I got an email from another colleague regarding the experience converting a 4-lane to 3-lane conversion on NE 12th Avenue. I could spend a lot of time to describe it or I could summarize blog posts that BikePortland.org had on the subject in chronological order with better reporting than I could accomplish at home in the evenings after work.
Pushback on the Plans - are signals enough? - April 28th: This was the time I got involved. There was some earlier work on the concepts, but I hadn't done a whole lot of new information.
Implementation Notice - June 2nd: PBOT implemented the signal changes with some striping modifications before the school year ended.
Moving Forward with Concerns - June 16th: A second meeting was held to discuss initial results.
Consensus with the Stakeholders! - September 29 : We studied the after when school was back in session to do a reasonable comparison.
Implementation pictorial: The completed project, we still have a few things to modify and we committed to evaluate the after before the end of the year. We haven't had any complaints that we were not able to address.
Showing posts with label cars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cars. Show all posts
Monday, February 27, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Misuse of Level of Service and Travel Projections
This is the post that I wanted to write if I had only made the time. Nice debate on the use (or misuse) of Level of Service.
Levels of Service and Travel Projections: The Wrong Tools for Planning Our Streets? by Project for Public Spaces.
This makes me think of Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of Great American Cities. There were so many notable quotes from that book that bear repeating in our engineering curriculum that it's one of of the primary motivations for my being involved in training. A great insight into that book was offered by Kirk Paulsen who attended the PSU trip to the Netherlands this past summer. His post is here.
Levels of Service and Travel Projections: The Wrong Tools for Planning Our Streets? by Project for Public Spaces.
This makes me think of Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of Great American Cities. There were so many notable quotes from that book that bear repeating in our engineering curriculum that it's one of of the primary motivations for my being involved in training. A great insight into that book was offered by Kirk Paulsen who attended the PSU trip to the Netherlands this past summer. His post is here.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Roads Going High Tech... and Bicycle Lanes Too
Today's blog from the Secretary of Transportation describes roads going high tech. At yesterdays, TransPort meeting (the Intelligent Transportation Systems Subcomittee of Metro's TPAC) we learned about how the Oregon DOT is going to implement some queue warning signs and additional technology to highlight where highway traffic is stopped and to reduce the speed limit accordingly. It's an exciting development for improving safety and improving our highways (specifically Highway 217 and ) as we seek to do more with our existing infrastructure. This specifically should reduce the potential of wasting capacity that can be restored if motorists are aware of the change. One can debate the extent of the improvements, but putting information in the hands of engineers can yield societal benefits.
Not to be outdone, we're working to pull together information on bike lanes in a similar fashion. The link below shares where the map is and the progress on where we're counting and monitoring use of the system.
UPDATED: I recieved a comment about how we're detecting bikes and that's found here: http://koonceportland.blogspot.com/2011/09/automated-bicycle-counting.html
Monday, October 3, 2011
Walk 21 Transforming the Automobile City
I am in Vancouver BC this morning attending the Walk 21 Conference and this is the insert in the Globe & Mail newspaper.
The consciousness around walking and car culture are very interesting and it seems that more people in Canada are aware of the urban conditions. I think this is primarily due to the fact that many of the large unviersities are in the urban context.
The program schedule started off with a fantastic array of speakers including the conference organizers and the City's Director of Streets, Neal Carley.
One of the speakers on the docket was Gordon Price, who was an elected leader in Vancouver who talked about Motordom and the Wars Between Pedestrians and Cars between 1920s and 1940s. He offered some wonderful context related to the growth of streetcars and the rise of the automobile.
He cited Vancouver's example of Construction of Streetcar by decade which was a steep incline to death in the 1930s when automobiles took over.
1889 to 1899 16.1 miles,
1900 to 1909 37.2,
1910 to 1919 50.2,
1920 to 1929 10.3
He highlighted the three elements needed in Vancouver and other communities as:
Gordon Price highlighted the term "Motordom" in the book Fighting Traffic – The dawn of the motor age in the American City. He defined Motordom as an alliance of engineers, etc that “Socially reconstructed the purpose of the street”.
A good example of this was the term "Jaywalker", where a Jay is a hick – a person that doesn’t know the rules of the City. Pedestrians "need" to stay in between the lines. So, in 1920s there was a war on the car because new drivers had problems with safety, but in the 1930s the car had won and we have been accomodating the car for the past eight years. Streets are places for movement of vehicles.
He highlighted that "the car is fabulous, we love it. It’s a freedom machine." Moving forward we have to figure out how we change the guidelines in the Transportation Planning Handbook by the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
He went on to discuss how ITE principles resulted in efficient, free, and rapid car traffic. What could be wrong with that? It’s universal. We have been focused on Auto-Dependent Urban Planning. The car isn’t going away, nor should it. It does things that the car can only do. BUT when you Design for Car, you get three things:
Once you design the roads, then you have to get parking. Motordom drove out all of the other choices.
It was an insightful presentation highly relevant to the audience.
The consciousness around walking and car culture are very interesting and it seems that more people in Canada are aware of the urban conditions. I think this is primarily due to the fact that many of the large unviersities are in the urban context.
The program schedule started off with a fantastic array of speakers including the conference organizers and the City's Director of Streets, Neal Carley.
One of the speakers on the docket was Gordon Price, who was an elected leader in Vancouver who talked about Motordom and the Wars Between Pedestrians and Cars between 1920s and 1940s. He offered some wonderful context related to the growth of streetcars and the rise of the automobile.
He cited Vancouver's example of Construction of Streetcar by decade which was a steep incline to death in the 1930s when automobiles took over.
1889 to 1899 16.1 miles,
1900 to 1909 37.2,
1910 to 1919 50.2,
1920 to 1929 10.3
He highlighted the three elements needed in Vancouver and other communities as:
- Sufficient density – single family homes and higher
- Good mix of uses
- Walkable distance (3 blocks to transit maximum)
Gordon Price highlighted the term "Motordom" in the book Fighting Traffic – The dawn of the motor age in the American City. He defined Motordom as an alliance of engineers, etc that “Socially reconstructed the purpose of the street”.
 |
| Detroit 1917 Campus Martius picture showing amazing mix of uses |
A good example of this was the term "Jaywalker", where a Jay is a hick – a person that doesn’t know the rules of the City. Pedestrians "need" to stay in between the lines. So, in 1920s there was a war on the car because new drivers had problems with safety, but in the 1930s the car had won and we have been accomodating the car for the past eight years. Streets are places for movement of vehicles.
He highlighted that "the car is fabulous, we love it. It’s a freedom machine." Moving forward we have to figure out how we change the guidelines in the Transportation Planning Handbook by the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
He went on to discuss how ITE principles resulted in efficient, free, and rapid car traffic. What could be wrong with that? It’s universal. We have been focused on Auto-Dependent Urban Planning. The car isn’t going away, nor should it. It does things that the car can only do. BUT when you Design for Car, you get three things:
- Big and Simple,
- Flat, and
- Uniform (limited chances for making a great place).
Once you design the roads, then you have to get parking. Motordom drove out all of the other choices.
It was an insightful presentation highly relevant to the audience.
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