Tom Nosal: We know how to make streets safe. Let’s do it!
Every month Liz Trice interviews a community member for The West End News. This month Liz caught up with Tom Nosal, a transportation engineer with Toole Design.
Why aren’t our roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists?
For a long time, street design has prioritized speed and travel time for cars over safety. A typical engineering approach to a transportation study might start with today’s traffic volumes, estimate how much traffic will grow, model how many lanes would be needed to move that traffic during peak hours, and then allocate whatever space is left to people walking and biking. The result is wide, multi-lane arterials cutting through our neighborhoods that are often empty. Greater Portland Council of Governments (GPCOG) found that in Greater Portland, four-lane streets are nearly twelve times more likely to have fatal or serious injury crashes.
Why don’t we start with, “People should be safe walking and biking…” and then decide how fast the traffic should be?
Making streets safer often means reallocating space from cars. Our current system forces most people to rely on their cars, so decision-makers worry it will be unpopular and economically damaging to increase driving times. We don’t have societal consensus that those trade-offs are worth it.
The exciting thing is that it isn’t a mystery: we know how to make safe streets. Safer streets have huge economic benefits. It’s a calmer, more enjoyable experience, and kids can have autonomy, people don’t mind hanging out outside talking to their neighbors.
Why don’t we just narrow lanes to be appropriate to the speed limit?
Reducing painted lane widths can help. Restriping the same street from 13’ to 10’ can have an impact, but may not get you from 35 mph to 25 mph. Vertical elements like a curb or flex bollard may have a bigger effect, but the city hasn’t prioritized doing that.
Slower streets are safer and quieter, but the MaineDOT resists local towns slowing speed limits. How about slowing speed limits at night?
Right, 20 mph is much safer for pedestrians and bikes, and much quieter for people living there. DOT’s approach to setting speed limits is evolving, but it remains to be seen what that will mean in practice. Posting lower speed limits are typically only effective when you’re enforcing them. We all drive too fast on roads that allow us to do so, so safer design is the real solution. There is an important equity consideration – poorer people tend to live in places where the infrastructure is conducive to speeding. We should revisit automated ticketing for speeding.
What positives are happening right now?
So much! Portland’s city council just voted to support restoring two-way traffic on State and High Streets. A road diet [reducing number or width of lanes] on Forest Avenue is on the table, which could make it much safer for everyone and add bike lanes. The City and MaineDOT are advancing the redesign of Franklin Street. The LIbbytown Safety and Accessibility Project has been a great collaboration between Portland and MaineDOT, and will convert Congress Street and Park Avenue to two-way, two-lane streets with separated bike infrastructure. MaineDOT’s Village Partnership Initiative is funding transportation studies for safer village centers across Maine.
More people are calling for safer, more complete streets. Much of the public response to the Maine Turnpike Authority’s Gorham Connector project centered on saving Smiling Hill Farm, but I heard a lot of people saying we have enough roads, we need more options for walking, biking, and using transit.
If you had a magic wand, what would you do to make our roads safer and quieter?
The amount we spend to support walking, biking, and using transit is still a tiny percentage of what we spend on car infrastructure. Last time I looked, METRO had a roughly $15 million operating budget. That’s tiny compared to what we spend on roads. The Maine Turnpike Authority is ready to spend over $330 million on the Gorham Connector spur – that would fund METRO for decades.
What can people do to make roads quieter, slower, and safer?
The Maine Climate Action Plan says that by 2025 we need to reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) by 25%, yet we’re still building for stable traffic or growth. We should say, “How can we plan to reduce the traffic on this road from 20,000 cars a day to 15,000?”
Everyone can tell their city councilor and representatives that they want to see more money and priority going to pedestrian and bike safety, and that you’re ok with cars being slower. You can read the state and local plans, and show up at meetings.
Links:
Mainers for Smarter Transportation
Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee PBPAC
Maine’s 3 Year Plan
Greater Portland Council of Governments
“Killed by a Traffic Engineer” by Wes Marshall
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
