Pavement Alters You Mind

Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin, and Rebecca Sanders, a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Safe TREC interviewed hundreds of professionals in public health, planning and engineering, and safe streets advocacy around the country and uncovered three main factors that seem to determine if a driver will yield to a pedestrian at an intersection without a traffic signal: Street width, pedestrian volume, and the part of the US where you happen to be. All three of these factors are interesting, but the one most directly related to bike and pedestrian safety is street width. The design of traffic infrastructure directly affects both our perceptions and the behavior we expect from others and from ourselves: In short, pavement alters your mind.

Take a look at the walkability map for our old hometown, Berkeley, and you'll notice a lot of green. This is where the city is walkable: Good sidewalks, crosswalks, housing and density of neighborhood shops all contribute to walkability. If you live in the green areas you probably take the ease of walking for granted and might not even know that Berkeley has a walkability score of 79 out of 100. Those areas of red are less walkable mainly due to the steep terrain of the Berkeley Hills.

There's a lot to like about our new neighborhood in San Luis Obispo (SLO), an area referred to as Downtown South. Many errands can be accomplished on foot or by bike, there is a mix of single-family homes and apartments, most of the housing is modest. Our neighbors seem to have low-stress lives, there's seldom aggressive driving behavior. SLO has a reputation for valuing a SLOw way of life, but it has an unremarkable walkability score of 51 out of 100. That very small area of green just happens to be the part of town to which we gravitated. Unfortunately, there are parts of SLO where the speed of traffic and the lack of infrastructure are make things unfriendly to pedestrians.

We think we're lucky to be living in a walkable area, but it seems some folks do not like densely populated areas at all. A Pew Research study uncovered a strong correlation between liberal or conservative values and the type of neighborhood you in which want or choose to live. Quoting from the study:

"It is an enduring stereotype – conservatives prefer suburban McMansions while liberals like urban enclaves – but one that is grounded in reality."

The older part of town is the green area while the newer parts of SLO is mostly optimized for cars. We've tried biking through the non-green areas shown on that map of SLO. It ain't pretty. The city prides itself on being "bike friendly" and there are bike lanes in most parts of town, but my wife finds many of the shopping areas just too dangerous to cycle: Multi-lane roads, speed limits of 40 to 50 miles per hour, numerous opportunities for vehicles to turn right, bike lanes that end unexpectedly, and nothing but a stripe of white paint on the pavement to separate a cyclist from a fast moving car. I feel safer cycling through most parts of Berkeley and gritty downtown Oakland. My wife is right, the commercial shopping areas of SLO are dangerous.

For pedestrians, SLO has plenty of crosswalks near schools and most city parks. In other areas of the city, crosswalks are strangely absent. One intersection where the lack of a crosswalk is particularly striking is where King Street intersects with South Street (which also happens to be California State Highway 227).

• Neighborhood residents need to cross South Street to access Meadow Park
• The speed limit on South Street is 40 MPH
• The road has a median, parking on each side, and a designated bike lane
• There are no crosswalks painted where three neighborhood streets intersect this state highway
• Several years ago, a child was killed on halloween night while crossing this intersection

In short, South Street looks like a highway and so it's natural for drivers use it as a freeway: They seldom yield to pedestrians trying to cross or in the process of crossing the street, even though they are required to yield by the California Vehicle Code. No one expects to see pedestrians on a freeway because that is where we've all be trained to think "Cars are King."

CalTrans and the City of SLO arranged to do a traffic study of these intersections and concluded they didn't meet the necessary thresholds required to justify crosswalk paint on the pavement or signs to alert drivers to the possible presence of pedestrians at each intersection. There are just two signs at each end of South Street that warn drivers of pedestrians crossing in the next 3/4 miles. These traffic studies were done over eight years ago.

Another problem area for pedestrians is Broad Street from South Street eastward to the entrance to the San Luis Obispo county airport. This part of Broad Street has four lanes, a painted medial/turn lane, and bike lanes. It also has a speed limit of 45 to 40 MPH and looks like a highway. Woe unto him or her who tries to cross this four-lane street. I've witnessed pedestrians literally trapped in the median, trying to cross, and virtually no drivers yielding right-of-way. 

The problem at work here is that if a road looks like a highway, has near-highway speeds, and no crosswalks, then pedestrians must not matter. And the lack of protected bike lanes in heavily trafficked commercial shopping areas sends a similar message: Leave you bike at home, get in your car and drive. The SLO life is a great ideal, but the city's traffic engineers have some work to do if that ideal is to survive and grow. 

Mind Yer Topknot

People are talking lately about bike share programs, helmets (or lack there of) and bike safety. Folks who don't like bikes clogging up their streets and who believe that cars are king may side with folks like Wall Street Journal board member Dorothy Rabinowitz, who last year blasted NYC's CitiBike program with some pretty bizarre rhetoric. More recently, a Washington Post article erroneously claimed that cyclist head injuries have increased in cities that implement bike share programs when the study they cited actually found something different: Bike share programs lead to an overall reduction in bicycling injuries, but the proportion of injuries involving head trauma increased slightly. So let's get this out of the way: Bike share programs reduce bike accidents overall. The Washington Post recently edited the title of that article to be more accurate, but the debate on helmet-less cyclists continues to simmer.

When my wife and I used a bike share in Boston two summers ago, we solved the helmet issue by visiting a local bike shop and purchasing two low-cost helmets. At the end of our trip, we shipped the helmets back home to keep as spares. We were very much aware that the lack of helmets in a bike share rental leads to a subtle pressure to simply ride without a helmet. If you're a tourist, all sorts of rationalizations spring easily to mind: "I'm on vacation, lighten up!" "What are the odds that I'll be in an accident?" "I'll be extra careful." "People in Europe ride without a helmet all the time."

I'd like to think the main reason we chose to buy helmets is that I'm good at recognizing and managing risk. As a pilot and flight instructor, god knows I've had plenty of opportunities to learn about risk management and one trait I see in a lot of pilots is the inability, the lack of imagination if you will, to recognize hazards and risks. Another trait I see is people who recognize a hazard or risk, but rationalize it away with optimistic, magical thinking: Keep yourself from thinking about potential bad consequences, think good thoughts, and nothing bad will happen.

If you ride a bike in the US, your odds of having a collision with a car or truck are an order of magnitude greater than if you ride a bike in Europe. There are many possible explanations for the greater risk in the US, but the main reasons seem to be that there are fewer people riding bikes in the US, traffic laws often do not adequately protect cyclists, and when cyclist are injured in a collision the driver of the motor vehicle is often not held accountable.

Based on a sampling of other Washington Post articles, it would seem they have a bias against riding a bike without a helmet. I tend to agree with that position, but that doesn't justify skewing an article so much that it ends up misrepresenting the facts.

Car, Bike & Pedestrian Safety: The Common Denominator

I asked a neighbor who works in bio-tech if he knew Susan Watson, the 62 year-old researcher who was recently struck and killed by a big rig truck at 5th and Market in Oakland while riding her bike home from work. He works in the industry, but didn't know her. But mentioning her death sparked a discussion about the responsibilities of cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians. Standing on the sidewalk in front of his house, my neighbor made two interesting assertions: Bicyclists never obey traffic regulations and if cyclists want safer roads, they should be taxed. Two fascinating ideas that indicate just how far market values have penetrated our everyday view of life, ethics and morality (a topic explored in depth by Michael Sandel).

I was about to respond with "No one obeys the rules of the road any more ..." when it occurred to me: The unifying element in this discussion about car, pedestrian, and bike safety is obvious. It doesn't really matter what sort of vehicle a person is operating, more and more of us are doing whatever we please: California stop, Idaho stop, texting, talking on their cellphone without a hands-free device, applying make-up, eating, reading, and so on. Pedestrians make risky choices, too: Walking against the light, jay walking, blundering into the street while texting, talking on their cellphone, reading and so on. The unifying element is us, We the People, aka human beings.

If dividing the world into equal parts crazy drivers, crazy cyclists, and crazy pedestrians doesn't move the debate forward, perhaps asking why people engage in risky behavior will add some clarity. One factor in risky behavior is what those in aviation refer to as external pressures and most of us have plenty of pressure in our lives. One good example? Step outside my front door between 7:45am and 8:05am on a school day: Stressed out parents driving their kids to the school down the block doing all the things they know they shouldn't do: They speed, cut off other drivers, fail to give pedestrians in a crosswalk right-of-way, and they put those few parents and kids who cycle to school at significant risk. Hell may have no fury like an angry parent, but it's not just parents who are stressed out.

All of us are going too fast and it's clear we are pushing the limits of our primitive neurological abilities. Most of us are in denial about this. We try to squeeze too much into the available time, we work long hours, and we don't sleep enough. These factors leave us cognitively impaired. And consider that research indicates chronic stress can cause mental illness and you have an even more complete, albeit sobering picture. So we think we're smart, but we make poor decisions. We think we have lightning fast reaction time, but we miss important events due to distractions. And we fail to recognize the hazards that our impairment brings to something as simple as trying to parallel park or crossing the street to a catch the bus.

We know that trying to reason with a stressed out driver, cyclist, or pedestrian doesn't work. You have to wait until they've calmed down, the adrenaline has subsided, and they have collected their wits. Even then, it's difficult to get most Americans to do something we should all be better at, given the number of errors we make every day: Admit our mistakes and apologize. We could also do a better job of respecting the lives of those around us, whether they were in a car, on a bike, or traveling on foot.

Carrying things on a Bike, on a Bridge

If you want proof that engineers and designers who come up with bike routes are often not bike savvy, consider that 2nd Street is a designated bike route through Oakland's Jack London Square: It cuts right through the wholesale produce market, there are stop signs at virtually every intersection, and the street is lined or blocked with forklifts and delivery trucks. Even when a bike route is through a quiet residential neighborhood, what's with all the stop signs? The idea behind biking is to keep your momentum going, not to be forced to stop and start dozens of times. That's why I avoid designated bike routes and boulevards due to the greater amount of traffic and the preponderance of stop signs that seem to crop up at every intersection.

With the early part of today free, I spent time running errands and doing laundry before cycling to Sweet Maria's to pick up some green coffee. I threw one pannier on the rack and began winding my way through the back streets of Berkeley and Oakland. I won't tell you the route I took since, frankly, doing so might increase the number of bikes on my little bit of asphalt heaven. So stick to the bike lanes and the main thoroughfares or stay in your car and drive on the freeways, nothing to see here, move along ...

With three pounds of green beans loaded, I lamented the fact I'd be driving to the airport later. Since I'd be sitting in a car (undoubtedly in traffic), why not take the long way home on this bike ride? So I rode 7th Street to Maritime and cycled the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. I've cycled the bridge a half dozen times or so, but each time there seems to be something interesting going on with the deconstruction of the old cantilever section. This day was near perfect as the path was mostly empty. If you haven't cycled the bridge and gotten a close look at the old span, I suggest you do so before it's gone. At the rate they are going, it won't be long before the old bridge is history. And once the old span is gone, work will begin on completing the bridge path to Yerba Buena/Treasure Island.