Promoting Public Safety through Land-Use Design

I’ve previously written about UrbanPlan, a program of the Urban Land Institute which introduces students to the complexities and trade-offs of land-use decisions.  ULI recently updated the UrbanPlan package to include additional elements, such as green roofs, and new voices, such as aging-in-place advocates, to add to the complex balancing required of the students.

For many UrbanPlan participants, it’s their first exposure to a problem without a single right answer.  Working within a team, trying to balance multiple desirable but incompatible objectives, is a fine lesson for the working world.

I recently participated in my first mock city council under the new rules.  As always, I was impressed by the students.  Most had tried diligently to learn and to apply the lessons that UrbanPlan offered.

However, there was one point that struck me, and not for the first time, during the presentations.  It touched upon an issue of land-use theory that was inappropriate for a mock city council, but worthy of discussion here.

Within the fictional UrbanPlan setting, one of the buildings can have space dedicated to community uses.  A list of possible community needs is provided in the UrbanPlan package.  One of the possible uses is a police substation.  A couple of teams said that they planned to include a police substation to make their proposed neighborhood “safe”.

The problem is that police aren’t the best path to safely.  But site design is.

I intend no disrespect to the police.  In adequate numbers, they can provide deterrence.  But most municipal budgets don’t have the financial resources to sustain those numbers.  So instead police most often function in a responsive mode, reacting when a crime is reported.  A neighborhood police substation may shorten the response time, but only after a crime has been reported, which isn’t a definition of a safe neighborhood.

On the other hand, site design has the capacity to prevent the crime from occurring, providing the deterrence that’s otherwise unaffordable.  That deterrence, often called “eyes on the street”, can be provided through multiple elements of site design.  Residential units upstairs from retail in commercial neighborhoods.  Smaller setbacks between homes and sidewalks.  Accessory dwelling units allowing more sets of eyes to live on a street.  Walkable destinations so more people are likely to be on the sidewalks.  Well-used parks.

The role of site design in minimizing crime is well-known.  In “Happy City”, Charles Montgomery writes of lower crime rates in public housing where site design encourages gathering in courtyards.  More than fifty years ago in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Jane Jacobs wrote how busy and active sidewalks made for safer neighborhoods.

Jacobs also noted that the expanses of grass around public housing towers, the lawns that idealists thought would be used for games and picnics, instead became the domain of miscreants, emboldened by the lack of nearby watchful eyes.  Eventually, public housing residents came to despise the grass, yearning for the small stores that had once provided eyes on the street but had been razed to make way for the towers and lawns.

Many communities understand the problem with the absence of eyes, encouraging the formation of “neighborhood watches”.   But the watches are a poor substitute for the eyes of people who have a reason to be on the street and who would provide a deterrence that no neighborhood watch can match.

Imagine designing residential streets to a 45 mph standard and then imposing a 20 mph speed limit.  No matter how law-abiding a driver wants to be, it’d be harder not to let the speedometer creep upwards.  It would take an Orwellian flotilla of traffic enforcement officers to keep the traffic close to 20 mph.  So we don’t build 20 mph streets to a 45 mph standard.  Instead, we build 20 mph streets with narrower lanes and smaller radius curves, so drivers naturally drive at speeds close to 20 mph.  It’s only common sense.

But it’s a common sense that we’ve usually failed to translate into our land use planning.  We’re taken the eyes that could have provided deterrence and instead put them into family rooms at the rear of homes or in cars hurrying through neighborhoods and shielded from streetlife by tinted glass.  We’ve encouraged land-use patterns that are inherently less safe and then we’ve tried to add safety after the fact.

Fortunately, the UrbanPlan toolkit includes building types that can help return eyes to the street.  (I’d prefer more vertical mixed-use options, but perhaps that omission can be addressed in the next update.)  But the students, many because they don’t see examples in their own worlds, don’t grasp the crime-prevention power that they have.

However, I’m hopeful.  Urbanism is slowly making inroads.  Perhaps in another decade or two, the public safety aspects of good urban design will become evident to all.

And when that happens, perhaps a site planner on an UrbanPlan team will say “We considered a police substation for the restored historic building, but had designed our land-use plan to reduce crime, so instead included a community childcare center.”  That’ll be a good day.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

The Reality of Reducing Neighborhood Speeds

Even if a neighborhood chooses to accept a lower speed limit, the realities of effecting that change can be daunting.

In earlier posts, I wrote that the joint use of public streets was reduced by the advent of the automobile and that some people are pushing back by proposing a maximum speed of 20 mph in all residential neighborhoods.  (Tying together my recent threads on streets and parks, I’ll note that park use would likely improve under a “Twenty is Plenty” policy.  Parents may be more willing to let children walk to a park if cars were well-behaved.)

Let’s assume for a moment that a neighborhood unites behind the “Twenty is Plenty” concept and wishes to reduce the speed limits on their streets.  How should they proceed to implement the change?  Most would probably assume that a petition to the city council would be the right first step.  They’d be wrong.

Cities have a surprisingly small role in setting speed limits.  Instead, rules written in Sacramento are used to set the speed limits, with only a small bit of local autonomy permitted.  And those rules mandate that the speed limits be established based on how fast we actually drive.

The process is simple and objective.  Vehicular speeds are collected by radar when speed limit signs aren’t present.  The speed limit is then set at the 85 percentile of measured speeds.

Most people are startled when they first learn this.  They’re shocked that speed limits are set by how fast we do drive, not how fast we should be driving.  But it’s indicative of how well the automobile lobby has played the public policy game.

To be fair, cities have a small bit of remaining authority.  A City Engineer can unilaterally reduce the speed limit if he believes that there are traffic hazards not visible to the driver.  But those reductions can be challenged in court by a driver who feels wronged, so City Engineers are cautious in their use.

Some may have spotted a possible loophole in the speed limit process.  They may be thinking, “What if we ask neighbors to drive slowly while the speed data is being collected?  The 85th percentile would be pushed downward and our neighborhood would be safer.”

The idea isn’t new.  I recently learned of a North Bay city that tried the trick.  City employees were recruited to slowly cruise through the speed check area.  At first, the plan worked.  A lower speed limit was established and the police began enforcing it rigorously, with speeding tickets being written.

But as happens with most conspiracies, someone blabbed.  The tale got back to the traffic court judge who was heartily displeased.  The collected traffic fines were returned, the speed limit was raised, and a round of hand slaps was administered.  

If we assume that Sacramento isn’t about to change how speed limits are set, what other options do we have?  We can build streets such that the comfort zone of driver is affected, with resulting lower speeds.

In recent years, we’ve already begun seeing some of these driver comfort zone modifications, which are collectively known as traffic calming strategies. 

Calming strategies are often categorized as horizontal or vertical.  Horizontal modifications can include street markings, such as center stripes or the City Repair intersection painting concepts that were discussed last fall.  Other concepts include narrower streets and center medians.  Even roundabouts can temper traffic speeds, unlike stop signs which sometimes result in dashes between intersections.

Vertical modifications can include speed bumps, speed humps, which are wider than speed bumps and allow higher speeds, and speed tables, which are wider yet and usually include crosswalks or other pedestrian accommodations.  The new East Washington Plaza in Petaluma makes extensive use of speed tables.

But there are two problems with traffic calming strategies.  First, they’re costly.  When cities don’t have the funds to fix potholes, street modifications to reduce speeds are likely out of fiscal reach.   Second, public safety agencies, fire, police, and ambulance, often push back.

This isn’t to criticize public safety agencies, but for too long they held too much influence over street geometry.  Streets were built with widths and turning radii such that emergency vehicles could respond as quickly as possible, the street geometry encouraged higher driving speeds thereby pushing up speed limits, and parents began keeping their children inside because of concerns over pedestrian safety.  In one of great ironies of urbanism and vocabulary, public safety became the enemy of public health.

In recent years, public safety agencies have been forced to negotiate emergency access versus pedestrian safety, although not always happily.  Within the past few days, a San Francisco Supervisor and the San Francisco Fire Chief had a public contretemps over street widths in new development.

The balancing act between public safety and public health will hopefully continue.  It’s another reminder of Jeff Speck’s observation that cities should be designed by generalists who can find reasonable balances between alternative goods, rather than by specialists who push only their own agenda.

Even if reducing traffic speeds in residential neighborhoods is a good idea, and I think it is, the path to making those changes won’t be easy.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Perceptions of Urban Risk

Five years ago today, I was in New York City.  I was in the midst of a ten-day trip to view ballgames in Major League ballparks that I hadn’t yet seen.

Before the trip was over, I would see games in Fenway Park, Shea Stadium, Citizens Bank Park, Camden Yards, Nationals Park, and Yankee Stadium.  (Fenway was my favorite, but my goodness are those seats tiny.  Also the Yankee Stadium that I saw in 2008 was the dumpy Yankee Stadium that had been rebuilt in the 1970s, not the Steinbrenner mausoleum that would soon replace it.)

On this particular night, I rode the subway from my hotel near Penn Central Station to Yankee Stadium.  As was true for most of the trip, I was traveling alone.  Upon arrival in the Bronx, I walked a quarter of the way counterclockwise around the stadium to reach my entrance gate.  But when I exited the ballpark after the game, I couldn’t backtrack my way to the subway.  The police had blocked off the route and were directing us to continue our counter-clockwise loop around the remainder of the stadium to return to the subway.

It seemed a long and unnecessary walk.  When most of the folks around me began moving away from stadium in a route that seemed likely to return to the subway station more efficiently, I walked with them.

But they were heading to parking lots.  As we walked, the group gradually dissipated.  In a couple of blocks, I found myself alone on a Bronx sidewalk at 11:00 pm, with an expensive camera around my neck and neither the stadium nor a subway station in sight.  It was uncomfortable.

I continued on a route that I thought would bring me back to the subway.  In a couple of blocks, I came across a young mother casually walking her twin infants in a double stroller.  Not only did her presence reassure me about the neighborhood, but she also gave me directions to a subway station that was only a block away.

Even with the successful completion of that mini-adventure, I was still unsure about the short walk to my hotel after my subway ride back to Manhattan.  Once again, my fears were unreasonable.  I found myself walking behind a pair of attractive young women, still wearing party dresses after an evening event.  And they were so comfortable in the setting, and so uncomfortable in their shoes, that they had removed their footwear and were walking barefoot down a Manhattan sidewalk at nearly midnight.

Did I feel silly about my fears?  Yeah, a bit.  But I’ve seen worse.

I attended a public hearing in a Northern California city a few years ago.  Ahead of my project on the agenda was a proposal to split a half-acre lot into two quarter-acre lots.

I knew the area of the proposed lot split slightly from having grown up nearby.  The subdivision had been developed shortly after World War II and was comprised of large lots in a semi-rural setting.  But with metropolitan growth, it was now surrounded by more dense development and had become an island of drivability surrounded by an area that was, if not walkable, at least transit-friendly with areas of walkability.

Allowing market forces to gradually increasing the density of the older project seemed reasonable.  Splitting a lot seemed a miniscule step in the right direction.

But some neighbors saw it differently.  To them, smaller lots would allow less expensive homes, which would allow lower-income homeowners, which would promote the distribution of drugs and which might even lead to meth labs.  Yeah, quarter-acres lots in quiet, upscale neighborhoods are a well-known gateway to meth labs.  And their particular concern was that buyers, having secured their fix, would speed through the neighborhood, endangering the nearby homeowners.

I’m sure only a few of the neighbors had taken a hit from the bong of paranoia.  As is usual in land-use hearings, most of the commenters were likely from the fringe, with the more reasonable people staying home to watch television.  The hearing body apparently felt the same, approving the proposed lot split with little discussion.

But the hearing comments, and my unease at finding myself in an unfamiliar Bronx neighborhood after dark, illustrate the irrational fears that can be attached to urban settings.

Indeed, that fear is often invoked by opponents to planning concepts that would increase density.  But is the fear justified?  Not really.  Yes, it’s true that homicide rates are often higher in areas of greater density.  But driving to the metropolitan fringe carries its own risks.

A comprehensive study by the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which looked at more than a million accidental deaths between 1999 and 2006, found that the rate of accidental deaths became greater as population densities decreased.  Perhaps the chance of getting killed in a drive-by shooting goes down in the suburbs, but the chance of being a motor vehicle fatality went up and there are far more vehicular deaths per year than homicides. 

This isn’t to say that all urban settings are safe.  If you choose to wander through a high-crime neighborhood at 3:00 am with a roll of hundred dollar bills hanging out of your pocket, don’t call me from the hospital claiming that I wrote that you’d be safe.  I did no such thing.  There is still a place for common sense.

But arguing that urbanism increases personal risk is a flawed argument.   Arguing against urbanism on the grounds of personal safety is fear-mongering that interferes with rational discussion.

Although the next time I visit Yankee Stadium, I will probably follow police direction.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)