Could Complete Streets curb pedestrian deaths in Phoenix?
After reading this article from the Arizona Republic on pedestrian deaths and dangerous streets in the Phoenix region, I wanted to share this writeup of my experience attending a City of Phoenix Complete Streets meeting last summer.
In July of last year, I went to a Complete Streets working group meeting at Phoenix city hall. City staff led a discussion of the Design Guidelines the working group developed in March 2018 to detail the Complete Streets Policy that City Council approved in June 2017. As expected, the most contested points of the Guidelines were where the Streets Transportation Department substantially changed the originally-drafted plan.
This meeting followed months of speculation around the Complete Streets plan, especially after the dramatic resignation of “all but two” advisory board members. Representing seven of Phoenix’s eight city council districts, the resigning members wrote a scathing letter accusing City staff of “lying, obstruction, and even an attempt to disband [the board] entirely” and ultimately lamenting the lack of support from City Hall.
Although Phoenix City Council voted in April 2018 to implement the Complete Street guidelines on an accelerated timeline, the Board continued to face a bureaucratic runaround and opposition from lobbyists. This pushback was especially disturbing alongside continued reports that Phoenix is a particularly dangerous metro for walking in a state that hadthe highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the country in 2017.
A lot of the debate focused on a proposed city staff change that removed the instruction to design streets at or below the posted speed limit. Staff argued this direction was implicit in another goal to “design streets for slower speeds to reduce the number of serious crashes,” but Complete Streets advocates maintained that designing streets to slow down traffic to or below the posted limit was a distinct goal from a general preference for streets with low speed limits.
City staff relayed concerns from the fire and police departments about the accessibility of Complete Streets to emergency vehicles, although this worry is sometimes more of a smokescreen to oppose change than a legitimate concern; results from past redesigns suggest that road diets and other programs to slow and reduce vehicle traffic actually improve emergency response times, while also improving roadway safety for all users.
Another controversial point was the changed language around bike lanes. The advisory board proposed a strong standard that all streets should have bike lanes, including protected lanes on any road with a 30+mph speed limit. City staff scaled this back to bike lanes on streets that don’t “primarily provide direct access to single family residential or industrial land uses.” Their argument was that residential streets were already wide and low-traffic enough to safely bike on, and that industrial areas were more geared to truck traffic.
Complete Streets supporters, however, saw this change as a cop-out and watering down the plan’s commitment to protecting people on bikes. The “primarily provide direct access” language seemed vague enough that the city could easily argue many areas out of the bike lane requirement. This was a realistic worry because as bike advocate feedback explained, Phoenix’s existing Bicycle Master Plan and 5-year Bicycle Plan were both lackluster (under 8 miles of protected lanes) and under-implemented (no further progress since the first one installed last year).
I thought protected bike lanes on residential streets were an interesting engineering question: how would homeowners react to new restrictions on parking in front of their houses, and were protected lanes even feasible on a street with driveways every 100 feet?
Another point of high-intrigue (for a law student) contention was over the limits on the city’s authority to implement Complete Streets policy in the first place. Under the directive to “Design for Connectivity,” the following bullet point and chart set a goal for more interconnected grid networks. Though people who study cities have known for centuries that an orderly, fine-grained street grid facilitates both easier property development and more flexible, interconnected streets that are better to walk and bike on.
City staff agreed with the benefits of a more traditional street pattern, but pointed out that only public city streets are under their control. A lot of these metrics of connectivity would apply in residential subdivisions, which are controlled by the Subdivision Ordinance, a separate regulation. Specifically, §32–26 Street location and arrangement guides street layout in subdivisions and directly opposes a connected grid: “Local streets should be discontinuous and generally should be interrupted with jogs and offsets. Four-way intersections should be avoided.” I agreed with Complete Streets advocates that the goal of interconnected streets should inform the subdivision rules, not the other way around, but that seemed beyond the scope of change the City was ready to push for.
My small contribution to the discussion was to quibble with multiple uses of the phrase “maximize the flow of vehicular traffic.” By measuring vehicles rather than people transported, using this metric unfairly advantages car traffic from the start. A private car carrying one person, a bus with twenty people on board, and a 100-passenger light rail train all count as one vehicle traveling down a stretch of road, but have vastly different capacities to move people.
You can “maximize vehicular traffic” by just adding more travel lanes, but moving more people through the same space takes dedicating right-of-way to more efficient modes of transportation. For example, wider, tree-shaded sidewalks wouldn’t fit any extra cars down the street, but the extra space and comfort could attract more people to walk or bike, compounding the substantial, measurable health benefits of street trees. I thought “maximize passenger throughput” would more effectively convey the plan’s context of prioritizing people over vehicles.
An even more detailed and climate-oriented metric for mobility I heard on a recent episode of the Streetsblog Talking Headways podcast. The head of transportation policy and research at Uber mentioned the company’s goal of getting adequate data to calculate, and minimize, emissions per passenger mile. Setting and measuring goals with a focus on 1. moving people, rather than vehicles and 2. emphasizing low– or zero–emission modes is important as cities look to address the interconnected problems of climate change and transportation policy.
