We know a low speed street works fine from a safety standpoint. High speed roads work well too, because the people know better than to try to use them for walking or biking—most of the time we ban them entirely. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen. On the trip to the airport on Tuesday, John Ivan and I saw a jogger on a limited access highway. He was pretty far off the road and there wasn’t a lot in the way to keep us from seeing him—which means he was probably safe there too, though I wouldn’t recommend it.
A new paradigm: Choose Street or Road, not both.
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
—John Lydgate (later quoted by Abraham Lincoln)
Most of the problems we still have in roadway safety have to do with trying to be all things to all people. The drivers want to be able to get places fast. Businesses want drivers to see them and stop in. Planners want people to be walking and biking everywhere. When we try to accomplish all of these goals simultaneously in the same roadway, something is going to end up falling through the cracks.
The worst of these roads have been given the dubious moniker of “stroad”: a road/street hybrid that is the equivalent of the futon or the Ford Pinto. It’s not fast enough to get anyone anywhere and the clutter makes it shockingly unsafe for everyone.
If we want to have a network that is safe for all users, we need to be intentional about whether each block will operate as a street or a road and we need to be realistic about whether we can actually get it to operate that way. Far too often, we have already made that decision and don’t realize it.
An Uncomfortable Truth:
I’m going to say something that makes me uncomfortable:
Any road that operates with an 85th percentile speed between 23 mph and 34 mph is likely to be a problem.
Anything operating at 35 mph or more is not suitable for integrating non-motorized traffic into the travel stream.
The reason that statement makes me so uncomfortable is that these roads probably account for 80% of our surface streets. I want a ped/bike safe network that EVERYONE—even a squirrel prone, ADHD 7 year old boy—can use. Realistically, I see a lot of areas where that just isn’t going to be possible anytime soon.
The reason stroads are so unsafe is because of a mismatch in expectations. Drivers don’t expect to see anyone walking or biking. Pedestrians and cyclists see the facilities we’ve provided and assume (wrongly) that drivers are looking out for them. When no one is responsible, no one takes responsibility.
Fundamentally, this is a land use issue first.
Anticipating face to face interaction is the first prerequisite for drivers to behave safely. I can’t expect drivers to expect pedestrians and cyclists in places where they have no practical reason to be—and that’s the vast majority of our suburban world here in the US. In an area where residential subdivisions take up square miles and parking lots take up acres in every commercial parcel, walking isn’t going to be the norm.
As an equity issue, some will always walk, but our brains don’t see equity. They see probability—which puts the poor, disabled, and those unable to drive at a serious disadvantage. This is one of many ways it’s really expensive to be poor.
The good news is that Amazon has changed our land use patterns quite a bit. In order to be competitive, brick and mortar stores have to provide what Amazon cannot: goods that meet immediate needs, close enough for a quick trip, and a relational connection with the people you see there. Local grocery stores are now spaced at 2 miles on center and are a lot more intimate than they were 20 years ago—both in terms of space and in terms of relationships. When you’re never more than a mile from a local grocery store, it’s possible to shift those trips to biking. Add in the work trip shifts that have happened with COVID, and we’ve got a whole new world to work with.
During the era when the supercenters reigned, their typical catchment area was a 6 mile radius. Less than 1% of that catchment area was within a walkable range (0.5 squared divided by 6 squared=0.7%) and because they usually located them on major arterials, realistically, an even smaller percentage would ever walk there. Now that the range is much better, adding ped/bike facilities can actually give us real mode shift—if the facilities are safe and comfortable enough to use.
The hard choice that may have already been made for you: integrate or shelter.
Now that it’s possible for mode shift to be functional, we need to make decisions about whether each facility can be safe for integrating these users into the cross section or if we need to be intentional about protecting them from inattentive drivers by sheltering them. This is a choice that needs to be made on a block by block level because walking and biking happens at a very small scale.
The vision zero and complete streets movements have been pushing hard to make every street safe for walking or biking, but that is unrealistic. Many default design decisions mean you have already given away the farm on that score:
If your jurisdiction has invested in optimizing their signal system, they have chosen to prioritize throughput, which means prioritizing high speeds. Drivers are never going to be able to respond adequately to pedestrians. Once you get above about 20 mph, pedestrians only get seen about half the time. That’s not good odds.
As we saw a few weeks ago, if the corridor looks wider than about 60 feet, you’re not going to get drivers to voluntarily slow down below 30 mph. Congestion will get them to go slower temporarily, but the minute the signal turns green, they’re going right back up to those higher speeds—and they’re not looking at anything but the backside of the car in front of them, which means they’ll hit your cyclists.
If you’ve got more than one drive aisle of surface parking, you’re not going to get your visual width narrow enough or pedestrian counts high enough to get your speed down.
Same goes for most subdivision walls.
If you have more than 48’ of pavement width—that’s 4 lanes of pavement—you’re probably out of the game. Still too wide.
If your doorways don’t face directly out on the corridor, you’re probably not going to get drivers to expect anyone there.
Long block lengths usually mean there is no land use mix to work with.
You can still have pedestrians and cyclists on these corridors, but you’ll need to either provide some type of visible vertical impediment in the space between or shift them elsewhere—in other words, give them some shelter. That can mean a line of trees or poles: anything that puts some skin in the game for the drivers. Adding those vertical elements can slow the traffic speed, but more importantly, it gives pedestrians and cyclists the comfort to know that there’s something to keep the drivers at bay. If you’ve given them destinations worth the trip, they will come, but only when they feel safe enough.
If you’ve got a grid network, you’re golden because you’re likely to have a parallel street that you can design to accommodate low speeds. That’s why I keep saying:
If you have a dense roadway network, you can shift to functional multimodal travel within a decade.
Without it, you’re going to need to create a network for those slower modes before they can really become functional. We have yet to get genuinely creative on that score. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Many of the suburban retrofit projects do just that. They take old shopping malls and turn them into walkable downtowns. The parking gets distributed throughout or ends up in garages and the value per acre goes through the roof—besides providing your community with a much needed living room and a bit of housing to boot. Walk paths inside these projects are common and commonly safe. That may mean that it’s better to create mid-block crossings to connect these projects up, but that’s doable.
Suburban subdivision retrofits have yet to even be considered.
If you can’t tell, you’re going to start out with not very much integrated network on your major roadways. That’s ok because they’re ROADWAYS, not streets. We need more streets, but we can’t make a roadway a street just by saying so. It takes intentionality in terms of both the land use and the facilities. Slow, pedestrian safe travel doesn’t happen by accident and it won’t happen overnight. You have to plan for it. We didn’t get here in a day. We won’t get out of it that quickly either.
Stroad elimination
Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we can’t stop trying to eliminate stroads. If you have a facility that has an operating speed between 23 and 34 mph, you need to start thinking about whether it needs to be reconfigured to serve throughput or access. It’s not doing either well as it is. A balanced system will include both. There will be roads that can be dropped down to streets, but it will require both a tight land use mix and a tight cross section to make it successful. Those are rare as hens teeth in suburbs, but you can build them right from the start if you know how.
Next week,
I’m going to give you a tool to help think through the choice between a road or a street that will also help you decide what kinds of treatments you need to provide.