On Getting Around: When Common Sense Isn’t So Common
Posted on Friday, March 14 2008 by Heather Brandon
Just prior to last Friday’s seminar at Hartford’s Trinity College, the second in a series hosted by the Center for Urban and Global Studies, West Hartford resident Lyle Wray (pictured) had a lot of trouble finding a parking place.
This was no small matter: in his capacity as the executive director of the Capital Region Council of Governments, he was a panelist for the seminar, titled, “It Takes a City-Region: Economic Development and Political Governance in Greater Hartford.”
Some of Wray’s presentation, once he was able to park and get inside Mather Hall, focused on the lack of a regional-scale planning strategy, adding that the built environment ought to be retrofitted as pedestrian-friendly.
He cited Trinity College’s parking situation as a prime example of pedestrian hostility—a dense urban location where safe crosswalks are sparse or entirely absent, and where it’s hard to know where to park. The length of Summit Street on campus is at the top of a city hill that drops off precipitously on one side, just beyond a long, narrow strip where a bulk of the school’s heavily-regulated parking is located.
Crosswalks there are nearly impossible to find, and there is poor lighting and no sidewalk close to the parking areas.
When he arrived for the seminar, a bit late, Wray turned to fellow panelist and 1000 Friends of Connecticut president Heidi Green (pictured), and said, “Did you have trouble parking?”
“I went to school here,” Green gave as her answer, as though to say, this was just par for the course.
Observing this exchange, I realized Wray was the man who pulled up alongside my own car just as I was parking—the conclusion of my own prolonged struggle to find a legitimate spot where I hoped I wouldn’t get towed—and he stopped his car, looking as though he intended to take my parking space. Apparently he didn’t realize that I was arriving, and not leaving, until a moment more had passed. He drove away looking frustrated, and a thought occurred to me, “I wonder if he’s going to the seminar.”
Wray isn’t the only one who has had a lot of trouble parking at Trinity. In the March 4 issue of the Trinity Tripod, features editor Anne Benjamin wrote an article about how difficult it is to be a commuting student driving from two miles away, and continually seeming to park in the wrong spot. She described one encounter with a campus safety officer who ticketed her twice in the span of ten minutes, including after she moved her car, and she racked up $175 in charges. Benjamin wrote:
Every day the back of my head is filled with anxiety about finding a space in the morning, about my car being towed, and about having to pay Trinity another hundred dollars because they have done nothing to help out students who actually have to drive.
I did not relay this story because I want to complain about the parking, but would like to rally the student body troops and do something about it. …We notice that every day, the campus is scattered with more and more cars parked in silly and sillier places.
Benjamin noted that not only are commuting students being ticketed in confusing fashion, but also students who live within closer walking distance are actually driving to school. “Can’t you walk?” she asked. “First things first, if you are worried about the environment, why use your car when …you can appreciate the Gothic architecture while waking up to a fresh morning breeze. I beg you to think about the unnecessary inconvenience you are causing.”
During the CUGS event, Wray said in order for transit-oriented development to work, “you need to be able to get there alive on foot,” which boils down to walking.
Wray added the current strategy to make this happen in and around cities is to solve walkability problems “one development at a time,” but this isn’t enough.
He advocated for what he called “a paradigm shift,” along the lines of what urban designer and architect William Morrish is helping to accomplish with his focus on retrofitting entire cities and towns (sample conceptual design pictured; more of Morrish’s fascinating work is available in a gallery here).
Where he lives, Wray said—which is in a cul-de-sac he disparaged—there are no sidewalks. Just trying to take a walk or a bike-ride in the area can be a life-threatening experience, he indicated. Such problems aren’t exclusive to the suburbs; cities or neighborhoods or institutions are either playing catch-up, or in some cases, they’re doing nothing at all.
Some say more regulation is the answer, finding new ways to slow speeding cars and hold law-breakers accountable. In her article, Benjamin said Trinity campus safety keeps blocking off more areas for parking, and issuing more tickets, as though this is helping the situation.
Where to put our cars is one issue, and slowing them down while in transit is another.
Some cities, like Springfield, are installing cameras at traffic lights so light-runners can be issued a ticket along with evidence of the infraction. Some studies have shown that such approaches reduce accidents; others cite an increase as a result of people slamming on the brakes to avoid a ticket. Does such regulation help pedestrians in any way, or is it meant to focus on the damage drivers often do to each other?
In Hartford, while there are plenty of sidewalks available, crossing the street on foot is still an extraordinarily difficult task in many locations, and crosswalks often appear to mean nothing to drivers. A popular solution to slow the speeding traffic has been speed bumps or speed tables, either temporary or permanent. Some residents love them because they savor watching drivers slowing down just to go over the bump; others note the difficulties faced by emergency vehicles who apparently need to take speed-bumped side streets to get somewhere fast.
Painted lines on the pavement are another approach to trying to rein in the traffic. In Connecticut, I’ve noticed that a popular engineering solution is to transform a fairly wide city corridor into a much narrower one by redirecting cars in squirmy lines using dotted and dashed white paint, making three lanes expand from two and contract again for an intersection where a left-hand turn lane is needed, as a kind of afterthought.
Near Blue Back Square, it looks as though there was enough space to build wider streets in some places (above, a skateboarder attempted a crossing). Where Main Street and Farmington Avenue intersect, the addition of new swervy lines was apparently preferable to total reconstruction in handling the heavy stream of traffic flow.
Along Whitney Street in the West End, new lines on the road were painted to a very odd effect. The lines created parking spaces on the left and right sides alternating, while the main traffic channeling through is meant to swerve in between and somehow not cross the double yellow line. Since people appear to travel about ten or 15 miles an hour over the speed limit there on average, it’s more of a race track than a safe place to walk or bike.
Add to the problem the fact that residents on the street have nowhere reasonable to place their trash bins. On a weekly basis, the bins sit on the narrow sidewalk and literally block the path entirely for a pedestrian. Those of us walking to the nearby school may as well drive instead, because everything on the stretch seems to be screaming out, “You will die if you attempt to travel here by foot.” Bulky trash collection bins blocking the small sidewalk passively force pedestrians to venture into the street, where cars are speeding along and darting left and right, if they’re following the snaking white and yellow lines in the first place.
One of the fundamental aspects of fixing traffic problems is gathering facts first. Springfield has initiated an effort to do that around its Zanetti Montessori School in the South End, very close to the downtown central business district.
At a meeting earlier this week, Gary Roux, principal planner at the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, sat with an ad-hoc committee of City Council and School Committee representatives and presented initial data leading up to a more complete study of traffic patterns around the school. Roux focused on gathering data at the intersections of Union Street, Main Street, Howard Street and East Columbus Avenue (where demolition of St. Joseph’s Church has been underway, apparently adding some to traffic issues).
The resulting traffic movement counts can be viewed here (Word doc) and the observations near the school (including photos) can be read here (Word doc). If you were a planner surveying that traffic situation, what do you think would help to solve it?
One town in Germany, Bohmte, did away with signage and regulation altogether, including the elimination of some of its street curbs, sending a message that all must now share the road—and the only way to navigate the system is by carefully observing it closely, which involves slowing down. A November 2006 article in Spiegel, by Matthias Schulz, noted:
[D]rivers find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They’re constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window.
The new traffic model’s advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. They demand streets like those during the Middle Ages, when horse-drawn chariots, handcarts and people scurried about in a completely unregulated fashion. The new model’s proponents envision today’s drivers and pedestrians blending into a colorful and peaceful traffic stream.
It may sound like chaos, but it’s only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they’re forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.
A January NPR piece about the town shared this point of view:
Along one stretch of the town’s main thoroughfare, the curbs have been removed and the asphalt and sidewalks replaced by one continuous red pavement. There’s hardly a street sign in sight. As [delivery driver Uwe] Muther’s van approaches this section, he slows down.
He says the kind of pavement here and the lack of street signs mean everybody has to be considerate of everyone else. It’s about cooperation on the streets, and Muther thinks it makes sense.
It seems counterintuitive to give drivers less information, by taking away street signs, stop lights and lane markings, to make them drive more safely. It’s supposed to help reclaim the streets for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Advocates of this traffic-management philosophy, called Shared Space, say it works.
Could such an approach to transit-oriented development work in cities like Hartford and Springfield—or in their well-populated, occasionally traffic-snarled suburbs?
Part of the challenge we face results from the removal of some of the simpler thinking processes—common sense, “instinct”—from the experience of getting around, and its replacement by an overwhelming amount of information and instructions we must obey.
Sometimes numb to all the verbiage on the signs, we default instead to operating by adrenaline, ignoring everything else, rather than responding to situations reasonably and allowing our senses to guide us.
