Traffic lessons for communities, from the ever-moving Dan Burden

Dan Burden, doubtless the most constantly traveling traffic-tamer in the United States, carried his narrow-the-roadways message to an unlikely venue Oct. 27 — a cars section in The New York Times. In an interview that filled nearly half a page above a Volvo ad, Burden explained a few counterintuitive notions about how to move traffic more smoothly and at the same time make pedestrians more comfortable. “We actually lose capacity on a road if we design it for high speed,” Burden told interviewer Keith Schneider. “If you are in an urban area with a lot of driveways and intersections, you get your best capacity at somewhere around 30 mph. … When you drive at a slower and more uniform rate, you need less space between cars. Drivers feel more comfortable being closer to the car in front of them. Therefore you can move more cars through than if the cars are traveling faster, [when you’d need] more headway, more space, between cars.” “The typical road [American transportation departments have] been building for a long time is five lanes,” said Burden, who founded a nonprofit organization called Walkable Communities in 1996 in High Springs, Florida, and who has conducted workshops on traffic problems in 1,700 communities across the US and Canada. “The fifth lane, where people make left turns, is called a scramble lane.” Traffic engineers believed the extra lane in the road’s center would take left-turning vehicles out of the flow and “greatly increase the capacity of the road and reduce the crashes,” Burden noted. “It was a mistake,” he said. “It reduced the carrying capacity of the road 30 percent and increased the number of crashes. A better idea is to build boulevards with divided medians. A typical boulevard has an opening every 660 feet and a lane to allow people to make left turns. By doing that, you increase the carrying capacity of the road 30 percent.” proponent of ‘road diets’ Burden, a former photographer for National Geographic who has been known to travel 49 or 50 weeks of the year, often prescribes “road diets,” which reduce the number of lanes in existing roads. In Hartford, Connecticut, road diets have been imposed on six roads, he said, “and everywhere Hartford has done it, traffic has improved. … the average speed has come down 6 mph on neighborhood streets. Safety goes up.” Narrowing a road benefits both pedestrians and motorists because it reduces the width of pavement that pedestrians have to cross and it makes intersections more compact. That means the traffic signals don’t have to stay red for so long — delaying motorists — while pedestrians cross. Asked to name places that are doing things right, Burden cited the new urban development Fairview Village, east of Portland, Oregon. Besides having an excellent mix of uses — “a Target store, a department store, a school, lots of single-family residential housing, apartment housing and vast amounts of open space” — Fairview Village “has six points of access into the village so that all the traffic gets distributed,” Burden told The Times. “None of the roads are big. It has links and trails.” u