Can transportation agencies learn to count pedestrians?

People on foot may benefit as the Transect is applied to street design. Nelson/Nygaard Associates of San Francisco is developing “performance measures” that may help overcome an entrenched problem — the refusal of transportation engineers to pay close attention to the needs of pedestrians. For years new urbanists have tried to persuade transportation agencies to stop unnecessarily favoring motorists over pedestrians. Jeffrey Tumlin of Nelson/Nygaard says a major obstacle has been the lack of a method that adequately measures how well a street serves pedestrians. Without a quantitative way of recognizing the importance of foot traffic, transportation engineers will continue to favor cars, he says. Consequently, Nelson/Nygaard has been working for the City of Seattle on a “quality-of-service” measuring tool, which could help transportation engineers determine when pedestrians should be a priority and how well they are being served. Engineers could use the new instrument instead of the established “level-of-service” system, which is biased toward accommodating fast, heavy volumes of automobile traffic. The fundamental idea underlying Nelson/Nygaard’s quality-of-service approach is the Transect. As conceived by Andres Duany, the Transect identifies a series of zones — from dense urban centers to rural areas — and prescribes the heights and placement of buildings, the character of landscape treatments, and other elements appropriate to each zone. Nelson/Nygaard uses it to identify a series of contexts that the street and road network should adapt to. “Certain aspects of both roadway design guidelines and transportation performance measures vary according to a Transect scale, which we have cut a bit differently,” Tumlin explains. The contexts range from “less urban” to “more urban” as follows: • Trails. • Rural roads. • Low-density, single-family home neighborhood streets. • Nonretail areas surrounding walkable neighborhood main street areas. • Retail main streets outside the central business district (CBD). • Dense urban downtown neighborhoods around the CBD. • Retail streets in those dense urban neighborhoods. • CBD “B” streets. • CBD “A” streets. In the more urban zones, a context-based system might give engineers the rationale they need to make traffic lanes narrower, sidewalks wider, street corners more squared off, and on-street parking more common. Counting individuals, not vehicles The system devised by Nelson/Nygaard calls for measuring the number of individuals — not just the number of vehicles — that the circulation network is able to move toward their destinations. The current level-of-service system counts how many vehicles move through an intersection or on a section of roadway in a given period. Nelson/Nygaard’s proposed system would count how many people the circulation network moves — including pedestrians, bicyclists, and bus riders. By determining how many individuals are accommodated, this system would generate balanced recommendations on questions such as whether a bus-only lane should be added to a street or whether a lane of parking should be removed to make way for a wider sidewalk. Seattle has not yet embraced all of Nelson/Nygaard’s recommendations; the city is not fully prepared to do all the counting the consultants called for. “Data collection would be kind of overwhelming, especially in the bicycle and pedestrian area,” says Jeffrey Bender, senior transportation planner for the city. Possibly such measuring may be done in the future, if not in Seattle, then in some other city interested in becoming more walkable. Seattle has taken a strong interest in the consultants’ ideas for “transit performance measures.” Bender says the city has asked King County Metro, which provides most of the local bus service, to pursue those transit measures. “We’re looking at key corridors in Seattle,” he notes. The performance measures would include transit frequency, hours of service, reliability (delays), how full the buses are, and travel speed. The result would be a transit report card. “We’re looking at key corridors in Seattle where we’ll monitor that over time,” Benders says. “Over time we hope to pursue bike and pedestrian measures, too. We’re working on a bicycle master plan right now.” Tumlin says one goal in Seattle is to help transportation engineers understand trade-offs that can be made between one mode of movement and another. In dense settings, for instance, it may make sense to make it easier for pedestrians to cross the streets, even if it slows vehicular traffic. “Downtown, the pedestrian is critical,” he notes. On main streets, Tumlin observes, “transit will tend to be more important; the speed of motor vehicles is less important there than farther out in the Transect.” Progress elsewhere Fred Dock of Meyer, Mohaddes Associates in Minneapolis has been working with Access Minneapolis, a city-sponsored program, on a comprehensive citywide Transportation Action Plan, which will lay out goals to be achieved in the Minnesota city over 10 years. Aspects of the Transect are being applied in that program, which is concerned with pedestrians, bicycles, transit, automobiles, and freight. The program will include “street design guidelines that reflect the characteristics of the surroundings,” a city Public Works document states. The Transect is also influencing transportation work in Arlington, Virginia. For the City of Denver, Kimley-Horn & Associates developed design standards specific to seven land-use types. Two of the designs are for urban residential streets and transit streets. A proposed “recommended practice” in street design has been prepared by the Institute of Transportation Engineers in conjunction with the Congress for the New Urbanism (see March 2006 New Urban News). Titled “Context Sensitive Solutions in Designing Major Urban Thoroughfares for Walkable Communities” it was published this spring and will be under review for a year, says Jim Daisa at Kimley-Horn in San Ramon, California. Information is available at www.ite.org.