Twenty Seven Thoughts from the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professional Professional Development Seminar

1. We try to make sure every project is a Complete Streets project. 
2. “Great” results from incrementally getting better.
3. We love the Charlotte Department of Transportation.
4. Whenever I run on concrete paths I think the orthopedic surgeons must have an interest in it.
5. Communities decide the uses of a street. 
6. Commerce happens at three miles an hour, not thirty miles an hour.
7. There is flexibility in transportation standards if you ask the right questions.
8. Right-size the streets.
9. This is about creating better communities. 
10. Design the whole street for all users.
11. We should liberate ourselves from conventional road classifications.
12. Communities decide the uses of a street. (See #5)
13. Speed becomes greed when it takes away a child’s ability to choose to walk.
14. Twenty is Plenty for US(A).
15. Lessening the barriers to active living increases individual motivation. 
16. “It’s my street. It’s my park.”
17. We love the 6-Step Process for Creating Successful Complete Streets Projects. (See #3)
18. First step from policy to practice: change procedures.
19. Getting ALL the stakeholders involved in street planning throughout the process  makes good streets.
20. I’m going to invite the right people to the next webinar I participate in.
21. We should ask, “How can we help solve the problem?”
22. Break down the silos.
23. Engage and educate the public, don’t design and defend.
24. Why pilot something that you know works elsewhere?
25. Change the functional classification to lower design speed.
26. The right combination of street classification and design speed makes great streets.
27. Why not here?

"Every trip begins with walking"

At a conference I attended recently, a transportation planner said something so elementary that I had never thought about it in this particular way.  “Every trip,” she said, referring to car trips of all sorts, “begins with walking.” In other words, we walk out the door of our houses to our vehicles. Continue the thought, and every trip ends with walking as well.

Thinking about the way we design our houses for access to our vehicles is a little silly, but imagine if you had to walk around the block to get to your garage.  What if, instead of a front walk, we exited our houses directly onto the side of a busy road, one that had no sidewalk? Or suppose we had utility poles installed right in front of our doors.

Of course, these designs would never make it to the building stage.  But it doesn’t take much looking to see them around many towns and cities. Because the focus of street design has been for so long on moving automobile traffic, we have lost sight of the elements of our everyday transportation. Next time you leave the grocery store, for example, pay attention to the atmosphere for even walking to your car. Seldom is there a dedicated pathway for us, and we must put ourselves in automobile lanes as we traverse the sea of parking lot.

And look at this failure of design:

There are so many problems here: I stood on the sidewalk –protected pedestrian way, right?—to take the picture.  The two cars that passed me felt like I was in such danger there that they moved out of their travel lane to give me more room. The two poles so narrow the sidewalk that I couldn’t get through myself without turning sideways.  Now put a stroller, or a wheelchair there. And my favorite: someone with the city decided that this spot would be ideal for the Bicycle Friendly Community sign. Was that a sense of irony, or just straight ignorance?

Or this one:

This is dismissal time at a local high school. Of course there are students walking in the street, between cars waiting to turn left, and right in front of me driving straight past the line of left turners. Not a crosswalk in sight, no traffic signal, and I didn’t see any law enforcement directing traffic.

Or how about this one:

The new sidewalk you see extends about a half mile back past an elementary school, a community park, and a library, but ends about 30 yards or so from the entrance to a subdivision.

While we do see some renovations that try to add in facilities for walking, the incompleteness almost makes it more dangerous because it may give a false sense of safety.

These failures are not permanent, but fixing them will take a conscious effort on the part of planners, designers and engineers to allow for transportation choices. Our streets can look more like this one:

Or this one:

Streets are only safe if users make them that way, through vigilance and attention, but street design works either for or against those efforts.  If we remember, and remind our policy makers and transportation folks, that we are all at some point pedestrians, then perhaps we will see improvements made that keep us all safe.

Built Environment 101

Despite calls to exercise more and eat healthier—which many have heard, as the running and aerobics crazes show—obesity rates in the United States have tripled over the last 30 years. Obesity rates among children have also tripled, with rising rates of adult-onset disease like Type II diabetes being diagnosed in children as young as 7 years old.  Poor and underserved populations are disproportionately affected.

These frightening statistics have led public health leaders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to target community design as one of the culprits, and have sought to make changes in policy and in the way we build. 

So now we hear new words slung around, words generally reserved for city planners and engineers, like “built environment,” “environmental change,” “connectivity,” “complete streets,” and “food deserts.” But what do these words mean?

The built environment is made up of all the stuff we build to meet our needs: roads, sidewalks, sewer rights-of-way, buildings, parking lots, and all that kind of thing.

 As I’ve said before, since World War II, the patterns of the built environment have favored automobiles travel, with interstates, wide roads with no sidewalks, and buildings set back from the street behind massive parking lots designed to hold Black Friday traffic. 

We’re seeing examples of environmental change in cities around the world as we try to retrofit the built environment to allow for pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass-transit users safe passage. We’ve added sidewalks, reduced the number and width of travel lanes, and increased the mileage of bike lanes. In many areas, renovations of defunct shopping areas have included more pedestrian friendly designs to create the types of neighborhoods many of our planners grew up in.

These renovations and additions have the goal of making our communities more connected.  Connectivity is the degree to which the amenities of a city are accessible by foot, bicycle, and mass transit. Can you walk to school? Can you get to a grocer by bike? Is there more than one exit from a subdivision? Many studies show that if a neighborhood has sidewalks, more people will walk.  Many of these changes are based on the “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” idea, but research and evidence shows that these changes result in a healthier community.

But roadway renovations are not always immediate. In that case, a Complete Streets policy, in which the body that owns the road makes a commitment to include sidewalks, bike lanes and transit stops in all new road way development and in any major renovations. This type of policy allows for changes in administration and staff without losing the commitment. The South Carolina Department of Transportation, the City and the County of Spartanburg all have resolved to build complete streets.

While physical activity is one element of the obesity problem, eating is the other. Many communities are becoming aware of a dynamic of the built environment called food deserts. A food desert is a neighborhood where unhealthy food options, like fast food restaurants and convenience stores, significantly outnumber healthy food options.  When that ratio exceeds 5-1, we call that a food desert.  The City of Spartanburg’s ratio is 8.5 to 1. In other words, for every grocery store or year-round produce store, there are 8.5 fast food restaurants and convenience stores. If you put eight plates of cookies and one plate of carrots out at a party, which one will folks fill up on?

The food desert problem is complicated with free market capitalism, private property rights and “this economic climate.” But many cities, counties, and states are using incentives to attract new grocery stores and other fresh food outlets, and are working with existing convenience stores to offer more healthy options. 

A More Equitable Transportation System

Where do you get the extra half-hour a day that the Centers for Disease Control recommend for adults to exercise?  What if you were active in your everyday life, walking to the store to get a gallon of milk, biking to the park with your kids, or walking to work two days a week? 

More than 88% of over a thousand Spartanburg County residents surveyed last year as a part of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan process responded that they would walk to work if conditions were safer for doing so.  More than 75% said they supported improving conditions for walking and biking, and 88% supported using public funds to do so.

However, most indicated that they did not want new taxes to cover those costs.  A recent poll conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation found that while transportation projects are very important, most Americans do not want to pay more taxes to fund them. So where do the funds necessary to improve conditions come from?  Many communities are not adding to transportation budgets, but rather reallocating those funds to pay for improvements that allow for and encourage different means of travel.  After all, adding bike lanes and sidewalks improves the transportation system, often reducing automobile congestion, and improving air quality and community health at the same time. 

In 2008, South Carolina enacted the toughest bicycle safety laws in the country.  The laws guarantee that bicycles will be treated as vehicles in enforcement—cyclists are required to obey all rules of the road, and accidents between motorists and cyclists will be treated as vehicle accidents by law enforcement.  Despite these laws, including one that prohibits harassment of cyclists, South Carolina had a high rate of bicycle fatalities in 2009.

Part of the problem is that the physical roads do not treat bicyclists equally.  We have to put ourselves in the automobile travel lanes, and take our chances that drivers are paying as close attention to us as we are to them.  In those circumstances, it’s hard to expect bicyclists to adhere to the same rules when the physical conditions are so unbalanced. 

And the more vulnerable members of our community who cannot drive?  The elderly, the young, and the poor are often constrained by economics or age, and have no other choice than to travel by foot or bicycle, not to mention those with physical handicaps who cannot drive.  But when the transportation system overwhelming prioritizes automobiles, these folks are left to fend for themselves. 

More complete streets, those that accommodate all forms of transportation, would improve the entire system, and thus should be part and parcel of existing transportation funding.  Spartanburg County’s Capital Improvement Plan for 2011-2015 calls for $26.5 million for roads and intersection improvements, $5.6 million for bridges, and $300,000—less than .1% of the spending for roads and intersections—for “sidewalks and alternative transportation,” including exactly $0 for this fiscal year.  No money is allocated for public transit, and only $50,000 for traffic calming measures. 

Compare these figures to the Nashville Metropolitan Planning Organization’s re-allocation of transportation funding.  By policy, they dedicate a 15% minimum investment of available funds to active transportation, and another 10% to mass transit.  All projects are evaluated on a number of criteria, including health of residents and impact on air quality.  By incorporating health outcomes in transportation planning, they have moved beyond “autos only.” 

The recent renovations on Broad Street in the City of Spartanburg, for a good local example, reallocate space so that cyclists and automobiles have similar safe routes.  Using the same amount of space as before, the City reduced the number of travel lanes and included bike lanes.  They also upgraded the crosswalks to make them more visible to pedestrians and drivers alike.  According to City engineer Tim Carter, costs for the project were not significantly higher than they would have been with conventional striping.  But now cyclists and pedestrians have a fair share of the road. 

The City of Spartanburg has taken significant strides to improve conditions for all road users.  And according to Spartanburg County Engineer Ron Kirby, the County has spent about 5% of its budget for sidewalks.  But this effort to equalize funding for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists requires a policy change, one that signals greater concern for the health of all residents, not just those traveling in multi-ton vehicles.  Dedicating funding for active and alternative transportation will show a greater commitment to community health and to a more equitable transportation system. 

Investments in a Healthy Community

origianlly published in the Spartanburg Journal, October 2010

Why all the recent interest in “active living”?  A quick glance at statistics on obesity rates in the United States offers a telling story: since 1980, obesity rates have more than tripled; according to the Centers for Disease Control more than two out of three Americans are obese or overweight.

Ask folks about these statistics, and most will focus on social dynamics: too much television, laziness, the proliferation of video games, and the stranger-danger fears that keep parents from allowing their children to walk to school or the park.  Sometimes they will get to other causes, like poor nutrition in school lunches, or not enough physical education. 

What they never refer to are the running and aerobics crazes, the proliferation of gyms, the intense focus on healthy eating and exercising.  According to marathonguide.com, more Americans participated in and finished a marathon in 2009 than ever before.  The number of marathons in the US also increased by about 10% last year.  How can these two sides of the same issue exist together?

This is where the active living piece comes in.  As a society, we have become less active in our daily lives.  According to the US Department of Transportation, only 13% of school age children walked to school in 2001, where 41% walked in 1969.  For a variety of reasons, new schools are typically sited far from the neighborhoods they serve.  Many are built in areas where the road system is not adequate to handle so many cars, much less to support children walking and biking to school. 

Add to that dynamic our disjointed community design caused by the ways that conventional zoning separates uses such as residential and commercial spaces, forcing residents to drive rather than walk to the store for a gallon of milk.  While we may walk for exercise, we are not walking to lunch from work, or walking home from school, or biking to the post office or the coffee shop. 

Another factor in our bodily expansion is that obesity inordinately affects low income populations.   These communities tend to have fewer healthy food outlets like grocery stores and produce stands, and crumbling infrastructure, lack of adequate play areas, and high crime rates only exacerbate the problem.

It is indeed the activity of our daily lives that makes the difference in our fitness.  When the CDC recommends that adults exercise a half hour a day, or 150 minutes a week, we wonder where to find those extra minutes.  We feel as though we need to go out to exercise. 

I take care of my half hour a day riding my bike to and from work.  But I’m an active person, and have been riding in urban settings for over 25 years.  The absence or presence of bike lanes doesn’t affect whether or not I ride.  But the absence of a neighborhood grocer makes it hard to use my bike for that errand.  The difficulty of crossing major streets like Pine and Church Streets keeps me from walking or biking with my kids to the library. 

That’s why you’re seeing more bike lanes in Spartanburg, and sidewalk improvements like curb ramps, which allow those in wheelchairs and those pushing strollers to move about more easily.  That’s why Partners for Active Living and others advocated for complete streets resolutions that Spartanburg City and County Councils adopted in 2006 and 2007, which encourage efforts to ensure the safety of all users—pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and bus riders—by including plans for sidewalks and bike lanes in all roadway projects. 

These kinds of policy changes, and the physical changes that go along with them, will serve as truly sustainable measures paving the way to “active living.”  We should consider any costs associated with them as investments in a healthy community.