A Shared Path is not Enough
I want to share a story of a recent bike commute to illustrate some of the systemic failures of transportation planning efforts in the City of Burlington. To guard against objections, I'll say up front that this article is making a case against poorly designed infrastructure, and not complaining about bad individual behavior. Human beings can be distracted and impatient, and our infrastructure should be able to safely move distracted and impatient people. We should not expect humans to be perfectly focused and patient in order to avoid serious injury or harm while moving through our city.
An Unpleasant Commute
Yesterday evening, I was riding my bike home from Generator in the south end to where I live at the edge of Downtown. It was dusk, which meant that visibility was declining and that headlights and streetlamps were not yet very effective. The shared use path along the Champlain Parkway and Pine Street is the most straight-forward way for me to get home, and has become the primary way I get back and forth to the "South End Innovation District" area of the city. And so I found myself making the roughly 1-mile, 5-minute journey home on this brand new separated path at dusk, during rush hour on a weeknight.
Unproductive Intersections
The first issue is the intersection between the Parkway and Lakeside. This is an extremely complicated intersection that sprawls over 200ft long, with six signals, and a still unknown-to-me number of signal cycles. Most times of the day when I'm crossing there, there's not a car to be seen in any direction and so I cross without waiting for a signal—it is humiliating to wait 90 seconds for a light to tell me I can cross the street when there's not a soul in earshot. But at rush hour there are just enough cars to make that infeasible, so I sat and waited my turn.
The most striking thing about this intersection is that, despite all of its complexities and the way its design screams "I'm the peak of modern traffic engineering excellence", it is characterized by stillness. Because of the number of separate signal cycles and conflicting traffic merges, this intersection facilitiates waiting (generally for at least 60 to 90 seconds) more than it facilitates movement. In the context of my trip, I spent about a minute and a half—or about 30% of my total commute—waiting for the walk sign to let me cross, while watching a dozen or so cars mostly sit in stillness. This intersection should have been a roundabout.
Conflict with Drivers
After continuing on my way up the Pine Street portion of the path, it didn't take long before I ran into another problem. As I was approaching the driveway entrance to the BED parking lot, there was a motorist trying to make a left turn into that driveway. As a cyclist, I have to be very situationally aware and noticed not only the driver but also that there was plenty of oncoming traffic that would prevent their left turn.
However, the driver saw a narrow gap in traffic and chose to floor it into the left turn so that they didn't have to wait any longer for a safer gap—just as I was crossing the driveway. While unexpected, I still had my eye on the car as a threat, and swerved out of the way as they slamed on the brakes once they saw me. A crash had been facilitiated by the infrastructure design, but was avoided by my vigilance and a bit of luck.
Conflict with Pedestrians
Another quarter-mile up the path, across from the Dealer building, I could make out some figures ahead of me. Dusk was really settling in now, and visibility was low and unaided by street lamps. There seemed to be some people off to the left of the path, and what looked like a dog on the green strip to the right. I began to slow down a bit as I processed the situation, but as I approached I also saw there was another cyclist approaching from the oncoming direction. I suddenly had to add a third component to the interaction in my mind and slowed down further, though I was getting quite close to the conflict point now.
I rang my bell as I got closer, and was then able to make out the entire situation within the last 50 feet or so. Two people were in conversation off the path to the left while both looking at something on a smartphone, while one of the two people was holding a leash that was attached to the dog on the other side of the path... meaning the leash was "clotheslining" across the entire path. The leash was a dark blue, which made it nearly invisible in the lighting until the last second. Both I and the other approaching cyclist reached this conflict point at about the same time, and had rang our bells, and seen the leash at the last moment and managed to come to a stop. As we stopped, the person holding the leash looked up and noticed the situation, and moved the dog and leash out of the path. But once again the infrastructure had facilitated a crash, and vigilance is what prevented it.
Infrastructure is to Blame
Again, this story played out over a five minute commute that covered less than a mile. There was wasted time to everyone at an over-designed intersection, risk of injury to a cyclist (me) by a vehicle, and risk of injury to a pedestrian and a dog by a cyclist (also me).
To make it crystal clear: I'm not upset at the driver who almost hit me—even though a risky and fast left turn across a bike/ped path is not exemplary behavior—and I'm not upset at the people who were involved with the dog leash hazard. What upsets me is that on a long-planned, expensive, disruptive, and brand new infrastructure project, we built something that facilitiated all of these conflicts and unneccesarily created the surface area for harm. None of these annoying or risky interactions needed to happen, and all of them could have been mitigated at the design stage of the road.
There are two fundamental failures that created this situation:
Shared Use Paths are not Enough
Shared paths have become a panacea for traffic planners to say that they "did a good job" for pedestrians and cyclists. But just like cars and bikes don't mix, bikes and pedestrians don't mix. They are different modes that travel at different speeds and that have different expectations.
Pedestrians should be allowed to bump into a friend while walking their dog, and show them some pictures from their recent vacation. A passing pedestrian walking 3 MPH isn't going to have an issue with the dog leash, because that is an obstacle that can be dealt with easily at a pedestrian scale. Similarly, cyclists should be given well lit paths with a low probability of obstacles that can't be dealt with at 10-20 MPH.
Active Transportation "Transitions" are an Afterthought
Imagine if two roads intersected without any signage, signals, or striping. Just two roads that intersect, and expect drivers to "figure it out". Imagine if a road just ended at a destination; no place to park, turn around, or drop off passengers, just a sudden end. In many cases, this is how the "transitions" for active transportation facilities are designed. There is very rarely any real thought given to how people walking or biking will get onto or off of the "travel" infrastructure, or how the conflict zones (i.e. where different modes intersect) will be transitioned safely.
In my story, both the Parkway/Lakeside intersection and the left-turn driveway conflict were consequences of traffic engineering processes that just genuinely didn't consider 1) how to handle these conflicts, because 2) they probably don't consider them at all. When we throw all of the non-car movement into a combined overflow gutter and just say "they'll figure it out", we create hostile infrastruture that facilitates conflict, which increases the odds of injury.
What are the solutions?
Again, infrastructure is the problem, and so we need to change the way we design and build our transportation infrastructure. A major component of this is that we are not taking the infrastructure design process seriously, though that could be an entirely seperate article. We need to be designing transportation corridors that are fully multi-modal by design from the beginning, not high-speed/high-convenience roads for cars with other uses bolted on afterwards.
Separated Infrastructure
The key infrastructure point I want to continue hammer on in this article is that shared use paths are not enough. They only serve to shift car-bike confilct to be bike-pedestrian conflict, and in some cases still maintain the threat of cars to both pedestrians and cyclists when conflict zones are not designed well.
Cycling is a different class of movement than walking, and requires separated infrastructure systems. Shared use paths are only useful in recreational capacities where they can be very wide (~15 feet or more), and they are not viable urban transportation infrastructure. Cyclists deserve to get around safely without obstruction, and pedestrians deserve to not share space with vehicles that can be moving at almost 20 MPH. Shared paths facilitate conflict and rely on human vigilance for safety, instead of reducing conflict by design.
If a project is pitching a shared use path as a high-quality option for those outside of cars, this is a sign that they don't actually know what they're talking about (for example: the Winooski Bridge redesign underway).
Institutional Shifts
To sustain these changes in the long term, however, we need to internalize the fact that traffic planning as a discipline is not equipped to solve—nor, based on its actions, is it interested in solving—these problems in North America. The education programs, regulatory bodies, design manuals, and institutional culture among its practitioners are all fundamentally geared towards increasing the speed and throughput of car traffic on our roads. Even while Burlington has a target to reduce "drive-alone" mode share by 15% from 2017 levels and the goal of eliminating GHG emissions from ground transportation by 2030, transportation planning is primarily concerned with getting more cars on the road, and get them moving faster.
It's worth pointing out: this brand new Champlain Parkway corridor and its bottleneck intersections and dangerous shared use path are designed to the specifactions of modern traffic engineering guidelines. The spec is the problem, and transportation planners designed and signed off on this road—we can't defer to the experts that are creating the harm.
In order to create transportation systems that are actually safe and convenient for all, and especially to transition away from car-dependence and towards sustainable and human scale movement, we'll have to look to other cities and countries that are succeeding in these efforts. Other US cities are not alone in this effort: the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) is a coalition of US (and Canadian) cities that are trying to blaze their own path on new urban mobility guidelines that more quickly move past the archaic systems that are mandated by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) guidelines.
For more tangible starting points to this long term outcome, Burlington should consider joining the NACTO coalition, DPW should require all staff traffic planners and engineers to read NACTO's upcoming 2025 Urban Bikeway Design Guide when it releases in January, and the city should require all consultants on Burlington-based projects do the same.
And this is just a starting point: even many of NACTO's recommendations are tame compared to what cities in other countries are succeeding in implementing. As a small city with a limited budget, Burlington needs to be thinking even more creatively about how to reach our ambitious and necessary transportation goals—even if it means stepping outside of our car-dependent comfort zone.