave of buzzword practices will be finally be the solution that leads to safer streets for all road users.
The buzzwords seem to evolve but the actual engineering of streets doesn’t. In my nearly 18 years in this profession I feel like we’ve been exposed to three major phases of false promises.
Context Sensitive Solutions This was the rage in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the heels of major federal transportation legislation in the early 1990s, FHWA published its Flexibility in Highway Design manual in 1997. It states on page 15, Considering Scale:
“People driving in a car see the world at a much different scale than people walking on the street… In many road designs, pedestrian needs were considered only after the needs of motorized vehicles. Not only does this make for unsafe conditions for pedestrians, it can also drastically change how a roadway corridor is used. Widening a roadway that once allowed pedestrian access to the two sides of the street can turn the roadway into a barrier and change the way pedestrians use the road and its edges.”
That was 21 years ago. They recognized the engineering process was predicated on first identifying and laying out the road for all the comfort needs of a motorist: Detailed vehicle level of service analysis, 85th percentile speed analysis, number of lanes, turning radii, etc. If a community was lucky enough to have sidewalks or bike lanes included, those features were last in line in the design process and simply slapped alongside the primary features for motorists. There was no integration of how the needs of people who walk or bike were influenced beyond the presence or absence of their own five-feet of space alongside the road.
Assessing the character or context of an area, both its human and natural environment, was identified as a key component to transportation engineering through that FHWA guide. It was meant to change the design paradigm and make the needs of not only active transportation users, but other facets of the environment, an input to the design and something that drove an authentic evaluation of the tradeoffs.
This spawned the Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) movement. In 2004, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials published A Guide for Achieving Flexibility in Highway Design in response to CSS and building upon FHWA’s initial flexibility guide.
The introduction of AASHTO’s flexibility guide states:
“Context sensitive solutions (CSS)…recognizes that a transportation facility, by the way it is integrated with the community, can have far-reaching impacts (positive and negative) beyond its traffic or transportation function.”
The AASHTO flexibility guide has some striking statements that contradict assertions you still commonly hear from traffic engineers and other transportation professionals:
Level of Service: AASHTO’s vehicle level of service measures “are for guidance only. Failure to achieve a level of service indicated in (AASHTO’s LOS table) does not constitute of a non-standard design decision.” (page 13)
Design Speed: “Given the historic equating of design speed with design quality, the notion of designing a high-quality, low speed road is counter-intuitive to some highway engineers…Context-sensitive solutions for the urban environment often involve creating a safe roadway environment in which the driver is encouraged by the roadway’s features and the surrounding area to operate a low speeds.” (page 19). Today we call that “target speed.”
Lane Widths: “In urban areas…narrower lane widths may be appropriate. Narrower lane widths lessen pedestrian crossing distances…and…also tend to encourage lower speeds…There is less direct evidence of a safety benefit associated with incrementally wider lanes in urban areas. It is noted that lane widths may vary from 10 to 12 ft for arterials.” (pages 64-65)
Liability: “In order to reduce exposure to losses due to liability claims, it is essential that the planning and design process be thoroughly documented. If a new or innovative solution is proposed, reference to where it has been applied, how it has performed, and how the circumstances are similar…would be good information to include in project reports…Note that this requirement is really no different from best current practices.” (page 107)
The AASHTO flexibility guide served as the foundation for what at the time was the most meaningful project of my career: The Ada County Highway District’s Transportation & Land Use Integration Plan. It was a $1 million effort I led in 2006 and 2007 with a goal of changing the way the agency conducted its business with regard to project design. If we tried it today, we would probably call it a Vision Zero plan.
We bought 40 copies of AASHTO’s flexibility guide to give to department managers, planners, and engineers. When it was clear the agency didn’t want to change its practices, I left the agency and the Boise region.
At my going away party, my boss, who was equally frustrated at the agency’s stubbornness, handed me a copy of the AASHTO flexibility guide and said to me, “Take this with you. I know the other copies won’t be used here.”
My well-used copy of the AASHTO flexibility guide was a going away present from my boss when I left ACHD. She said I should take it since it wasn’t going to get any use at the agency once I was gone.
Complete Streets Despite all the Context Sensitive Solutions guidance from FHWA and AASHTO clearly justifying safer design considerations for vulnerable road users, it didn’t really change anything. It was just another bucket of coal from Santa Claus, PE.
Enter the Complete Streets movement. As much as the FHWA and AASHTO flexibility guidance justified a change in perspective, it was realized that state and local agencies still had to adopt their own design and funding policies and that some agencies took federal guidance and proceed to adopt facets of it as more stringent local design standards or policies than the federal guidance suggested.
I departed Boise and moved back to my home state of North Carolina in early 2008 to take a job in private consulting. I knew at that time North Carolina’s DOT had a pretty good reputation for Context Sensitive Solutions.
At least that’s what I thought based on tens of thousands of dollars NCDOT spent sending their staff to give presentations about it at national conferences. They bragged about trained more than 1,500 of NCDOT’s designers and project decision-makers on CSS. I think it’s safe to say they spent more sending people to those conferences and training them than they spent implementing it.
It turns out that what NCDOT called a “policy” was really nothing more than a resolution, a declaration of the Board of Transportation. The “policy” contained no compulsory statement for NCDOT engineers to follow; no “shall” or “must” statements. It made no commitment to fund implementation of the policy.
I could write 10,000 words on the debacle of NCDOT’s Complete Streets policy. Streetsblog summed it up nicely after it reviewed a 2018 NCDOT report stating that nearly 10 years after its adoption, the application of Complete Streets within NCDOT was non-existent. The report states:
“…the policy is written more as an advisory document and does not include enforcement measures and language needed for implementation. A sentiment echoed in multiple external interviews was that Complete Streets elements are typically viewed as an enhancement, as opposed to a necessary component, of a project.” (page 8 of the PDF file)
The result in North Carolina since NCDOT passed its Complete Streets policy: Rates of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths have increased dramatically and NCDOT’s lack of implementation of its policy led to more than two, full five-year cycles of Statewide Transportation Improvement Program projects lacking safe engineering for vulnerable road users.
North Carolina’s story isn’t much different than what we are seeing in many other state and local agencies: So-called Complete Streets “policies” are mostly resolutions, not ordinances, that contain few if any compulsory clauses or dedication of funding.
Just another bucket of coal left under the tree.
Vision Zero I’m this/close to giving up on Vision Zero in the United States. I feel that way because the term has already been bastardized by the traffic safety offices of state DOTs.
Elected officials and the public are confused when you try to bring up what real Vision Zero means. They think it’s a traffic safety education campaign sprinkled with some focused law enforcement. They are socially engineered by state DOTs to think that way.
Road to Zero. Toward Zero Deaths. This is how national organizations like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and its partners have diluted Vision Zero before it ever had a chance to emerge. They still seem to insist that perfecting human behavior will get us to zero traffic deaths.
An Alaska DOT engineer, when I brought up the topic at a 2017 conference, challenged me when I said Vision Zero was a design-focused endeavor. He asserted it was based on education and enforcement. My response was this: “Engineering influences 100% of a road’s users 100% of the time. Education and enforcement may not reach any of a road’s users and those efforts, even when well-funded, are sporadic at best.”
The state DOT twitter handles for Zero-whatever-they-want-to-call-it reflect their lack of perspective. Explore them a little bit.
Those of you in San Francisco or New York City or Boston or Portland or Seattle may disagree. There are certainly some aspects of what those cities are doing that reflect a true safe systems approach to Vision Zero. They take engineering seriously on many accounts. I wish they were the national model and the national voice through AASHTO, NHTSA, and FHWA. My only real hope is the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). They are partnering with the Vision Zero Network and the speed management class they led at the Vision Zero Cities conference was outstanding.
The problem for the rest of the country is so many small- and medium-sized cities look to their state DOT for guidance, policy, and design standards. “They’re the experts, so let’s do what they do.” The smaller cities don’t have the budgets to develop their own methods for properly incorporating a Vision Zero approach to engineering. They take whatever the state DOT feeds them. Many even recruit state DOT lifers to come finish out their careers within a city transportation department.
I’ll reserve final judgment for a couple more years. For 18 years I’ve waited for the right DOT to flip the right switch to light the way.
Hurry it up, Clark. I’m freezing my baguettes off.
Previous Posts in the 12 Days of Safety Myths Series
