Around 1980, when I was a reporter for The Buffalo News, the New York State Department of Transportation decided to cut down all the trees lining the main road, US 20, in one of the small towns along Lake Erie southwest of Buffalo. This would make motorists safer, the department said. Instead of risking crashing into maple trees, motorists who lost control of their cars would have a wide shoulder on which to recover.
To me this seemed a dubious trade-off; I often drove Route 20, never found it dangerous, and anybody could see that the sheltering rows of trees made both traveling and the townscape more attractive. In the 1980s, though, there was no winning an argument with a transportation engineer. The engineer invariably claimed to understand safety, and safety trumped aesthetics.
Several years later, living in New England as a free-lance writer, I worked on a book project that required me to visit many of the houses in the Boston area that had been fixed up by the TV show “This Old House.” As I drove from one renovated house to another, I noticed that some of the most pleasing roads had trees extremely close to the pavement. Unlike the trees on Route 20 in western New York, no one was cutting down the ones on Boston’s periphery; they were growing thickly, sprinkling shade across the asphalt. If accidents were numerous on these roads, there was little sign of it. The contrast made me wonder: How could eastern Massachusetts allow trees right next to the road, while western New York mandated a barren run-off zone?
A story on Page 1 — about safety and the assumptions held by transportation engineers — helps explain why so many American roads have been mistreated as Route 20 was. It’s immensely encouraging to see that after a long period in which transportation engineers’ simplistic ideas easily prevailed, those ideas are now being subjected to empirical analysis and in some instances proven wrong. Engineers’ beliefs have often made it difficult to create humanly appealing surroundings. If researchers can show that those beliefs are unfounded, we will have a much better chance of building traffic networks that serve people and communities well.
CHALLENGES TO CONVENTIONAL PRACTICE
One of the first challenges to conventional engineering practice came from Peter Swift and Matthew Goldstein of Swift and Associates, civil engineers and planners in Longmont, Colorado, and Dan Painter, transportation planner for the City of Longmont. In 1997 they examined 20,000 automobile accident reports spanning eight years in Longmont and showed that safety differs in important respects from what transportation officials had thought. The three found, for instance, that narrow streets (24 feet) were safer than the wider ones generally favored by transportation engineers.
Other researchers have weighed in since then. The recent studies by Eric Dumbaugh, an assistant professor of transportation at Texas A&M, are especially exciting. Dumbaugh’s discoveries are appearing in peer-reviewed publications whose influence may give them a clout that most critiques of road and street design have lacked.
Meanwhile, Aimee Flannery, an assistant professor in civil, environmental, and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University, is conducting a study of how the public judges road networks. In four areas across the US, Flannery is gathering groups of people and asking them to evaluate scenes of urban and suburban road networks. She shows scenes of varied choices of pavement width and differing kinds of medians (or no median), intersections, turn lanes, sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike routes. Flannery believes her study will be something new for transportation engineers: an attempt to ask the public to assess how well the roadways serve their varied users — pedestrians and cyclists as well as motorists.
These two approaches — empirically testing the safety of various road and street conditions and asking the public what it likes and dislikes in its circulation network — could bring relief from the unsatisfying environments that for too long have been the norm. Let’s hope these studies circulate widely and make an impact.
This article is available in the September 2006 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |