Not everyone at the conference got the memo that it wasn't about encouraging speed. Photo: Michael Cahn

The Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) is like a daughter of Caltrans. The mothership builds the roads, then Traffic Safety comes on the scene, addressing the safety deficits with education and enforcement efforts. The OTS conference, scheduled every other year, is a forum which unites local government, safety advocates, and a whole lot of police officers. MADD, Mothers against Drunk Driving, set the tone. The 2011 Leadership Seminar was held last week in San Diego. The agency offers a number of scholarships covering tuition, travel and accommodation. I attended the Bicycle and Pedestrian track, other tracks covered DUI, drug impairment, collision investigation, engineering and leadership.

The good news is that California fatality rates are low, the lowest since 1949. The bad news is that pedestrians and cyclists are greatly over-represented in these crashes. Simply put: Speed and distracted driving kills.

In California we call it Complete Streets, on the federal level it is called Sustainable Communities (DOT, FHWA, HUD, EPA), the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health have PLACE and RENEW programs: They all describe broad policy goals that have grown together over the last few years. Together they offer a new framework to work for more transportation choices, improved air quality and public health. Traditionally, traffic safety tries to compensate for the defects of an infrastructure that is designed for unsafe speeds. Historically, OTS moves into action after the roads are built and drivers have yielded to the temptations of overbuilt infrastructure and high performance machinery. Attempting to move away from this position of the latecomer, OTS is now spending time on educating planners on street designs where safety standards for vulnerable users are not an afterthought, but included from the outset. The attempt to educate engineers and advocates on new engineering standards for streets that serve all users is part of a broad wave of new handbooks and guidelines such as Smart Mobility Framework, Complete Streets Manual, Model Streets Manual etc. They all try to encroach upon the hegemony of Caltrans Highway Design Manual, which is no longer considered sufficient in accommodating non-motorized road users.

Of course, many obstacles to the implementation of such policies can not be overcome with design handbooks. To ease the way of these grand policies into local reality on the ground, events like this OTS training seminar serve to share best practice with local agencies, and to equip transportation advocates with the tools that allow them to make their case locally. Yes, the advocacy community has a firm place in the delivery of these broad policies. You may think you just wanted your kids to get to school safely on a bike, but before you realize it, you have become a important piece in this complex puzzle of ending the national dependency of  fossil fuels.

How?

If this seminar is anything to go by, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping will become an important avenue to include community based groups in this larger policy shift. The geography of social inequities, the digital analysis of environmental injustice is the tool of choice. Geographical Information Systems and community organizing are coming together to form a powerful brew: For instance, healthycity.org displays a wide variety of social indicators. Likewise, the Transportation Injury Mapping System tims.berkeley.edu is set to become a remarkable tool for crash analysis displaying and selecting road collisions in a compelling manner that can inform and guide planners and elected officials towards the enlightened choices we need. Through these tool the memory and the structure of traffic injuries and fatalities translates into prime political capital. Some bicycle advocates have known this all along: Witness the series of highly publicized bike fatalities in New York City which eventually paved the way for Sadik-Khan. But other advocates are reluctant to exploit this gruesome capital – during my tenure on the board of the LACBC I encountered this resistance: Many organizations do not see the benefit of dwelling on “roadkill” and prefer to look away. It is not about a morbid fascination with fatalities: it is about utilizing them properly to advance improvements and changes in culture.

At least for the OTS there is no “looking the other way” when a fatality occurs. We were treated to elaborate marketing tool called Communication for Pedestrian Safety. Funded by CA Public Health, NHTSA et al, it offers a timely reminder, and an elaborate tool, for advocates to be ready for the press when the next fatality occurs on our roads. Who would want to waste a valuable advocacy and education opportunity? With the right preparation you can direct the attention of the media onto the factors which contributed to this crash, especially those which can be addressed with enforcement or changes to the street design. This can transform a tragedy into the natural stepping stone towards a better and safer transportation system.

Design Guides, mapping tools, crash marketing. The fourth leg of the OTS stool is the police.

Removing the bias of California car culture from the mental system of law enforcement is not going to be easy. It has been said that it takes 20 hours to change the mind of a police officer. Those who represent the law on our streets are right by default, making it difficult to address the latent prejudice against non-motorized transportation from the equation. The conversation between safety advocates and police officers is not simple. We often speak different languages. Yet we urgently need to have this conversation. Police forces can benefit from the collaboration with community based organizations because they can carry the message much further. At the same time, pedestrians and cyclists are desperate for better enforcement of distracted or impaired driving. A local example where this collaboration was successful occurred in San Diego where the SDPD launched an effective campaign together with community groups in the wake of series of fatalities involving young children.

Perhaps future installments of the OTS seminar could specifically and expressly invite engineering and enforcement staff from those cities which lead the annual OTS statistics of bike and ped crashes, and tailor the remedial training to the statistically determined deficits in those high ranking cities. Some car-centric police departments still perceive the dangers of “traffic” as a natural force against which they are powerless. Not only do they become deaf to the safety concerns of the community, they also become immune to the improvements this training can yield for their city.

Traffic safety is really simple: Speed and distraction kills. Look again, and it is really complex, requiring dialogue between agencies which speak different languages, have different skills, come from different planets, all competing for the same piece of real estate, the street.  The OTS does a sterling job trying to facilitate these conversations and collaborations. The methodical background for this is the Strategic Highway Safety Plan which includes an ongoing process of identifying challenge areas (16 so far) and develops strategies to address them. But then step back for the bigger picture: “The risk of being injured or killed in a traffic crash is disproportionately high for members of certain groups as defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and cultural practices.”(OTS) Acknowledged or not, such findings put transportation advocacy firmly in the context of social equity issues: It is poverty which kills.

Dr. Michael Cahn is the Secretary of Sustainable Streets (www.sustainablestreetsla.org)

Getting more people to walk and bike was a major theme of the conference.
Photo:San Diego Personal Injury Attorney

The foundation has a rigorous program which supports quantitative research to inform public policies that can foster healthy communities. Remember: In this country 40 billion dollars are spent on food promotion each year. Combine this with low energy prices which hide the true cost of motoring and transportation, add the agricultural subsidies which unleash rivers of sticky corn syrup and cheap meat onto an unsuspecting population, and hoopla, we have an obesity epidemic. For the first time in history, the current generation of children will have a lower life expectancy than the generation of their parents. Strong stuff. The system is broken, they say. The energy balance gone awry, can the bicycle set it right? Can pedestrianism come to the rescue when 8-18 year-olds spend an average of 7.5 hours per day in front of electronic devices.

A monumental task against well entrenched structures, staged as a painful contradiction between the concern for communities without access to healthy lifestyles, and the plush chandelier surroundings of US Grant, A Luxury Collections Hotel in San Diego. During three days of Active Living Conference, this contradiction never quite went away, because amid all the concern for measurement, verification, community participation, reaching the sedentary population (80% of the total), making research relevant for policy, nobody ever went on the stage to say: The system is broken. The whole damn system is broken, and we are here trying to fix it by addressing the symptoms. Of course, addressing symptoms is better then not addressing symptoms.

Based on the success of tobacco control, the public health community now zeros in on the obesity epidemic, with support from Michelle Obama, who has just launched Letsmove.gov, a campaign to raise a healthier generation of kids. The name "Let's Move" highlights how public health advocates are looking towards transportation (and land use) for a solution. Indeed, the two political silos of transportation and public health have slowly started to connect. The relationship between health and transportation will be the site for many interesting developments in the future, and it is precisely in this area that the bicycle rides. Public Health departments are funding bicycle coordinators (PLACE Grants), and we are now waiting for a department of transportation to acknowledge that their policies have significant health impacts.

The return on investment for complete streets, the health impacts of congestion pricing, Safe Routes to School and diabetes, these are some of the areas which the National Institute of Health, the Center of Disease Control and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are ready to fund now. They want to study the impact of bicycle boulevards on property values, dog walking among youth, engaging park directors, physical education and justice, etc. These are prime research opportunities for non-motorized transportation, and a partnership of advocacy and academic expertise must be a winning combination in this context: They call it natural experiments, or community based participatory research.

Throughout the three day conference, a robust optimism was displayed that scientific research will improve our lives. The poster sessions were prime exhibitions of scientific verbiage. This scientific spirit may be the founding myth of the public health profession and its trust in the statistical bedrock. Some punters may just want to cut right through the words and numbers and assert simply: The price of gas is to low. But this simple truth is not scientific enough to inform policy changes. To do that, it requires numbers, percentages, and statistics.

For those who want to advance policies that encourage cycling, the greatest issue is how to calculate the benefit of each mile driven on the bicycle. Its health benefit, the monetary saving, the environmental benefit, and even the social benefit neatly expressed in dollar and cent. That is the Eldorado of non-motorized research and advocacy, and the foundations know that too. The Victoria Transport Institute has done some work in the area, at the conference Thomas Goetschi (Rails to Trails, now University of Zurich) presented an interesting paper on the Cost-effectiveness of Bicycle Infrastructure - The Example of Portland. More work is needed here, including GIS technologies and mobile phone applications, to gather the much needed data.

6 P.M. After a long day of numbers and data and valuable advice how to speak with elected officials, I ride up the endless hill with is Third Street in San Diego on my way to University Heights. Halfway up, a pedestrian who just parked his car spots me and dispenses his blessing as I ride by: "Good for you to be cycling to work" he shouts. His spontaneous display of support and encouragement (and envy?) shows that the tide is indeed turning.

This incident also reminds us that changing cultural values are hard to express in those statistical formulas the public health profession loves so much. A better qualitative understanding of the "transportation personalities" that we construct for our appearance on the street by choosing (and registering) year, model, color of our car, and by selecting our mode of transportation, is essential to overcome the cultural and psychological barriers to active living choices.

Next year, again in San Diego, the theme will be "Evaluating Youth Advocacy." To make this occasion even more valuable, the foundation may want to consider a scholarship-program to support attendance by advocacy groups.

Photo: Duncan Rawlinson via The Last Minute Blog

(editor's note: Dr. Michael Cahn is a lecturer in book history at UCLA. There is also someone with the same name affiliated with some bike group in town, but that is another chapter.  This story has received very light editing on my part and is re-printed with no change in content to give you an honest feel for the author's view.  Streetsblog remains excited about the changes occurring in Long Beach and cautiously optimistic about the value of bike-sharing programs in L.A.'s future.)

In 2001, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition released A Blueprint for a Bike-Friendly Los Angeles County. One specific demand outlined in this document was for Metro (MTA) to fund Bike Education and Promotion projects at five million dollars per Call For Projects (CFP) cycle. CFP is a competitive process through which METRO awards money for Transport Demand Management projects to cities and other agencies in the county.

The bicycle coalition realized ten years ago that the bicycle needs a firm place in the Transportation Demand Management (TDM) process which aims at reducing the number of Single Occupancy Vehicles on the road. Metro apparently saw this differently, and in the last few years, the Call for Projects process, despite some inspiring presentations by Todd Litman and Michael Woo, remains an arcane and bureaucratic process, from which the bicycle programs has been effectively excluded. The money is awarded only to a cities, and other agencies or non-profits are not admitted to the process. As it happens, this process puts bicycle work at a most serious disadvantage.

With the new SB 375 (editor's note: for more Streetsblog's coverage of SB 375 click here, here or here.) regulations around the corner, new expectations are being created that the elite of TDM experts can somehow reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions by a mighty 40% per a presentation by Metro's Michael Turner. But as long as the CFP process remains the same, the results are likely to remain the same, - small, little steps that actually get more people into one car; while Metro's Robin Blair sitting at the helm and encouraging us to be innovative, and start something new. I have seen him in this mode for two years now, and I am not happy with it. If you do not change the process, you will not change the results.

Which brings us to this year's Multi-Mobility Forum, a Metro-sponsored, invitation-only, event billed as a chance to work together in an effort to develop and implement effective multi-mobility strategies  in Los Angeles County. Calstart's Fred Silver delivered a compendium of Sustainable Community Transportation Strategies, in which the plain vanilla encouragement of cycling is suspiciously absent. We read about Ciclovia as a TDM strategy, and the old red herring called bike sharing.  Yeah, people don't bike because someone has forgotten to put in a bike sharing program? Exactly!

His list of 10 options flexible and easily inflateable and on one of his slides he brags about "20 to 30" options available. I don't care how the numbers go up, but if you don't fund simple bicycle encouragement programs, driven by cyclists, using cyclists, rewarding cyclists, then you are swimming with one arm only. Feels like drowning in cars?

William McCarthy from the School of Public Health has his affiliation misspelled on the program, but delivers a powerful reminder of the limited agenda of those TDM experts who work the transformation of Single Occupancy Vehicles to High Occupancy Vehicles and forget the body. He reminds us of the solid health benefits of the non-car friendly city. This public health expert is still stunned by the success of the anti-smoking movement, which became unstoppable when it focused on passive smoking. He exhorts the audience to lead the TDM work into a similar area: Stop focusing on the "sacrifice" of the driver, and start talking about damage created by car, and how to protect the whole community from it.

Then follow a few presentations by recipients of last years program. Jane Choi speaks for City of LA and Jay Kim for LADOT, both offering a compelling proof of how broken the Call For Projects process is. Both projects pretend to be studies of some kind, but not exactly by academic standards. Some strange and costly exercises which raise many questions and pretend to be useful for someone. Oh dear. Oh dear. I probably failed to get the point, but to me these "studies" seemed a sheer and utter waste of money. Painful, very painful, if you ever wondered how much it would cost you to get one friendly cyclist to convince and assist his colleague to try the bike on the way to work. Sterling work, just get it done, and don't waste my time with more studies which wait in vain in some drawers. Sitting in the 15^th floor, looking down on the broken landscape of what could be Los Angeles, tears come to my eyes as I see Jay Kim burning precious MTA dollars, compiling a list of difficult questions, instead of engaging cycling commuters, rewarding them for the encouragement work they all would love to do.

Then comes the City of Long Beach, dancing around some assumed and probably fraudulent attributes involving words like "most" and "bikefriendly". No doubt good things are happening there. But is this TDM money that is spent on encouraging cyclists? I am not sure. This matters, because we are here not to hear about sustainable transportation successes in Santa Monica (LUCE) or Santa Clarita, we are here to learn how Metro CFP will deal with the bicycle in the future. Or will they continue the habitual and all-Californian injustice of discounting the bicycle option right from the start. Injustice it is, and sheer stupidity, or something else I do not understand. Perhaps it is politics.

A strange and pathetic spectacle: Metro seems to encourage the multi-mobility audience to offer new programs, raise new options, but always knowing in advance what to do with the bicycle: Nothing. 30% of all trips are less than 5 miles, but METRO CFP somehow cannot support bicycle encouragement programs. A scandal for which I have not words. The drama is all in the person of Robin Blair, who presides over these proceedings as clown, sage and questioner, with a small band of ill trained soldiers. Has he invited us to teach us, to get our input, to feel the pulse of the time, to have a dialog with his own preconceptions? Has he invited us to remind us of the challenges of SB 375, so that we remind him of the exclusion of the unjust bicycle? Questions, questions.

How to improve the process? I'd say start with formalities and procedure. Make the invitation process public and put aside the old boys network of "you have been selected to participate." Inviting a distinguished speaker (McCarthy) two days before the event is striking proof how little importance Metro invests in serious TDM work. Circulate the program in advance of the event. Put it on the internet. Answer emails. This is good practice, but apparently very difficult at Transit Plaza. Even the speakers were left in the dark about the program and their time slot. This lacks respect and betrays the fatal arrogance of an institution which has grown too powerful. Be clear about what Calstart is doing in this process, and what their role is. Why is their logo on the program? Be clear about the nature of the event: Was that the "task force committee to develop the structure and objectives" for which an invitation was sent out in May 2009, and for which a meeting date was never divulged to the bicycle advocate who expressed an interest. Have we missed something?