MyWHaT

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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EDITOR’S NOTE: Updated  and reposted May 11, 2012. 

Video Tuesday

via markenlei

Cut down the conflicts, minimize the ones remaining and improve the roadway experience for everyone involved–Simple!

Seems like sound advice for any number of intersections.

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Here in Traverse City, we have yet attempted to carry 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 reach an intersection, on Woodmere at 8th St., pinches bicyclists 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?

UPDATE: Correction to headline/content added 9:50am to reflect correct dates.

The advanced notice along the TART Trail going east along Bay St. by Traverse City Light and Power is most appreciated. Seldom do we see notice for pedestrians and bicyclists as we approach construction zones, however, there is one thing slightly off about this sign’s message.

Anyone? … Want to take a guess?

observation & photo via Bill Palladino

Again, great job to TCLP on the crosswalk at Bay and Division St. and kudos for the public service announcement (below) that went out yesterday that announces that the Bay St. crosswalk will be closed through Labor Day weekend  Friday Sept. 2, but will not impact east west travel on the trail or crossings of Division and Grandview. Only the route to and from the Dairy Lodge is impacted. The crosswalk will be open this weekend. 

And, as far as the sign goes, it’s a subtle bias and perspective that shines through often. The hint: bicyclists do have another choice, albeit it isn’t for everyone…Anyone? 

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PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: August 31, 2011

Bikers and pedestrians should be aware that Traverse City Light and Power’s contractor, Molon Excavating, Inc. will be closing the north/south pedestrian crossing on bay street, west side of division street, beginning august 31 through approximately September 2. An alternate route using Randolph Street and Cedar Street is available and is marked with signs. All bike and pedestrian crosswalks across Division Street and across Grandview Parkway will remain open and not be affected.

Unfortunately, this construction will generate dust, noise and cause inconvenience. We would like to thank you in advance for your patience and cooperation.

Please contact Glen Dine, chief engineer, at 932-4551, if you have any questions, comments or concerns about the work or our schedule.

What streets in your community does the image below remind you of?

After you click play, watch as the scene is re-envisioned with overlays showing different designs.   As you watch, ask yourself how your behavior and interaction in the place would change depending on the scene.

• If you were driving a car here, what are the likely impacts on the experience?
• In which image would you be more inclined to ride a bicycle? Walk? Expect to find a bus stop?
• Or, in which image are you more likely to sit on a bench and people watch?
• In what scene is that great retail idea you’ve been kicking around more likely to succeed?

Any other scenarios you can think of that might change?

What might happen in Grand Traverse if we change the scene along Division, 14th, Garfield, 8th, Front, Cass, Barlow, South Airport, Munson, Grandview…

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Well Put

Just breezed into Madison…

… almost as if they were expecting people to arrive on bikes.

~ Text message from Bob Otwell

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How are the edges of your community?

What transportation modes are invited with open arms?

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* Follow this link to read about Laura and Bob’s Continental Cruise. 

Video Tuesday

“Biking around town with Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen” via StreetFilms

This StreetFilms film was shown at last week’s Third Coast Bike Festival movie night and it seems very appropriate after last night’s commission meeting about bicycle and car conflicts. As would be predictable in northern Michigan, a lot of the commissioner discussion was on law and order; how to enforce the rules. The ethicist has a different spin on that topic. The pull-quote most apropos:

You can’t buy your convenience at the expense of someone else’s safety. This is not a law and order position; it’s a consequentialist argument. What are the effects of your actions on others?”