One of the issues is that LADOT sends just a small amount of their staff to trainings on pedestrian and bicycle issues. Many of these trainings are local and are free to LADOT staff. We just had two Federal Highway Administration trainings in the last month, in Santa Monica and Long Beach, free of charge and the LADOT representation was woefully inadequate.

If anything, many of these documents are online:

http://www.tfhrc.gov/safety/pedbike/pubs/05085/index.htm

It is extremely easy for people to access this information.

I just attended the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike Conference in Seattle, which is a national conference for transportation professionals to learn about the latest in bicycle and pedestrian planning and engineering, and there were only a few people from the Los Angeles area.

It’s time that our public officials learn what the latest technology and treatments are, and use them to make our city a safer place for bicycles and pedestrians.

“(1)most people know what the safe speed of travel is for the road they are on, (2) it is not so much SPEED that kills, but VARIATION in speed — the more uniformity of speed of travel on a road, the better, and (3) most people will drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted speed limit, and no feasible amount of enforcement will change this.”

If we accept this as true, and we find that the vast majority of people are exceeding the posted speed limit on a given stretch of roadway, then we have two choices: raise the speed limit or change the nature of the street in such a way that 85% of the people perceive the safe speed to be the posted speed limit, i.e. traffic calming. I will grant that traffic calming is not appropriate for interstate highways and urban freeways if Tom will grant that raising the speed limit is not appropriate on residential side streets where 9-year-olds are often found riding bicycles (which he does).

The question then becomes what to do with the middle ground: arterials, major streets, etc. It happens to be my opinion that we have generally erred in favor of facilitating increased speeds on surface streets as against the quality of life for people who live, work, shop, maintain businesses, commune with neighbors, exercise, etc. on these streets, as well as bicyclists and pedestrians. In other words, the street functions both as a place in and of itself, as well as a means of travel between places, and we have to consider both functions in deciding how it should be designed.

The problem with the current approach is that we are allowing one particular issue — LAPD’s ability to do radar enforcement — to trump all other considerations of how we might find the appropriate balance between the two functions alluded to above, and we have no process that would provide a mechanism to let the community have a voice in making that decision.

There is a huge amount of research, going back decades (for example, try the Institute of Transportation Engineers web site) that shows that, in most situations, the way to set the speed limits is to do a study of the speeds that drivers are traveling and set the speed limit at the 85th percentile “free flow” speed — that is, the speed that people are traveling without restrictions. The concept is extremely difficult for many people to accept, but it is based on: (1)most people know what the safe speed of travel is for the road they are on, (2) it is not so much SPEED that kills, but VARIATION in speed — the more uniformity of speed of travel on a road, the better, and (3) most people will drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted speed limit, and no feasible amount of enforcement will change this. In fact, when freeway speed limits were raised after the repeal of the Congressional mandates for 55 mph, fatalities dropped. (When the speed limits were lowered to 55 mph after the 1973 gas shortage, there WAS a drop in highway fatalities that was widely heralded — and still in, in some quarters — but the definative analyses done by the late Charles Lave of UC-Irvine and others showed that the fatality reduction was caused by the high price of gas and shortage of supply, which led to a decrease in vehicle miles traveled, and it was the VMT reduction that produced the fatality downturn.)

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule, and “UBRAYJ2″ lists the most prominent. However, these exceptions need to be studied and applied in a non-biased manner by experienced professionals applying their experience and judgement, NOT as universal ways to declare a need for lower speed limits because “we KNOW it isn’t safe to drive faster than this number.” If there is an attempt to apply these exceptions in an inappropriate manner, the result will be speed limits that are improperly set too low — and, therefore, at less than optimum safety.

For example, on I-5 between the Bay Area and Los Angeles in the Central Valley, where the speed limit is posted at 70 mph, the drivers who are doing 80 mph (which is BELOW the 85th percentile speed), ten mph over the posted speed limit, are far less likely to cause or be in a collision than those doing 60 mph, ten mph under.

One of the problems with setting speed limits too low is that people learn very quickly that speed limits are not properly set and, therefore, there is no safety reason to pay attention to them. As a result, many American motorists tend to ignore ALL speed limit and many other safety signs on the road. By pertending that the speed limit must be set lower for public safety, what we have done instead is to teach our drivers to ignore ALL safety warnings as unrealistic. This can pose major problems when, for example, someone who is used to seeing speed limits on highway turns that are set 10-15 mph under the actual safe speed goes to a state that sets such limits AT the actual safe speed.

“Traffic calming” — aka, “driver enraging” — is a mixed bag of things, but there really isn’t a lot that makes it appear that there is any improvement in traffic safety in many applications. In fact, there is considerable question if there is a net improvement in overall public health at all, as the extra time required for emergy vehicles to transition through speed bumps and the like can have great negatives, particularly — but not only — for parametics responding to emergencies like heart attacks, where a minute lost can easily mean a life lost. (That said, if I was the father of an nine-year old riding a bike on a residential street used as a short-cut by people barreling through narrow streets with cars parked on both sides at 45 mph, well, you know, I think I just might want SOMEBODY to do SOMETHING.)

I am most certainly not saying that all roads should be treated like the Daytona speedway; clearly, this is not acceptable. In an ideal situation, there will be sufficient capacity on freeways and arterials to allow the vast majority of longer trips to take place there at safe, relatively high, speeds — and for local streets, particularly residential ones, to be designed for only short trips by people who have business in the area and are not passing through. Obviously, for large parts of our urban areas and street grid, we are way past the chance of this happening.

What we DO need to do now is to recognize the real-world dynamics of what is going on and to recognize that trying to mandate unrealistically low speed limits is extremely counterproductive; we need to design urban areas, including roads, with an understanding of how the world really works, and try to change the urban environment to conform to human behavior — because trying to do the reverse just doesn’t work out very well.

The MUTCD states the following:

When qualifying an appropriate speed limit, local authorities may also consider all of the following findings:
Residential density, if any of the following conditions exist on the particular portion of highway and the property contiguous thereto, other than a business district:
a. Upon one side of the highway, within 0.4 km (0.25 mi), the contiguous property fronting thereon is occupied by 13 or more separate dwelling houses or business structures.
b. Upon both sides of the highway, collectively, within a distance of 0.4 km (0.25 mi) the contiguous property fronting thereon is occupied by 16 or more separate dwelling houses or business structures.
c. The portion of highway is larger than 0.4 km (0.25 mi) but has the ratio of separate dwelling houses or business structures to the length of the highway described in either subparagraph a or b.
2. Pedestrian and bicyclist safety.