ECR speed, priority, and public safety

ECR- El Camino Real is this biggest arterial that runs north south through San Mateo County. It has most of the pedestrian, bike, and auto collisions. The state Office of Traffic Safety says speed is the major problem in the corridor. ECR is posted at 35 mph. If you drive 35 the lights are not quite synced- so you tend to get caught by almost all the lights. However is you speed about 20% over the limit you tend to make most of the lights. The incentive is to speed. Sharing a public right of way so that its safe, healthy, accessible, and pleasant is just not convenient or efficient- at least how our economy and the life style we have come to accept defines these terms. Because for peds and bikes the opposite is the case- all the treatments to accommodate them with the speeding cars such as count down timers and lit crosswalks along with the near 40 mph synced corridor lights result in danger, inconvenience, and inefficiency. These are the problems identified by Brian Appleyard in getting to livable streets.

Pedestrians and cars are not compatible

The physics is all wrong for pedestrians and cars to interface. Pedestrians travel at two miles per hour. Cars have evolved to be unable to travel under 25 miles per hour. In California it's not legal to post a lower speed limit. The average car easily gets up to 30 mph. Police in turn have given up monitoring and enforcing signage such as "25mph limit when children present".

Policy makers in turn have followed the police to Starbucks. Planning for example has expanded the city to its most remote environs... despite bankrupting the city to supply services. Transit service has collapsed and gone to the County; which today can't provde transit in even its most heavily used corridor. Cars don't need transit; so it makes sense that this particular service would suffer long term declines in revenue.

But Police and Fire today are also moving to the county despite the larger budget deficits at the county level. The idea is that the economics of scale can be supplied to the management. However the size of the car-accessed-city-operations-base increases the cost to the general fund by the square of the radius.

Such issues are not staples of pedestrian cities. For example the walking postman both exemplifies the city limit and maintains a sustainable service budget. Minor changes like electric trucks which we had in the eighties and nineties and todays little gasoline post trucks continue to bankrupt the service to the detriment of public health.

Job creation, health, and the economy not war and decline.

The administration is Flogging the same "cost" dead horse despite the evidence of GM. If the American auto industry won't let them see that they are protecting dinosaurs instead of the economy what will? EPA rules need to be tightened now 
so that new technology can enter the market and invigorate business. Otherwise we will CONTINUE TO have war and decline.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703493504576007622632878748.html

The Obama administration is delaying a decision on whether to tighten limits on ground-level ozone, the third time in less than a year that it has put off the potentially costly environmental rule in the face of congressional and industry pressure

And this San Joaquin County ruling early this week shows that, in addition to Jerry Brown leaving AG being a loss, these rules still take decades and lives in the millions before being enacted in very piecemeal fashion.. 
  
This ruling also shows why federal standards need to be tightened. They should be set to equivalent DALY deaths with crashes instead of the present 3X. Another problem is that the CARB July 2007 regulations on off road Diesel doesn't become fully realized till 2020. And rail, port, agriculture, and fleets in compliance. And we  know from who killed the electric car that this period can bring about inequitable change from rule reversals or delays.

I don't like the idea of the developer paying in lieu fees. For one the mitigation measurers have not been shown to be effective for operational emissions (even though this wasn't in the challenge.) What kind of a solution is it when a community group must bring suit to made the site perform for local health needs decades later? We need to be vigilant of the Air Districts shenanigans with hydrogen buses, bike sharing, etc. The standard, not the subsidy, should force the technology. Let technologies compete for success in the market. There are many clean "technologies" of yesteryear like walking, bicycling, and slower speeds enabling neighborhood electric vehicles on the same network pattern as successful transit that work today.   

Spending costly millions going nowhere without complete systems.

Cities know they have a problem- high energy users like drivers are enabled by the city with roads, parking, and faster streets. Then they make life impossible for other users like children, elderly, parents with strollers, park goers and downtown shoppers. The air and water become toxic. Drivers and the driven in turn get obese and/or develop diseases of fast mobility: depression, early onset of Parkinsons, memory failure, heart, lung, diabetes, etc; as the organs that are sustained by walking, collapse. Worse drivers behave like cholesterol, clogging their own systems, until congestion brings society to a halt. The policy response of congestion management progressively requires millions and can never solve the problem its staffed to maintain!

The congestion management solution is to provide choices by accommodating other users if the street like cyclists, walkers, etc: people who don't cost the city or state or trash the planet need to be provided with some form of  equal access with high energy users. Cities thus "spend a fortune planning "pedestrian friendly," "multimodal," "alternative transportation" strategies to reduce traffic congestion in the urban core"  to provide alternatives to driving.

But without complete systems, primarily because of costs, the alternative options remain dangerous, unused, hostile, and unpleasant. Quoting from the same opinion article: "But in reality, the downtown remains rather unfriendly to cyclists. For example:

There are no bike lanes on important sections of Ringling Boulevard or Osprey Avenue south of Main Street. On Orange Avenue, the bike lane is intermittent at best.

Bikes are not allowed on crowded sections of Main Street sidewalks. This makes sense, but it forces cyclists to thread their way through rows of cars backing out of angled parking spaces. That's not safe.

Overgrown landscaping, buildings too near the street and other obstacles block cyclists' sight lines. Countless driveways and intersections create additional conflict points and crash opportunities.

City officials say they'd like to fix these problems but don't have the money."

Other problems-
Bike lanes are in the door zones of parked automobiles create an unpleasant interaction with automobile access. In Oakland Eric Fitzpatrick was killed when a door was opened into his path. The cyclist was knocked into traffic and was run over by a bus he had just dismounted from. The news didn't know if the driver was charged! Increasing costs the bus driver was placed on paid administrative leave.

Now planners will tell you that sure the roads are dangerous (for cyclists and pedestrians- hello, anyone there?) and they can't plan for every eventuality. But as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research says "if our regulators cannot understand the potential harm from extremely rare, but extremely costly, disasters, then the country has a very serious problem."

So the key factor is cost. Cities don't have the money to do the job right. And low energy users don't have influence in economic justice to make drivers pay increasing insurance costs; and letting risk be mitigated by circumstances. The solution is not for cities to look for more money to expand or maintain existing infrastructure or provide more alternative infrastructure. The solution is to reuse existing infrastructure for complete systems now.

Potholes, low cost solution, for pedestrian safety.

Pedestrians are essential for a low energy future. We need walkable cities so that fossil fuels can stay in the ground.

Yet the police cannot guarantee pedestrian safety since the job to monitor all the roads all the time is beyond their capability and broke cities are cutting services anyway. Distracted drivers continue to prowl the streets with immunity and are actually increasing in numbers. Caltrans and city have design goals that emphasize throughput, wider and faster streets, at the expense of life; which Context Sensitive Solutions is meant to solve but is not applied because of throughput!

That is why increasing potholes on most roads would be safer. Drivers would have to actually watch where they are going as they negotiate around potholes instead of bowling over pedestrians. This is a natural low cost way of addressing problems with access. Its a good thing we are broke and "our state roads have deteriorated." This editorial also says that congestion has worsened. But that is a different problem- a function of Caltrans throughput from the surrounding sprawl into the road challenged built out Bay Area.

Violence against cyclists symptomatic?

A fireman in Asheville NC shot a cyclist after he turned to leave an argument on safety. The cyclist was carrying a three year old in a child seat. The fireman thought it was unsafe to subject children to the dangers of auto traffic by transporting them on a bike. "Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road."

I'm not sure how he thought the three year old would get home after the parent was killed. However the parent was not injured- amazingly the helmet stopped the bullet. But cyclists put up with violence regularly in how the roads are laid out and how they can get around. So is this incident an anomaly or a result of a violent system?

Is shooting a cyclist different than running the cyclist of the road or sideswiping or driving by too close ignorantly, or being distracted and killing them? Yes at least in how the law perceives it. And riding while poor carries its own penalties. The police will ignore the folder irrespective of how egregious the driving fault was because as they said in one recent case in NY they were too busy to follow up. Even threatening someone with death by car is your word against the driver unlike threatening them with a gun which can bring down every homeland security swat team in the region.

Just riding a bike has this violence associated with it that could be worse if we slip up by trying to avoid a pot hole or brick in the road without looking. On the road from Yellowstone to Glacier I hit a dead raccoon. The bike flew about five feet into the road and surprisingly landed upright. I corrected the front wheel and regained the shoulder. Ahead and behind me were logging trucks. What fortune do I owe for my brief inattention?

Socially we get used to the driver side violence from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to the traffic in front of our homes. So when someone flips out its easy to think of them as illogical. Or irrational. Or a confusing blend of the two. Road rage, distracted driving, speeding are all defensible unlike waving a gun. Instead these incidents are a logical extension of an accepted pattern of violence.

Don't keep rewarding agressive driving

I ride my bicycle, but constantly risk being killed by lung destroying irresponsible motorists, driving aggressively, because government rewards them for saving time, to access sprawled out services, like doctors and schools spread out over large areas that should be open space and functioning creeks, with infrastructure that penalizes walkers and cyclists today, for some Clean Air Act fix in the future, like a TDA-3 over-crossing of Ralston at 101.

Bike boulevards every one mile would help walkers and bicyclists while deterring the near 100% infrastructure dedicated to aggressive driving.

restore the food shed on a walking perimeter

Peak everything around us. We have problem. So city leaders convene green committees. Green committees look around and think bikes and walking a no brainer since you don't have to be a doctor to know that you should take your heart for a walk.

But now the bigger problem. City leaders have spent the last 70 years chaining us to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia. As they have expanded roads and raised the speed limit to get to the development permitted in the outer reaches of their jurisdictions they have made walking impossible and bicycling dangerous. Self sufficiency is dangerous and illegal in places with no walking closures at some intersections. So dangerous that leaders like Sue Lempert and Coralin Fierebach now say that they will not attempt to bike on these road they labored decades to proudly build. They want separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda they want to go build a another network to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.

But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of the jurisdiction? It will be too expensive so we have to live with what we got. There is nothing to be done. One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these centers via bicycles boulevards. Ideally if we have Transfer of Development Rights we restore the food shed on a walking perimeter and have a complete neighborhood.

The Bay Trail

Trails go over bridges
with names from the past

Cordilleras Creek, San Francisquito Creek
reminder of river valleys, river people, red wooded hillsides
coursing through us creasing the landscape.

Water tags to the past are calming
terrorizing moms with strollers, toddlers on trikes
plastic bags in the marsh the air damp with dust and diesel

Can't let the past slow us down
got appointments to make, shows to watch
socially speed is responsible.

A goose chick through the front wheel.
A child's gasp.
We are all crowded on this little trail.

More on 20 mph streets

18 mph streets benefit all. They would also encourage more walking and bicycling. Instead of waiting for separate paths people would see fit to use the road. People are scared to use the streets for bicycling and walking because hostile traffic makes it preferable to be surrounded by steel. Presently over-designed streets would be simple and cheap to reuse; streets space can be allocated for other modes at 18mph. More importantly since slowing down traffic can be seen as increasing congestion, instead of congestion management we need congestion design.

Quote from Vanderbilt
We consistently get urban speeds wrong in the U.S. In Germany, the land where speed is supposedly worshipped, the speed-limit free sections of the autobahn are contrasted by a mandatory, heavily enforced 30 KPH (that’s 18 mph, folks) limit in residential areas.

Quote from Streetblog comments on the Times article
The case for traffic-calming and automated enforcement is already strong. This makes it even more airtight. Drivers are basically ignoring posted limits on roads designed to accommodate speeding. (Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt wrote a great post last month about the multi-pronged wrongheadedness of this approach to street design. Since drivers respond more to the threat of tickets than the inherent dangers of speeding, automated devices like red-light cams and speeding cams are essential to thoroughly deter this behavior.

Another quote-
The fact that this story was picked up by health reporters is an encouraging sidenote. Livable streets advocates will have powerful allies if public health authorities recognize unchecked speeding as the catastrophe that it is.

What does it take to keep bad drivers off the road?

How easy is it to get a license in CA? A bus driver in a fatal crash had a history of arrests, tickets, had his license revoked, just got it back, had a history of substance abuse and then was put behind the wheel of a bus.

The articles states:

• Watts was arrested as he lay critically injured in his hospital bed. His mother said he had wrestled with drug and alcohol problems, was jailed several times on drug charges and had smashed a car carrying a friend into a tree a few years ago, though neither was seriously hurt.
• He was a longtime truck driver, but had been unable to find a trucking job since being released from jail on a domestic violence charge six months ago, his mother said.
• Chaney Mae Watts said she believed the crash came on her son's first day behind the wheel of the bus after several training trips watching the owner drive. She and her husband told their son they were uncomfortable with him driving a vehicle that carried people instead of cargo.
• "He wasn't the best driver," she said. "He knew we didn't want him to drive."

The DMV has struggled with the problem of licensing most recently setting some tougher standards that appear to target seniors involving a revised vision exam as well as memory and reflex assessments. However its had a problem keeping people with a bad record and impaired driving record off the road. In addition many people with revoked licenses still drive so the question remains what other form of electronic monitoring can be used on bad drivers.

Commuter benefit small token of real problem in bailout bill

Why does the LA Times think auto makers will face an either or demand situation for gas guzzling planet toasting SUV vehicles? Won't higher fuel prices, declined home value, reduced 401k, declined job markets, and other economic pressures put a damper on spending for larger items?

Instead of reading the front page they write: Falling oil prices could prove a blessing or a curse to automakers. When fuel costs were soaring, firms retooled their lineups to emphasize small and efficient vehicles. If prices continue declining, they could be unprepared for renewed demand for SUVs and trucks.

This nonsense reflects the conventional thinking mired in the age of dinosaurs, of drilling, of building with a wish-we-could-afford-green attitude, of nature as property to hand off to corporations. Going to a meeting on a bicycle should mean not spreading asthma and cancer for the kids of the other attendees. But more likely than not a homicidal attitude will pervade- knowing how I drive I think its crazy that you biked here.

Congress naturally is the place where the employees of the fossil fuel industry hand out the free market prerogatives for a toxic planet to burn and a motorcide intensive warfare state. The credit bill bailed out the fossil fuel industry. Here's how:

What sprawl did was extend the area where banks could function. The result was exponentially larger consumption of resources like water and wetlands and deterioration of both the commons and the resource basins (like air) and their ecological services. For example rice harvest in CA was delayed this year because smoke from the fires stunted growth. Even in sparsely populated areas fire departments were restricted by sprawl to "save lives" instead of keeping large tracts from burning.

Housing has collapsed on the outskirts of the driving economy, like Modesto, Merced and even the suburbs of Sacramento- the new ghettos. Gas prices by raising budgets 25% pushed stupid negatively amortized keeping-up-with-the-jones families over the edge on the outer rings of sprawl nation. And as these home compete in the foreclosure market, and future gas prices and related food and energy prices rise, the effect of increased poor quality inventory, will continue to be felt in declining home values.

So if a H.R. 1424 bailout is to occur it should change the way we get around in the fossil fools economy. The Senate Bailout Bill, signed by W, of W (MD) fame included a commuter benefit for Bikers of $20/mo. Instead of being seen as pork, $20 to bike makes sense since its a minor incentive (a penalty with a gas tax ladder for example would have been better) for connected communities via zero CO2 transport. With Bluemenauer and Obestar in the house who in the Senate found enough brains to put section 211 in? Hopefully the employer will cash out the $20/- to the employee. The reduced parking demand should (another incentive that could have been written in) reduce the parking ratio allowed employers to make higher uses of land.

$20 per biker per month is a small start to ridding us of a fossil fuel destroyed future because the time for solutions is now.

Modal equality through traffic calming.

Modal equality is the ability of walkers and bicyclists to get safe, healthy, accessible, pleasant, and efficient (SHAPE) access on a road network similar to automobiles. We can SHAPE up with traffic calming.

Bicycle Boulevards close streets to automobiles, with chokers and diverters, in order to reduce the volume and speed of traffic that peds and bikes contend with. Another approach to reduced auto traffic is to close the intersection itself, since that addresses a crossing network for bikes and peds. Closing 25% of intersections to automobiles will allow other modes like walking cycling and boards to gain access across a city. It will save 50% of the revenue (Half of Belmont's projected road repair bill from auto usage is $15M) and improve throughput- since the direction of traffic on remaining streets is known and can be optimized- like one way roads- eliminating the delay from intersection second guessing. The remaining public works revenue can be better targeted since the options are reduced.

Braes Paradox said that additional roads, or network options, add anarchy into a network. The result is increased congestion. Physicists Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, along with computer scientist Micheal Gastner, looked at the price of anarchy caused by self-interested drivers and showed that closing off roads improves throughput.

Design elements like roundabouts, for the optimized network, reduce options for collisions, resulting is saved time and money for drivers. Time magazine writes Carmel, Ind., is driving in circles. Since 2001, the Indianapolis suburb has built 50 roundabouts, those circular alternatives to street intersections that have become a transit fixture in much of the rest of the world. Because roundabouts force cars to travel through a crossroads in a slower but more free-flowing manner — unlike traffic circles, roundabouts have no stop signals — in seven years, Carmel has seen a 78% drop in accidents involving injuries, not to mention a savings of some 24,000 gal. of gas per year per roundabout because of less car idling. "As our population densities become more like Europe's," says Mayor Jim Brainard, who received a climate-protection award this year from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, "roundabouts will become more popular."

Headway unrealized until we slow down

We are in this planet toasting pickle because planners have designed cars into our forests, food, water and health systems. Now as a resource depleted planet asks for urgent solutions these same planners say we need to make transit an attractive alternative to get drivers to use it and stop generating green house gases. 30 minute headways are not really attractive. An axiom among transit planners is that 15 minutes is the maximum if you are going to seriously attract drivers. Transit systems must start a drive to double their service level to achieve the sort of ridership and other social benefits (air water health) we know them to be capable of delivering.

This expert way looks at headway (how fast a transit system goes between stops) and keeps the system in all its planet toasting glory and bring transit and other disadvantaged modes up to toasting par. Separated routes for bikes, grade separation for transit, etc to equalize headway with speed which surprising means more energy. But we end up with funding and NIMBY issues which result in incomplete systems and the O'Toole criticism of unfunctioning modalities stealing from drivers.

Another way is to take away planet toasting headway from drivers and share it with other modes. Road diets, bus only lanes, headway via intersection closures to automobiles for bike boulevards, fifteen and twenty mile per hour neighborhood and collector streets plus 25 mph arterials in the city limit, 50% of intersection closed to automobiles with pocket parks and play grounds that allow bikes and peds through in a system of traffic calming that's linked to the landuses of children and returns a sustainable return on investment of $2500 per resident in reduced road repair and stormwater mitigation, PAYD, unbundled parking, etc. are the types of solutions that share headway and cost across modes making choices more appealing.

This is not say that we end up like LA which proves that drivers can handle a infinite congestion, i.e. nothing the experts say for workable transit will work if autos continue to see expanded capacity. We need to realize that we in this mess because the experts don't know what they did and how to fix it. By slowing down traffic we can improve VMT (x=vt) and improve throughput since the carrying capacity is raised. It just takes a minute longer to go between freeways. But by seeing equivalent headway between modalities drivers can see an option that will have real financial consequences in the choices they make.

Landuse control for transit agencies

We regulate a lot of bad things- for example there is no gun range by your house, no paint manufacturer. We also don't regulate a lot of bad things like pesticides. Or cars which not only kill people and poison the air but now eat our food (ethanol), starve our soil (cellulosic), burn our forests (sprawl), and are threatening to drink our water (hydrogen).

Just because we don't regulate a bad thing does not mean its good and needs continued funding.

On the other hand its in-effective long range planning when we use federal funding sources with their insidious requirements like designed-in-racism-in-sprawl. Since the gas tax funds transport, cars get built into the cycle of generating revenue. Our MTC plans are then hobbled- for example crossing streets prevent effective grade separated Caltrain times and toxic traffic slows down buses and stunts children. Without going for a connected and whole transit system we end up with a discombobulated mess; primarily because none of the landuse changes to make it successful are thought through and implemented. Universities, for example, control the landuse decisions around the campus and can appropriate property, like San Carlos Ave and El Camino from the city and state. Transit agencies should control the landuses within a 1/4 mile of the STATION FRONT for a slow system like Caltrain and two miles for HSR. Without these landuse controls other modes have a hard time competing and getting access with cars and become sitting duck for the O'Toole's. And why walking, which is our signature form of transportation on this planet, ends up being called alternate transportation. Instead of bonding to raise matching funds for federal dollars we should bond or tax for a complete system and eliminate gasoline since it doesn't fund anything that's controlled locally.

Negligence more relevant in crash cases.

This car versus car case in the LA Times report, on a possibly unfair conviction, is laced throughout with an exposition of more prosecutions, in driving crash cases, where participants end up with fatal injuries. The reporter writes that acting with negligence can get manslaughter charges. I wonder what a bicycle or pedestrian crash specialist attorney would say? Looks like cyclists and pedestrians want a finding of negligence or gross negligence from the drivers actions, relative vehicle speeds, and likelihood of injury from the vehicle types. If any of these factors play into the definition of negligence. The article says that crash based "criminal prosecutions is rising, in part because the state has aggressive legal standards and in part because, prosecutors say, advances in accident investigation technology allow them to more precisely understand the causes of fatal accidents."

The article unfortunately disproves that statement and Ralph Vartabedian the writer exhibits quite a bit of hyperventilation implying that everybody can be in a crash and get prosecuted; contrary to the overwhelming data from NITSA, DMV, and insurance institutes which says that crashes are caused by negligent drivers who are characterized as having two or more points against them. The rescheduled Pedestrian Safety & Advocacy Conference will be discussing issues like this- see Challenge Area 3, 7, and 8.

Standing out from the mostly maudlin crap in here, "one veteran accident investigator Robin T. Harrison said. "I have spent my life doing accident reconstruction, and the police regularly lead the charge in lousy accident investigation."" So maybe this would be good piece to talk to the local police chief about too since crashes and driving (gasoline) make up a big portion of their underfunded budgets.

Caltrain Bicycle Master Plan, bumped bikes.

The Joint Powers Board for Caltrain heard the Bicycle Master Plan report. In it Caltrain reported that bikes were 8% of ridership. Drive and parked car was 27%, Drop off pick up was 9%, Walking was 29%, transit was 19%, and the free shuttle was 8%. There was no sense of 21st century issues like the cost, co2, pollution especially PM10, and congestion burden for each of these modes.

For example Caltrain maintains 300 spots at its Belmont and San Carlos Stations at a cost of $15.7M dollars that cannot be developed for other uses like mixed use housing and retail which could bring revenue into the agency. This is relevant because the agency receives public dollars to offsets a huge loss in fare box recovery.

The public benefits for the subsidy are that
- transit users reduce congestion (Someone on the JPB once said that 10% ridership on all the transit properties was what was necessary to relive congestion on the roads.)
- transit users reduce pollution to help CCAG meet its air quality requirements and qualify for federal funding through.

Both MTC and ABAG have said we cannot meet out PM10 goals by 2035 even after the most stringent alternatives for vehicles and fuels have been adopted. And clearly with 55% of CO2 coming from transportation primarily single occupant vehicles something needs to happen.

So setting aside the $15.7M cost fixed internal cost for a parking lot, which is clearly not recouped at the $1/- per day rate in the poorly occupied parking lots (with the free shuttle about 75 cars use the lot in Belmont), and the $5k cost of 25 bike lockers and racks, one has to look at the other benefits in the shares of the modal groups getting to Caltrain.

At 8% of trips the bicycle groups far outpaces the other modal shares except for walking. This means that only 37% of trips come from low cost, low CO2, zero congestion, and zero PM10/pollutants modal shares. That means for the transit authority two out three trips have a huge public non-benefit only one of these trips meets the purpose of Caltrain funding.

Priority for walkers and cyclists

With higher gas prices people are mode shifting by taking to the streets as walkers and cyclists. But to their horror they are finding that the street environment was re-engineered for automobiles only, in the last seventy years, while we were all driving on cheap gas. Street timing, road and lane layout, space allocation, turn lanes, sight lines, scale and threading all favor the driver in faster heavier and more powerful cars. With time all the priority on the street has gone to the driver. The result has been killing speeds that make the city unwalkable. We need to share priority with other modes.

Worse laws to ensure equality are routinely ignored because the police are not around (like the postman cops can't be everywhere), and even when around are either dummies (police station a dummy in a cruiser in San Mateo to get drivers to slow down), or preoccupied with homeland security or drugs in the public space. Mode shifters find that they are second class citizens, taking the risk of getting run over to save on gas prices without recourse from the DA. Shared priority engineers the street to allow modal equality by acknowledging the fig leaf of enforcement and the technological pretense of equality.

Street timing- street crossings should be timed to get seniors, strollers, and able bodies adults across on a green. Presently many large roads signals will time out before a person is fifth of the way across. Congestion would be reduced if we had two to three lane roads instead of seven to thirteen lanes for people to cross since it would discourage driving while enabling walkers. A lead walk signal provides a walk prompt two seconds before a green light to allow walkers to get into the visual field of the right turning driver who tends to be looking left. Once seen the possibility of being run over is eliminated for pedestrians in the crosswalk. Bicycles should be provided with a waiting box in the front of the shoulder lane instead of being stuck to the right of traffic that may want to turn right; or have to take an optional turn lane and irritate a driver who thinks the world revolves around his time. But as much as possible we want smaller streets that don't require a scramble for lights where drivers godzilla out the peds.

Road layout should provide crossings based on a pedestrians scale. That means mid block crosswalks every 100 feet to improve threading. This makes a roundtrip by foot 200 feet plus the crosswalk distance of say three lanes which would be 30 feet. Provide incentives for services to be located in a 1/8 mile radius so that the walking circle is a 1/4 mile on a diameter. Presently crosswalks are placed every 500 or more feet making roundtrips 1100 feet or a 1/5th of a mile. Pedestrian scales are in feet. Auto scales are in miles. Since an auto can easily go 200 miles before the driver needs to stop for a pee the likelihood of finding services (bread, dental, movies, school, costco) in a 1/5 of a mile is non-existent. Road layout therefor conform to auto scales of volume and speed and not pedestrian scale. The resulting crash rates between people and cars is predictable. Landuse planners then turn around and make the city more drivable by locating each service (dental, doctor, pizza, playground, library, work, grocery store, movie theater) in a separate distant location making the ability to chain trips together by walking impossible. Imagine if all these services were in the same building infront of the playground. Would you drive anywhere?

Lane layout- Lanes should accommodate autos at speeds the street was designed for. 8 and 9 foot lanes are adequate for streets of 15 and 20 mph, speeds that pedestrians and cyclists can adjust and coexist on with automobiles, and which were the basis of the street layout a hundred years ago. Today's lanes of 12 -14 feet can accommodate 60- 70 mph traffic (one reason police won't chase an escaping criminal is that the lane widths accommodate racetracks with sorry results for the public around) with the resulting elimination of foot traffic and a huge increase in speed creep. Residents today can remember only 25 years ago when arterials like Ralston were 25 mph; and the intervening speed creep that have brought speeds to 40 mph and threaten to take it to 50 mph. Having one 8' lane for cars would allow for reduced driving and slower traffic that is not a death knell for walkers and bicyclists.

Road width and lane layout- If your town center or business district is on a 1/4 mile diameter then three to four lane arterials and slow streets are adequate. Dead business district with few businesses that struggle to stay alive and large dilapidated parking lots are a consequence of providing access to drivers only. The motivation to drive is not your place but the destination down the road with the next mall or walkable district. Adding lanes only says take the business elsewhere. Cars can drive to Tahoe or Monterey for recreation or business. How do we keep them in our little towns? By discouraging driving in the first place.

Road width encourages speeding. El Camino is posted at 35 mph. Through Burlingame it is hard to do 35 because the four lane road appears narrow against the tree canopy. But in San Mateo the street opens up six and seven lanes. The driver is challenged not to go 45 in the center lanes and will be tailgated at 35 and 40 mph. Other drivers expecting the higher speeds will cut through the other lanes to get around the driver observing the speed limit. This makes the shoulder lane dangerous for bikes and peds and delays buses who are too wide to adequately share the shoulder lane with parked cars. Seven lanes streets are faster and designed so since they provide dual acceleration lanes as drivers don't have to around a left turning automobile.

Engineers have known for more than 70 years that wider lanes are much more dangerous to all road users and onerous burden on bikes and peds. Standards like Level Of Service allow enginers to bypass safety issues to front load priority on automobiles. EIRs will not even address safety or other modal share decreases as roads are widened instead throwing up their hands and saying this is unmitigatable and some thing we have to live with along with all the associated toxins and pollution. We have re-look at how we provide comments on the EIRs to see if CEQA allows another way to get road widening to mitigate these problems.

Space allocation- Sidewalks should be a minimum of 7' clear space and level and smooth so parents can walk with children alongside, seniors can walk with walkers, and wheel chairs users can fit comfortably. As road width increases with additional lanes sidewalks suffer and get squeezed down sometimes to a width that will not accommodate even one walker. Newer sidewalks in the North San Jose are by gleaming wide new roads are 3'wide and empty of walkers with no reasonable destination in sight under the hot baking sun. In our downtowns we should have a minimum of seven feet and as we get closer to the transit center make the sidewalk surface level throughout.

Turn lanes should be used to discourage through traffic with chokers and diverters. Presently turn lanes get huge turning radii so that drivers can take them at speed. In very few areas traffic calmers seek to reduce danger by putting in bulbouts. This is drive-to-walking. One drives into a downtown with a few traffic calmed blocks, eat dinner, go for a few blocks walk, hop in the car and leave. Instead use turn lanes to take way through traffic by turning half the intersections into parks. This doesn't reduce driveability- it takes away half of the million options available and turns them over to pedestrians and cyclists for a complete network.

Sight lines- drivers can go fast because they can see a long way down the road. In a walkable circle the sight lines should be reduced by planting trees that cover the street creating a canopy or outdoor cathedral. For walkers the welcome shade can overcome the fiery environment of even Chico, CA. Other ways to reduce sight lines is to plant trees in the middle of the street and create diversionary street scenes like outdoor dining, band squares, etc.

15 and 20 mile per hour streets- todays automobiles are made to accommodate that street infrastructure that has been given over to them. Cars are most efficient at 60 mph and have a difficult time driving 20 mph. Speed limit signs are almost never below 25 mph. However the energy crisis and planet toasting driving results of the past 25 years have resulted in hybrids today that can drive 15 mph and get run on the electric motor while so engaged. Enable them with the slower speed limits which can be monitored with cameras or engineering. In addition high gas prices have make some people start to drive golf carts. These vehicles go a maximum of 20 mph and are ideal for pedestrian friendly city where people are the priority.

Sharing priority will allow modes to be equally utilized reversing the last 75 years of discrimination against walkers and cyclists.

No detriments to high gas prices

Wow another great benefit of higher gas prices, no more road widening, to pile on reduced VMT, reduced gas consumption, lower fatalities, higher public transit usage, reduced pollution, and improved national security by virtue of alternatives to gas consumption, etc.

When will policy makers stop moaning and start cheering a ladder for $20/gallon along with some minor TDM strategies? Parking cashout, unbundled parking, service location in a 1/4 mile walking circle, etc would work.

Yesterday we heard from Peninsula Traffic Relief Alliance that all their last mile shuttles are running full.

Soaring gasoline prices may be hurting Uncle Sam in the wallet too from reduced inflow from the federal gasoline tax as Richard Simon wrote in the LA Times. But because policy makers have filled the coffers in Saudi Arabia for the last fifty years to our detriment, we are all benefiting now as motorists make more responsible choices by cutting back on their driving and buying more fuel-efficient cars.

Pollution related deaths exceed traffic fatalities

Air Pollution Fatalities Now Exceed Traffic Fatalities. U.S. air pollution deaths are equal to deaths from breast cancer resulting in a need to spend more on health insurance to treat air pollution-related ailments and Causes of Death.

A study by the University of Birmingham has shown a strong correlation between pneumonia related deaths and air pollution from motor vehicles. This powerpoint addresses the Global Burden of Disease Due to Urban Air Pollution and Fraction of Deaths Attributable to Outdoor Urban Air Pollution by Region.
Pollution is known to Cut Life Expectancy and Threatens Child Development In Europe
despite reductions in some air pollution and improvements in wastewater treatment. This causes reduced life years mostly from transportation with related data in the US from the Sacramento area. Living within 500' of a major road causes permanent lung damage in children.

Indoor air pollution within houses and cars is also a problem.