Of the nation's 75 largest cities, Providence ranks ninth most difficult city to navigate by car. Woohoo! Top Ten, baby! This is right, though:
"I would rather have our winding, historical streets than the bland, wide streets of a grid system," said Thomas E. Deller, director of the Providence Department of Planning and Development. "It adds to the charm and beauty of New England cities, just like the European cities."
I wish someone would rank the best cities to navigate by foot. I think we'd have another top-ten spot.
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So they want to widen 32 miles of interstate highways in RI. You ever get the urge to just grab someone and shake them? That's me and the DOT right now. I thought it was finally sinking in that adding a lane to a congested area doesn't alleviate traffic, it just creates another lane of backup. I guess not. And actually, part of the plan calls for widening an uncongested area, because, uh, well... Our ProJo reporter knows where the story is:
Henry Sherlock, who represents the state's construction industry, also backs the Rhode Island road-widening project. "The problem is already there," he said, and alternative transportation systems "are not going to get rid of these cars."
Go figure. How about this one, though:
"It would be a lot less expensive per mile" to widen the southern part of Route 95 than to widen it in the dense urban areas it crosses farther north.
What?! What does that have to do with anything?! It would be a lot less expensive, per mile, to not throw money at unnecessary projects!
Luckily this is all much ado about nothing, as the suggestion was low on the to-consider list for RIDOT. Hopefully these knuckleheads won't be around when the plan actually comes up for review.
No wider highways. No double-decking. No more accommodating sprawl and throwing our money down the freeway pit.
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Thinking about congestion in southern RI, though, gave me a good idea. Instead of widening 95 South near the Connecticut border, why don't we knock it down from two lanes to just one? Instead of easing the potential congestion there, it will be constant! As you may know, millions of Rhode Islanders' dollars literally flow to CT just an couple exits into the Nutmeg State. What better way to stop the cash flow than to slow the traffic flow? Perhaps while sitting in the ungodly traffic it would occur to folks that maybe tossing quarter after quarter into a slot machine isn't actually that fun, and certainly not worth the hassle of gridlock.
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Meanwhile, as RIDOT tries to imagine ways to blow nine-figure allocations, RIPTA is facing its annual budget deficit, needing about $1.75 million to cover a shortfall. Threats of reduced service and cut routes are making their yearly appearance.
Public Transit funding is one of my favorite little vicious cycles. Transportation policy sabotages public transit, by, say, widening a highway to literally pave the way for rapid suburban expansion, ridership goes down, thus lawmakers see fit to cut the PT budget, which lowers service quality, which drives people away from PT, which precipitates more cuts (hey, ridership is still down...) and on and on.
Listening to AM radio this week, though, it occurs to me that RIPTA should start sponsoring the traffic reports (as of now, warnings of accidents and congestion are brought to you by cool, refreshing Dunkin Donuts iced lattes...). What better way to suggest transit alternatives to people stuck in traffic? (I'd also like to see one of those billboards that say "Don't like the traffic? You ARE the traffic")
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Speaking of RIPTA, this week's email newsletter had an interview with RIPTA's planning manager Tim McCormick. This guy "gets it" (can we send him to RIDOT?!) Excerpts:
Who's the biggest pain ?you have to deal with?People who don't take the bus and have decided that there is no room in the world for people who do, regardless of the applicable laws. This includes businesses and churches (believe it or not) that don't want a bus stop in front of their property, even though it has every right to be there, and property owners who want bus routes removed from their streets.
If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?
A $4 per gallon gas tax -- and fund transit with the proceeds.
Would you label yourself an environmentalist?
Yes, because I believe we should each personally use as little land and resources as possible to get by. I don't have a lot of baggage about it. For me it is like being polite to strangers or not. It is a way to treat other people, animals, and the planet itself.
What's one thing the environmental movement is doing badly?
Attracting the political right.
If you could have every ... reader do one thing, what would it be?
When you travel to another city, always look to see if you can use public transit exclusively. You will learn something about the place and its people that you never would have otherwise, and I guarantee you will have some fun.
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Finally, we end on some good news. West Bay commuter rail isn't dead! The new date for construction of the Warwick train station is 2006, and if I remember correctly this was supposed to start in 1997. The Warwick Station has to be one of the biggest no-brainers in the last couple decades, as TF Green Airport is the closest airport to major rail lines in the country. Such a no-brainer, in fact, a cynic would be surprised it's still moving forward.
Apparently, the latest delay was in dealing with Amtrak about adding a few more rails, but that seems to be squared away now. So really, this time, 2006. Please?
Here's a fascinating article in Salon about rethinking the way we design our streets. (click through the ad to get a free day pass)
[T]he chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other "traditional" modes of transportation -- light rail, streetcars and bicycles -- are making a comeback in cities across the country. The shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe communities, you have to control them.
The article talks about success with this type of planning and muses about bringing 2G traffic ideas to the US. The author's experience, though, was in China, and promising installations of this system have only really been found in northern Europe, two regions with vastly different psychologies than Americans. Indeed, the article quotes a city traffic engineer from Portland, OR as saying "We live in a culture that gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car." That is certainly true.
A problem the article does not take into account, however, is the nature of our built environment. This new thinking in "managed anarchy" is really only applicable to truly urban areas, which are in shrinking supply in the overly suburbanized US.
That said, there are important points in there, too. We could definitely benefit from some ideas of 2G traffic calming. Andres Duany (and maybe Jim Kunstler, I think) write about how our roads have been made more dangerous in the name of safety (for example, removing roadside trees so there are less things to hit actually encourages faster and more reckless driving). I know from experience that tighter streets are much less dangerous (and less stress-inducing) than wider ones.
From the three E's, we're really not doing too well. Engineering has proven to be counter-productive in many cases, enforcement is a butterfly in a hurricane, and education... well, I'll let you make your own conclusions on that one. I drive through a rotary/roundabout in Cranston many times a week, and I'd say only half of its users actually know the proper way to navigate the road there (though, as far as I've seen, there haven't been many accidents there!).
Implementing these ideas would certainly be tough, though. How do you test a new traffic structure, especially a counter-intuitive one, when safety is at stake? The key is certainly getting drivers and pedestrians to interact more, not less, but is that possible in our car-crazy, me-first road culture?
BONUS: Here's a scary example of what happens when pedestrians and scofflaws mix on our roads now.
The Rhode Island legislature, showing its great capacity for procrastination, is scrambling like mad to pass a whole bunch of stuff before the current session ends. One bill that passed the Senate yesterday among the flurry was a new requirement for state businesses who subsidize their employees parking costs to offer RIPTA passes in lieu of paying their garage bills. Someone on Smith Hill is obviously reading the URBlog.
Sounds like a good plan to me. Will it work? I don't know, but it's worth a shot. Preferably there would be a support program to go along with it, to highlight the many benefits of bus commuting over highway traffic and to maybe convince suburban white folks that buses aren't nearly as scary as they think.
ProJo.com: Cicilline urges study of transportation needs in Providence area
Prov Mayor David Cicilline wants the lege to create a commission to study transportation issues holistically in the state's urban center. He wants the General Assembly to create a 17-member legislative study commission on transportation and appropriate $375,000 for the study. Besides Providence, the study area would include North and East Providence, Central Falls, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Cranston and Warwick. Commission members include Grow Smart RI's executive director and the head of RIPTA.
This is a very welcome (and seemingly out of the blue) initiative by the mayor. Smart growth is thrown out there, and with towns like North Providence and East Providence who are currently embracing New Urban principles, there's a good chance that this type of study will lead to reforming some areas with transit-oriented designs.
On the subject of parking, I hope the mayor's director of administration John C. Simmons was misquoted or something when he said: "Maybe we [just] need to build two parking garages that are in an area that could bring people in and out of the downtown area so that we don't have as much congestion either at night or in the morning." I'd like him to explain how inviting more cars downtown will ease congestion anywhere, but whatever. This isn't to say that Providence doesn't need a parking garage or two, one of which is going forward to construction soon.
Unlike his predecessor Buddy Cianci, David Cicilline doesn't get mentioned in the same sentence with the phrase "urban visionary," but if he keeps this kind of forward thinking up, he will be.
BONUS: Here's a free suggestion to the commission: offer incentives to downtown businesses to promote employee bus ridership via discounted or free bus passes. There's an excellent opportunity to test this program as downtown will soon have a large influx of GTECH'ers while their new headquarters will contain only 80 spaces for hundreds of employees.