The abuse, misuse and absence of motor vehicle regulation and the problem of politics

It's been a bit over a week since Anita Kurmann was killed in a crash with a turning truck that then drove off without stopping. Few details are available but there are two things that we can be certain about: first that it is a terrible tragedy, and second that little to nothing will be done to prevent such tragedies in the future. There are possible alleviating measures that exist and could be required by proper regulation, including truck side-guards, or restrictions on the size, weight, number of axles, and length of trucks that are allowed on certain city streets. Our public street rights-of-way were laid out long before the concept of a 5-axle, 40 ton, 53-foot long truck was ever conceived. And it is difficult to imagine how a human-friendly environment could ever be compatible with such behemoths.

Although technically receiving more oversight than the personal car, the trucking industry is remarkably regulation-free compared to other transportation sectors. No other form of transportation allows size, weight and maneuverability concerns to be so radically dismissed in the same way. Air traffic control would never allow an oversized jumbo jet to land at a tiny airport. Railroad companies would never tolerate oversized freight cars that slammed into bridge abutments. Yet, for some reason, when it comes to the road, we simply shrug when oversized trucks cause death and destruction on a daily basis. It is curiously ironic that city planners have spent the past century meticulously separating people's homes away from industry, but still continue to design extremely dangerous, high-speed roads carrying heavy industrial truck traffic right next to those very same homes.

When it comes to regulation of motor vehicles, all the furor seems to focus around taxicabs vs Uber, where the regulations have no safety purpose, but are just one piece of a tug-of-war between the few dirty 1970s-style dirtbags who run the taxicab business and the slick B-school douchebags who run Uber. And when it's not about profits, it's about traffic speeds, because the only thing, besides money, that seems matter to people in power is convenience for suburban drivers. Such regulation has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with privileging the powerful. Meanwhile, some drivers manage to keep their license long enough to score four OUI offenses and kill someone. Or even when the police determine that a driver is an "immediate threat" the antiquated system cannot process the paperwork in time to prevent him from killing. Those are some real examples of problems that could be fixed with proper rules, procedures and regulations. I wonder if it will ever happen.

The trouble is, of course, that regulations are not created solely based upon merit in achieving objective goals such as safety. Regulations are a product of politics, a swirling morass of money, culture, personal vendettas, and tribalism. 149 people were killed by motor vehicle crashes in the first 6 months of this year. But no politician is going to be held accountable for that carnage. Few voters even spend much time thinking about it. So the perverse story doesn't change from year to year. I won't pretend to have an answer, but I will note that if the problem is politics, then the solution has to be too.

Comm Ave Phase 2A public meeting: Tuesday March 24th

March 24th, 6 p.m.

565 Commonwealth Ave (Kenmore Classroom Building)

Room 101

The city is holding their long-awaited Comm Ave Phase 2A public meeting on Tuesday. This deals with the segment of Comm Ave between Packard's Corner and the BU Bridge (non-inclusive). One of the biggest topics of contention has been whether or not the bike lanes would finally be fixed on Comm Ave to match the Boston Bike Network plan for having a protected bike lane on Comm Ave.

The status quo

Good news seems to be that they will be presenting some kind of protected bike lane option at the meeting, so that represents a major step forward for the city. The precise details remain to be seen.

Another one of the major problems on the street is the lack of a crosswalk at Alcorn Street and Naples Road. On one side is a densely populated residential area, on the other side is the neighborhood supermarket. Most people simply wait and cross the street over the tracks when clear. But, the engineers believe that people should be walking over 1,000 feet out of their way, traversing 6 extra traffic lanes and waiting through extra cycles of the traffic light, simply to get across the street. While carrying heavy bags. This is a clear case of a disconnect between the planning department -- who only see this street on paper -- and the people who live here.

Even in the heavy snowfall, people would still rather cross here than go around the long way.

(source)

So, while there has been a great deal of progress made on the design, compared to where it was 3 years ago, there is still some more to go.

Finally, I would like to mention that although the MBTA has finally put out a plan for much-needed station consolidation, it is not clear that they will be ready to go before the city starts the reconstruction project. That will put us in the absurd situation of rebuilding the street around the 4 old stations. Then, presumably, the MBTA will come along and cut those out, and rebuild 2 properly accessible stations, but at that point they will simply leave the old station locations as dead space. That's a terrible waste, and a lot of extra pain too -- as the time period of construction would be lengthened. It seems to make a lot more sense to simply get both projects done simultaneously, so that the new street doesn't have to waste space, and so that the station construction can proceed in parallel with the street reconstruction, in a fully integrated fashion.

Induced demand is a real problem and it makes congestion relief nearly impossible

For some reason, contrarian articles on "induced demand" seem to be the topic du jour. While they are right to point out that induced demand is a more subtle and nuanced concept than the way it is sometimes popularly handled, both articles seem to err too far in the other direction. Induced demand is a real problem, even if some people sometimes misuse it when making arguments.

Reliability, frequency, and speed

I want to take a quick detour to talk about goals in transportation investment. People tend to make decisions about transportation based on many factors, which I will boil down into three: reliability, frequency, and speed. Reliability encompasses factors such as predictability of trip time, probability of vehicle breakdown, and in general, the ability to make a confident statement about your location at a future time. Frequency is a metric of opportunity: the number of chances that will you have to undertake your trip in the window of time that you have available. And speed is the cost of the trip in time. To be sure, there is some crossover: frequency affects average speed and predictability, for instance. But let's roll with this for now.

There are two major categories: scheduled transportation and unscheduled transportation. Scheduled transportation is largely mass transit, whether public or private. Unscheduled transportation includes modes such as walking, biking and most driving. Frequency is obviously a huge deal for transit; there is also a frequency limitation on unscheduled transportation caused by things like traffic signals, but it is usually small enough to go without notice.

For many people, reliability is the most important characteristic. Walking and biking tend to have the most reliability because they are the least complex modes. Transit with a dedicated right-of-way is also supposed to be highly reliable: a properly run railroad should operate like clockwork (the MBTA on the other hand...). Modes such as driving are very susceptible to being caught in unpredictable and chaotic traffic congestion because they are highly inefficient in terms of space. Cars are also complex pieces of machinery that can easily break down. And mixed-traffic transit gets the worst of it because it has to contend with traffic congestion as well as passenger loading.

Speed should be broken down into average and top speed. Walking is obviously the slowest in average and top speed. Biking does not have high top speed (for most people) but can often maintain decent average speed comparable to a local city bus or a slow train. Transit can vary depending upon quality of right-of-way and maintenance. Driving is usually the mode with highest top speed but in typical traffic conditions can have significantly slower average speeds; possibly even slower than transit or biking.

The speed and reliability of walking is almost always independent of the number of people walking, except in the extreme cases (important as they are). Biking is also mostly able to enjoy that same feature. Transit in a dedicated right-of-way has the capability of operating reliably independent of the number of people attempting to ride it -- up to a point. Once the number of people reaches a certain "crush" capacity then dwell times can be impacted if the operator takes no further action. Finally, driving and mixed-traffic transit are most clearly the modes that are bothered the most by other vehicles on the road. As a driver, or as a mixed-traffic transit rider, the reliability and speed of your trip is highly dependent upon the decisions made by thousands of other people.

Perception and reality don't always match. For example, many people perceive to be in "more control" when driving. But in fact, they're highly dependent on the behavior of other people. Another: many transit riders don't perceive slowness because they are absorbed in some other activity such as reading or working; whereas drivers traveling at the same average speed might be seething and pounding the steering wheel in frustration. And of course: "There is a very strong element of psychology behind traffic patterns."

So, when considering a transportation investment, there are multiple ways to increase capacity. But they do not all have the same effect, even when viewed in such an abstract fashion.

Induced demand

Halloween just passed, so let's talk about candy. Prior to Halloween, there is a high, and one might say inelastic, demand for candy. Many people want to buy candy for Halloween, almost no matter what. This usually shows up in stores as an increase in both supply and prices. Luckily for kids (and the young at heart), supply of candy is relatively easy to increase.

Post-Halloween, the demand drops off. People remember why they don't binge on candy, or let their kids do so, all year. Excess supply is sold off as prices drop in response to the lower, much more elastic, demand. Then the market returns to normal, at least, until the next spike in demand.

Normally, I don't eat much candy. I try to avoid too much sugar for health and personal reasons. And I don't want to spend money on something like that. I could easily go for weeks and months without having a piece of candy. But if you put a bowl of chocolates in front of me, I'll probably take one sooner or later. The low price and ready supply has literally induced my demand. But not every type of candy will have this effect. I'm mostly not a fan of hard candy and will probably just ignore it. And perhaps I've generated economic activity by consuming a piece of chocolate, but I may also be ruining my diet and harming my health.

You probably guessed where I'm going with this. One major difference between candy and transportation is that the supply of the latter is much, much harder to increase. With transportation, very large, very expensive fixed investments are usually expected to accommodate all fluctuations in demand over time. Furthermore, in the United States, people generally do not expect the nominal monetary cost of everyday transportation to vary based on supply and demand, even though prices regularly change for commodities such as candy, food and other items. Instead, the cost fluctuation of everyday transportation is usually expressed as traffic congestion or overcrowding.

When a transportation investment is made, it can both increase the supply and possibly lower the overall cost of travel (either perceived or real) in that corridor. And the way that travel patterns change is hard to predict, despite many efforts.

Former Bostonian, and now Los Angeles transportation blogger VamonosLA writes:

In a large city, there’s almost always going to be trips that people want to make but don’t because of large travel times. This is especially true in large US cities, where we underprice road capacity to the point that new lanes are almost always quickly filled. We misinterpret the construction of the new lane as having caused the demand, but it was there all along.

This is true but is only part of the story. To be sure, some trips generated do represent increased economic activity. Other trips might represent less efficient usage of the now-cheaper resource. For example, you might make multiple trips where one would have sufficed in the past. Or, it might be due to drivers who were enticed into giving up existing car-pools, or who ditched transit. They might even have switched from walking or biking in cases where the distances were feasible (perhaps not in LA).

For a rather stark example, suppose you live in a neighborhood with sidewalks and you are able to walk for many trips. Suddenly, the DOT decides to "improve transportation" by taking away your sidewalks and replacing them with additional car travel lanes. Most people would then choose to stop walking and start driving everywhere. Nowadays it seems unimaginable that such a thing would happen, but it has in the past, and continues to a lesser extreme: oftentimes it is not that sidewalks are removed entirely, but rather, walking is made more unpleasant for the benefit of motor vehicle traffic.

An unknown contributor to the Transportationist named JW writes:

I hate the term “Induced Demand”. I hate the idea that induced demand is something bad; something to be avoided. 

[...] From the individual’s point of view, access provides opportunities to more jobs, more entertainment and social options, and more alternatives for consumption of goods and services. From a business’ point of view, access provides a larger pool of labor and more raw materials. From a retailer’s point of view, access provides a larger pool of consumers. From a municipal government’s point of view, access allows more efficient provision of police protection, fire protection and ambulance service by reducing the number of facilities necessary for a given response time. 

[...] Transportation improvements that provide greater access per unit of time lower transaction costs. Lower transaction cost lead to great efficiency in the economy and a higher standard of living.

Although JW is careful to couch it in terms of access, which is a good thing, this otherwise sounds like an argument that could be lifted straight out of a 1950s highway builder's manual: new highways lead to greater efficiency and higher standard of living! According to this logic, the congestion on the new highway facilities justifies the construction of even more highways. Clearly something is broken in this reasoning.

The mistake that JW is making is that not all transportation improvements are equal, and that there are more considerations than just raw "access per unit of time", which itself is a difficult thing to measure in practice. For one thing, the increase in access by one mode (say, private car) can lead to the degradation in access by another mode (such as walking, or emergency vehicles). For another, some modes lead to far more pollution and other bad side effects like poor urban planning decisions (e.g. minimum parking requirements, urban renewal, pro-sprawl zoning laws, etc).

Congestion relief

But I think that by far the biggest confusion stemming from the debate around induced demand comes because people are often talking about different things. When highway builders are trying to sell expansion, and when the general public is getting excited about it, they often refer to "congestion relief" as the major feature of the proposal. But what is "congestion relief?" Is congestion relief equivalent to the fact that more people can travel more miles by car? Is congestion relief the possibly increased economic activity and higher standard of living that JW talks about? Is congestion relief the fulfillment of "latent demand" as described by VamonosLA?

I would argue that congestion relief is none of those things in the popular understanding of the term. Instead, congestion relief is generally understood to be an increase in reliability of travel and a subjective decrease in the frustration that each individual has when using the transportation facility. Highway builders sell highway expansion to a public that is hungry for predictable travel times and less stress behind the wheel. However, that sort of congestion relief is largely a false hope, precisely because of the phenomenon that has come to be known as induced demand. It doesn't matter whether that comes from latent demand, or even that it might represent increased economic activity: if the typical driver still experiences large variance in travel times, and high levels of stress, then the congestion relief was a mirage as far as he or she is concerned.

Even the level of spending associated with projects like the Big Dig did not make it immune from this effect. From the Globe:

A Globe analysis of state highway data documents what many motorists have come to realize since the new Central Artery tunnels were completed: While the Big Dig achieved its goal of freeing up highway traffic downtown, the bottlenecks were only pushed outward, as more drivers jockey for the limited space on the major commuting routes.

Ultimately, many motorists going to and from the suburbs at peak rush hours are spending more time stuck in traffic, not less. The phenomenon is a result of a surge in drivers crowding onto highways - an ironic byproduct of the Big Dig's success in clearing away downtown traffic jams.

[...] The findings also call into question the promises made when ground was broken in 1992. At the time, state officials said in a promotional mass mailing to the public that, when it was all done, "people will find the commute to their jobs faster and easier than ever."

The new tunnels may have been able to handle the flow coming into them, but those outer links themselves were not able to live up to the induced demand.

Conclusion

So what can be done about congestion, then? It has rightly been pointed out that transit improvement and biking facilities do not "reduce congestion" in this sense. Actually that point should be clarified further: those improvements do not "reduce congestion" when the travel demand is virtually inexhaustible. However, it is possible that in some cases demand is actually exhaustible: for example travel along Comm Ave in Allston, in which case those kinds of improvements can be very effective at real congestion relief. But for destinations such as downtown Boston, there will almost always be another driver willing to replace a trip that is mode-switched away from private vehicle.

All that does not make transit, walking and biking improvements worthless. Jarrett has discussed several reasons why transit is still very worthwhile even without "congestion reduction" and I won't reiterate, but I will add that dedicated-lane transit, walking and biking facilities all increase the supply of "reliable transportation" that boosts accessibility without the harmful side effects imposed by increased car travel. Walking and biking also have great implications for the health of urban neighborhoods and are worthwhile goals on their own.

The idea behind congestion relief is to try and make personal motor vehicles as reliable as walking, biking, or riding a well-run railroad. There are only two known ways to make that actually happen: (a) rigorous scheduling, or (b) decongestion pricing. Railroads avoid congestion and conflict by imposing very strict discipline and heavily analyzed schedules on the movement of trains. To try and apply that same discipline to private cars on roads is politically and practically unfeasible. Therefore that leaves decongestion pricing as the only known way to make private motor vehicle travel reliable, and it works by allowing the price of travel to vary based upon the supply and demand for travel. This is, of course, standard procedure for allocating just about every other resource in our society, but for some reason is completely ignored when it comes to roads. In any case, this article is about induced demand and I have already gone on too long, so I will leave discussion of pricing to others.

Boston's narrow streets are safest for walking and riding a bike: wide streets are the most dangerous.

A wide street, Brighton Ave: 80 feet wide. Chung-Wei Yang was killed by a bus here.

I was reading an interesting Globe article on winter biking the other day when I spotted a sentence that was clearly tossed in there without much thought:

But urban biking does present risks, especially in Boston with its narrow streets and aggressive drivers. In 2012, five cyclists were killed in accidents — though none in winter.

This false, lazy sentiment about Boston's streets is unfortunately somewhat widespread. In fact, Boston doesn't really have many narrow streets. But, the narrow streets that Boston does have are one of its greatest advantages over other American cities.

In general, narrow streets are safer. From that study in Colorado:

“The most significant causal relationships to injury and accident were found to be street width and street curvature,” according to the report. “The analysis illustrates that as street width widens, accidents per mile per year increases exponentially, and that the safest residential street width is 24 feet (measured from curb face).”

Even 24 feet is fairly wide (enough for two fast-moving traffic lanes), but that town did not have any smaller streets to study. Even without the research, it's easy to see that the main purpose of wide roads is to make it easier to drive faster -- and speed is the biggest danger to life and limb. One of the reasons New York City is having so many problems with street injury is because, other than a few, relatively small areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn, that city is cursed with extremely wide streets.

Huntington Ave (courtesy: Google): about 95 feet wide. Kelsey Rennebohm was killed by a bus here.

Boston is luckier in that it escaped the foolish 19th century fad for wide streets with much less damage. The oft-noted "cattle paths" (not really) of downtown Boston are not so problematic. There are some cases where arrogant city planners from the twentieth century actually tore down buildings and parks to widen streets, and that was unfortunate. But luckily we managed to save most of Beacon Hill and the North End from their depredations and those neighborhoods survive as examples of people-scaled streets. We are also lucky that when the Back Bay was built, the streets were not created as big as New York's -- although they are still quite a bit larger than they should be, and in some cases, quite dangerous.

Beacon St and Charlesgate West: at least 100 feet wide. Kanako Miura was killed by a dump truck here.

But Boston's narrow streets pretty much end after you leave the downtown area, Beacon Hill, and the North End. Outside of that scope, Boston has many wide streets, and many streets that are much wider than they ought to be. While many of the residential side streets are 24-30 feet wide, I still see many drivers using them as high speed cut-through routes. But the truly dangerous streets are the main ones, which around me range from 50 feet, to 80 feet, up to even 170 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk.

Comm Ave at St Paul St (courtesy: Google): about 110 feet wide. Chris Weigl was killed by a tractor trailer here.

This is where the perversity of the Globe article quote comes into play: all of the people who were killed while riding their bike in 2012 were killed on very wide streets. Yet, the author blames "narrow streets." With such misinformation flying around, is it any wonder when people don't know better? Wide streets continue to be designed and built, on the premise that they are safer, when nothing could be further from the truth! One time, I asked an architect about why he was creating a new street that was so wide, next to a park where children play. He told me: but that's how it is in the South End, where I live! He didn't stop to think that the South End's wide streets were a danger and a drawback to living there.

Here's some more data. BPD identified several intersections which had the most crashes involving a bicyclist in 2012:

From Cyclist Safety Report 2013: most problematic intersections

Here are the street widths:

• Beacon St at Massachusetts Ave: 50 feet
• Massachusetts Ave at Beacon St/Comm Ave: 60 feet
• Harvard Ave at Brighton Ave: 50 feet
• Brighton Ave at Harvard Ave: 80 feet
• Comm Ave at Harvard Ave: 160 feet
• Huntington Ave at Belvedere St: 95 feet
• Belvedere St at Huntington Ave: 60 feet
• Columbus Ave at Cedar St: 70 feet
• Cedar St at Columbus Ave: 26 feet

All of those streets are very wide except for Cedar St; a small side street that is one of the only ways to walk or bike between two densely populated residential sections of Roxbury, and requires crossing the very dangerous Columbus Ave between two very long blocks.

Columbus Ave (courtesy: Google): about 65 feet wide. A woman was struck and killed here on Christmas Eve.

I could keep going on and on, but I think I've made my point quite clear: wide streets are dangerous. Unfortunately, Boston has many wide streets, and it is very difficult to fix them once they are created. The best way to create safer streets is to build them narrower from the beginning. But in the rare cases where we have that opportunity, we are still building wide streets because people do not know or understand the danger. Engineers claim to try and anticipate future traffic growth, and they do not consider the costs of the wider streets at all. Fire marshals want wider streets and turning radii for their trucks, but they don't think about the people who will be killed or injured by those design choices. Architects like wide streets because it feeds their egos: they're always trying to build the next "grand Parisian boulevard" and, at least in the bad old days, they could care less about the human cost. Even the new planners, with their "complete streets", tend to favor wider streets: to squeeze more stuff onto. That is unfortunate. Complete streets should be seen as a way to reduce the danger of overly wide streets, not as an excuse to make the mistake of building wider streets from the start.

If we want streets to be safer in the future, what we really need is a program which encourages narrow, human-scaled streets, and also celebrates the narrow streets that we have inherited from the past.

The streets around the Public Garden

There is an upcoming public meeting to discuss the possibility of a two-way cycle track around the Public Garden. I encourage people to attend. The mess of one-way streets around the Public Garden (and around downtown Boston) makes it difficult for bike riders to get around safely. It's good that they are looking into fixing this. Perhaps it can integrate with Connect Historic Boston. But there's so much more to these streets than just cyclist safety, as important as that is.

As anyone who has lived, or visited, here knows, the streets around the Public Garden and the Common are some particularly nasty, wide, one way racetracks. It seems absurd: the Public Garden being one of the jewels of Boston with so much money and effort invested in it, yet it is surrounded by a sea of pavement. How did it get to be so screwed up?

Well, we've heard about the dirty 1970s and the damage wrought on this city by traffic engineers and leaders who seemed determined to gut every nice aspect of town and turn it into a giant highway/parking lot. But it goes further than that. From the Ninth Annual Report of the City Planning Board (1923):

Boston was one of the first cities in this country to adopt the expedient of one-way streets in order to lessen congestion and confusion.

It must be hilarious, to generations of lost drivers, that they thought these one-way streets would actually "lessen confusion." But what's sadder is that this attitude comes from a time when pedestrians were being driven from the streets, murdered in mass numbers (200,000 in the 1920s), and stripped of their traditional rights to the street as a public space. The elites wanted wider streets for their cars and trucks, even though the vast majority of citizens did not possess either. And the elites got what they wanted. The City Planning Board, which had been formed only a decade earlier, seems to have viewed its job as primarily being about identifying blocks for destruction with the goal of widening streets.

They even sliced off a piece of the Public Garden itself -- unthinkable today -- and claimed that there was "no opposition" from the public:

Unfortunately, the matter had progressed beyond the stage of a public hearing before coming to the attention of the Board, and there being no opposition from the public or from the Transit Commission to a taking in excess of its recommendation, a further strip of the Public Garden was taken, and Boylston Street widened between Church and Arlington streets to a width of 120 feet.

And that's where it remains today.

The proposed cycletrack is a better use of all this excessive street space than current conditions. But there's an even better solution: Two-way complete streets. There's simply no sense in having a high-speed one-way loop around the Public Garden. It's incredibly irresponsible on the part of BTD. This aggressive engineering of multi-lane one-way streets here, and in adjacent blocks, is ridiculous, reckless and unjust. Let's take a tour:

Boylston Street is 120' from Garden to building line. I've noticed that crossing at this intersection (~80') is difficult for seniors because BTD doesn't care enough about pedestrians to set the timing right.

Well at least there's a nice sidewalk. You can see how the street flares out though.

Arlington Street is about 50' curb-to-curb. That's wider than Memorial Drive.

This bit of devilish engineering has more in common with a highway ramp than a city street.

Westbound racetrack, but not so helpful for people trying to go east.

Just ridiculously wide. Beacon Street varies between 50' and 65' curb-to-curb along this stretch.

This section of Charles Street is 45' wide curb-to-curb and functions as a one-way speedway. What in the world for? It's supposed to be a shopping street. There's simply no sane reason for it to be one-way, with so many lanes.

The sidewalks are tiny, pitiful, and difficult for people with disabilities to navigate. Or just difficult for crowds, period. Wide streets, tiny sidewalks. This street is a disgrace.

Back to Beacon Street. Hey look, it's two-way, and the world didn't end. Too many lanes though. This is highway-thinking, not city thinking.

What "genius" thought a HIGHWAY between the Public Garden and the Common was a good idea? The roadway is 70' at this point. That's almost as wide as the nearby Mass Pike.

The fact that I can take these pictures indicates that this road is massively over capacity. It's like standing on a drag strip.

Tiny or impassable sidewalks, giant roadway. Yes you can walk through the parks, at least. But you can't ride there. And what kind of message does a 4-lane highway send about our city?

One rider braves the racetrack.

Just think about how much tax money gets sucked into maintaining this ridiculously wide monster road. It's anti-urban and it confuses drivers too. What a waste.

BTD probably thought putting a dinky little planter with some flowers in it is all that's needed to make everything better. Nothing that actually involves making the street safer or more human-oriented.

I guess the walk wouldn't have been complete without a large SUV running through the red light as I'm trying to take a picture.

The cycletrack idea is better than nothing, but it's a band-aide. The real problem is that our streets are still largely unchanged from the highway-crazed, anti-city transportation departments of past decades. What would really help everyone -- pedestrians, cyclists and drivers -- would be to discard all the ridiculous over-engineered intersections, and replace all the wide one-way streets with two-way streets that meet at simple, well-understood intersections. I also propose the following rules of thumb for city streets:

• First, ensure sufficient walking space. If you can't guarantee 10' sidewalks then consider a "shared, slow street" concept.
• If the street is wide enough for two lanes then it should be a two way street.
• If the street is wider than that then either widen sidewalks (for slow streets) or create bike lanes (for slightly faster streets).
• If it is even wider than that, then consider wider sidewalks, street parking, separated cycle tracks, buffered bike lanes, or bus lanes if there is a route.
• If the street is really wide, then implement the Complete Streets concept. But why is the street so wide? Perhaps it should be narrower.

There really isn't a place for more than one travel lane in each direction on most city streets. Perhaps the busiest, widest and most central streets could have more, assuming there doesn't need to be a bus lane there. Intersections should be kept as simple as possible. Traffic signals which attempt to be too clever just confuse people, and almost always wind up screwing over pedestrians. Fancy traffic engineering is not appropriate or necessary. The point of a city street is not to be a sewer or a conduit, but to be part of our shared inheritance, our public open space, a public way that is open to everyone for business or pleasure. Having streets around the Public Garden designed in a way that is more appropriate for the city may even obviate the need for cycle tracks, and make it safer for pedestrians and drivers as well.

Tiny signs

Lately, these street signs have been popping up on and near Commonwealth Avenue:

"Caution: High Bicycle & Pedestrian Activity Zone. 25 M.P.H."

It seems that this is the follow-up to this announcement: Mayor Menino and Boston University Launch Bike-Safety Initiative.

In a continuing five-year effort to improve safety and calm traffic along its 1.5 mile-long main campus straddling Commonwealth Avenue, Boston University today announced with the City of Boston a series of measures to further protect cyclists and pedestrians, encourage bike use, and promote awareness of cyclists and pedestrians among motor-vehicle drivers. They will include new signage, enhanced bike-lane markings, and highway reflectors in the pavement.

Sounds good. I appreciate the consideration. But I have to wonder: does posting these tiny signs really accomplish anything? Personally, I barely notice them when I'm walking past. I can't imagine anyone in a car stopping to squint at a sign like this. Some are a bit more visible, some are not so much.

"Share the Road"

And there's still legacy screw-ups like this:

"Turning Vehicles - Yield to Bike"

The glowing green arrow is at driver's eye-level. The yield sign is up and off to the side. Which do you think will get noticed? Fortunately, this is not a high-volume turn.

Going back to the 25 M.P.H. sign in the first picture: is this setting the legal limit? Or is it just a suggestion? It is an orange sign instead of the MUTCD standard design. I know that Commonwealth Avenue is signed for 30 M.P.H. elsewhere, which is the standard speed limit for these sorts of roads in Massachusetts (*).

It's not really clear how these signs are supposed to help. Judging by the speeds at which motorists fly down Comm Ave, I don't think they're noticing the signs either, or caring. Signs don't substitute for good design. Instead of merely telling motorists that this is a busy pedestrian area, the layout of the street should show it.



(*) Write to your legislators in support of H. 3129 to change the default speed limit to 25 M.P.H. in urbanized areas.

Sign of spring

The bike racks are back, and busy as ever, helping keep the sidewalk clear of piled up bikes. Perhaps they are also a sign of thawed relations with BTD, which has started acknowledging the existence of non-motorists finally, this past year. They are also supposed to install a pilot "parklet" on Harvard Ave soon, near the @Union Cafe, and paint "bike priority shared lane markings" on Brighton Ave to try and address some of the safety issues along that corridor.