ped/bike improvements

[gfish]

I spent the day biking around town as part of my half-assed attempts to get ready for STP. Without a whole lot to occupy my attention, I thought a lot about pedestrian and bicycle improvements. This is my list of what the city (any city!) needs to do. Nothing extravagant, just basic steps if we're actually serious. It wouldn't be practical to do all this at once, but they should be basic design criteria for all roadwork and upgrades.

• Basic principle: As it is quite legal in Seattle, sidewalks need to be designed with bicycles as well as pedestrians and wheelchairs in mind. You get a lot more riders if you can make sidewalk riding easier -- it's a hell of a lot less scary than most arterials, particularly if you're slogging it out uphill.
  
  
  
  • Utility poles should not be placed in the middle of sidewalks. If bikes and wheelchairs can't get by, you might as well not have the sidewalk at all.
  
  
  • All corners with curbs need pedestrian curb cuts. These should be at the corner, not tucked around the corner. It's important, particularly when riding along a busy street, to stay completely visible when crossing the side streets. People just don't pay enough attention when turing right.


• Marked crosswalks need to line up with the curb cuts. I mean, duh.


• We need more marked crosswalks, and more mid-block crosswalks (with pedestrian bulbs).


• Crosswalk signals and buttons are all fucked up. Currently, they only serve (in the vast majority of cases) to have the walk signal turn on the next time the traffic light cycle gets around to it. The walk signal does not turn on otherwise, and they don't influence the timing of the cycle. This is car-centric bullshit. The walk signal should always turn on for each cycle, rather or not a button has been pushed. The signaling buttons should serve the same purpose as car sensors in the intersection and influence timing. In particularly pedestrian-oriented areas of town, the traffic lights should default to all-red/all-walk until a car arrives to trigger a sensor.


• Any non-residential street that has the room should have marked bike lanes. The burden of proof for bike lanes needs to be on the side of the negative. Bike lanes are cheap and really good marketing.


• Car sensors in intersections seriously need to be able to detect bikes. One should not have to lay a bike down directly over the sensor in order to trigger it. This applies even in industrial areas, dammit.


• Shrubs need to be kept trimmed along sidewalks. Soil creep off of steep slopes need to be kept cleared off of sidewalks. This is probably the responsibility of the property owner, but in that case more fines need to be levied or whatever.


• In a slightly different vein, we need to drop the minimum parking spot requirements for new development. Maximum parking limits like SF has would be even better.

Comments

and part 2 as I exceeded allowed comment length (WTF?)

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

On our current job we are placing the ramps so that the outer (away from intersection) wing of the curb ramp ends at the end of major radius of the curb bulb. There are other options, but any solution is a compromise.

Somewhere among all this, one has to fit the signal poles, etc.

They are installing curb ramps in all curbed intersections (that allow crossings). One does not go through and install ramps in every legacy curb in the country in one year. Everytime a street receives a certain level of work or upgrades, the ADA improvements have to be installed, as practical.

All sidewalks must maintain the minimum clear width of 36" for ADA purposes. All the junk on the sidewalks annoys me too, but that's where we stuff all our utilities, etc. We look at all clearances when placing the poles, lights, fire hydrants, etc. Typical minimum design width is about 5', with occasional obstructions down to 36".

We don't even strip centerlines or fog lines on small streets, much less bike lanes. That's silly.

The marking of crosswalks is something I disagree with the standards on, but designers are essentially legally bound by them. Traffic controls typically require "warrants." If the intersection/street doesn't "warrant" the control based on the current and predicted traffic volumes, it is very difficult to justify the installation. Crosswalks have additional restrictions--crosswalks are considered a way to channel pedestrians to safer crossing points, so they are not installed on intersections that are bad crossings. Doesn't make sense, does it? Well, that's the way it is. Given sufficient existing/predicted pedestrian traffic, crosswalk signals will be installed. But one has to meet sight distance, etc. So installations are very involved.

I wish that pedestrian crossing that require button pushing at least put a sign up on the pedestrian signal that told one that. I often end-up standing at an intersection wondering why the crosswalk sign didn't trigger. Although I don't like it, the reason for not automatically having pedestrian signals each cycle is that the pedestrian signal can often be the controlling time for the intersection, and it is unacceptable to degrade intersection performance for foot traffic that is sporadic and only is actually there a small fraction of the time.

-B.