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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And I'm joined by my friend and co-host Colin Fiske, Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, or CRTP. And we're also joined by my co-worker and friend, Matt Simmons, Staff Attorney at EPIC.

All right, we have two great guests here today. We have Oona Smith from HCAOG. And we also have Dan Burton, walkability expert, who's coming to our community to help us figure out how we can have safer, better streets. Hey, Dan.

DAN BURDEN:

It's a delight to be here, thank you.

WHEELER:

All right. So, Dan, you are a special guest. You've traveled here all the way from the great state of Washington. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. How does one get into being a walkability expert?

BURDEN:

Sure. Oh, well, in my case, I just followed my heart. I first wanted more people to enjoy bicycling. I was a serious advocate of bicycling. And so through a series of steps, building the Transamerica Trail, setting up the Bicycle Federation of America, and leading an expedition for National Geographic Alaska to Argentina by bicycle, I became known. And the state of Florida hired me to be their first bicycle coordinator for the Florida DOT. And from then, everything just started to grow. And I realized that it wasn't just bicycling. It was walking. And it was how we design our cities to either embrace or grow a beautiful city or to fail to do that by overemphasizing the car and speed.

WHEELER:

Absolutely, it's remarkable to think that Florida would have somebody on staff working on bicycles now with Ron DeSantis as governor, and it seems like the bicycles are a little too woke these days.

COLIN FISKE:

You know, I, uh, I learned to bike in Florida at the age of 25. So there you go.

WHEELER:

Yo, yeah, so we are talking about walkability. What the heck does that even mean? I think that we all have in our brains Like walkability. Yeah, I I can walk places many places you can walk, but they're not safe. They're not comfortable They're not really designed for pedestrians. What are kind of the broad principles of walkability? What is it good walkable neighborhood look like?

BURDEN:

Well, it looks a lot like Arcata. I would say that the key to walkability is designing for people. And that means not spreading everything out so that you are forced to own and drive a car. A walkability is a community that is really looking out for everyone. That those who are most in need being able to walk have a system laid out that works for them, that they're not being excluded like they were for so many things. And it's a compact form. So whatever neighborhood you live in, or if you live on campus or near a downtown, then you can walk to almost all of your needs over a course of a week. You would still own a car perhaps, but you wouldn't be forced to use it for trips. It would be a choice. And the community would truly be laid out in a way that you didn't have a lot of speed. And a lot of really great communities have achieved that by focusing on making sure that they embrace enough types of housing, that they keep the block lengths short when they lay out their community, and really make it green, inviting, welcoming, and I'd like to say adding in beauty.

WHEELER:

I like that, adding in beauty. So you've done walk audits in Eureka, Arcata, and I believe also McKinleyville, since you've been here. Can you talk about what has worked within those jurisdictions and what needs to improve?

BURDEN:

Well, first of all, the downtowns are very, very well laid out. McKinleyville's got its own special challenges because it's more suburban, but they're looking at how could they become more of a true community. And so their focus is on converting what are not the best streets and not really great connectivity into a community that can now become a real place.

WHEELER:

Colin, do you want to take a sec to talk about the McKinleyville Town Center? As a former McKinleyville resident, what the county is looking at right now to try to have a downtown core that is a little bit more walkable, a little bit more human-centered as opposed to automobile-centered?

FISKE:

Sure, and I'll try to keep this brief because it's a process that's been going on for many years, but we're sort of nearing the finish line here with the McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee and the County Planning and Building Department developing an ordinance that would implement new zoning rules for a real town center in McKinleyville. And this would be kind of an area that's focused around the current Safeway Shopping Center on Central Avenue. And it would involve changing land use regulations to encourage more mixed use development that's more pedestrian friendly, more housing in close proximity to other uses, and also would focus on kind of redesigning some of the streets to make them more bike and pedestrian friendly. And sort of one of the major points of contention has been what to do about Central Avenue, which right now is really just a unpleasant place to be as a person walking or biking and is just sort of a high throughput, fast speed place for cars.

WHEELER:

I, I just want to take a second to appreciate how far we've come as, as a community as well, before the show, we were talking about this for a rural area population, what, like 150,000. We have a advocacy group here in CRTP who is pushing for better bike ability, walkability, more human centered neighborhoods. We have an environmental movement that is pushing for infill development that is trying to be pro-development in the right kind of way. We are bringing in folks like Dan Burton into our community to help us envision and plan what this future is. And we have great folks like Oona in government at HCOG, who are also allies in this, in this idea, in this great grand conspiracy to have good communities that are safe for all road users. So let's all just like give ourselves a little pat on the back and appreciate how far we've come and how different Humboldt County is from other rural areas. So, Hey, round of applause. All right. So, so Dan, you have been doing walk audits. This is probably a new term for folks who aren't CRTP members. Can you talk about what an, a walk audit is and can folks do these in their own communities? Or do they need an expert like you to come help them do a walk on it?

BURDEN:

Well, yes, first of all, a walk audit is a very simple, fun tool where you basically take a walk through an area that you want to bring change to, make it more friendly. Might be traffic speed, might be new housing that's needed, it could be any of a number of things. And for people to walk and talk. We also call it a walk shop or a walking workshop, and it can be almost any topic. We've done it where we're laying out a new environmental issue for a community, but it's becoming very popular. It's only been about 20 years in its production, but I do courses to teach people how to do walk audits. The main thing is to get a diversity of people and have a focus that you want to accomplish. Then make sure you stop often. Sometimes we only go 100 feet. And then there's a new talking point. And what is working? What is not working? Who is out there walking? Do you have children? Do you have elders? Do you have people with disabilities walking? How are the motors behaving when they're in the presence of people? And how do the buildings feel? Are they sitting in the right location or not? Are the streets designed for speed or not? We always look at intersections. If it's a waterfront, we really study how we feel, whether or not we're drawn to the waterfront or whether it's populated with people. It's really an exploration of a part of a community.

WHEELER:

I like the subjective aspect of a walk on it. We often make our transportation choices based on how we feel. I know when I'm walking to the co-op in Eureka, there is an intersection that I just absolutely hate that makes me not want to walk to the co-op because I don't feel safe crossing the 101 because I don't have a good line of sight to vehicles that are traveling at speeds that would absolutely kill me if I were to stand in the street and get hit by a car. It's interesting because we are so obsessed with objective measures, traffic speeds and things like that, but I love the idea of incorporating our emotional response to roads. It looks like, Collin, you have a thought.

FISKE:

Yeah, I think that really helps to highlight something that Dan said, which is the importance of having a diversity of people participate in this. Because we each have our own subjective experiences, and a lot of times when we talk about walkability, we hear concerns about folks who are older, folks who have different abilities, people with kids. And so making sure that we not only are observing how a variety of folks are using the facilities, but also having them participate and getting everybody's input, not assuming that our own experience is the only experience that one can have.

WHEELER:

And I have a great experience with that, with a COTP board member, Peggy, who's vision impaired, and I went for a walk with her once and was able to understand how she uses sidewalks and roads and transportation infrastructure in a way that's different from my lived experience. And it was illuminating for me to understand how she uses those little bumps that are by a crosswalk, how that helps to guide her safely or sometimes unsafely into an intersection and how those can be better installed and worse installed. So it was an absolutely illuminating experience and speaks to the value of diversity and having a broad range of experiences on, on one of these walk audits. Thank you for, for highlighting that point, Colin. Absolutely. Oona, as someone who works in transportation planning locally, how are you able to use things like walk audits or other kind of data points like this in imagining a different transportation future?

OONASMITH:

It's like Dan said, and you two both use the word experience. I find that getting out there with people to share the experiences and then also help inform about things they've never thought about. For example, you said there's the emotional subjective part in how you feel where you walk or try to bike somewhere. But we know what's behind those feelings is the way we've designed it. And we know it's because of the speeds and the more not exactly scientific stuff, but maybe the more objective stuff. Like Dan goes out there in the middle of all kinds of roads, Broadway, for example, standing on the center line so he can take his tape measure and just learning that, oh, this lane is 14 or 12 feet wide when ten is when you get the cars to understand the speed that we want them to drive or the drivers we want them to drive. That that's where the objective and subjective meet. And so when we're out walking with people and experiencing it together, one, we're taking time to process that stuff in the real experience. And we're educating and we're engaging and having a community conversation and thinking more about what do we want the transportation system to be? And and very quickly, we all recognize we're not just talking about transportation. We're talking about the vitality and health and joyfulness and beauty of our streets and therefore communities. So in that way, that is the nugget of all planning is what's your vision and goal. It helps us understand how we get there and then we implement.

WHEELER:

Let's use a real-life example of something that's going to happen this summer. Colin, can we talk about H&I Streets in Eureka and how the roads are currently designed and what the plans are for redesigning these roads so that one, traffic actually moves at the speed that we want it to, and two, that we can have other road users besides just automobiles, how they can feel safer and better utilize this area of the city?

FISKE:

Yeah, so this is a project that's been on the books for a long time and is finally about to start construction, which we're very excited about H and I streets. Of course, there are three lane one ways through a lot of the city of Eureka. People's speed they're designed, they're designed, frankly, to encourage people to speed. And so the plan is to take away one of those lanes that's currently designated for cars and trucks and to provide a protected bike lane or bike facility. And then also to make some improvements for pedestrians to make it safer to cross the street. That's sort of the short version there. And it's coming at the same time as some similar improvements to sixth and seventh streets, which have have related issues. So it'll be a really big improvement for safety and walkability in the city of Eureka.

WHEELER:

The Eco News, we're talking about how we can have safer, better streets. So as a pedestrian that often crosses H and I street, when I live in the city of Eureka, one of our favorite walks, me and my wife go for a walk every morning. We, we have to cross both H and I street twice going one way and then coming back home, it'll be wonderful to have a shorter distance to travel across these lanes of traffic, to have fewer lanes of traffic. So we're not having to play as much of a game of Frogger, right? We're having to consider three lanes of traffic. It's also going to reduce the speed. It's a 30 mile an hour street. That's not going to change right now. People drive way, way, way, way, way too fast on the street because there are so many lanes of traffic that you can weave in and out and ask people and go as fast as you want. The lanes are relatively wide. So you don't feel as a driver, like you are constrained. You actually feel as a driver that if you're going the speed limit, it's somewhat unsafe because you will get tailgated and people will be mad at you. So it's going to just be an overwhelmingly better experience. I'll be able to better see traffic. I will be at risk for a shorter period of time in crossing traffic. The consequences, if there was to be some sort of a bad interaction between me and an automobile, I will be safer because traffic is going to be traveling more likely at the speed that's designed to travel on that street instead of a higher speed, which me as pedestrian, I'll have a higher likelihood of serious injury or death. So it's, it's going to be a radical improvement to the city of Eureka. And this is the sort of stuff that we're talking about when we're talking about designing physical infrastructure to have safer roads.

FISKE:

Reminds me, Dan, one of the things that you've talked about a few times on these walk audits that struck me, something I think maybe we don't talk about enough is noise, maybe you could talk a little bit about how the traffic speeds affect noise and livability in that way. Yeah.

BURDEN:

Noise is a serious detractor from just enjoying your city. Noise, once you hit 40, the decibel of the sound level goes up 1,000%. Well, wow. I mean, it's just vast. So corralling the speeds at what is appropriate for an urban living experience is primary. My recommendation for any downtown is you don't want speeds above 20. It's just not safe. Motor's behavior shifts when you hit 25. It shifts even more when you hit 30. Above that, there's no yielding behavior whatsoever. So I think it's very important to corral the speeds where people live. There's no reason in the world to have more than 20 in a neighborhood, near a school, near a park. We still need our principal streets to do the work they need to do, but not at high speed in an urban area.

FISKE:

Wonderful.

MATT SIMMONS:

Something you just said made me think of, there's a great study that I read and it showed that when you add a protected bike lane, obviously it increases safety for bicyclists, but it actually also increased safety for car drivers, right? Because there's less conflict with the bikers on that road. And so the stuff that you're talking about, you know, reducing speeds, reducing the distance of crosswalks, adding protected bike lanes, it's great for bikes and peds, but it's also really great for drivers because it increases their safety as well. And I think oftentimes when we have these conversations, we get accused of being sort of anti-car, right? But what we're really trying to do is create a safer environment for everyone. You know, I think each and I will also be a more pleasant street to drive on as a driver after those changes happen because of that kind of improvement.

WHEELER:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's maybe get to some misconceptions. Dan, what do you think are some of the biggest myths that harm our ability to have safer?

BURDEN:

streets, right? Well, one that I always pick up on is that when we take something away, say a right turn lane, a left turn lane, or a full set of lanes from a road, people think that it's going to impede traffic. It doesn't. It does just the opposite. When we built roads too wide, we forced traffic signals and other elements of the transportation system to be less efficient. So there is a size or a scale to a road that maximizes the efficiency, and it turns out to be more compact. Now, you can't always take out a dedicated right turn lane or a dedicated left turn lane, but when we can, we're actually making the road more useful, safer, and efficient. So yeah, there are like easily 20 myths we like to debunk, but one of them is we need narrower lanes. We need more compact intersections. If we're doing something for walking or bicycling, it always benefits the motorist, and that's probably just at the core. Every time we widened anything to create efficiency, we were actually doing just the opposite.

SMITH:

Yeah. So Dan gives a wonderful example of a road that he worked on. He shows this in his slideshow presentation where they took out signals and also lessened the crossing area for pedestrians. So that also slowed down the cars. And what happened was there were more opportunities for cars to stop for pedestrians to cross rather than having long wait times for either one. And what resulted was from the big work area to the destination of residents, from that point to point, the people driving actually after the traffic calming, their trips were reduced by a few seconds, not increased. And then for all the pedestrians trying to cross that road, they were able to cross sooner. So that is a wonderful example where the truth of the application just worked and proved it.

FISKE:

Are you saying that zooming from one stop sign to the next one isn't the most efficient way to travel is

SMITH:

Is that what I said?

WHEELER:

So, we have some interesting allies in the grand conspiracy to improve our roads. AARP, among them, are good proponents and have a walk audit toolkit. Dan, it seems like you're familiar. Do you want to talk about resources from the AARP or other places for folks who are interested in doing their own walk audits? And then, Kalana, I want to talk about, after this, safe streets and how we can incorporate user-created data from that into our grand conspiracy again.

BURDEN:

Yes, AARP is really striving to make walking and all of lifestyle better for all people, all the time. In fact, I've done over 100 community walking audits just for AARP. They want to focus on livability, access, safe conditions as we get older, and to understand that if we're designing for our elders, we're designing for everybody. And they make a really good point on that. They will lead walking audits quite a bit with their organization, usually at the local level, but sometimes the state AARP office comes in and encourages that activity. And they do a beautiful job of leading walking audits.

WHEELER:

I like that, designing the roads for the kind of most vulnerable road user is going to make it safe for all persons. So Colin, COTP has been a big proponent of a data collection system, Street Story in conjunction with UC Berkeley, that hopes to get more data on road use to help governments better design road systems. Can you talk about the Street Story system and your work to try to get people to report how they are interacting with roads?

FISKE:

Yeah, so this is a crowdsourced tool that was developed by a team at UC Berkeley, as you mentioned, and it's online at streetstory.berkeley.edu, and basically if you're not currently on a walk audit, you're in between walk audits, you can report things that you notice on the street or experiences that you have through this website. It's quick and easy, it's anonymous. Those data become then publicly available, so we can look and see what everybody thinks about the environments that they're walking and biking and driving around in. You can report a place that you think is safe or comfortable, you can report a place that you think is hazardous, and you can also report experiences like near misses or even collisions through this platform. And so CRTP has been promoting it around here for a few years. We have over a thousand reports in Humboldt County now, and this is one of those tools where the more people use it, the more useful it is, and you can go back and look at reports that your neighbors have made and use that to advocate for safer streets. Also, agencies like HCOG can use it to apply for grants for safety programs and projects, and so it's just a really useful tool. It's sort of like an ongoing walk audit, if you will, and a little grassrootsy thing.

WHEELER:

So from pulling through the data, which I know that you've done, what stands out to you as areas that require improvement in our county?

FISKE:

Yeah, so I think we're at a point where we probably should do a more quantitative analysis, but I would say, you know, anecdotally, the places that people are the most concerned about and have the most near misses and hazard reports are kind of the places you would expect. It's places where there's high speeds of traffic. It's big, wide intersections where people walking and biking are exposed to a lot of car traffic. It's places where there's no facilities for walking or biking. So I'm sure we can all think of where those places are in our own communities, but it's sort of, I think, highlighting problems that we, if we took a step back, we would not be surprised about.

SIMMONS:

I've used Street Story several times to report near misses, and the places that it always seems to happen to me is where a fast road meets a slower road, right? And you've got cars sort of turning off of, say, Samoa, turning right towards downtown Arcata or in Eureka, turning off of the 101 onto those streets. And I think people in the car still have this mindset of, I'm still on a highway, I'm still going fast, and they meet an area that's more of a pedestrian, where I'm hopefully going to feel safer crossing the street than I would crossing the 101. Those seem to be the places that I've always experienced these sorts of conflicts, and I think it's obvious why, right? It's like that barrier, that boundary, and so thinking about ways to make those sort of exchanges safer is important.

FISKE:

important. You know, I think that highlights another thing that you've talked about a lot, Dan, which is the turning radius. Do you want to explain what that is and how that works?

BURDEN:

Every time you approach an intersection as a motorist, you, let's say you're going to turn right, there's a corner that, if it's a very tight radius, it's almost square, it could be as little as three feet. But if they make it very big, very wide, very sweeping, like 20 feet or 30 feet or 40, and we were looking at one that was over 60 feet, then that invites you to speed into the next side street, right? And it's very dangerous. We should not be building wide sweeping curb radii. Thanks.

WHEELER:

I like how all of this, when we're talking about built infrastructure, is just making little minor tweaks to things that will make us and our kind of lizard brains behave better. And it just, I feel like one of the myths that I would love to combat is this idea that we just need to have more cops and the cops need to enforce traffic rules and we just need to have people being pulled over for speeding. There's an easier solution to all this, which is just let's design streets that make it difficult for somebody to speed. Let's increase what's called the friction in the street so that people don't feel comfortable just jamming their car at 50 miles an hour down a residential street, as often occurs in Eureka. So it's a simpler, more elegant solution in my mind. And it's kind of less invasive in some sense too. It's just making minor alterations. We know better now. We have a different mindset now. Let's close on, again, how we can incorporate this data that we collect and our lived experiences with living with roads into government. So we've previously got Una's answer to this, but Dan, how would you advise people to become better advocates in their local communities for safer streets?

BURDEN:

Sure. Well, certainly to organize a really comprehensive group of many different thinkers and include people that don't ordinarily get a chance to talk through what their concerns are and really bring people to where they now understand the tools better. What I've always tried to do with walk-in audit is to create the vocabulary that gets away from all the engineering-ies or planner-ies and really talk about common sense things. How do you feel when you're under shade compared to out in the sun? And look at every issue in terms of it's not a debate. It's really just coming to appreciate what we have and recognize what we don't have that we might like. And one thing I will say about walk-in audits is it is the best form of public engagement ever invented, where people can sit in a boring room and people want to argue a point. When you're out walking and you see things and you know how they're working, all of a sudden everything has clarity.

WHEELER:

I love that. I love that point. This is unfortunately the end of the show we have run out of time. Thank you to Colin from CRTP, Matt from EPIC, Oona from HCAOG and our special guest from the great state of Washington, Dan Burden. This has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast, California.