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Library location matters

(A version of this originally ran in the Chapel Hill News on March 31, 2013. The Chapel Hill News archives have gone missing, so here it is.)

Saturday morning, our family headed out to University Mall. My wife and I shopped the Farmer’s Market and Southern Season with our 4-year-old while our two older boys browsed the Chapel Hill Public Library. We wrapped up the morning with an impulse purchase from Kitchenworks and lunch at Red Bowl Asian Bistro. Visiting University Mall has become a Saturday routine for us during the last year and a half, but that routine will end with the library’s return to its permanent home next month.

When the new building opens at the top of Library Drive, Chapel Hill residents will get a much larger new library with expanded community spaces. But by moving the library away from businesses and restaurants, we will lose several close and casual connections that are key to a thriving and walkable urban community. The library’s temporary location, integrated among shops and restaurants, had substantial benefits that we should remember as we plan Chapel Hill’s future.

Mixing retail and service businesses next to an institution like the library benefits both local businesses and residents. At its temporary location, the library was near many local stores, restaurants, and community events. Chapel Hill's farmer's market takes place in the mall's parking lot, and Saturdays bring community events such as Back to School day and the Day Camp Fair.

Library visitors could grab a cup of coffee at Joe Van Gogh right outside the library’s front door, drop into Cameron’s, or pick up dinner at Village Burgers, supporting local businesses and keeping tax revenue in Chapel Hill. By contrast, the library's permanent location stands alone and isolated. Once you get back in your car, you can just as easily shop at New Hope Commons or eat dinner in Durham as you can shop or eat in Chapel Hill.

For residents who don’t drive, the new library building stands nearly 300 yards away from Estes road, up a 60-foot vertical climb, making it challenging for bicyclists and pedestrians to visit. It’s especially hard for residents in wheelchairs or pushing strollers to reach the entrance. For transit users, the nearest bus stop is on Franklin Street, whereas buses stop at University Mall multiple times per day Monday through Saturday. That’s because transit is practical for destinations that serve multiple uses, such as a shopping center, but not for a library set back 300 yards from the road. Therefore, although one of the vaunted features of the new library is a teen room, most Chapel Hill teens will need an adult to drive them to the library to use it.

It’s not surprising, then, that the renovated library includes 111 additional parking spaces, for a total of more than 200 spaces. For a town that is trying to emphasize transit use, bicycling, and walking, the library’s poor accessibility is a step in the wrong direction.

I’m not arguing the town was wrong in rejecting a proposal to make the library’s permanent home in the mall. Investing a lot of money in an aging University Mall posed its own problems. Renovating the existing library site may well have been the best of a limited set of options.

The lesson here that location matters. If we want to support our local businesses and decrease our dependence on cars, we need to support public and private development in places that serve these goals. Compact sites, on flat ground located and near other businesses (such as the University Square redevelopment downtown) support such sustainable urbanism. The library’s permanent location does not.

Fixing Chapel Hill's bike paths

On the agenda for this week's meeting of the Town of Chapel Hill Transportation and Connectivity Advisory Board is a discussion of bicycle safety improvement. Much of this is in response to the death of a woman on a bicycle who was hit by a motor vehicle near the intersection of Hillsborough Road and MLK Jr. Blvd, a notoriously dangerous part of town on which to ride a bike.

The Town has decided to make bicycle safety a priority and has already taken several steps, including an awareness campaign, changes to pedestrian crossings on MLK Jr. Blvd and adding green-painted sharrows to roads on certain popular bike corridors.

Given this attention, I thought it a good opportunity to reiterate my concerns about the pedestrian and bicycle side paths along NC 54 in Chapel Hill. Back in 2012, I pointed out to the Town that the intersections were dangerous and that bicyclists were put at high risk. I wrote the following letter to the Transportation and Connectivity Advisory Board and hope that at least some of these improvements will be implemented in the near future.

I've included an image of one of the intersections below, followed by the letter.

November 16, 2014

Dear members of the Transportation and Advisory Connectivity Board:

In light of your scheduled discussion at your Tuesday meeting (November 18) on bicycle safety improvements, I wanted to suggest other critical bicycle facility issues that should be addressed.

Some of you may recall that in 2012, at a meeting of the former Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board, I delivered a short presentation on the deficiencies of the sidepaths along NC-54 near Meadowmont (Raleigh Road). While these sidepaths are an excellent alternative to NC-54 along most of their stretch, the intersections are substandard. The conflicts at these intersections pose a substantial danger to bicyclists and are inconvenient to pedestrians. The presentation is available here.

The key problems are:

Lack of visibility for cyclists traveling two-ways at intersections

Conflicting traffic control devices — stop signs, walk signals, and traffic lights are confusing and mean that most bicyclists likely violating the law

Very long pedestrian cycle times, and inadequate walk times

Poor geometry at the Finley Golf Course road intersection in front of the UNC Imaging Center

The abrupt termination of the facility at Burning Tree Road without any signage.

These facilities seem to behave like cycletracks, but the intersections fall far short of meeting basic requirements. It is only a matter of time before a bicyclist is hit and injured at an intersections due to the high volume of traffic on NC-54 and lack of clear guidance for all vehicles.

In light of the renewed attention being paid to bicycle safety issues, I thought I would recommend some treatments that could improve these intersections for all:

To improve the visibility of two-way travel of cyclists at intersections, paint the crosswalks green and use sharrow symbols painted within. See this post at Greater Greater Washington for details.

Eliminate right-turn on red at the intersections which cross the cycle path; on the south side, Barbee Chapel Road (both intersections with NC-54) and Meadowmont Lane; on the north side, Finely Golf Course Road, driveway to The Exchange complex, and Friday Center Drive.

Add bicycle signals to alert two-way bicycle traffic that they may proceed during the times that straight-ahead (not turn) vehicular traffic has the light.

Eliminate the stop signs on the sidepaths and clarify between new bicycle signals and pedestrian signals

Eliminate permissive right-turn off NC-54 onto roads for which right-on-red has been eliminated, and allow right turns only on green arrow. Since there is a dedicated right-turn lane at each intersection, this should have no impact on through traffic.

Re-time the pedestrian walk cycle so persons have time to cross the street, particularly at the crosswalk in front of the Exchange building (see presentation for details). I recognize this may be challenging during rush hour, due to the need to prioritize vehicular traffic in and out of Chapel Hill, but off-peak and certainly on weekend mornings the walk cycle could easily be lengthened.

Similarly, reduce the signal cycle time so that pedestrians do not need to wait as long to cross.

Provide clear guidance to motor vehicles and bicycles as to how to merge at Burning Tree Road heading west.

Many of these suggestions mirror those I made in my August 2012 presentation, none of which have been implemented. However, in light of the new emphasis on bicycle safety, such as the use of green painted sharrows on key roads, I thought now would be a good time to raise them again.

I hope to attend your meeting to further discuss and answer any questions you might have, and that you deem it wise to implement at least some of these recommendations.

Yours truly,

Geoffrey F. Green

#bicycle #cycletrack #intersection

Snow walking in Chapel Hill

The south isn't really well prepared for snow; we don't have the equipment to clear the streets as quickly as our neighbors to the north, and the infrequency of heavy snowfall means that many of us don't know how to drive in those conditions. So it makes sense that it took until Friday afternoon, the day after the storm ended, for most streets to be passable.

Sidewalks and greenway trails are another story. Up north, it's pretty well settled that the owner of the property adjacent to a sidewalk is responsible for clearing it. That may be the case here as well, but many people don't have adequate snow removal gear. Greenway trails require specialized equipment, and it's not surprising those are often the last to clear.

But while some things with snow removal may be excusable, one practice is not. Almost invariably, in their rush to clear the roads and parking lots, snow plows will pile snow up into huge piles at the corners of intersections, blocking pedestrians and making it impossible for almost anyone to cross the street safely. Many of the sidewalks leading up to these intersections have been naturally cleared by the warm weather, but because so much ice and snow from the middle of the road was piled up to the corner, the intersections remain impassible days later. (At the same time, every road is almost entirely clear.)

One culprit is the main YMCA branch on MLK Jr. Blvd. Its parking lot was clear, but ice was piled several feet high where the public sidewalk intersected with the entrance to its parking lot. Likewise, in its rush to clear its parking lot, the UNC Wellness Center on Sprunt Street in Meadowmont blocked the public sidewalk outside its facility. And Carrboro isn't doing much better, at least outside the 300 East Main development.

I drove up Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. in Chapel Hill today, and there were too many blocked intersections to count. My wife took some photos of some examples:

This photo was taken just west of the intersection of Homestead and MLK:

This is the southwest corner of Homestead and MLK. Notice that every lane of the road is clear of any ice or snow, as is the sidewalk itself. But if you're in a wheelchair, you're not getting through.

This is the northwest corner of Homestead and MLK. Even if you managed to make it into the crosswalk, you've got another barrier to climb.

This is the northeast corner of Stateside Drive and MLK. If you look closely you can notice the clean and dry sidewalk beyond the intersection.

Here, on the northeast corner of Weaver Dairy Road and MLK, the freshly painted, highly visible zebra crosswalk leads to a pile of ice. Ironically, Weaver Dairy Road was just given a makeover to make the whole stretch more bicycle and pedestrian friendly.

For young and healthy able-bodied individuals, some of these blocked intersections may only be nuisances. But for the elderly, disabled, or parents pushing baby strollers, these ice barriers may as well be made of concrete. In the rush to clear the roads of all snow and ice, pedestrians are made to feel like second-class citizens. This is especially disappointing in a town which prides itself in accommodating different modes of transportation, not just automobiles, and which has an extensive fare-free bus system. It's hard to take the bus when you can't reach the bus stop.

The next time Chapel Hill gets substantial snowfall, I hope that the Town, NCDOT and private property owners make sure that their eagerness to clear the roads does not block pedestrians from making their trips. If it means a little more snow on the side of the road, so be it. Humans traveling on foot deserve nothing less.

#transit #sidewalk #snow #snowremoval #pedestrians

From my op-ed in this Sunday's issue of the Chapel Hill News (March 31, 2013).

The danger of high-speed roads

This is a sad story of a 14-year-old high school student who died when she was hit by a car yesterday morning (Monday, March 25) while crossing the street to catch a school bus that was approaching the stop. The article above includes a photo of the house where the student lived and where she crossed the street, and here are a couple of photos to put the scene in context.

First, an aerial shot, taken from Google Maps:

I'm not certain, but I think the student's house is off to the right. Next, here's a street-view shot, also courtesy Google:

This is a two-lane road that is the antithesis of pedestrian friendly. It's high speed — the speed limit is 55 miles per hour. There's no controlled intersection in the vicinity. No marked crosswalks or other warnings for cars. No sidewalks. No lights (the accident occurred before sunrise). No shoulder worth mentioning. It's perfectly straight, so there's no natural curve of the road to nudge drivers to slow down.

Cars are invited to speed down the road as fast as they want to, and if a kid is crossing the street so she won't be late for the bus, there's no time to react. The police at the scene said that speed did not appear to be a factor in the collision, but what that means is that unlawful speed was not an issue. It's the lawful speed that's the concern and that contributed to the girl's death.

I do feel bad for the driver — she was doing what was expected of her, which was to drive at an unsafe speed on a road where people aren't expected to venture absent the protection of a two-ton steel enclosure.

We need to stop engineering our roads to put driver speed and efficiency above all other considerations. Many of of North Carolina's towns and cities are beginning to consider the mobility needs of bicyclists and pedestrians when planning roadways. Likewise, the North Carolina DOT's new "Complete Streets" policy is a welcome effort to design roads that provide facilities for all users. But while we have a long way to go in our more densely populated towns and cities, rural areas have even further to go, as this sad incident demonstrates.

#NCDOT #roads #pedestrians #collisons #speed

“One consistent lesson that's been learned is that in a lot of transit station areas, property values can skyrocket,” [I said]. “It happened in Charlotte. Land prices around their light rail line increased dramatically after the plans to build the line and after construction of the line started.”

American Tobacco Trail I-40 bridge, a set on Flickr.

The other day I visited the construction site for the American Tobacco Trail greenway bridge over I-40. The project is scheduled to be completed by June.

Look in the dictionary next to the word "NIMBY" and you'll find this quote. It's from a story about the Raleigh City Council prohibiting a plan to allow backyard cottages, aka "granny flats," on single-family lots:

During a hearing last month, several residents said they didn’t find Gaylord’s vision appealing, though they agreed to the neighborhood opt-in.

“Many of us moved to Raleigh because we don’t want a dense neighborhood,” said Linda Watson, chairwoman of the Glenwood Citizens Advisory Council. “My neighborhood is particularly at risk. We have deep backyards, big trees and we’re near (N.C.) State. This could be a disaster for our neighborhood.”

140 West on Flickr.

Promoting cycling and walking

Today I was fortunate to attend a talk given by John Pucher, a professor at Rutgers, a visiting professor at UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning, and a well-regarded researcher in the active transportation world. He’s done an extensive amount of research around the world on cycling and walking, combining statistical and research expertise with an on-the-ground perspective. For more than an hour he provided an international perspective on cycling and walking, showing just how far behind many of us in the US (and especially in North Carolina) are in providing infrastructure to support non-auto travel. I live-tweeted the presentation and my tweets, along with some comments from others on Twitter, are included below in the full post. If my effort to embed these tweets doesn’t work, you can view it on the Storify web site.

He has a new book on the topic, called City Cycling, which you can purchase at your local bookseller or from Amazon.

Adventures in intersection design

Meadowmont is a neo-urban neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was designed with a mix of uses and is trumpeted as a walk-friendly community, with sidewalks along both sides of the street and a network of greenway trails. (It was also designed as a station for a light-rail line, but that's a different story.) During the approval process, Meadowmont's developer emphasized its "pedestrian orientation for working and living." So you would hope that the design of the sidewalks, roads and intersections would consistently reflect the importance of access for people traveling on foot.

Alas, you would be wrong.

This is the UNC Wellness Center.

It provides an assortment of health and wellness services, among them cardiovascular exercise facilities, group classes, an aquatics center, nutrition services, and a cardiac rehab center. It's a place dedicated to improving the health of its patrons, which makes its driveway entrance onto the surrounding roadway so disappointing. It makes vehicular access a priority while ignoring the safety of pedestrians.

Here's what you see if you're trying to cross the intersection at its driveway:

There are several problems here. First, you can see that the stop bar is in front of the pedestrian path across the intersection. That invites cars to block the path of pedestrians. By directing the cars to proceed up to that point, it puts pedestrians in danger from drivers who are focused on the road that they don't notice the possibility that someone might be stepping off the intersection. From personal experience, this is a real danger because there are plenty of drivers who speed up to the stop, as well as plenty of elderly drivers whose reaction times are not up to par.

Second, the intersection has a very wide turning radius. It's perhaps easier to see on this image:

This also increases the pedestrian danger. It's an invitation for cars to take the turn from the roadway onto the driveway at high speed. It increases the distance that pedestrians are in the roadway as they attempt to go from one side of the intersection to another. That increased distance is especially dangerous for people who can't move as fast, such as the elderly residents of the retirement community across the street. Drivers also find it harder see pedestrians as they are outside the driver's line of sight.

The Federal Highway Administration points out:

Designing intersections with smaller turning radii slows traffic speeds and allows perpendicular curb ramps to be positioned parallel to the crosswalk path of travel, as well as perpendicular to the curb (Section 7.2.1). In addition, smaller turning radii significantly decrease crossing distances for pedestrians, as shown in Table 8-1. Smaller radii also enhance detection of the crosswalk and improve crossing conditions for people with vision impairments because there is a greater distinction between the perpendicular and parallel traffic flows.

Also look at the curb cuts. Because of the wide turn, they are pointed at the middle of the street, not towards the destination sidewalk. For the able-bodied, it may not be a big deal, but a wheelchair is going to follow the slope and will need to be redirected into the proper orientation. It's simply a bad design.

Finally, the driveway is designed for three lanes of traffic. Three lanes! Given that it exits onto a low-volume, three-lane street, it boggles the mind why that much asphalt was deemed necessary.

The folks who designed facility were well aware that the pedestrian access along the sidewalk was inadequate. Just compare how they designed the crossing at the sidewalk with an internal crossing from their parking lot into their facility.

The red line at the bottom of the image shows the sidewalk crossing, while the blue line indicates the crosswalk between the parking lot and the facility. You'll note how the three wide lanes of traffic at the entrance compress to two narrow lanes as driveway continues towards the lot. The crossing distance at the crosswalk is only 27 feet, just slightly more than the width of two lanes of traffic. There's another crosswalk just north of the blue line, not shown in this picture that's only 22 feet wide. The sidewalks continue directly out to the edge of the traffic path, making it easy for drivers to see pedestrians and those on foot to watch for cars.

Down at the intersection, where people not going to the Wellness Center need to cross, the distance is 47 feet, That means it takes the average traveler twice as long to cross as it takes the Wellness Center patron. And of course, drivers who have entered into the Wellness Center's driveway recognize they are in a driveway and that they need to be aware of pedestrian-auto conflicts. On their exit, though, pedestrian concerns are shunted aside and they are encouraged to travel on to their next destination with haste.

What to do? There are two easy steps. The first is to tackle the low-hanging fruit by pulling back the stop bar. Make it clear to drivers that there's something between the driveway and the road that they need to be concerned about, and that they're not entering onto a wide road along some commercial strip in strip-mall land. it's a cheap and easy fix.

The second step is to decrease the turning radius. A complete fix would be expensive, but there are some interim fixes. Restripe the road to remove one of the travel lanes — there's not a lot of traffic leaving the Wellness Center at any one time, so removing one lane of exiting traffic would have minimal impact on departure time. Paint stripes along the shoulder to narrow the travel space allotted to cars and install bollards to expand the space clearly allocated to pedestrians. This Greater Greater Washington post provides an example of some cheap fixes.

The real lesson here though is that as we design our streets and pedestrian paths, we need to think of more than just the interests of autos. If such poor intersection design can occur even in a place that was specifically planned for pedestrian access, we must be all the more vigilant elsewhere.

(UNC Wellness Center photo from the UNC Wellness Center; Aerial imagery from Google Earth.)

The Chapel Hill News posted this doozy of a question on twitter:

So if we pay for park and ride lots, is Chapel Hill Transit really fare free? Read bit.ly/14yy7An and tell us at [email protected]

February 4, 2013

Along those lines, let's ask some other questions:

"So if we pay for gas, is parking at Southpoint really free?"

"So if we have to drive around looking for a space and can't find one because people are camping out in all the spaces, is parking really free?"

"So if walking makes us hungry, is walking really free?"

To try to control my snark and answer the original question — if parking at a park-and-ride lot were the absolute only way to get onto a Chapel Hill Transit bus, then yes, you could make the argument that Chapel Hill Transit is no longer fare free. But it's not. You might as well claim that Chapel Hill Transit isn't fare free because Chapel Hill residents' property taxes, and UNC students' mandatory transportation fees, help finance the transit system.

So yes, Chapel Hill Transit is fare free. A fee to park at certain lots does not change that fact.

The descriptive @PedestrianError links to another article that shows how police and others are so quick to blame people for walking to destinations when they get injured instead of putting responsibility where it belongs, on our poorly-engineered and auto-centric roads. I ranted about this before, and it indicates that despite the energetic Complete Streets movement and the research showing the importance to health and livability of providing safe and convenient walking facilities, the safety of people outside these steel capsules remains a low priority.

My OrangePolitics post on the importance of Orange County's proposed transit tax.

About "pedestrians" and busy roads

This is a short rant on this article in the News & Observer about the dangers posed by Capital Boulevard, a busy arterial in Raleigh, to people trying to walk across the street.* A 16-year-old kid was hit the other day and is in critical condition; two people have died and sixteen have been injured over the last five years.

According to the transportation officials quote in the article, these walkers are responsible for their own injuries:

‎"Human nature can defeat safety precautions. No matter what cities install, it’s a challenge to get pedestrians to use safety features. For instance, [Raleigh Transportation Director Eric] Lamb said, cities install pedestrian walkways over busy roads only to have people cross the road directly rather than climb the stairs."

It's not surprising that people on foot don't want to be relegated to lengthy, often unpleasant detours. That's the key problem of the proposed transit station on the opposite side from me on NC-54 in Chapel Hill — no one will want to take the proposed pedestrian overpass. At the end of the article the reporter talks to a jaywalker who says he doesn't wait for the walk signal because it takes too long and challenges the reporter to try it. The wait time? More than one minute. No wonder folks don't want to hang out there.

“You can’t engineer [against] bad judgment,” said Mike Kennon, Raleigh’s transportation operations manager. “We feel like we’ve done all we can.”

Oh really? How about making it a road that actually respects pedestrians instead of relegating them to third-class status.

* In light of Tom Vanderbilt's fascinating discussion of the pejorative history of the word "pedestrian," I'm declining to use that term here.

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