In traffic you can save a life every day: your own. German journalist Siegfried Sommer in a 1960 short story "The Last Pedestrian".
The people of cities understand the symbolic, ceremonial, social and political roles of streets, not just those of movement and access. Allan B. Jacobs, Great Streets, 1993
I rubbed my eyes and perked my ears: There were four transportation planners, each responsible for traffic in a major North American city, San Francisco, Phoenix, Toronto and Philadelphia but there was nothing about signal optimization, added traffic lanes or new intersection layouts all trusted stock items of traditional traffic engineering. Without the panelist from Phoenix Arizona, who in passing mentioned new freeways and capacity increases, I would have wondered if I were at the right conference at all, so drastic was the departure from what had been the mantra of the high priests of transportation for most of a century.
Throwing out the cherished Level of Service
(LOS
) tool for the assessment of intersection performance when evaluating proposed development was one of those jaw dropping innovations reported by Ed Reiskin from San Francisco. This and "demand based parking pricing", another drastic departure from the typical litany that there can never be enough parking. To top it off, the planner from Toronto, Stephen Buckley, pointed out that increased density and development in the core city had actually coincided with decreased congestion. Wow! |
A street to sit on the stoops and watch
what is going on (Photo: ArchPlan) |
The most entertaining slaughter of sacred cows came from Rina Cutler, Deputy Mayor for Transportation and Utilities in Philadelphia, the current chair of the TRB Big Cities Committee. She wants to eliminate the term congestion altogether ("
too auto oriented") and replace it with a new mobility culture where people get safely where they want, no matter the mode. Ms. Cutler brought creative ad campaigns to Philly including posters that state: "thank you for not running pedestrians over". In a move that borders on spite, she installed speed sensors that trigger not the usual cameras clicking urban speeders but make red lights at the next intersection turn red forcing the offending driver not only to slow down but come to a complete stop. Not surprisingly, she measures her success by how many "irate phone calls" she gets. She provoked the assembled expert audience with the assessment that the advocacy community is ahead of the professional one. Even the speaker from Phoenix, arguably one of America's auto-centric sprawl queen cities, talked mostly about transit, complete streets and greening the highway.
TRB brings together thousands of transportation folks and there were over 3000 individual sessions. But this one session about congestion revealed that we are at the dawn of a new age of transportation planning.
The problem is well known, the solution less so.