Any discussion of pedestrianizing the downtown must consider traffic calming tactics, and implement best practices in this area. The process is incremental, and not without some controversy, inasmuch as its explicit purpose is to reduce traffic velocity and volume. Motorists, understandably but mistakenly, want to cover ground with dispatch, what with time being money and all.

It's sort of puzzling to me, because we aren't born in automobiles. Every car ride begins and ends with a walk. So the reflexive hostility that motorists and pedestrians routinely exhibit for each other is strange. When driving into downtown, the driver sees each pedestrian crossing the street as an obstacle, but as soon as he's out of his car and crossing the street, he sees other motorists as the enemy, and purposely slows his gait to further inconvenience the oncoming soccer mom in the Escalade bearing down on him.

No wonder people go to the mall. Once safely inside the climate-controlled uberstore, the gravest hazard they face is indigestion from the food court.

Traffic calming is not a new subject in Chico. In the recent redesign of East Eighth street, for example, three roundabouts were planned, specifically to calm traffic while facilitating smoother traffic flow. Were the residents along the corridor happy about this? No. Instead, they mau-maued the designers, insisting, essentially, that they don't like their traffic calm and smooth, they like it frenetic and rough. Go figure.

But other neighborhoods around Chico, confronted with thoughtless drivers speeding along residential streets, have petitioned the city for increased traffic calming measures, and where they've been implemented, they've been effective.

Usually, this means "speed bumps" (or, as they're called in Europe, "sleeping policemen"). But this is only one of many weapons in the traffic calmiing toolkit.

The Project for Public Spaces has a comprehensive catalog of traffic calming measures, summarized on the next page.

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Greater Downtown - Traffic Tranquilizers

Posted by Alan Chamberlain at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I should, properly, disclaim that I served on the Citizen's Transit Advisory Comittee, the last two years as chair, just prior to its decommissioning when transit services throughout Butte County were consolidated under BCAG in 2005. But my observations today are from the perspective of a citizen and downtown activist. Still, I gained some insights into how sausage is made, and I confess it has influenced a rather jaundiced view of the policy process administering transit strategies.

One thing I learned, early on, is that the purpose of mass transit is not to furnish needed transporation services, to decrease traffic congestion, reduce air pollution, or improve public safety. No, as it happens, the purpose of mass transit is to ensure that no state or federal subsidy monies go unspent.

I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, I lived in the Bay Area for 20 years, where the Muni system served as a sort of dumping ground for incompetent civil servants from other departments in the city. Still, I was astonished.

I should also observe that Chico, like similarly-sized communities outside of urban centers, receives far less in the way of subsidy money per capita than the large coastal metropolitan areas. In fact, Chico itself receives no transit subsidy money; that is allocated to the county, and administered by BCAG. Butte County gets first crack at the cash, though, and counties like to build bridges and roads. So the amount that BCAG receives is already diminished, and Chico's priorities, while not ignored, are rationalized to the overall transit needs of the county as a whole. This is a done deal, spilled milk, and all that, so developing new strategies for transit services in Chico itself is probably an exercise in speculative fiction.

Not that some investment can't occur outside the BCAG ambit. Indeed, the construction of the new transit center on Lot 2 proceeds at feverish pace, bought and paid for exclusively by the City of Chico. This is notwithstanding the appallingly misguided location of it. In my discussions with various business and civic leaders, I know of no one who approves of this site for a master transfer hub. Nearby businesses bemoan the loss of business and mutter darkly about potential litigation. The University is not happy about it, either, preferring that the eastern gateway to the campus not become a magnet for the career homeless.

Plans to construct a transit center at this intersection have been under development for years. Fortunately, Chico's charmingly parochial process has repeatedly confounded its implementation. The initial proposal comes with a modest cost. Then the various special pleadings begin, requiring photovoltaic power systems, public restrooms, art installations, etc. Then the project goes out to bid, and the proposals received all exceed the budget, so the plans go on the shelf.

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Greater Downtown - Transit

Posted by Alan Chamberlain at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Pretty much any day of the week during peak demand hours, traffic backs up on 2nd Street downtown, in both directions. And the reason is fairly obvious to the reasonably observant; left turns.

It only takes one person wanting to make a left from eastbound 2nd onto Main, or from westbound 2nd onto Broadway, to stack up waiting cars like cordwood, engines idling, exhaust belching, tempers simmering. Once the light turns yellow, the waiting motorist can execute the maneuver, meanwhile stranding a half a dozen or more at the light.

I've proposed for some time that eliminating left turns at either of those intersections would be a benefit. Now there's some science to back it up.

UPS has developed a routing methodology for planning delivery trucks' itineraries. The core idea? No left turns. A division of UPS, Roadnet, has embedded this concept into a commercial logistics software package it furnishes to other large delivery-oriented customers, such as Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch. Roadnet estimates that customers using the software save over 54 million gallons of fuel per year. That's over 150 million dollars, with a concommitant reduction in emissions.

These savings can also accrue to individuals, as well. An Oregon family recently conducted an experiment using the traffic flow software, and saved $3.69 per day in fuel consumption. That's nearly $1000 per year. Could you use an extra thousand bucks?

And those benefits don't even take into consideration the wear and tear on the patience and good will that waiting for a left turn (or for someone ahead to make a left) can exact. If Chico is serious about being a "green" city, and make a real contribution to reducing greenhouse gases and all the rest, perhaps it should seriously consider prohibiting left turns at high-demand intersections. It's certainly worth a try.

Posted by Alan Chamberlain at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A few years ago, I pitched an idea to then freshman councilmember Scott Gruendl, to convene a permanent citizens' advisory board to oversee public policy on transportation. This proposal grew out of a certain frustration with increased traffic, constrained parking in high-demand corridors, deteriorating air quality, and reduced public safety caused by growth. But mostly I was concerned about a degradation of public civility.

I had participated two years before in a task force facilitated by the Chico Chamber to evaluate and prioritize transportation infrastructure investment, and to recommend strategies for obtaining funds for more aggressive investment. That process was long, arduous, and ultimately ineffective. It pretty much rubber-stamped the project plan already defined by city staff, and made no meaningful recommendations for funding alternatives. Not that none were proposed in the meetings, only that the Chamber only forwarded proposals consistent with the Chamber's priorities. Not to disparage the Chamber, but its priorities are consistent with the National Chamber's priorities, even when they are in conflict with the needs and wishes of the local Chamber membership. That's just the way these things work. So it was unsurprising, but nevertheless disappointing, that nothing more came of it. A lot of early morning meetings went for naught.

So I wrote up a two-page proposal and formally submitted it to the city for consideration. Councilmembers Scott Gruendl and Dan Nguyen-Tan championed the proposal, arranged a meeting with the city manager and senior staff, and it was subsequently agendized for council consideration. It was referred to the Internal Affairs committee, which, on the recommendation of Planning Director Kim Seidler, tabled the proposal indefinitely. Seidler's rationale was that the General Plan revision process would certainly be addressing these same issues, and a standing transportation panel would confuse the process. The GP Revise was, Seidler argued, imminent. That was two years ago.

In the intervening period, we've seen a lot of new investment, mostly in street widening and resurfacing, and a lot of controversy regarding downtown parking, the transfer of city transit to BCAG, and a continued deterioration of congestion, parking, air quality, and public safety. The recent crisis concerning existing traffic problems, and those projected by Costco expansion, on Whitman/MLK Parkway, illustrates the urgency of more proactive and pragmatic planning. Notwithstanding the enormous amount of time, money, delay, and concrete poured into the East Avenue/Cohasset intersection, problems there have actually become worse. No need to limit development in northeast Chico; no would want to live north of that nightmare, anyway. (A friend mentioned recently, when we were driving back from the airport, that when his family was shopping for a home, they limited their search to south of East, e.g.)

So I don't think it amiss to resuscitate this proposal. We have a new City Manager, a new Planning Director, and a new City Council. Transportation policy planning and execution is a cabinet-level department in the US government; surely Chico deserves no less.

Posted by Alan Chamberlain at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is the routing map for a monster traffic circle in England. It's designed to carry three to four lanes of traffic each way. There are actually five regular single-lane traffic circles within this enormous interchange. As motorists enter the main circle, they can either continue clockwise (left-hand side driving, of course), or use the integrated circles to go counterclockwise. Given that each entry has a yield requirement, I imagine it can get quite congested, although the ability to go either way must reduce this somewhat. Here's an aerial view.

Traffic circles have been a popular topic of discussion around Chico. Three roundabouts on West Eighth Avenue have provoked outrage and admiration, and suspected roundabouts on Eaton Road have provoked protest signs. Two traffic circles are proposed on Manzanita at Hooker Oak and Vallabrosa.

Personally, I like roundabouts. As a sometime network engineer, I'm fascinated by the similarities between data networking and vehicular traffic networks. Roundabouts reduce auto latency in the same way a switching hub reduces packet latency between ethernet segments. At intersections regulated by signage or signals, traffic stops, backs up, compacts, and then takes a while to unpack itself when the light turns green.

Well-designed roundabouts should permit traffic to enter and circumnavigate at approximately 27 miles per hour. This happens to be the most efficient speed for moving the maximum number of vehicles past a fixed point. It seems counterintuitive, but the faster vehicles are travelling, the more distance they have between them, and thus fewer can make it past the post. And at higher speeds, latency from intersection negotiation amplifies exponentially.

The strategy of adding lanes to secondary routes only makes things worse. More people begin taking that route, assuming that the more/wider lanes will be faster, and usually the speed limits are increased (or ignored) so people drive faster, leading to inefficient throughput.

On a two-lane secondary route with intermittent stop signs, latency gets pretty bad at peak demand times. Using roundabouts reduces that latency, and tends to regulate the speed of the entire length of roadway. While you might get slowdowns as you approach a roundabout, rarely do things come to a complete stop.

Certainly they're confusing to people unfamiliar with them. I remember my first visit to Washington, DC in a rental car. Very stressful. But by the time I drove around in England, though, I was a past master at it, even on the wrong side of the road.

Posted by Alan Chamberlain at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the recommendations of the parking and access charrette was to increase available on-street parking by re-striping to provide diagonal (as contrasted to parallel) parking. This is a pretty good idea, all things considered, inasmuch as it provides about twice the parking per linear block. It is estimated, by the charrette facilitators, that by restriping just Wall, Salem, Orient, Flume, and Normal Streets, an additional 496 (why they didn't just go ahead and round up is left as an exercise for the reader) parking spaces in the downtown core.

This would be a genuine boon, and provide much needed near-term relief for downtown merchants' patrons. It's not a meaningful solution to the larger issue of providing employee parking for new businesses locating in downtown, but it is something we can do right away, at a relatively low cost, and perhaps stimulate more visitors to come downtown during normal business hours.

The one gaping flaw in this strategy, alas, is that in all of the planning illustrations, the cars are backed into the spaces. This is not exactly a new or novel idea, but it is profoundly misguided. We currently have back-in diagonal parking over by the Amtrak station, and it has not been a problem, because of the lack of vehicular traffic in that area. But as the veil is lifted on the new city plaza, back-in parking is one of the features of that design. And in downtown, it introduces latency, no less than parallel parking.

Latency is a data networking term that describes the conduct of data packets when they pass through a network segment experiencing congestion. Packets are delayed in transmission while waiting for other packets to complete their journey, and sometimes packets collide, forcing all hosts to back off and resend. These metaphors used in data networking theory find their origins in street network jargon.

On a corridor, such as the Broadway-Main couplet, or on Second Street, latency occurs when someone stops to back in to a parallel parking space. This latency backs up traffic for however long it takes for the motorist to move out of the traffic lane. Latency also occurs when someone tries to make a left turn at an intersection with left turn yield control, and other cars stack up behind it. Unfortunately, many of these cars are also intending to make the one or perhaps two left turns that can occur when the light turns yellow. Latency is also introduced by motorists waiting for a crosswalk to clear before making a right turn, jaywalking pedestrians, or a Critical Mass demonstration. The end result is increased frustration on the part of the delayed motorists, and an erosion of the good will that marks good citiizenship. That person holding up trafiic might be your florist, hygienist, accountant, or neighbor, but while you're delayed, that motorist becomes instead "that *&^% moron":

The great advantage to head-in diagonal parking is that it reduces latency. You see the open space, you turn your wheel, suddenly you are out of the traffic lane, and others pass freely. The chief disadvantage, according to bicyclists, is that motorists backing out of head-in diagonal parking present a hazard to bicyclists. And this is a true fact, if the bike lane is assumed to be in the through traffic lane adjacent to all those auto rear ends.

But suppose instead that the head-in diagonal parking was stopped by a curb that was 60" from the sidewalk edge. This would provide an ample bike lane that would be protected from vehicular traffic by a rank of parked cars. Re-engineering downtown streets to accomodate diagonal parking would certainly encourage motorists uncomfortable with parallel parking to come back to the city center, and a genuinely useful bike lane strategy would encourage those so inclined to use human-powered transportation when visitng downtown.

There are some good ideas in the charrette findings, but they are unmoored from a central strategy, and reflect nothing so much as a catalog of planning trends. We can find some useful suggestions therein, but we must animate them with a vision and shared values for them to find meaning.

Posted by Alan Chamberlain at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)