MyWHaT

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Recently on Henry Morgenstein’s “Essays”, he calls attention to the planning truth that goeth unspoken: the power of a healthy grid of streets.

If you have a grid of ten street by ten streets – you can all envision that – if you seek to go by car from one corner of the ten street grid to the other far corner, there are 184,000 possible ways to do that.  You heard correctly, 184,000 ways to get from point A to point B.”

He continues, applying the analogy to Traverse City.

The point of all this?  If you make one major road — the Old Town by pass for instance — they’ll all come roaring down that wide & welcoming way — and it will soon be stinky, clogged, overcrowded, noisy….

But if you leave the situation alone, some will come down tenth, some will go down seventh, some will take State, others Cass, others union.”

Traverse City residents and fearful fearless leaders have heard this here before … and here (MW). The lesson repeated over and over and over and over is: maximize your grid while treating all your streets as livable streets (StreetFilms). Do it responsibly, of course. Slow our 2-3 ton beasts down and stop investing in ”car cannons”– those arterial speed zones that border and divide the community. The attempt to “solve” our traffic problem with more arterials is insane in the full Einsteinian sense of the word.

To flip the approach, start thinking about people cannons (MW).

Henry concludes with a call for sanity. Balance.

For at least the next 20 years, let us focus all our resources on making towns navigable by foot, by car, by trolley, by bus, by train, by tram.  It is not so much that we will ban cars as that we will make the alternatives enticing, fun, inexpensive, readily available, safe & warm.  Everything that cars are now.

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Of course, isn't this how we arrived at our current problems?

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Thoughts?

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Contributions greatly appreciated.

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Video Tuesday

via USEPAgov

Now, this is placemaking

Normal, IL’s Uptown Normal Roundabout project won the EPA’s Smart Growth Achievement Award for turning a solution to a traffic dilemma into something much, much, much more value added.

The Uptown Normal Roundabout project solved a complicated intersection, created a public plaza that has fostered economic vitality & increased social capital. In addition, the integrated stormwater system (Hoerrschaudt) naturally filters the runoff from the surrounding streetscapes and reuses it in the form of a water play feature and eventually to irrigate the adjacent landscaping.

This is a Complete Street project.  Complete + Green Street = Designed for People

Can you imagine this place with just concrete? Or, even just grass here with no people? It’s just, I mean, it’s boring.”

~ Mark Peterson City Manager of Normal, IL

Dear Decision Makers, Please take note. 

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NOTE: Roundabouts in Traverse City? Still looking for leadership at the commission and staff level. They seem more interested in $3-million tunnels. The MyWHaT Modern Roundabout page continues to get hits, so someone is interested. 

Eliminating Parking Requirements

The difference of 500 or 100 ft.

Another change in Traverse City’s traffic control policies occurred on Monday night. The City Commission accepted a change to the parking requirement that required all new development or expansions to provide a minimum number of parking spaces if the property is located within 500 ft. of a public parking structure. The planning department originally was requesting a 1000 ft radius, but the politics of Central Neighborhood’s discomfort with overflow traffic reduced the coverage. This is unfortunate, because it creates a hole in the intended coverage downtown where a 3rd bookend parking deck is likely to be built on West Front St.

Eliminating parking requirements is something I support city-wide. Cities need not require any private parking and instead need to charge more market-based pricing to existing publicly provided parking facilities, including on-street parking. If a new business wants to build a surface lot, there should be mechanisms in place to discourage it. Currently, banks and investors drive a lot of parking requirements and a sure-fire way to counter that push is by making it less cost-effective to have a massive parking lot. Communities seem to not apply basic principles of real estate when comes to parking cars. Land dedicated to parking is wasted economic and social opportunity.

Neighborhood Streets and Parking

The morning after

The policy above makes sense, but during the discussion a lot of issues were raised about parking in the neighborhoods, namely that neighborhoods next to downtown carry a burden of over-flow commuter parking. I’m still not convinced that this is an issue. Access needn’t be a concern as the majority of homes have alley parking. The streets in our neighborhoods are generously wide enough to handle parking and two lanes of traffic (part of the reason we have speeding problems through the neighborhoods) and that extra paved surface space needs to be used or eliminated–ideally, the City does both. 

As written here before, I’m in support of narrowing as many streets as we can for benefits of safety, quality of the neighborhoods, improved water quality, and economic sustainability. The basics of the latter point is simple: less pavement=less investment.

I’m also in support of the City experimenting with 24/7 (overnight) residential parking. If the community can encourage more people to use their front entrance by parking there, we can achieve some street narrowing without huge infrastructure investment. We may also address some of the concerns about over-flow commuter parking, as then someone could, if they so chose, have first dibs on the public on-street parking in front of their residence. The details of the scheme could be worked out to discourage commuter parking as well as the parking of a fleet of cars by one owner. On May 23rd of this year, I sent a request to the traffic committee (an internal staff committee) to consider the possibilities. That email is below. I didn’t hear a reply other than that it would be discussed.

What do you think?

Would you like to park in front of your house over-night?

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Makayla and the Traffic Committee,

I’m interested in seeing the City pursue a 24/7 parking permit program for our neighborhood streets. I think it may help achieve a better quality of life for city residents by:

• Providing a service to residents who might feel inconvenienced having to move their cars at night
• Providing more space for visitors who may visit city residents
• Providing traffic calming by narrowing streets and creation of chicane effects
• Providing a small, but useful, pot of money to re-invest into the neighborhoods in the form of sidewalks, traffic calming or park improvements.
• ???? (There may well be other benefits once we begin to explore the opportunity)

I suggest a scheme where residents may purchase “neighborhood investment permits” that allow for 24/7 parking on city streets. It isn’t mandatory and would target residents who like the idea of getting a small service in return for contributing to city improvements and who also support the use of on street parking to calm traffic. The cost need not be restrictive, but substantial enough to raise funds. The 1st permit could be priced at $50-$75 and a 2nd permit at $100-$150. A 3rd permit could be explored, and good be priced at $200 or higher. I think an annual or bi-annual permit both could be explored. Permits could also be an opportunity to engage citizens about the benefits of traffic calming.

Obviously, this is not intended for long-term storage of under-utilized cars, so regulations would need to be established to ensure that cars are moved regularly. This is easily done through the need for snowplows and street cleaning, like requiring certain days for the cars to be on one side or the other. Many cities that have heavy snowfall also have 24/7 on-street parking, so the right policy could easily be found. These are for neighborhood streets, so perfectly cleared streets need not be a priority.

I’d be interested in what your initial thoughts are. I’ve run the idea by a few of my neighbors who were supportive and they also said they’d likely purchase a permit if it wasn’t priced to high, $100 seems to be the highest anyone would go for the first car. Around 10 pm on many nights, you can see people walking out in their pajamas to pull their cars around the block and most of us have had the dreaded $15 dollar ticket on more than one occasion.

Thank you for considering this and let me know how I could help.

Gary

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If you support this opportunity and/or have something to add, please let MyWHaT readers know. More importantly, let the City’s traffic committee know. You can send an email to the assistant to the city manager and the city planner at: “Makayla Vitous” <mvitous@ci.traverse-city.mi.us>, “Russ Soyring” <rsoyring@ci.traverse-city.mi.us>.

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Proven fact: typos and grammatical errors decrease following  a contribution to the management and cause of this blog.  

Keep the Wheels Turning

Video Tuesday

We’ve heard this spiel before…now it’s in a video. Thanks.

This process needs to be altered so that the comfort and safety of our driving-selves isn’t the only item considered in the setting of speeds. The 85th percentile has some logic to it, but it’s highway logic and not neighborhood and city logic. It has a built-in bias towards faster drivers. The quick is, the 85th percentile assumes that most drivers are reasonable, don’t want to crash and only concerned with the shortest amount of travel time. The latter of which we have seemed all to willing to reward.

What’s missing from the process is reminders are needed to help us be prudent drivers. Any street that runs through a city needs to be designed and managed in the priority of first and foremost the safety for all users before the setting of traffic speeds. This may will involve different approaches to designing roads than has been customary. Traverse City’s Division St. is a great example. Sure, an officer may argue that perhaps 40-mph is too slow according to the 85th percentile numbers, but the context of the street (family homes, city parkland, and businesses) needs to rise in level of importance in the consideration.

Of course, the National Motorist Association disagrees with all of this.

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Zoom Zoom

• Motorway speed limits ‘could be raised to 80mph’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Texas Ups Speed Limit To 85 MPH (consumerist.com)

Go Team!

Chalk it up, 20 more feet of sidewalk!

The City connected one of the more obvious social trails this past summer at this location in front of the Elks Club on the east side of Division St. The inclusion of the crosswalk is a promising sign that a full connection to Randolph St. one block to the south is doable in the short-term.

This is a busy intersection for pedestrians, many of whom are pushing strollers or moving in wheelchairs to get to the shoreline on West Bay. Previous to this connector, there was a loose sandy social trail similar to the one that remains just to the south.

This forgotten section of Division St., just south of the Elks Club, needs some love

I received my annual insurance newsletter from Liberty Mutual recently. On the back page is a spread touting the safety of roundabouts. It is a reminder that it will be increasingly difficult for local politicians to fight consideration and ultimate construction of modern roundabouts as the insurance industry becomes increasingly involved.

In the end, it’s not about what one elected official likes or dislikes, it is about what saves lives and, particularly for the insurance industry, reduces payouts.

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The MyWHaT Roundabout Resource Page Continues to be updated.

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Video Tuesday

via markenlei

Cut down the conflicts, minimize the ones remaining and improve the roadway experience for everyone involved.

Seems like sound advice for any number of intersections.

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Here in Traverse City, we haven’t even attempted carrying a bike lane through the intersection. Almost every bike lane we have ends at a minimum 20 feet plus before the intersection and the one that does go to an intersection, on Woodmere at 8th St., bicyclists are pinched between a curb and turning automobiles with nowhere else to go…(advice: take the lane or cross as a pedestrian).

We can do better, the models are out there. 

mocked up Google Streetview of Woodmere Ave.

The Hotel Indigo Tunnel Returns

How not to plan expensive capital projects in the city

~ by Guest Contributor Mayor Chris Bzdok

The engineering for the Hotel Indigo tunnel is in, and it’s a doozy. You can find it here (PDF) or view it in your browser.

This underground crossing of Grandview Parkway from the warehouse district to the Open Space was originally budgeted at $800,000. Last spring (Plan for TC), the developers of the Hotel Indigo approached city manager Ben Bifoss and DDA director Bryan Crough, and requested that the city sign a contract obligating us to build the tunnel.

Click for full design report by NDG

The hotel developers wanted us to commit to this high-cost project prior to designing and engineering it, or knowing its true cost. The reason given was that they needed to begin construction of the hotel by May 1st, and needed to know if the tunnel was going to be there or not. The developers denied that the purpose of the contract was to guarantee to their investors that the tunnel would be built.

Bifoss and Crough put the contract on a fast track for approval. DDA approved it after a long debate by a vote of 6 to 4, and the city commission approved it by a vote of 6 to 1. The contract included a new, “not to exceed” price of $1.2 million. At my urging, the city commission modified the contract to give the DDA and city commission a final look at the design of the tunnel before we truly had to build it. The city hired Northwest Design Group out of Petoskey and they began the design engineering of the tunnel.

Added Expenses

About a week after the public bodies approved the contract, Traverse City Light and Power informed the city that utility relocation had not been factored into the estimates. Some TCLP underground utilities had to be moved over to accommodate the tunnel, and this job could add $400,000 to the cost. Mr. Crough told the Record Eagle that utility relocation had been discussed as part of the project, but none of the city commission or DDA board members interviewed by the paper recalled that happening.

Now the engineering is in, and the new cost estimate is $2.3 million. That price does not include the design and engineering work to date, nor does it include construction engineering or MDOT permit review costs. The total savings balance in the DDA’s primary savings account (TIF 97) is a little over $1 million, so there is not enough money to pay for the project as it stands. Staff is nonetheless recommending approval of a new contract whose purpose at this point is unknown. Staff also recommends that the city seek a federal TIGER transportation grant of over $4 million – with a $1 million DDA match – to pay for the tunnel and other warehouse district improvements (DDA).

Another piece of news from the engineering report is that the recommended traffic control for construction is to re-route all four lanes of Grandview Parkway onto the open space. Like the escalating costs, this information is not yet on the public’s radar screen.

Next Steps, Lessons to Learn

The next steps in the process I expect will be a discussion and vote on a new agreement, and a commitment to back the TIGER grant application with the $1 million match. I expect discussion of these issues to begin at Friday morning’s DDA meeting, and to continue in front of the city commission at some point in the future.

The whole process is a stark lesson about what not to do when it comes to planning big, expensive capital projects. I expect the Hotel Indigo tunnel will now die a slow death from causes including negative public opinion, mismanagement by the city, mistrust of the developers, and the lack of a viable plan to pay for a project that has tripled in cost. There will likely be an effort to keep the project on life support until a decision on the TIGER grant. But hopefully the DDA and city commission will say enough is enough, and halt further expenditures of public resources on what is starting to look like a fiasco.

If I’m right, the only value that can now be extracted from this endeavor is educational – in the form of lessons we can learn to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. In that spirit, and tongue-in-cheek, I offer a Hotel Indigo Tunnel Guide to Bad Project Decisionmaking:

1. Don’t define your goal and then decide how to accomplish it--pick the project first and then look for goals to justify it. Just about everyone agrees that Grandview Parkway serves as a barrier between our city and our waterfront, and that we need better connections to help people move safely and conveniently between the two. Just about everyone agrees that the warehouse district is an interesting place with a lot of potential that should be supported. Just about everyone agrees that we should be business friendly and support economic development in our city.

But when we talk about spending large amounts of limited public money, it is essential that we first figure out what our objective is, and then figure out the most cost-effective way to meet that objective.

• If the goal is better access across the parkway, calming speeds on that road and providing better surface crossings is vastly cheaper and would help the entire corridor instead of just 14 feet of it.
• If the goal is to maximize the use of a single crossing, this is the wrong place. It’s bounded immediately on the south by the river, and it’s literally a stone’s throw from the signalized intersection at Union Street.
• If the goal is to support the warehouse district, we need to ask what is the best way to spend a million dollars to do that. Streetscaping Garland and Hall Streets, and/or the Pine Street pedestrian bridge connecting the district to Front Street, might draw more people than building a tunnel from the district to the Open Space.
• If the goal is to have a great tunnel to the waterfront, we ought to look at expanding the Cass Street tunnel – which leads from the center of downtown to the phase one bayfront improvements at Clinch Park.

The point is, these projects cost a lot of money – in this case the entire savings of the DDA and more – and they need to be well thought out. That means deciding what your highest priority objective is, and then deciding the most cost-effective way of achieving it.

2. Set it up as a sweetheart deal. When the project first came before the DDA, the DDA director and city engineer recommended hiring the hotel’s project engineer, Garth Greenan, on a no-bid contract to do the design, engineering, and final cost estimates for the tunnel. The proposed contract amount was $100,000. The DDA board refused to hire the hotel’s agent to do the city’s due diligence on a multi-million dollar project the hotel was pushing the city to build. It’s frankly astounding anyone thought this was a good idea. But even though the attempt was rejected, the fact that it was made communicated messages to the public body and to the developers about the integrity with which the decision-making process would be managed.

3. Rush-the best public decisions are always made in a hurry to meet someone else’s timeline. The hotel developers pushed the city to make this decision so they could start their construction by May 1st. The city obliged, and in doing so failed to consider $400,000 of utility relocation costs and almost agreed to build the tunnel before even knowing what it would look like. Now it’s mid-September, the project costs even more than we thought it would, and the hotel shows no sign of starting construction before the snow flies.

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The silver lining in all this is that if the Hotel Indigo tunnel is rejected, the money earmarked for it could be re-purposed for other projects that would benefit the public. These could include providing additional funds for the phase one bayfront improvements, helping pay for the additional expenses that will result from the city commission’s decision to keep the train at Clinch Park, making calming improvements to the Grandview Parkway corridor, putting in public downtown restrooms, and improving the Warehouse District. Discussing these kinds of objectives, and the most cost-effective way to re-purpose the tunnel money, is a conversation we could all look forward to.

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Related articles

• Tunnel Vision: Is The Garland St. Tunnel A Priority?
• Does A Tunnel Help Us Put The ‘Park’ Back into the ‘Parkway’?

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EDITOR’S NOTE: MyWHaT encourages guest contributors submitting posts about issues relating to public spaces, transportation and community issues. This is the first guest post by Mayor Chris Bzdok. 

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This is an opportunity to also point out MyWHaT’s standards and ethics for all posts:

My Wheels are Turning is published with standard journalistic practice and ethics. The basics of which include: 1) Contributors seek to be accurate and inclusive in the coverage. 2) They treat all topics, viewpoints and individuals covered in a post with respect and dignity. 3) This is an editorial endeavor in that this online publication seeks to support and shift public perception of the value of public space, as well as pedestrian and bike culture. 4) All content is first & foremost the perspective & opinion of the author of that post and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editor, other contributors, or underwriters. 

Announcement

Back in April, MyWHaT teamed with TART Trails to host a community conversation about the importance of complete streets policies for a more connected community.  There were over 60 people in attendance ranging from representatives from the Grand Traverse County Road Commission to a few who had never been to such a meeting. Since that April meeting, the coalition has met twice to learn more about planning and roles that citizens can engage in at the local government level. These conversations have led to the creation of a Connected Community: Complete Streets resource page utilizing the Grand Vision website. (A similar page will be mirrored here on MyWHaT.)

This resource page will be a clearinghouse for information on upcoming events, learning opportunities, and actions. In addition, it will be a source for collecting answers to questions that are requested through the complete streets coalition. If you see an item missing or have a burning question that you think others might benefit from knowing the answer to, please use the form below and we will see what we can do. You may also use the form to let us know how you would like to engage.  We need more people with initiative getting involved; this coalition body can help you help us!  

The next event is this upcoming Tuesday and is a chance to learn about road conversions and how they might be applied in locations here in northwest lower Michigan. Follow this link for more info and an agenda: Road Conversions: A Tool for Complete Streets

Also since April, Acme Township has passed a complete streets resolution and Frankfort, MI has begun creating partnerships for Safe Routes to School and Complete Streets (Morning Star)–Go Team!

Related articles

• How Does Changing the Context of a Street Change Your Behavior? (mywheelsareturning.com)
• A Stop at Crosswalk Ordinance is Only One Needed Treatment (mywheelsareturning.com)

Video Tuesday

On the issue of helmets and bicycling, I prefer seeing people without them. It lifts my spirits. When someone asks me from their car or the sidewalk, “where’s your helmet?” I typically reply, “where’s yours?” It is a silly question.

I’m uncomfortable with the steady mantra promoting helmet use and believe it does more harm than good. Real solutions to bicycle safety are better design & public investment to decrease conflicts in order to increase bicycle ridership more generally–with or without helmets.

Contrary to popular sentiment, helmet use isn’t the single most important personal action to take to protect yourself on your commute or trip to the grocery store. Much more important is developing confidence, skills and awareness both personally and in relation to the built environment. I fully realize that for some people and in some circumstances, that involves wearing a helmet.

Mikael Colville-Andersen, of Copenhagenize.com fame, in part lays out this perspective  in the TEDxCopenhagen video below. The data he reports on isn’t contrived or fabricated, though some people claim the data he uses is overstated. I’ll let you research for yourself and be the judge. Still, at a minimum, his findings question some widely held assumptions. It’s longer than a normal video Tuesday clip, but not too long, and for anyone who has yelled from the sidewalk, “hey Gary! Where’s your helmet” it is required viewing.

Some of his main points:

• Riding a bicycle is safe, let’s not embrace the culture of fear.
• “It’s all about data” and the data has been incompletely presented.
• Where helmets have been legislated or heavily promoted, cycling levels drop.
• There is safety in numbers.

My findings, experience and subsequent views tend to align more along the lines that helmets simply needn’t be such a focus. The writer Elly Blue expressed an excellent balance on the subject in her post last year: Helmet Wars: A gripping account of the great bicycle helmet campaigns.

I agree 100% with her closing perspective:

Personally, after all this research, I remain most swayed by the point that the great helmet question is the wrong one entirely to be asking.

When bicycle safety is treated like a war of attrition, with every soldier responsible for her own body armor, we all lose. When we can freely ride on streets where we are not threatened with deadly violence at every moment, we all win.

Amen, sister.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The reason I’m writing about helmets today is due to a discussion that took place at the MyWHaT Facebook page. A small debate occurred after I posted a tweet in response to a Record Eagle brief about a bicycle-car crash on South Airport. Without much detail about the crash, or the injury, the phrase “the bicyclists wasn’t wearing a helmet” was tossed into the brief. So, I tweeted:

Reading today’s @RecordEagle in briefs abt bicyclist hit by car. Why mention she wasn’t wearing helmet? It’s irrelevant.”

I took issue that there was perhaps an inference of a social value-judgment on the person riding a bicycle by including the fact out of the context of any injury. Particular at issue was that she was near one of the most dangerously designed intersections in the region–La Frainer and South Airport. I say, why not point out the dangers of the context instead.

Riding a bicycle is one of history’s most efficient, enjoyable and safe forms of transportation (and all of the benefits that go with it) and we should strive to make it an inviting, default option irregardless of whether someone is wearing a helmet or not.

Related Resources:

• Perceptions of Bicycle Safety Quiz
• Three lessons for cycling future
• Is cycling dangerous?