System Rants and Raves

 A family member lives in Chicago, and mentioned in passing a drive/transit decision with trade-offs.  They already have a car, and are not likely to consider a car-free lifestyle, so that decision already makes this commuting decision one of incremental cost.  I suspect this is a very common situation. Scenario:  Commute to work, about 5 miles each way, more or less normal business hours.  The route has options for car (of course), train (decent), and cycling (poor - no protected lanes and fairly fast road segments). Option 1 - Cycling:  This one is not much desired, due to safety concerns but also societal expectations.  "A man coming in sweaty or unkempt is 'that cycling guy' at the office.  A woman doing the same is unprofessional and not good at her job."  Perhaps this is a societal issue we should fix? Pragmatically, an e-bike ride is possible, if the risk is embraced.  She thinks it'd be as fast as driving, or faster, for a confid...

  When a speeding motorist is pulled over by a police officer and he asks, "Do you know how fast you were going?", most people say "not exactly", and probably often this is true, especially on city streets where cruise control is not much used and the stroad feel is more highway than street. We say individuals are responsible for managing their speed, yet we give them more tools to evade laws than to follow them, and then we're somehow surprised when the behavior is less than exemplary. Why are cars built to go over twice as fast as any highway speed limit in the country? Why do cars permit setting cruise control in cities, and at speeds over the speed limit on highways? Why do uninsured cars operate at all? Why do cars, which know exactly where they are on the city streets, not at all control speed on those streets to match posted limits? Why can cars with hacked vehicle computers and inoperable safety systemsbe operated on the street? How can we have meaningfu...

  A couple of weeks ago I introduced the notion of a safety pyramid. Now that we've dug through some of the needed changes and the ramifications of culture, I though we could revisit the model and hit the high point. I'll add a few cautionary notes, too. For reference, here's the pyramid again, with modestly updated numbers as I've attempted to find decent statistics. Ideally, we'd each calibrate these for our cities and then manage the whole pyramid down in size. Recall that the general assertion of this model is that it is not usually possible to chop off the top of the pyramid, but that action must be taken at the lower layers (improving the slices of cheese in our avoidance model) to reduce the top layers, as these manifest as statistical inevitabilities. Unfortunately, as we've outlined in the intervening blogs, we cannot hope to have a healthy, robust safety system to create and improve a robustly safe street network without better responsibility. ...

We've got one major problem to think about, and that is a meta-problem -- thinking about how we think about transportation networks. Shift our thinking from the 1950's car-first, zoning-heavy mobility strategy to a car-last accessibility strategy. As we started up high and dug down, we said we should shift our focus from Mobility (car based for healthy, capable, well-off people ) to Quadruple-A Accessibility (all ages and ability accessibility, including all wealth classes), and so now we need to figure out how to go back and re-do some previous decisions that got us where we are. We already hit one bit topic - safety - and we'll keep that in mind as we think about zoning and our neighborhood structures. Here is a critical point: every journey is a personal decision, and as we discussed in earlier discussions about network theory, most are repeat decisions, so the "iteration with preference" provides a powerful engine for change over time. Ideally, most des...

  A couple of blogs ago we ended up with 4 key things to fix, and the first two we covered last time, as the "hard" people/culture sorts of problems. That leaves two "easy" technically-focused problems. Change street design to improve inherent safety and to promote better driver behavior. Shift our thinking from the 1950's car-first, zoning-heavy mobility strategy to a car-last accessibility strategy. The "street design problem" is by now fairly well understood, as Jeff Speck, Charles Marohn (and the StrongTown crew), and the Bruntletts have written about this in depth from social, economic, and engineering perspectives. I'll only briefly recap, as I cannot do better than these experts: Cars drive sprawl, which ends up being unsafe, uneconomic, and dehumanizing Applying roadway (actually, highway) design optimizations to streets turns them into "stroads", which are not safe or accessible streets for living/shopping/working, nor are the...

  We previously outlined four major problems to solve to improve street safety, and two of these are related, as they both deal with responsibility. Figure out how to make somebody in relevant authority responsible AND accountable for street safety Alter our social and legal responsibility for crashes from individual obligation to collective responsibility. Let's dig in a bit. We know that changing broad social attitudes -- the culture -- is not easy. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" said Peter Drucker. We also know how to actually change culture, and we also know that intent, discussion, convincing arguments, and cajoling will not do it. Changing culture requires forced action first, and then over time, with empirical experience, attitudes change. It takes pressure on a lot of implicit points, and it is generally a slow process. Yes, individuals can change their views on their own, but it's an even slower process with uncertain results. It's bette...

  Last blog we established a couple of pretty obvious changes to improve safety, but ended up asking WHY are our cities and streets (stroads) built this way? Here I have a bit of a confession: I've finished reading Marohn's "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" and while I thought it would be mostly civil engineering, Marohn actually covers some of the system-level issues I'd been working on. He's done so more thoroughly than I probably could, so I'm not going to pick at those details. Cliffs notes: We purposefully decided to go all-in on car-centric mobility, and with an over-zealous and racially-tinged view of building suburban enclaves, we separated residential from commercial from industrial land uses, and we knit them together with roads. At the outset, many engineers didn't realize where this would lead, as the early model suburbs were "not that bad" in that they had slow, narrow residential streets to fairly slow collectors to fa...