The 12 Days of Safety Myths
December 17, 2018
By Don Kostelec

“Just go to the nearest crosswalk.”

Seems simple enough, eh? Pedestrians, just go to the nearest crosswalk and cross there.

How many times have you heard that from a traffic safety campaign or a law enforcement agency? It’s as if they all have a NHTSA app to give them a pedestrian safety catch phrase of the day.

If you quiz highway agencies or law enforcement on it their response is usually “We’re just reminding people of the law.”

True. But these agencies never bother to look at the law in a historical context. They never examine how traffic engineers have designed roads to take advantage of their understanding of this law to promote greater dominance of motorists on the streets. They never account for the value of the pedestrian’s time despite spending millions on corridor studies to do value of time analyses for motorists. From my experience, most of the agency personnel spouting these messages really mean to go to the nearest signalized (or controlled) crosswalk.

One of my favorite TV news personalities is Stanley Roberts. He worked for a long time in San Francisco doing spots called “People Behaving Badly,” where he routinely chronicles motorists failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, especially unmarked ones. He recently moved to Phoenix where it appears he’s having a blast.

A December 13, 2018 piece by Roberts was posted on AZFamily.com. His lede is:

• “In Arizona, sometimes the nearest crosswalk can be a quarter mile away, which begs the question: Does the state or city really expect someone to walk a quarter mile or more just to legally cross the street?”

History
The prevailing laws on crosswalk use in the United States emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as motordom began its vicious public relations campaign to clear the way for automobiles to dominate the streets. They created campaigns using term “jaywalking” (a “jay” being a hick or a rube who didn’t know how to cross streets among an abundance of cars) and related laws as a way to publicly shame pedestrians for not crossing the streets the way they had done for centuries.

After all, there was a new kid on the block–the automobile–and they were determined to establish its dominance over the streets. They enlisted a new profession called “traffic engineers” to do part of the deed for them, all in the name of efficiency. This history of motordom taking control of the streets and relegated people who walk to second class road users is well-chronicled in Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic.

These efforts, which Norton headlined as “Organized Ridicule,” can be summed up what Norton summarizes from the Automobile Club of Southern California: It is not particularly difficult to sell pedestrian control to a population which is motor-minded.

The laws put in place to force pedestrians to make more orderly crossings of the street led to the definition of the crosswalk, which is generally defined as any street corner or intersection. Today, those crosswalks are either marked (include some type of striping across the road) or unmarked (an assumed crosswalk that exists at every intersection and across every leg at that intersection. By law, pedestrians have the same right-of-way in a marked and unmarked crosswalk.

Additional laws to regulate pedestrians at traffic signals became more prevalent as that technology was deployed. Cross only when your parallel vehicle movement has the green. Pedestrian-specific signals emerged much later and gave pedestrians the WALK, flashing DON’T WALK, and solid DON’T WALK signals we’re all familiar with today.

Putting it in 1930s Street Context
Let’s strip away from the overt campaigning by motordom for a second and consider what the command of “just go to the nearest crosswalk” meant when walking about cities of the 1920s and 1930s. In researching the onset of these laws where I live in Idaho, we found that cities were adopting pedestrian-related ordinances in this timeframe; the State of Idaho didn’t follow with state laws until the 1950s.

I located a map of the City of Boise from the early 1940s through the River Street Digital History Project, which would be from the approximate time the laws requiring pedestrians to cross at crosswalks were adopted.

In scanning the high resolution version I was seeking what the longest block length was in Boise at this time. It’s 600 feet long, near the intersection of Fairview Avenue and 22nd Street. There’s a hotel on the site today. If a pedestrian came out of a building at the mid-block it would mean a 300-foot walk in either direction to get to a crosswalk, or 85 seconds. Most blocks in Boise’s city limits at this time were 300 to 350 feet, meaning a 45-second walk from a mid-block location to the nearest corner. To me, those aren’t unreasonable expectations placed upon a person who is walking.

The street context at the time was also notably different than today. Vehicle speeds were not as high. In researching Utah law, I found that land use dictated speed limits in Utah’s Traffic Rules and Regulations, 1933. Essentially, no roadway had a speed limit above 25 mph within residential or business districts (almost an entire city, not counting industrial areas).

Speed limits based on land use! Imagine that.

Pulling it all together: Pedestrians didn’t have to walk that far to find a crosswalk to use in the cities of the 1930s. They weren’t exposed to high vehicle speeds like today. There weren’t as many travel lanes at the time since traffic volumes were low.

Today’s Street Context
Traffic engineers are guilty of taking advantage of these laws and driving the misguided message common to their own agency’s traffic safety campaigns. They clearly interpret “just go to the nearest crosswalk” to mean the nearest controlled crosswalk. They hate designing frequent controlled crossings for pedestrians because it might mess up the precious traffic flow that they’ve been seeking ever since the creation of their profession.

Just four miles west of that Fairview and 22nd Street intersection in Boise is a section of State Highway 44 (or Glenwood Avenue) that has a series of signs (image at right) intent on restricting pedestrians from crossing except at controlled intersections.

(Aside: I’m 100% certain the engineers at the Idaho Transportation Department who approved these signs don’t understand the definition of an unmarked crosswalk. There are two “public” streets that access Glenwood on the east side between the controlled intersections of Chinden Boulevard and Marigold. They are public streets managed by Ada County as part of their fairgrounds complex.) 

If a pedestrian dutifully followed the directions as dictated by the Idaho Transportation Department they would find there is a 3,700-foot gap between signalized intersections at Chinden Boulevard on the south and Marigold Avenue on the north. That’s 500 seconds of walking time (!!!!!!) for a pedestrian who comes out mid-block in this stretch hoping to cross the street.

If we accounted for pedestrian delay the same way agencies like ITD account for vehicle delay, the equivalent to forcing a pedestrian to the nearest controlled intersection in this situation is like forcing a motorist to drive five miles up the road to make a u-turn just to cross the street. Can you imagine the outcry if they exerted that much control over motorist access on a surface street? Yet, it’s perfectly acceptable for them to do this to pedestrians.

Pedestrians: Design Guidance is on Your Side! 
Here’s the dirty secret the traffic engineers don’t want you to know:

• AASHTO and the Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE) support pedestrians having more opportunities to cross a street.

The AASHTO Guide for the Planning, Design, and Operations of Pedestrian Facilities might be your greatest gift from Santa. Chapter 3 on Pedestrian Facility Design includes a section on “Marked Crosswalks” (page 81; emphasis added):

• “Assumptions–Assume that pedestrians want and need safe access to all destinations that are accessible to motorists…
• “Frequency–Pedestrian must be able to cross streets and highways at regular intervals. Unlike motor vehicles, pedestrians cannot be expected to go a quarter mile or more out of their way to take advantage of a controlled intersection.”

In the 6th Day of Safety Myths I covered the AASHTO Green Book and how it’s seen as the predominant guidance for engineers. The Green Book references the AASHTO Guide for the Planning, Design, and Operations of Pedestrian Facilities at least 30 times in its more than 1,000 pages. So, AASHTO clearly see this specific guidance document on pedestrians as valid guidance for those using the Green Book.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), a much more enlightened group of engineers than those who develop AASHTO guidance, take the need for more frequent pedestrian crossings a step beyond AASHTO. ITE’s Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach has the following language:

• “Pedestrian facilities should be spaced so block lengths in less dense areas (suburban or general urban) do not exceed 600 feet (preferably 200 to 400 feet) and relatively direct routes are available.” (page 32)
• “In the densest urban areas (urban centers and urban cores), block length should not exceed 400 feet (preferably 200 to 300 feet) to support higher densities and pedestrian activity.
• “Generally, however, consider providing a marked midblock crossing when protected intersection crossings are spaced greater than 400 feet or so that crosswalks are located no greater than 200 to 300 feet apart in high pedestrian volume locations, and meet the criteria below.” (page 153)

The Last Hurdle: MUTCD and Liability
There you have it! The two leading transportation engineering organizations in the United States support greater density in pedestrian crossings. What’s the problem with your local traffic engineers?

That’s where it gets sticky and slightly harder to overcome their stubbornness. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), unlike the AASHTO Green Book, has several elements that are truly deemed “standards,” or compulsory elements. The word “shall” is used in many instances in the MUTCD, including the section on signal warrants contained in Section 4C of MUTCD:

• “An engineering study of traffic conditions, pedestrian characteristics, and physical characteristics of the location shall be performed to determine whether installation of a traffic control signal is justified at a particular location.”

Section 4C.05 Warrant 4, Pedestrian Volume, includes “shall” statements related to pedestrian volumes.

While an engineer’s concerns over liability in approving such a crossing in the absence of these values is valid on the surface, they still have the flexibility of their own engineering judgment to approve crossings in the absence of these warrants being met. Part 1A of MUTCD states:

• “Thus, while this Manual provides Standards, Guidance, and Options for design and applications of traffic control devices, this Manual should not be considered a substitute for engineering judgment. Engineering judgment should be exercised in the selection and application of traffic control devices, as well as in the location and design of roads and streets that the devices complement.”

In my work with engineers who have a modern perspective, they tend to take their duty of engineering judgment seriously. They don’t flippantly approve more frequent pedestrian crossings, but they do take into account factors such as land use, gaps between crossings, and presence of things like schools, parks, senior center, transit stops, and shopping areas.

It was drilled into my head as a young project designer who was managing engineering projects alongside a licensed engineer that we must document the times in which we used engineering judgment to deviate from the things like the “shall” statements of MUTCD. We were to put a memo in the project file explaining how we reached that decision and the engineer of record was to sign them.

This procedure is affirmed in in the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Legal Research Digest #63: EFFECT OF MUTCD ON TORT LIABILITY OF GOVERNMENT
TRANSPORTATION AGENCIES, specifically page 25: “MUTCD is not a substitute for engineering judgment.”

NCHRP’s Legal Research Digest #57 TORT LIABILITY DEFENSE PRACTICES FOR DESIGN FLEXIBILITY notes on page 13: “The MUTCD and other references are guidelines, not cookbooks.”

 

 

 

The 12 Days of Safety Myths
December 15, 2018
by Don Kostelec

Standard, /ˈstandərd/, noun:  a required or agreed level of quality or attainment.

Required level? Or agreed level? That’s a big difference in how we interpret what exactly a standard consists of in the street design realm.

“AASHTO standards” is a phrase used all the time when transportation agencies write their reports, produce their public meeting materials, and ultimately use the term “standards” as a way to deny safer engineering for people who walk and bike.

AASHTO–the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials–is essentially the national organization of state DOTs. All 50 state DOT executive directors serve on AASHTO’s Board of Directors. AASHTO is funded by them. State DOT engineers serve on many AASHTO committees and develop AASHTO design standards guidance.

AASHTO produces many engineering publications, most notably their “Green Book.” The Green Book’s formal title is A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets. AASHTO, whose Board of Directors is comprised of all of the directors of the 50 state DOTS, just published the 7th edition of its Green Book .

When you hear someone refer to “AASHTO standards,” they are most likely referring to the Green Book. To the layperson interacting with a transportation engineer the use of the term “standards” can be intimidating. Politicians with limited knowledge of transportation are even more reluctant to question something if an engineer says it’s a “standard.”

Nearly everyone, especially the engineers, use the definition of standard that aligns more with it being a “requirement” rather than an agreed to level of treatment. Pitching elements of the Green Book as a requirement allows engineers to deflect questions about their decisions. On the contrary, if they used the term “standard” to mean something mutually agreed upon, that would open up the design to a true community-based approach.

But the interesting part is this: Not even AASHTO refers to its Green Book as a standard. It’s guidance. The Preface of the Green Book’s 7th edition includes the following paragraph (emphasis added):

• “A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets provides geometric design guidance based on established practices that are supplemented by recent research. This document is intended as a comprehensive reference manual to assist in administrative, planning, and educational efforts pertaining to design formulation. This policy is not intended to be a prescriptive design manual that supersedes engineering judgment by the knowledgeable design professional.”

Guidance. Reference. Not intended to be prescriptive. Hmm. That’s not what your engineer told you, eh?

You should print that paragraph, laminate it, and put it in your wallet to carry to project meetings for the inevitable moment when the engineers act as if their understanding of the  Green Book is that it is some sacred text.

The Preface also states:

• “Designers should recognize the joint use of transportation corridors by motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit, and freight vehicles. Designers are encouraged to consider not only vehicle movement, but also movement of people, distribution of goods, and provision of essential services.”

Shall we? We must! 
If something was a true “standard” the sense that it is required it would stand to reason that a publication like the Green Book would contain many sections that use the word “shall” or  “must.” Those two terms are traditionally viewed as making an action compulsory. “Shall” is the word normally used in transportation policy to denote a mandatory element.

The PDF file of the Green Book is 1,048 pages long. Below are the results of a search for the word “shall” in that PDF. It doesn’t appear among the 1,048 pages.

The word “must” is, however, used in the Green Book. Section 1.8 is about Design Flexibility. It states:

• “The word ‘must’ is used in this policy only when specific design criteria or practices are a legal requirement…For example, ‘must’ is used to describe practices related to the development of pedestrian facilities that are accessible to an useable by individuals with disabilities.”
  

  More Green Book gold from our friends at Kentucky’s DOT.

It gets better.

That same paragraph goes on to say:

• “(T)he design criteria presented in this policy are not fixed requirements, but rather are guidelines that provide a starting point for the exercise of design flexibility.”

Laminate that, too!

The fact is the design parameters where active transportation interests tend to ask for flexibility are those where the AASHTO Green Book provides a set of ranges for design dimensions. Frankly, it’s not all that technical when you start to read through it.

For example, Section 7.3.3.2 addresses Lane Widths on Urban Arterials (page 601 of the 1,048-page PDF file, if you’re keeping score at home). A common request from active transportation interests is travel lanes narrower than 14-feet or 12-feet wide in order to provide room for bicycle lanes or sidewalks within a constrained right of way footprint. How many times have you had that request refused. Here’s what The Green Book says:

• “Lane widths on through-travel lanes may vary from 10 to 12 ft. Lane widths of 10 ft may be used in more constrained areas where truck and bus volumes are relatively low and speeds are less than 35 mph. Lane widths of 11 ft are used quite extensively for urban arterial street designs. The 12-ft lane widths are desirable, where practical, on high-speed, free-flowing, principal arterials.”

Nothing, NOTHING, about that is as prescriptive as some engineers will try to tell you when denying your request for narrower lanes.

Dear AASHTO: Make it free! Make it public!
Want a PDF copy of the Green Book? It’ll cost you $310. A paperback is $388.

AASHTO’s other publications and costs are:

• Guide for the Planning, Design and Operation of of Pedestrian Facilities (2004): $115 PDF, $143 paperback.
• Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities (2012): $162 PDF, $203 paperback.
• A Guide for Achieving Flexibility in Highway Design (2004): $27 PDF, $34.

It’s understandable that costs for printing a book would merit charging for it. But with PDFs there’s no reason these publicly-funded documents should be kept under lock and key. My PDF version of The Green Book is password protected and I must use my AASHTO login to access it.

Your local transportation department probably has copies of it. They might let you borrow it. If you’re part of an advocacy organization, try a fundraiser to purchase copies of these guide books. You’ll put them to good use and the engineers hate nothing more than when you come to a meeting with a hard copy of one of these guides.

Another approach is checking your library to see if it has a copy of the Green Book or any other publications. If not, suggest they get copies for their reference library. You may have to make photocopies of it to take to meetings, but it would be a cheaper way to make it accessible.

After all, the development of the AASHTO Green Book is paid for by your tax dollars. AASHTO is floated by state DOTs and the United States Department of Transportation. State DOTs are the AASHTO biggest customer, contracting with them to do training and bridge safety work.

The bulk of AASHTO’s revenue ($62 million of $74 million in total revenue) comes from what their audit report calls “Technical service fees and product revenue.” That has to be derived largely from state DOT contracting for their efforts. AASHTO reported $3.5 million in publication sales revenue. Membership dues netted them $2.7 million.

AASHTO’s 2017 Audited Fianancial Statement shows they received more than $9 million from USDOT that year, including nearly $1 million in federal funds for general AASHTO “Operations Support Activity.”

Another interesting find is AASHTO’s 2013 Tax Form 990, which revealed that their Executive Director had a salary of $332,000 for working only 37 hours a week that year. AASHTO’s Director of Policy and Director of Intermodal Activities each made more than $200,000. Their Director of Publications made $144,000. Five other AASHTO staff members made more than $150,000 in salary in 2013.

(Side note: AASHTO’s Audited Financial Statment from June 2017 revealed what’s called a “Control Deficiency.” According to the accounting firm that did the audit, AASHTO has a “lack of knowledge regarding the new requirements” for reporting the scheduled expenditure of federal funds. The report notes AASHTO failed to meet federal reporting requirements. They failed to meet deadlines for quarterly reports on expenditure of federal funds. LOL. You’d think an agency run by other agencies that manage billions of dollars in federal funds would know how to report on the use of federal funds.  And, yes, I’m the nerd who reads Audited Financial Statements of highway agencies! Back to the Green Book…) 

Below are two pages from The Green Book. They list the individual state DOT representatives who contributed to development of this guidance. 

The 12 Days of Safety Myths
December 14, 2018
by Don Kostelec

Walk Farce called it the ultimate “go home, traffic engineers, you’re drunk!” study and survey. It’s a research project funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) called “Guide for Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety at Alternative Intersections and Interchanges (A.I.I.).”

“Alternative intersections” is putting it nicely for engineers who are sipping a little too much spiked eggnog these days. Here’s a more detailed description of this ongoing research:

• “New alternative intersection and interchange designs – including Diverging Diamond Interchanges (DDI), Displaced Left-Turn (DLT) or Continuous Flow Intersections (CFI), Restricted Crossing U-Turn (RCUT) intersections, Median U-Turn (MUT) intersections, Quadrant Roadway (QR) intersections – are being built in the United States. (P)edestrian paths and bicycle facilities may cross through islands or take different routes than expected. These new designs are likely to require additional information for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians as well as better accommodations for pedestrians and bicyclists, including pedestrians with disabilities.”

Search YouTube for any of those intersection types an you’re likely to find a treasure trove of DOT porn explaining the virtues of these intersections for maximize traffic flow. All of these designs require navigation by pedestrians (and bicyclists in some situations) in what traffic engineers call “stages”. A two-stage crossing, for example, is something we’re all familiar width. It’s essentially a median or refuge island at a street crossing. Crossing to the next island is a stage.

I don’t dispute the safety benefit that refuge islands provide, especially at mid-block crossings containing Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons or Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons (formerly HAWK signals).  Allowing a pedestrian to navigate a mid-block crossing in two stages allow them to negotiate each direction of traffic separately and the traffic controls are exclusively regulated by the pedestrian.

The problem comes into play at traditional signalized intersections where the introduction of two-stage, three-stage and four-stage crossings have become commonplace. Be aware at a public meeting when a traffic engineers starts spouting the virtues of requiring pedestrians to do multi-stage crossing. It’s like the Wise Man who was carrying the myrrh: “Oh…gee…thanks. Can you find out where the other dude got the gold and bring me some of that?”

While islands do break the visual field of the intersection and allow pedestrians to navigate across one vehicular traffic movement at time, traffic engineers routinely use them to increase pedestrian delay, especially for disabled people, older adults, and young children that have walk speeds slower than the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) minimum rate of 3.5 feet per second that is used to time pedestrian signals.

The Federal Highway Administration, in its guidance for signalized intersections, chose some interesting language to admit that two-stage crossings discriminate against those who cross at a slower pace.

• “Potential Benefits: Medians of moderate width can allow pedestrians to cross in one or two stages, depending on ability.” (Marxist much?)

The schematic drawing shows “Separate pedestrian phases,” which means they likely don’t want to give a lot of green signal time to the parallel street crossing (typically called the minor street), so they don’t give pedestrians enough time to cross in one signal phase. This maximizes vehicle throughput for the “major street” (the four-lane road in this drawing).

“Hey, granny, you don’t walk fast enough to meet our goals for vehicle throughput, so we’ll stick you in the middle for another 3 minutes. Deal with it.” That’s when she got run over by the reindeer.

This video shows a person feeling they must run across the intersection because the traffic engineers viewed the two-stage crossing as more of an opportunity to limit cycle lengths for side street than to provide refuge for people. I captured it in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, along a highway managed by Iowa DOT.

Behold, the 5-Stage Crossing!
That brings us to the spiked eggnog part of this. The NCHRP study is looking at intersection concepts that make two-stage crossings look like a piece of fruitcake. Take three minutes to watch this video and you’ll understand. Hit the sauce while you’re at it.

This shows how the traffic engineering profession has reached a new level of absurdity. Much of the language in the actual survey (link now dead) framed five-stage crossings as some type of virtue for people who walk. A five-stage crossing is just an antiseptic for engineers to tell pedestrians “Prepare to wait even longer at our already-absurd intersections.”

If we are at a point where 5-stage crossings are consider an option, then that means we need to start to show DOTs they must move toward over/underpasses that provide the ultimate protection while not creating excessive delay (Las Vegas Boulevard-style pedestrian overpasses or some Dutch-style treatments). I’m normally opposed to pedestrian overpasses, but the reason those along Las Vegas Boulevard aren’t as punitive to pedestrian crossing distance and time compared to traditional pedestrian overpasses is they have escalators, stairs, and elevators, rather than a maze of ramps. The result is the time for pedestrians to cross is minimized and may actually be shorter than them having to wait through a traditional traffic signal cycle.

If they can spend the massive amounts of money to build these intersections, then spending a bit more so pedestrians and bicyclists don’t have to navigate a car-centric hellscape seems within reason if the engineers studying and designing these truly care about safety.

The engineers look at safety at these intersection through the lens of reducing conflict points between motorists and pedestrians. That’s definitely a valid point when compared to a conventional 7-lane by 7-lane intersection.

Pedestrian Level of Service and Value of Time
The problem is they fail to consider the value of a pedestrian’s time. Which is funny, because they love to talk about how many seconds they shave off a commute and use that compute a “value of time saved” dollar figure to woo elected officials and the public into spending billions on these crazy designs.

In failing to consider a pedestrian’s time, they’ve also failed to consider FHWA’s own published guidance related to pedestrian delay and safety.

If you’ve ever been involved in public meetings or on steering committees with traffic engineers you’ll hear merrily caroling about vehicle level of service. Use the phrase “pedestrian level of service” with your local traffic engineer and you’re likely to get a confused puppy dog head tilt.

The same folks at FHWA who developed the guidance for vehicle level of service also have a series of guidelines for pedestrian and bicyclist level of service. The module to run pedestrian or bicyclist level of service is in the exact same software packages they use to run vehicle level of service analysis.

For purposes of multi-stage pedestrian crossings FHWA looks at pedestrian level of service through the lens of average delay experienced by a pedestrian when waiting to cross. They cite research that found that “safety–motivated pedestrian control signals at signalized intersections may actually reduce safety by encouraging noncompliance to avoid the ‘largely unnecessary delay imposed’ on pedestrians.”

The table below shows different levels of service based on average pedestrian delay at the intersection. Average delay means the average time it takes a pedestrian to get a walk signal once arriving at the intersection. The right column is important as the studies found that longer pedestrian wait times, especially those longer than 40 seconds, leads to high or very high pedestrian noncompliance. This means pedestrians may ignore the WALK signal, or may attempt to shoot a gap in traffic, or may choose to cross elsewhere along the corridor but not at an intersection. Think about how many times you’ve waited more than two or three minutes to cross an intersection. That means the engineers forced pedestrian level of service “F” on you, a level of service “F” that many engineers would refer to as “failing” when vehicle traffic was measured through that same lens.

(Aside: One of my favorite lines in this pedestrian level of service section by FHWA is this one: “Indeed, despite the legal precedence of pedestrians over vehicles in the crosswalk, Virkler found that vehicles occasionally occupy a portion of the crosswalk during the pedestrian phase.” Thanks, Sherlock!)

Now think back to the five-stage crossing shown in that video. There’s a strong likelihood that, if implemented, the traffic signal cycle lengths will leave a pedestrian stranded in two or three of those islands to wait through another cycle length. Earlier in my career I looked more closely at one of these crossings of a Median U-turn (MUT) street in Chapel Hill, NC and found the average time to cross was more than three minutes, including nearly two minutes stranded in the median flanked by loud, high speed traffic.

I’ll reserve judgment on the research itself until it’s published. I know some of the people working on the project. They’re good people and solid researchers. I sent them a lengthy set of comments that are consistent with this post. We’ll see what happens.

My fear is they’re co-opted by the notion that since DOTs are already building these absurd intersections we need put as much lipstick on the pig as possible. Instead, let’s hit the reset button, truly account for pedestrian-related science on these matters, and realize once we reach this level of absurdity in intersection design we must fully separate pedestrians and bicyclists in meaningful ways.

Previous Posts in the 12 Days of Safety Myths Series:

On the 4th day of Safety Myths, my DOT gave to me…Shared responsibility!