Tag Archives: pedestrians

Several of Chicago’s most dangerous intersections the result of diagonal streets

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A new list of the most dangerous intersections in Chicago for pedestrians includes several with three streets:

The six-way intersection of Milwaukee, North and Damen avenues on the North Side is the most dangerous junction for pedestrians in Chicago, according to a list released by the advocacy group Active Transportation Alliance…

There were 43 crashes involving either a pedestrian or a bicycle at the Milwaukee/North/Damen intersection from 2006 through 2012, the highest number of any city intersection for that period, the group found…

“There are proven solutions to make crossing these intersections safer,” said Kyle Whitehead, a campaign directorat the alliance, said Tuesday. “Things as simple as improving the markings on a crosswalk or installing a pedestrian countdown signal can make a difference.”…

The three most dangerous intersections in Chicago were Milwaukee/Damen/North; Cicero and Chicago avenues on the West Side; and Halsted Street/Lincoln Avenue/Fullerton Parkway in Lincoln Park.

It makes sense that some intersections with more streets involved are more dangerous: there are more routes for vehicle traffic and pedestrians have to navigate more crosswalks while having to look in unique directions for potential danger.

Yet, I was struck by two features of these diagonal, and potentially dangerous, streets.

1. The diagonal streets have a long history preceding the efforts of Americans to impose a grid on the Midwestern landscape:

Well, it turns out that most of Chicago’s diagonal streets were originally Native American trails. No, really. Milwaukee Avenue (originally West Plank Road), for example, was once a buffalo route that led to the Chicago River. Eventually settlers moved in, kicked the Native Americans out, and started building taverns along the trail. Once there were taverns, homes and businesses cropped up and the street thrived. Sound familiar? These diagonal paths in the city (Lincoln was Little Fort Road, Elston was Lower Road, Ogden was Southwestern Plank Road) became plank toll roads, and then finally regular streets that serve as some of the major arteries of Chicago.

In other words, the diagonal streets were more direct routes between settlements.

2. Diagonal streets are one of the features of Daniel Burnham’s lauded Plan of Chicago. Such roadways cut through a grid, providing quicker access into and out of the center of the city. However, only one major diagonal was even extended as the result of Burnham’s plan: Ogden Avenue was extended to go closer to the lake. Burnham had a number of avenues intended to radiate out from his proposed Civic Center which was never constructed. (Read more in this booklet in honor of the centennial of the Burnham Plan.)

“Testing a No-Cellphone Sidewalk Lane”

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I’ve always been interested in the walking patterns of people along sidewalks, in public places, or in hallways so this TV test of cellphone lanes on sidewalks looks fascinating:

Sidewalk collisions involving pedestrians engrossed in their electronic devices have become an irritating (and sometimes dangerous) fact of city life. To prevent them, what about just creating a “no cellphones” lane on the sidewalk? Would people follow the signs? That’s what a TV crew decided to find out on a Washington, D.C., street last week as part of a behavioral science experiment for a new National Geographic TV series.

As might be expected, some pedestrians ignored the chalk markings designating a no-cellphones lane and a lane that warned pedestrians to walk “at your own risk.” Others didn’t even see them because they were too busy staring at their phones. But others stopped, took pictures and posted them—from their phones, of course.

Of course, you have to watch the show to find out the complete outcome. But, I would guess most people didn’t pay much attention to the markings. While the experiment targets cell phones, there are lots of ways pedestrians can create problems on sidewalks. Cell phones may be particularly dangerous because people keep moving while not paying attention but other issues abound including people who suddenly stop right in the middle of walking people or others who walk at least three people across and force others to move out of the way.

There are places where such signs or markings do seem to work. It is common in Europe to see signs telling people on escalators or moving walkways to stand to one side to let others pass on the other side. In contrast, Americans tend to clog up such pathways. Similarly, the BART in San Fransisco has markings indicating where to line up for train cars while waiting. This works with a system where the train always stops at the same place but it does create a more orderly system than the free-for-all that is often common around train car doors.

It would be interesting to know why people might or might not follow such directions. Are they not paying attention while walking (this is common amongst drivers who can tune out all of the signs)? Is there a lack of enforcement? Are sidewalks and other walkways seen as more democratic settings (they are public property after all) where people should be able to do what they want?

Chicago rated worst city for parking – but this could have some benefits

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Nerdwallet named Chicago the worst city for parking based on the factors of price and number of car thefts:

Takeaways:

  • Chicago is the worst city for parking — and also the most controversial. Parking prices skyrocketed in 2009 after the city made a deal for a group of investors, organized by Morgan Stanley, to operate its meters for 75 years.
  • Though you’ll probably enjoy Hawaii’s capital, Honolulu is an extremely expensive city to park in; it’ll run you $42 a day.
  • There are a lot of car thefts in Oakland — 124.59% more per capita than the national average.

1. Chicago, Ill.

This city is known for its parking woes—especially the controversial privatization of the parking meters, which led to a dramatic increase in parking fees in 2009. A consortium called Chicago Parking Meters LLC operates the meters. You’ll drop $35 a day to park in the city and $289 per month. The city lists the fines you’ll receive for various parking violations on their website.

This spring, Chicago will test its new ParkChicago app, which allows drivers to pay for parking via an app rather than a meter. There are various websites that help you find the cheapest parking in the city. Chicago is one of the cities supported by SpotHero.com, which helps you find parking and prepay. However, if you want to ditch driving altogether, the city has multiple public transportation options. Bus and “L” riders will soon be able to use their phones to pay for rides.

Unfortunately, Chicago also has 33.4% more motor vehicle thefts per capita than the national average. And if you get a citation, you must contest it within seven days of receiving it or pay the fine online.

Parking is heavily dependent on the number of people and amount of space available. In other words, urban density. If you look at the bottom of the list, or “the best cities for parking your car,” they are all sprawling Sunbelt cities. Presumably, they have much more space and are less dense, driving down parking prices.

Of course, there are positives to having bad parking. Such urban densities that make parking more expensive can lead to:

1. Vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods with plenty of housing as well as businesses, stores, public spaces, and culture. Lots of people in a small amount of space can lead to some exciting urban scenes.

2. Plentiful and efficient mass transit. This is difficult to provide when there are a limited number of riders and the transit has to cover a lot of ground.

3. A lot more people walking and riding bikes. This is good for health, limiting pollution, and livelier streets.

4. The space that might be devoted to cars (wider streets, on-street parking, parking lots and garages) can be devoted to other things. For example, see this analysis of snow plowing on Philadelphia city streets that reveals the potential space.

“How Trains Can Be Silent Killers”

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Over 780 people were killed by trains last year in the United States and it is possible for them to sneak up quietly on people:

“Statistically, every 94 minutes something or someone is getting hit by a train in the United States,” says David Rangel, deputy director of Modoc Railroad, a training school for future train engineers. Now, most of those incidents don’t involve people—Rangel’s statistic also includes the occasional abandoned shopping cart, wayward livestock, and other objects that somehow find their way onto the tracks. But, according to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), 784 people were killed in train-related accidents in 2013, the highest total in the last four years.

That accident rate comes down to a combination of factors, each increasing the likelihood of disasters. “Railcars are incredibly quiet,” Rangel says. “[Tracks] are designed to achieve the lowest possible coefficient of friction…At age 62, I could push a train car down a track.” Unlike a steam engine that would hammer the rails (a main reason why they were retired), modern railcars glide with low friction, and crushed rock underneath the tracks helps diminish impact. “You won’t hear it or feel it,” Rangel says.

The Doppler Effect, which explains how sound changes pitch based on an observer’s location relative to the sound’s origin (the reason sirens sound different as they approach you), plays a role. However, since they were in front of the train, where the pitch would be higher, they’d be more likely to hear the siren and doesn’t explain why they didn’t hear the train coming. Unsurprisingly, some train-collision victims often were wearing headphones or earbuds at the time. (These two were not wearing headphones.)

Terrain can also add to the danger. If a locomotive passes through a corridor lined with trees, those trees act like sound baffles in a recording studio, Rangel says, suppressing the noise. The average railcar traveling at 50 mph measures in decibels between at “loud voice” and a “shout,” according to the FRA. The horn itself, though, can be even louder than sirens on an ambulance.

When you think about it, it is surprising how open train tracks are to the general public. The average city or suburban dweller could probably get to a railroad line easily and walk around. This also includes a large number of at-grade crossings, a particular problem in the Chicago region with lots of freight traffic and lots of people. But, the goal of railroad lines is not to minimize accidents but rather to transport goods and people as efficiently as possible.

h/t Instapundit

Suburbanites mad at neighbors who don’t shovel their sidewalks

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Readers of the Daily Herald are upset about their suburban neighbors who didn’t both to shovel the sidewalks in front of their houses:

Nothing like hitting a nerve. Last week’s column about pedestrians in peril on unshoveled sidewalks provoked an avalanche of articulate emails. Let’s start with Nancy Johnson who writes, “I live in Elgin where shoveling sidewalks is not required and I struggle to trudge through the snow every winter to walk my three dogs.

“Two winters ago, I fell on an icy sidewalk that resulted from the homeowner never shoveling, and did serious damage to my back. I have tried putting friendly notes in neighbor’s doors reminding them to be good citizens and shovel, but to no avail,” Johnson said…

JR Beck joins three Hanover Park neighbors to clear sidewalk snow near a school and church.

“We all have snowblowers so the work is not as taxing as it once was a few years ago,” he said. “We have managed to keep the walkways clear for the blocks on which we all live.

“But no thanks to the snowplow jockeys who: plow in all the corners where the kids have to cross the streets; and drive so fast that the plows throw snow over the medians and onto the cleared walkways…

“When I replied that I was only talking about commercial properties — dead silence. I have seen people walking in the streets on extremely busy Golf Road and Algonquin Road during rush hour because sidewalks in front of these main commercial strips are impassible.”

A big problem in a really wintry season like the Chicago area just experienced. There are two possible routes of interpretation for this that come to mind:

1. This is another indicator of a lack of suburban community. People can’t be bothered to take care of parts of their property that others use. They put their own self-interest ahead of that of others. Kids may have special status and this makes sense since the suburban life is traditionally about raising children: the argument about kids getting to school or buses seems to be the most effective in motivating people to clear sidewalks.

2. This highlights the importance of roads and driving in suburban communities over the concerns of pedestrians. The suburban life is built around driving from place to place so this gets priority for snow removal. The average suburbanite or business owner may not think there are many pedestrians out there on the sidewalks so they don’t bother to clear them.

Neither reason is particularly positive but this is an ongoing issue in many places. In our residential neighborhood, in which I walk often and also walk out of (to get to the library, several stores, bank), I would estimate only 10-20% of sidewalks were clear, pushing walkers into the street. Even if I cleared my entire sidewalk (which I did throughout the winter), it doesn’t necessarily connect to anyone else who cleared their sidewalks.

Jaywalkers vs. car culture in downtown Los Angeles

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The battle for Los Angeles may not involve aliens but rather jaywalking pedestrians versus cars in downtown Los Angeles:

It is not quite “Dragnet,” but the Police Department in recent weeks has issued dozens of tickets to workers, shoppers and tourists for illegally crossing the street in downtown Los Angeles. And the crackdown is raising questions about whether the authorities are taking sides with the long-dominant automobile here at the very time when a pedestrian culture is taking off, fueled by the burst of new offices, condominiums, hotels and restaurants rising in downtown Los Angeles…

The police say they are simply trying to maintain order at a time when downtown Los Angeles, once a place of urban tumbleweeds and the homeless, is teeming with people competing for pavement with automobiles. “There’s a huge influx of folks that come into the downtown area,” said Sgt. Larry Delgado of the Central Traffic Division. “If you go out there, you are going to see enforcement.”

These pedestrians are confronting not only the police, but a historically entrenched car culture that has long defined the experience of living and working in Los Angeles. With its wide streets, and aggressive motorists zipping around corners, cutting in and out of lanes and sneaking past red lights, Los Angeles is hardly built for people who prefer to walk.

Yet times may be changing. There are an increasing number of people using bicycles, taking advantage of an expanding network of bike lanes. Los Angeles is in the midst of a major expansion of its subway and bus system. Much of the urban planning in recent years, particularly downtown and in Hollywood, is intended to encourage people to give up their cars in favor of public transit, walking or biking.

It is hard to tell what exactly is going on here without some hard data about jaywalking fines in downtown LA over time. However, it does make for an interesting narrative: while many cities and places are trying to encourage more pedestrian and bike use (for its green, health, congestion, and other benefits), Los Angeles is cracking down on walkers. The issue is that LA is perhaps the prototypical car city in the entire world. The sprawling city has traditionally not had a downtown on the scale of other major cities that people would want to crowd. The metropolitan area seems to stretch on forever, crisscrossed by numerous highways. This is home to the Beach Boys singing about driving, the rise of fast food, and lots of car commercials.

Jaywalking may be an opening skirmish but this could blossom into a longer war over the heart of Los Angeles: is it really a city about cars or can it also contain dense, walkable nodes? Critics of sprawl would see a Los Angeles full of pedestrians (at least in pockets) as a tremendous success story.

Chicago tries out a “pedestrian scramble” intersection

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Chicago has started testing the “pedestrian scramble” at a Loop intersection:

The changes center on a new pedestrian crossing pattern – dubbed the “pedestrian scramble” – that will be introduced at the intersection of State Street and Jackson Boulevard…

The test involves stopping all vehicles – heading east on Jackson and north and south on State – for about 14 seconds every other light cycle to give pedestrians a jump on traffic to cross in all directions, including diagonally, according to Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Developed more than 70 years ago, the pedestrian scramble allows pedestrians a running start to cross six ways instead of four ways.

The experiment is part of a larger plan by Chicago Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein to reduce speeds and the number of vehicle travel lanes on busy streets in an effort to slash the number of crashes…

Klein’s strategy involves narrowing some streets, or putting them on a “road diet.’’

Two quick thoughts:

1. This reminds me of photographs of busy intersections in Tokyo where you see mobs of people crossing at all angles. See short videos here and here. Indeed, other countries have used pedestrian scrambles for decades.

2. People may not like the idea of a “road diet” but there is evidence that reducing traffic capacity could be more effective at dealing with traffic and congestion rather than continually expanding roads. Plus, you then get the side benefit of more safety and convenience for pedestrians and cyclists.

The “Big Parade” in Los Angeles really highlights the city’s lack of walkability

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A Los Angeles writer started an event called the “Big Parade” that makes use of a number of staircases in the city. But, this event serves to highlight the city’s overall lack of walkability compared to other big cities around the world:

Koeppel’s early obsession evolved into a piece for Backpacker magazine called “I Climbed Los Angeles” that ran in June 2004. It’s since developed into an annual event called the Big Parade — a two-day, 40-mile urban hike from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood sign that covers 100 public stairways along the way. For this year’s parade, the fifth, Koeppel expects several hundred people to join him from around the country…

The parade’s secondary mission is to encourage a sense of community. Koeppel says the parade keeps pace with the slowest walker; he describes it as a simple “walk with neighbors.” The event is free, and Koeppel has even rejected sponsors to keep things as casual as possible. Each day’s walk is divided into segments, with a main loop of five or six miles, and participants are invited to come and go as they please.

“The majority are people who have not walked more than five or six miles in L.A. in the streets in their entire lives,” he says. “Taking them and showing them what L.A. is like on foot — showing them secret passages and landmarks and things they never see from outside the window of their car — has been just really fun.”

Koeppel, who’s known beyond Los Angeles for his celebrated book on the history of bananas, maintains that his purpose in starting the Big Parade isn’t to prove that Los Angeles is a walkable place. He denies the axiom that nobody there walks — rather, he says, nobody seems to walk when you’re looking out from a car window — and sees the city’s infamous sprawl as simply an opportunity for pedestrian exploration. The Big Parade, he says, “is a way to reestablish the presence of individual propulsion within that sprawl.”

So the “Big Parade” is a pedestrian cry in a wilderness of cars and vehicles…

Two things in particular intrigued me in this story:

1. Walking can involve building community. This reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ famous axiom about “eyes on the street” or her thoughts about “public characters” who are out and about and known in neighborhoods. Places like Los Angeles simply don’t allow for much informal encounters on the street level. But, a group of people walking together or near each other can engage in conversations in ways that are very difficult to do in cars. (This also reminds me of an idea my dad had years ago about putting scrolling sign boards in the back windshields of cars so drivers could deliver messages to each other. I imagine the ratio of destructive versus encouraging messages would get high pretty quickly…)

2. The article suggests a number of the staircases were constructed for homeowners who wanted to get off the streetcar and make the trek up to their house. This is a reminder of the extensive streetcar system that Los Angeles once had. How might the city be different today if those streetcars had survived or had been replaced by a similarly spread-out system of mass transit? As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in Crabgrass Frontiers, streetcars had a number of factors working against them. However, these staircases are a suggestion of what Los Angeles might have been.

A lack of automatic penalties for a New York City driver hopping the curb and killing a pedestrian

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Sarah Goodyear highlights an interesting legal area: New York City drivers whose cars kill pedestrians on the sidewalk do not automatically receive penalties.

In New York, unless the driver flees the scene (as happened in the Queens case mentioned above) or is intoxicated, crashes that kill pedestrians rarely result in criminal charges. “No criminality was suspected” is the mantra of the NYPD when it comes to pedestrian and cyclist deaths in general. The tepid police response to traffic deaths is even more jarring when applied to cases in which the vehicle actually leaves the roadway and enters what should be inviolate pedestrian space…

I talked to Steve Vaccaro, a lawyer who frequently represents victims of traffic crashes and is an outspoken advocate for pedestrian and bicyclist rights in New York City, and asked him to explain how running your vehicle up onto a sidewalk crowded with pedestrians can be seen as anything other than reckless. He explained to me that recklessness is in the eye of the beholder.“The standard for criminal charges is that the risk you take has to be a gross deviation from the risk a reasonable person would accept,” he says. “It’s about the community norm.”

And the community norm is to accept the explanations proffered by drivers such as the one who killed Martha Atwater – who, according to an unnamed police source quoted in the news, said he had suffered a diabetic blackout. Other drivers are let off the hook after simply “losing control” or hitting the gas instead of the brake. The ease with which pedestrian deaths are accepted by police as just unfortunate “accidents” has led to a deep cynicism among many observers of street safety in New York.

Shouldn’t the community norm instead be an understanding that if you drive your car in such a way that you end up on the sidewalk in the middle of one of the world’s most pedestrian-rich environments, you have somehow failed in your responsibility as a driver? Obviously, there are extreme circumstances, such as mechanical failure, in which a driver is not in any way at fault. But why are we so quick to dismiss the mayhem caused by motor vehicles as inevitable?

Seems odd to me. Frankly, pedestrians are not that protected on sidewalks. The speed and size of cars means the short jump up to the sidewalk isn’t much of an obstruction. But, perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising considering how much Americans love cars and how much cities have been redesigned to accommodate cars.

This reminds that New Urbanists often make this argument about their neo-traditional designs for narrower streets that allow street parking and both sides and trees in the parkways. These conditions both slow down drivers, which could give pedestrians more time to react, and also provide barriers between drivers and pedestrians. Better that drivers who lose control hit inanimate objects than also harm other people in the process.

The danger of railroad crossing accidents in the Chicago region

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The Chicago region is a railroad hub. While this may be good for business, it is not great for accidents between trains, vehicles, and pedestrians. Here are figures on the number of accidents from recent years and what might be done to reduce them:

From 2006 through 2011 in the Chicago region, there were 641 collisions with trains involving vehicles or pedestrians, a Daily Herald analysis found. A total of 253 people in the six-county area died coming into contact with trains in that time period and an additional 267 were injured, according to Illinois Commerce Commission data…

A total of 9.5 million people live in Chicago and the suburbs, where nearly 500 freight and 700 Metra trains chug through daily. But the design of some crossings and stations makes that coexistence treacherous, expert Ian Savage explained.

Mid-platform pedestrian crossings at train stations, angled streets intersecting with tracks so drivers “can easily come around the gates,” and platforms transitioning into streets are everyday hazards, he said.

“Some of the designs of the stations are strange and bizarre,” said Savage, a Northwestern University economics and transportation professor. For example, “when you have the street merge with the platform, it signals to people that ‘you can just stroll around aimlessly.'”

As the article notes, there are a number of solutions to this problem. The most effective would be to limit the number of at-grade crossings, of which the Chicago region has many. Of course, this is an expensive option:

The ultimate protection comes in the form of grade separations — overpasses or underpasses that keep the public and railways apart. Chicago and some older communities such as Naperville boast such structures that were built decades ago.

But constructing a grade separation is an exorbitant proposition. One structure dedicated in Downers Grove this fall on the BNSF Railway cost about $60 million. Another planned for West Chicago at Roosevelt Road and the Union Pacific Railway will cost $26 million.

The solution to this is likely a long-term one since new devices cost both money and time. Communities that took care of some of this far in the past are quite fortunate. The article mentions underpasses in Naperville. The suburb has two underpasses, one at Washington Street and one at Mill Road. Both are nearly a century old and were probably easier to construct even then because both of the crossings are away from the downtown and denser areas, an issue for many suburban communities. For example, Wheaton has had multiple discussions in the past about an overpass or underpass in the downtown but such a structure would overwhelm the quaint core.

I wonder if one possible solution to this issue would be to run fewer trains through the denser areas of the Chicago region and route more along the outer edges. This has been an issue in recent years as regional planners and others have looked for ways to move freight through or around the region more quickly. What if this was also promoted as a safety issue?