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Non-Agenda Item - Letter to Boulder City Council from Alan Streater March 12, 2002 Boulder City Council P. O. Box 791 Boulder, CO 80306 Dear City Council Members, I intended to send this to the Transportation Advisor Board (TAB), but now I notice that the approval meeting for the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) was yesterday. Therefore I am sending my comments to you, in hopes that my suggestions may be incorporated via "trickle-down" as you review the TNT. I apologize for not being able to get my comments to the TAB in time. Sincerely, Alan Streater 2830 Dover Drive Boulder, CO 80305 MAR ' 4 2002 Oa -0)q, t-' 7~~~ c%n-free, t February 27, 2002 Comments on the City of Boulder Transportation Master Plan I read version of the TMP that is available on the web, which may be the version just after the 1995 (1996?) update. I also read the 2000 annual report. Unfortunately, I could not find a document that reflects the amendments proposed for this year's update, so it is quite possible that some of my suggestions are being planned or implemented already. In general, the Transportation Master Plan is a very good document, at least in comparison to other TNT's that I have seen (usually regional). I have little quarrel with most of it, and most of my suggestions are ways to improve it on the edges. The use of warrants is a bad idea in general, and it is terrible for pedestrian planning. The warrant system requires deaths and injuries or some other equally foolish measure of need to reach a certain level before improvements are made. A system of warrants virtually guarantees that those areas that are bad and/or dangerous for pedestrians will remain so. Such areas are normally already devoid of pedestrians, so that deaths or conflicts do not occur. As a result, the warrants are never satisfied for such areas. The warrant system is a sophisticated way of arguing that a bridge is not needed because nobody is crossing the river. I strongly suggest eliminating any suggestion or reference to a warrant system in the pedestrian section, and a separate item should suggest the elimination of the warrant system for pedestrian planning. A goal that permeates the whole document is reducing congestion. The Roadway Infrastructure Policies statement also includes "improving level of service" as a goal. These goals do not necessarily solve the overall transportation problem, and trying to achieve them often aggravates the situation. Level of service measures how free the traffic is flowing. If more people can achieve their mobility needs with shorter trips on more congested streets, this would very likely be an improvement, but the level of service would indicate that the situation was worse. In the updated TAP we should strike such language, and simply state that improved mobility is the goal. A short walk through town reveals evidence of historic repression of pedestrians. Thankfully these old attitudes have been largely expunged from the TNT, but vestiges from the anti-pedestrian era can still be found, for example in the wording of several phrases on page 65. First the TNT states, The pedestrian crossover operation is intended to reduce vehicle delay, thereby increasing driver compliance pedestrian safety. The plan is thus to make it faster and more convenient for motorists, and that is supposed to be good for pedestrians. Such dishonest nonsense should be removed from the TMP. Then almost in the next line, The preferred practice is to build underpasses to take non-motorized traffic under the street. This practice is convenient for motorists, but if pedestrian convenience, comfort, and access were really important, this would not be the preferred practice. Underpasses force pedestrians to walk down and then climb back up, they are dingy and often smell of urine, and they often make the connections to other pedestrian facilities and destinations more difficult. Underpasses should be the last resort, and certainly not the preferred practice. At-grade crossing is usually better, but we have to be willing to divert traffic or control it so that the crossing is safe and convenient for pedestrians. In some cases as where roads are raised to cross over creek beds or railroad tracks, underpasses are appropriate, because the underpass can be constructed at grade. In addition to evaluating the sidewalk standards, we should also evaluate the effectiveness of our enforcement mechanisms. I did not see this in the plan. Although pedestrian safety is a laudable goal, I am also weary of proposed safety improvements for pedestrians. Most of the time this means restricting access, limiting pedestrian crossings to smaller time intervals at intersections, and other kinds of repression. If the transportation staff really care about pedestrian safety, they would propose reduced speed limits for motorists. The largest impediments to making the traffic environment safer and more comfortable for bicyclists and pedestrians are high speed and the lack of accountability of drivers for their actions. Speed is the most strongly correlated risk factor for death and injuries. The city should consider a universal city speed limit of 25 mph. If that cannot be achieved, the city should reduce speeds on individual streets wherever feasible. Another means of slowing traffic is photo-radar. We have tested enough. The updated TW should also describe an expansion of photo-radar, which has proven to be a cost-effective enforcement tool. The problem of accountability is more difficult because most of the legal issues are under control of the state government, who are brutally unsympathetic to bicyclists and pedestrians. We can at least step up enforcement of tinted windshield rules and make sure that license plates are visible and readable, but this will require a cultural change within the police department. The section on ADA compliance is inadequate. For years now, the city has been installing ramps that violate guidelines and might violate federal law. Specifically, ramps should not be built so as to create a slant to the side in the regular part of the sidewalk. It is very hard to travel on a wheelchair across such a slope. There should also be a landing zone. Yet I see badly designed ramps still being built today. My guess is that city staff understand these issues, but continue to build improper ramps as a matter of convenience, cost saving, and simple laziness. If they do not know about these issues, consider them to be now informed. In my opinion this could become a financial disaster for the city, especially if it can be demonstrated that the city was aware of these issues and still failed to comply. I suspect that judges might even be harder on the city if elected officials were aware that city staff was ignoring these guidelines. There is a section in the TMP that is referring to this issue in a general way, but I recommend more specific instructions for 3 ramps, or at least a formal reference to guidelines that should be used. Driveway cuts all over the city are actually a much harder problem for wheelchair access. I am not sure what the policy is currently, but we should make sure that new and rebuilt driveways do not create a slant across the sidewalk. Under the Transit section, I have two suggestions. I heavily use the transit system, but I do not use the HOP because it does not run on a published schedule. It is hard enough to keep the buses spaced properly when the drivers are accountable to a schedule, but without a schedule I truly cannot trust the service. All routes should have schedules. The publishing of schedules at bus stops is a good thing and should be expanded. We should not expand posting of schedules, however, without thought to maintaining the published schedules. The schedule at Valmont and Airport Road has been wrong for about a year now. My theory is that this is intentional, because the authorities want one more chance to tweak the folks who are released from the jail. I would suggest an update item to the transit portion of the TMP that calls for a study of breaking with RTD. Despite tremendous local support for transit, RTD recently raised fares unfairly. As I understand it, one problem we face is that the state legislature has put a limit on the percentage of subsidy that is allowed for a transit system. Including heavily subsidized routes such as the HOP in the RTD system increased the percentage subsidy of the entire system, and the Boulder part of the RTD system then has a subsidy that is higher than allowed. Thus RTD raises fares and lowers service, so that our local subsidy does not result in cheaper fares or better service. If the HOP and perhaps other community routes were run independently, in a way that doesn't qualify as a system, then perhaps we could reduce the fares of the regular RTD routes and still stay within the subsidy limits. Note that mini-systems such as the Winter Park shuttle bus are able to operate with 100% subsidy, somehow without violating the state rules. I also suggest a study of the effect of the Boulder Valley School District open enrollment program. Although the open enrollment program is popular, it is disastrous for our goals of improving mobility. Kids enrolled in schools not in their neighborhoods have to be chauffeured, which adds two trips per day for each student. I believe that the impact on traffic has not been properly evaluated, or at least communicated to the public. Although the open enrollment program is mandated by the state, we may be able to make choices within this constraint that could improve the transportation impact. 1 live in a dual-choice neighborhood, and this dual-choice could be eliminated if the public found that the transportation impacts were too severe. The TMP properly describes the advantage of the grid system over the hub-and-spoke system, but I could find no direct goal of keeping the routes straight. The SKIP loop in south boulder should be eliminated (wile maintaining some accommodation for serving T ehigh Street), and the routes that drive into Crossroads Mall should drop people on tile streets, without driving into the mall parking lot. If possible there should be convenient sidewalks from the streets to the mail entrances, so that people who walk or ride the bus don't have to walk across the huge parking lot. q I didn't see any specific recommendations for how to expand the RDT route coverage to accommodate new development, but one location comes to my mind. The new industrial park on Airport Road needs bus service. Several companies, each with hundreds of employees, have recently moved to that development, and the nearest existing bus stop is about a mile away. On page 65, in discussing the percentage of subsidy for automobiles, it should be noted that the numbers given do not include qualitative factors such as pollution, dust, noise, salt, sand, and death. It is very difficult to put a price on these qualitative factors, but we are subsidizing automobiles by accepting these ills. We can reduce these subsidies if we choose. For example we could reduce noise, dust, and deaths by reducing speed limits. We could reduce the effects of salt and sand by using less or none. It should also be noted that in urban areas the subsidies from general taxation are higher than the national averaged numbers, and that the city transportation budget over which we have control is 100% funded by general taxation and not by user fees at all. Finally, I noticed a lack of clarity in the section describing the traffic modeling. Traffic models are usually applied to road proposals where the authors of the study want to demonstrate a need for the proposed project. The models normally used are neither realistic, nor accurate, and they are sometimes quite dishonest. For example, the modeling that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation used to promote a large new freeway called the "blue route" predicted that if the road were built, traffic would be uncongested for 19 years. After the project was funded and built (making certain well- connected developers rich), it filled to capacity in 2 years. The adage "garbage in, garbage out" best describes most modeling applications. It takes great skill and experience to extract meaningful results from traffic modeling. I found the description of the modeling used to forecast general traffic trends so inadequate and confusing that I have very little confidence that the results have any real meaning. I could not find any reference to the modeling system that was actually used. I recommend dropping all the modeling unless it can be described more convincingly. Alan Streater, 2830 Dover Drive Boulder, CO 80305 720-304-3831