AUDIO:

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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 am joined by my friend and colleague, Colin Fiske, the Executive Director of CRTP, the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities.

All right, so Colin, we are going to be talking about CRTP's work trying to make streets safe in Eureka, in particular, 4th and 5th streets. And there is a petition hosted by the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. You can find it on their website at transportationpriorities.org to Caltrans to advocate for making the streets safer. And this is, I think, a timely topic because these streets are maintained by Caltrans. And at least for me, with my EPIC hat on, I'm really furious at Caltrans these days. So Caltrans is engaging in unnecessary projects that are going to harm old-growth redwoods at Richardson Grove State Park. We just received word that the agency is starting to cut trees in the park to facilitate the road-widening project there that's going to harm over 100 old-growth trees.

And meanwhile, we have some of the most dangerous streets in the North State here in Eureka that Caltrans is not really doing much about. So hopefully we can get the agency to redirect some of their energies to places that actually matter to humans and not to big, oversized trucks. So let's zoom in. What streets are we talking about here?

COLIN FISKE:

So we're talking about 4th and 5th streets in Eureka, and along with Broadway, that is US 101 through Eureka, the surface streets, and folks who live in the region are, I'm sure, quite familiar with all of those streets. Some of the heaviest traffic, as well as car and truck traffic, as well as pedestrian and bike traffic, and transit traffic. It's one of the biggest transit corridors in the region. And there's a lot of businesses around, a lot of government offices, so a lot of places people need to go. But also a lot of homes, and increasingly more homes being built in that area.

WHEELER:

So this is a highway that runs right through the heart of Eureka, and predictably, when you have a highway that runs through a city, we see higher accident rates, cars bumping into cars. I saw a pretty gnarly accident not too long ago, a T-bone on 4th Street. And we also see pedestrian strikes by cars. What do we know about the relative safety of 4th and 5th Streets compared to other similar streets or other streets within the county?

FISKE:

So they are, as you said, very dangerous. CRTP did a report a couple of months ago where we looked at crash data on 4th and 5th streets. And also, we looked at some other sources of data like Street Story, where people for years have been making public reports about places that are hazardous or where they've had crashes or near misses. And we also looked at the results of a couple of walk audits and a bike audit that we did over the last year or so with members of the public and local agency representatives where we just walked around those streets and identified issues for safety and comfort of people walking and biking. And so we kind of combined all of those things. And we found, unsurprisingly to anyone who lives or works or spends time there, that these streets are very dangerous. They have a higher rate of bike and pedestrian and motorist serious crashes than pretty much anywhere else in the county other than perhaps Broadway. And in particular for pedestrians, the rate of serious pedestrian-related crashes in that corridor is 90 times the average rate for all the roads in the county. So just really, really high. And over the past decade or so, we know that at least five people have been killed in that corridor. And at least 35 people have been seriously injured in crashes.

WHEELER:

And some of this is just built into poor planning, right? We, whenever you have a highway that runs through a jurisdiction, I think that you can kind of assume that there's going to be a higher rate of collisions and all the maladies of, of our road network. And also though, we have specific design problems with fourth and fifth streets that exacerbate the already elevated rate by which accidents are likely to occur. Is that right?

FISKE:

Well, I think you, you sort of said the key there where you talk about a highway through the city, and this is designed more or less as a highway. It was designed to get as many cars and trucks through as quickly as possible without a lot of consideration historically for the people around it. People walking and biking, even drivers trying to get across the street. And so that design choice, those design choices to prioritize speed and throughput over safety are what have led us to this position today. We can design streets, even streets that carry quite a lot of traffic in ways that are much safer. And that's really at the, at the core of what we're asking Caltrans to do.

WHEELER:

So you have a report that looked at a lot of data, what are some of the features of 4th and 5th Street that make it so dangerous?

FISKE:

So when we looked at those crash data that I talked about and the causes for those crashes, as well as reports that people have made through Street Story and other venues, and there are some trends that come out. I would say that one of the top things is just high speeds. People are driving too fast, frankly, for this urban environment where there's lots of other things going on. And then related to those higher speeds, things like failure to yield, things like people running red lights. And I think I would say another thing is, and this is sort of a combination of those higher speeds with the design of the road where we have three one-way lanes going in the same direction is that often drivers behave unpredictably and they sort of swerve around each other. Or if one vehicle, one driver yields to a person trying to cross the street, maybe the other two lanes won't yield. And so having these three lanes in one direction leads to all this sort of unpredictable, dangerous behavior.

WHEELER:

The three lanes, something that I see as a Eureka resident often, is a lot of weaving by cars in kind of a dangerous way that is facilitated by these extra lanes, by this third lane, that you'll have two cars relatively going the speed limit, or a number of cars relatively going the speed limit across all three lanes, and you'll have one driver who is kind of out of control, who will rapidly switch between lanes because they want to go 45 in the city of Eureka, and they will just kind of zoom, and they will rip past people in a way that's very dangerous, right? Like I've seen cars stopped to allow for people to cross the street, and people are ripping around them to try to go as fast as they can through the city, and I think that most pedestrians who live in Eureka know to not just trust that when a car stops at a crosswalk that you should be able to walk, that you have to take it one car at a time. You walk forward before the car that is stopped, and then you pause and wait to make sure that the next car is going to stop for you, and then you pause and wait to make sure that the next car is going to stop for you. Anyway, sorry, I just wanted to throw in my local flavor.

FISKE:

Yeah, no, absolutely, and that's exactly right. And like you said, it is really facilitated. That sort of bad behavior is really facilitated by having all three lanes in one direction. The other thing that I wanted to really mention, which we hear about all the time and which certainly we heard about in our walk audits and other research, was visibility problems. Both drivers complain that they can't see pedestrians and bicyclists and even other drivers trying to cross the street, but also people trying to cross those streets can't see what's coming in terms of drivers on Fourth and Fifth Streets, in terms of those cars and trucks. And so there are a number of causes for that, perhaps the biggest one being people parked, especially larger vehicles parked sort of close to the intersections that make it very hard to see what's coming. But I think that that is, it's a really important feature because it leads to not only those people not being able to see and therefore predict what's gonna happen, but also leads to dangerous behavior, particularly among drivers trying to cross the street. People in Eureka will have seen this, I'm sure many times, where someone trying to drive across the street will wait for a little gap in the traffic and then just gun it across the street without really looking for pedestrians or anybody else who might be around. So that lack of visibility can be a big problem. And I think I really wanna highlight too that we hear often from drivers that they don't see a pedestrian or a bicyclist, that these people just sort of like irresponsibly jump out into the street. We hear from pedestrians and bicyclists the same thing about drivers. And so that visibility goes both ways. And I would point out too that looking at those pedestrian crashes, the serious ones that have happened, most of them, more than half of them have been in crosswalks. And so that really highlights, I think, that people are trying to cross the street responsibly and still it's really dangerous.

WHEELER:

So I said it on this podcast before, and I will say it again. I think that there are fairly good odds that if I am to die in the next decade, it's because I will be hit by a car on Fifth Street, walking home from the bus, crossing from the co-op. Because I have such a hard time ever seeing cars, I have to functionally get into the road to look around cars to see if there are any cars coming. And yeah, it is a disappointing part of my almost daily life, is wondering if this time crossing the street is gonna be my last time crossing the street, because I am just unable to see traffic. And if I can't see traffic, traffic can't see me. And so that time when I will be hit, the driver will assuredly say, he just came out of nowhere. And to the driver, that will be true, because it was true to me that that car also probably would come out of nowhere. So I feel this very personally. As a Eureka resident and someone who often walks and has to cross Fourth and Fifth Street on foot, these are not fun, safe streets to cross. And that third lane of traffic too, adds such a significant further distance by which a pedestrian has to cross the street. It is a lot longer of time in the danger zone of the road prism.

FISKE:

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And one thing I want to add, which I just think is a fact people should know, but is maybe not so well known, is that as you drive faster, your cone of vision narrows. And what I mean by that is that if you're going 35 miles an hour, you don't see things in your peripheral vision effectively, as opposed to when you're going, say, 25 miles an hour, you can really process a wider range of vision. So you could see, if you're going more slowly, you can see people on the sides of the street, whereas when you're going faster, you really actually just can't see them. And so that just is another little feature of the human brain that is important to keep in mind when we think about, in these environments where there's lots of people moving around, why it's so important to go a responsible speed.

WHEELER:

So, so we have visibility issues. We have speed issues that are exacerbated both by that third lane of traffic. We also have a lot of areas of fourth and fifth streets that don't have natural, safe places to cross where there aren't crosswalks available. And I mean, just the most basic crosswalk, like the zebra stripe crosswalk. I'm not even talking about like a controlled light there. There's a great distance, especially north of the downtown area, where there's just kind of nothing. There's no control at anything by which pedestrians can cross. Can you talk a bit about crosswalks and safe crossings for pedestrians?

FISKE:

Yeah, and we have been advocating actually for a long time to just do the simple step of painting those high visibility crosswalks on all of the intersections. And to give Caltrans credit, they have recently done that for most of that corridor, just in the last couple of months. And so that is a step forward. There are still places, certainly, that are missing them, particularly as you go further north on 101, or I guess that would be west.

WHEELER:

Yeah, I was trying to think about directions, yeah. Yeah.

FISKE:

But in any case, just that basic thing is a big deal. However, even where there are painted crosswalks, such as in the location that you mentioned near the co-op on the south end there, there's no other control, and so it's very difficult and dangerous to cross the street. So certainly having some sort of traffic control in a few of those locations at least, so that we don't have such long stretches without any safe way to cross the street is really important.

WHEELER:

So I have recovered generally the, the problems of design.

FISKE:

Yeah, I think so. People are interested in all of that. I really encourage them to check out the report, which you can find at our website, which is transportationpriorities.org. But I think we've covered the broad strokes, and I think folks who live and work and use these streets probably know in their gut that these are dangerous streets already, so we don't need to belabor the point too much. Okay.

WHEELER:

So let's talk about solutions. So I think that in identifying some of the problems, some of the solutions will probably be obvious, but what, what can Caltrans do to make fourth and fifth streets safer?

FISKE:

So I think just in general, we want to think about since these are areas that they go right through the downtown area, they go right through the heart of the county seat, Eureka, right? And so these are, as I mentioned before, they're lined with businesses that people have to get to and that we want people to get to, to support local businesses. They're lined with government offices that people have to get to, and there's just a lot of people who live in that area. Other than the danger of these streets, frankly, it is really one of the most walkable places. It's one of the places in the county, one of the places with the best bus service. So people are there and they're going to be there, and how do we want that to feel? What do we want it to be like? I think, first of all, obviously we want it to be safe. We don't want people to have to take their life in their hands just to cross the street. But we also want it to be like a comfortable place. We want it to be a place where if you're living nearby with your kids, you feel comfortable going there with your kids. You feel comfortable crossing the street holding your child's hand and not feeling like that's a dangerous activity. Or even if you have teenagers, that teenagers need a certain amount of mobility independently and that you should feel safe having older kids like that just hanging out around our city.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. If you're interested in trying to make Eureka safer, go to transportationpriorities.org to sign the petition to Caltrans to make 4th and 5th Streets safer.

FISKE:

Another thing that actually I didn't mention earlier but everyone will know who's seen these streets is there's no bike infrastructure at all. So if you are riding your bike, which we have, you know, increasingly better bike infrastructure being built in Eureka, but if you're riding your bike and you need to go to a business or an office or a home on one of those streets, you got no option really. You got a lot of people ride on the sidewalk because that's the only thing that's really kind of safe. So anyway, making these places that we just feel comfortable moving around and that we actually are safe is the overall goal that I want folks to keep in mind. In terms of some of the specifics, so a lot of the things that we talked about, people will remember, a lot of those dangers have to do with having these three lanes of traffic in the same direction where that encourages this high-speed dangerous behavior, which is almost unavoidable when you have these three wide lanes just all going together like that. And so one of the solutions that we propose is to convert one of those lanes into a protected bike lane. That really accomplishes a lot. It shortens the distance that people have to cross the street as pedestrians, bicyclists, even as motorists. It makes people trying to cross the street more visible because they're further out towards where the traffic is and motorists can see pedestrians and vice versa better if we design those intersections well. It also just provides physical protection both for bicyclists and for pedestrians. One thing I didn't mention before is at least a couple of these pedestrian crashes have involved cars going up on the sidewalk. So providing that physical protection is really important. And it makes people more likely to yield. You know, you only have two, you only need two drivers to yield instead of three to cross the street. So this really accomplishes a lot of goals at once. And I think we have to remember too that as soon as the 101 turns that corner and becomes Broadway, it is already only two lanes in both directions. So there's no problem in terms of carrying that amount of traffic. And this is a big, a big step towards making those streets safer.

WHEELER:

And as we've seen from other lane reduction projects in the city of Eureka, we haven't felt any traffic increase, traffic jams, whatever that antagonists often would crow about or, or would predict. So we had on H and I street, we went from two streets each having three lanes down to two streets, each having two lanes, very similar to what we're talking about here. When this was being proposed, all of the folks who really, really love to drive their cars really fast would come out and would, would say that this is just going to force traffic onto side streets. It's going to make things more dangerous in that way that we're going to have traffic jams through the heart of the city. Lo and behold, none of that has happened. We have safer streets that are capable of carrying the same traffic and doing so in a safer way.

FISKE:

Absolutely. Another thing I want to mention, and we sort of touched on this already, but intersection improvements, right? And so there are some of those long stretches without any signals or anything that we talked about where it's really hard to get across the street safely. So one of the things that we call for are adding signals at some of those locations, probably not every intersection, but certainly more of them that allows people to get across the street safely. And then also adding other features. One thing that we call out in the report is something called a protected intersection, where you have little islands at each corner that someone who is biking or walking can wait behind. And that allows you protection while you're waiting to cross the street. But it also, for a bicyclist, allows you to make a two-stage turn to go left instead of having to merge into traffic, which on 101 is really scary and dangerous, that you could cross one way and then wait and then cross perpendicularly without ever having to merge with traffic. And so things like that are relatively simple solutions that have been done in other places and just could make crossing the street so much safer. Another thing that we call in the report is the possibility of making some of those side street crosswalks into raised crosswalks, which just makes people turning go a little slower and prevents people from gunning across the street like we talked about earlier. So there's a bunch of intersection improvements that could be done that would really just make the street, both streets, a lot safer.

WHEELER:

I think that one thing that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to highlight for my own personal experience is the way the psychology that two lanes versus three lanes, the propensity for people to stop at a crosswalk and allow a pedestrian to cross. I feel that currently when you are a driver going down 4th and 5th streets, sometimes you don't feel like you should stop for a pedestrian because you don't feel like you're gonna create a safe condition for the pedestrian to stop because there are two whole other lanes of traffic that are also going to have to recognize what's going on and stop. Whereas when you only have two lanes of traffic, the kind of signal is clear to other drivers that there's, hey, maybe a pedestrian that's looking to cross. And I feel like it will just kind of make more sense for all parties involved just to have two lanes. It will make people more inclined to stop. And I'm not sure if there's any science to back that. Maybe that's just my own armchair psychology, but it feels at least when I'm driving that I often almost make a deliberate choice not to stop for somebody because I don't feel like I trust other drivers around me.

FISKE:

Yeah, I think certainly having two lanes instead of three would reduce the options, the possibilities for people being irresponsible that way. The other thing is that there's a ton of science behind just reducing the lane width, resulting in people naturally driving a bit slower. And we also know that the speed that you're driving has a huge impact on the likelihood of a driver to yield. And so you can think about that from a personal perspective. If you're driving 35, for example, and you see someone about to cross the street, you're very unlikely to yield, partly because you'd have to slam on your brakes and you might think someone might hit you from behind or something. If you're going 30 or even a little below that, 25 maybe, you're much more likely to yield because you have the ability to brake more reasonably. You're more likely to even see somebody who wants to cross. So yeah, I think there is some science behind this observation that you're pointing out.

WHEELER:

So Colin, a lot of the things that we have talked about here sound like they could increase traffic, right? That we are trying to get people probably to drive slower by having interventions in the road that just instinctually cause people to drive slower. That we're taking away a lane of traffic that people often use to swerve and get around other cars so that they can drive faster. We are talking about more better crosswalks that could cause traffic to stop to allow pedestrians to cross the street. This is also a highway. This is Highway 101, the most major highway of our region. Can you talk about the balancing, such as you see it, that goes on in making decisions like this and why you think that the prescriptions here that you are outlining still allow for this to function in a way that will work for auto users?

FISKE:

Yeah, I think there's a couple of answers to that. One is that there's a lot of research about what are called road diets, where you remove a lane or two lanes of traffic from a major street. And although it's a little counterintuitive, the research almost all finds that you don't actually get a huge increase in traffic. Basically, collectively, when you look across everybody's behavior who's driving a car or a truck, they just change their behavior a little bit. And maybe it's that they take different trips or different times of day, or they chain their trips together so they don't make five trips a day on the same street, but make two instead. To be honest, we don't really know exactly what people do to change their behavior, but we do know that it happens consistently. And so changes like this typically do not result in a major increase in traffic. The other thing that I'll say is that, as we mentioned before, the rest of 101 through Eureka is only two lanes in each direction. Most of 101 in our region is two lanes in each direction. In some places, one lane in each direction, and we don't see huge traffic pileups. So I think it's certainly possible to carry as much traffic as 101 has on two lanes in each direction. And in fact, reducing those opportunities that you talked about for the unpredictable behavior, like weaving in and out of traffic and stuff, can result in actually, ironically, like smoother traffic flow that actually allows people to get through town just as fast, if not even faster. So that's one thing. I don't really think that we have a big worry about some massive traffic jam happening because of this. The other thing I want to say, though, is that even if it resulted in some minor increase in traffic or some minor increase in the amount of time it took to drive through Eureka, I think safety is important. People are dying on those streets. Yeah.

WHEELER:

What's more important, traveling 25 miles an hour as opposed to 28 miles an hour, or the pedestrian whose life was saved because they were able to safely cross the street? And it will be impossible to know the counterfactual, how many lives could be saved by something like this. But we do know that interventions like these do save lives. When you look at, when you have a large enough data set, you can see that things improve.

FISKE:

One other thing I wanted to mention is, I think, safety is obviously the number one thing here. And these are dangerous streets, and we want to make them safe, we want to keep people from dying and being injured on these streets. But also, slowing things down a little bit through the center of town, it's also good for business, it's also good for people who live there, makes people more likely to stop and patronize the business, more likely to go there for some activity if it doesn't feel like a hostile environment. And so, I just want to throw that out there too, that this is also part of rejuvenating downtown and connecting it more thoroughly to the rest of the city.

WHEELER:

Yeah, Old Town, anything on the water side of the 101 has always felt kind of disconnected from the city because you have a highway running through the city. I mean, so you have to cross that highway and then you can enjoy downtown. But the split between downtown Old Town always has struck me as kind of weird. And yeah, as Eureka and I, I don't particularly love it. So Colin, you have a petition to try to get Caltrans to take this safety aspect of their work more seriously for 4th and 5th Streets. Where can folks find the petition besides here in the show notes, which can be found on loscosoutpost.com.

FISKE:

Yeah, so you can find it on CRTP's website, which is transportationpriorities.org, and it's right on the homepage. You can click on it and sign the petition. And like you said, this is really a petition to show Caltrans the community support behind doing something major and something quickly to prioritize making these streets safer, making it so that people aren't dying on these streets all the time, being seriously injured on these streets all the time. And so we do ask that anyone who supports that, anyone who wants this to happen, go to the website, transportationpriorities.org, or look in the show notes, click the link, just sign your name to the petition. The more people who sign it, the more it shows the community support for this kind of thing. And the petition also includes a reference to Broadway, which as we know, is also very dangerous. And people may have noticed that Caltrans is building some safety improvements on the southern part of Broadway, south of the Bayshore Mall. We have also made sure that Caltrans has plans for safety improvements for the rest of that corridor, so we can make all of 101 and Eureka safer. But those other plans have not been funded or built. And so part of the petition also just calls for Caltrans to fund the safety improvements to Broadway as well, so we can make the whole corridor safer.

WHEELER:

Well, everyone go to CRTP's website. Colin, once again, what is it?

FISKE:

transportationpriorities.org

WHEELER:

Sign the petition. And also, if you are interested in issues related to pedestrian safety, safe roads, safe communities, check out the newsletter from CRTP, The Collector. You can sign up on transportationpriorities.org. I think it's really one of the best local newsletters around. It has a good summary of what's in the news, as well as ways that you can take action to try and make our communities safer. So check it out, transportationpriorities.org. Colin Fiske, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report. Thanks for having me, Tom. All right, join us again next week on This Time and Channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.