When the MOA and design firm CRW presented the proposed design for Strawberry Road at the Kincaid Chalet Open House in August, 2002 a number of concerns were raised about what was perceived as the dramatic over-design of the project. A committee was assigned to address these concerns with the Municipality of Anchorage.

The Strawberry Road Committee is a subcommittee of the Sand Lake Community Council. After a review of the original Design Study Review for the Strawberry Road Improvement Project and at the suggestion of Mayor George Wuerch, the committee randomly surveyed 437 residents in neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed project.

The results of the poll were as follows:

●3% of individuals liked the project as designed by CRW/MOA

●5% of individuals didn’t want any project at all

●92% of persons wanted the project modified to accommodate the following concerns:

Safety

Preservation of trees and country lane atmosphere

Pedestrian amenities

The Asphalt Rebellion

With the Mayor’s support the committee was able to engage CRW and PM&E in a discussion of the above issues and outlined a set of suggested criteria which would enable a design to meet both current engineering standards and the community’s three benchmarks:

1. SAFETY: the committee recommended a design of no more than 27’ back of curb to back of curb. Further research indicates that shrinking the lane width to 10’ and back of curb to back of curb distance to 24’ might be advisable.

2. LANDSCAPING (trees): the committee recommended a design which would preserve a 10’ landscaped or treed buffer between improvements and property lines.

3. PEDESTRIAN AMENITIES (including safe street crossings): The Committee recommends two possible designs, one with a sidewalk on the south side of the street and a multiuse path on the north and a second with only a multiuse path. (While the SLCC had voted twice to eliminate the sidewalk, it was in the context of preserving space for landscaping. By scaling down the road footprint the committee feels it is worth exploring the option of putting the sidewalk back into the plan.)

When the above alternatives were deemed not acceptable by MOA and CRW, we found ourselves in a situation similar to that described as “The Asphalt Rebellion” in a 1997 article in the professional journal Governing. The rebellion is against the proclivity of state and local road and highway planners to observe religiously the guidelines published in AASHTO’s design guide “A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, more commonly referred to as “The Green Book”. Not only do they adhere to those tend to treat these guidelines as standards, but they tend to the extreme end of published ranges.

Since 1997 there has been a significant change in both the laws and the professional standards surrounding street and highway design. ISTEA passed giving much greater flexibility in design where federal funding was used, the FHWA endorsed the concept of “Context Sensitive Design” and ITE published its own standard based on Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) concepts and entitled “Flexibility in Highway Design”.

Criticism of the Green Book is not centered on its technical accuracy. “When it (The Green Book) proclaims that a given road needs to be 30 feet wide to accommodate cars traveling at 60 miles an hour, it knows what it is talking about.” What has not been considered is the logical corollary to that statement: cars will tend to go 60 miles and hour on a 30’ wide street.

When studies were focused only on the safety of the automobile driver, wider and faster is better became an engineering canon and it was appropriate to building the interstate highway system. But by designing for the safety of the fastest drivers on the road one critic (a former state DOT commissioner) said that the Green Book “assume(s) that everyone on the road is a drunk speeding along without a seatbelt.”

New studies now challenge the basis for many standards when they are applied to neighborhood and neighborhood collector streets. Statistics from studies such as Peter Swift’s (included in the body of this report) which correlate accidents with multiple design features have identified street width as the largest factor in accidents. In a survey of over 20,000 accidents on local Longmont, CO neighborhood streets Swift found, somewhat counter-intuitively for those immersed in the Green Book, that narrower streets are safer than wider streets. The clear findings from his study was that the safest streets were 24’ wide and the least safe were 36’ wide. Wider streets encourage higher speeds. There is a severe penalty for this in the context of neighborhoods: increased pedestrian fatalities. The death rate in pedestrian/auto accidents is only 3.5% with cars traveling at 15 mph, 37% at 31 mph and 83% at 44 mph. Stopping distance increases by a factor of three between 20 mph (107 feet) and 40 mph (313 feet).

There is a veritable litany of opposition in professional engineering organizations against the wider and faster is better school of design.

"My personal observation is that wider lanes encourage excessive speeds and lazing driving, which can then result in larger vehicles (RVs in particular) coming over the centerline anyway when they cannot brake and slow sufficiently before a curve. [Widening will make] the road into what sportbike riders call 'long, fast sweepers.' " --Harrison Marshall, state DOT transportation planner, North Carolina.

And from “RURAL ROADS DESIGN STANDARDS ADVISORY COMMITTEE REPORT--"ROAD WORK", Clallam County, Washington, 16 pp.” "We believe the best way to decrease speeds and the detrimental effects of traffic is to retain the existing features of rural roads that tend to slow traffic speeds. These features, including narrow traffic lanes and curves, are the same features that give our rural roads their charm and rural character.

"Today's roads are designed for the 'operational efficiency (speed), comfort, safety, and convenience' of the worst driver, speeding in the largest vehicle, in the worst traffic 20 years from now." This report recommends support for Vermont State Design Standards used in road construction and reconstruction in rural areas. The report was generated in Washington State but these issues seem to be the same the world over. The report comes with a bibliography. This report is available in pdf format [ROAD report.2.pdf] from Bill Hennessey, M.D., chair of the Clallam County Washington advisory committee. Related website: http://www.saferuralroads.com”.

From the Federal Highway Administration research:

"INTERNATIONAL SCANNING TOUR on Highway Geometric Design Summary Report" A report of the multi-nation European concept of the "self-explaining, self-enforcing road". Their engineers believe that narrow, winding, scenic roads have better multi-modal safety because of lower speeds. Excerpt: "A roadway design philosophy common in all countries was the reliance on the physical roadway design to 'enforce' operating speeds and the development of a 'consistent' or 'self-explaining' look for each road category." Posted on the Federal Highway Administration site: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/progadmin/30dscan.htm.

Matrix of Design Element Conflicts

Neighborhood Requirements	CRW/PM&E Solutions	Committee Suggestions
Safety: Neighborhood wants narrower lanes, traffic calming and self enforcing design based on the desired 30mph speed limit.	Safety: Oriented to vehicles & drivers: Lane width is that which is suitable to 60 mph, Wide open ROW encourages faster speed Detracts from property values	Adoption of Context Sensitive standards similar to Vermont DOT or the proposed changes to the Delaware DOT standards. Narrow (10 or 11’) traffic lanes for neighborhood collector streets
Neighborhood Atmosphere Trees: Landscaping, trees and pedestrian amenities improve property values, mitigate environmental issues of noise and air pollution and reinforce the posted and design speed goals.	CRW/PM&E Design will remove almost all trees and does not leave enough unpaved area in the 60’ ROW segment to put any landscaping back into their design. Detracts from property values	Adoption of lane width appropriate to 30 mph speed limit and removal of shoulders will permit a balanced, safe design, enhance property values, reduce negative environmental impacts and provide adequate landscape buffers.
Pedestrian Facilities: Desires sidewalk and multiuse path if both can be incorporated in a design with adequate landscaped or preserved buffers of trees. Traffic calming, crosswalks and stop signs would make street a pedestrian friendly safe place	Pedestrian Facilities: Original CRW DSR provided both sidewalk and multiuse path. Alternate plan w/o sidewalk does not save many trees. With no trees or landscaping it will not have a pedestrian friendly atmosphere. Detracts from property values	Both sidewalk and multiuse path can be accommodated in the existing narrow ROW if the committee recommendations are adopted
Snow Removal: Committee recommendations will decrease the cost of snow removal and allow for permanent snow storage in landscaped areas.	Snow Removal: Design provides for some temporary snow storage but no permanent snow storage. All snow will have to be hauled from street, sidewalk and multiuse path. Expect increased taxes	Snow Removal costs will be orders of magnitude greater with CRW design. The committee advocates a 20% smaller footprint reducing maintenance and snow removal costs.

The Committee feels strongly that if its recommendations are incorporated into the design the overall cost of the project will go down and the quality will be enhanced.

Views of Design Proposals

A picture is worth a thousand words

Before

After

CRW/MOA Proposal 1

CRW/MOA Proposal 2

Strawberry Road Committee Proposal 1

Strawberry Road Committee Proposal 2

Strawberry Road Committee Proposal 3

Strawberry Road Committee Proposal 4

SRC Options 3 & 4 are THE SAME as SRC Options 1 & 2, except these use a 10’ traffic lane width. This width has been adopted as a neighborhood collector standard in many communities and helps balance the design elements.

Safety Issues in Neighborhood Street Design

The function of a road should be the major determinant of its classification. As the committee worked with the existing language in MOA manuals there were some inconsistencies but an overall logic which justified the description of Strawberry Road as a neighborhood collector.

From the Official Streets and Highways Plan come a number of features which should be considered in planning new collector streets. Particularly pertinent to Strawberry Road is the section which reads “....The collector street system should be designed so that through traffic is discouraged between larger residential areas or between larger residential areas and major activity areas. In residential areas, collector streets should be planned to not exceed one-half mile in length if possible and to discourage continuous links between arterials.” (emphasis added). (MOA, Official Streets and Highways Plan)

Because of the off-ramp at Minnesota Drive and Strawberry, Strawberry already suffers an excess amount of non-local through traffic. It continuously links two arterials (Northwood and Jewel Lake Road) with none of the traffic calming features required to discourage through traffic.. This is evidenced by the 800-1000 cars per day which go westbound only at the Jewel Lake end of the road. As all research studies show through traffic tends to go faster. This non-local traffic not only contributes to the speeding problem on Strawberry but also exacerbates a bad traffic situation at the intersection of Strawberry Road and Jewel Lake Road.

From Dan Burden’s address to the Transportation Research Board, January 2001:

“Principle 6. Keep Urban Traffic Dispersed and Low Speed. A general reduction in quality of life and property value has resulted from overly high urban traffic speeds. Neighborhood and main street speeds should be kept low. Although speeds should still be factored with the functional and regional traffic movement needs, there is rarely justification for traffic to move at speed above 30 mph in most areas, and 20 mph in some. As towns make the switch to safer, more appropriate urban speeds, they are learning to stop traffic less and maintain overall trip times. Towns taking aggressive actions to curtail speeding, especially many European communities, are achieving injury reductions from 30-70%, and greatly enhancing walking, transit, bicycling and other modes of travel.”

In Anchorage, AK pedestrian as in the rest of the country, pedestrian accidents are associated with crossings. Nationally 80% of pedestrian/vehicle accidents occur when pedestrians are trying to cross streets not when they are on sidewalks. Logically most pedestrian fatalities occur on wider, higher speed streets. Accident statistics for Anchorage are cited in Stan Gallagher’s report in the Appendix.

Lane & Street Widths

Globally, there is a growing body of evidence that street width and speed are inextricably linked. When the design speed of roads is significantly different (faster) than the posted speed chronic and costly enforcement problems occur.

Cities and states across the country have begun to recognize this and scale back the design standards which they apply to local and collector streets. The results have been dramatic, saving lives and lowering both initial construction costs and such maintenance costs as snow removal, street sweeping and speed enforcement.

The banner under which most of these changes are taking place is the FHWA’s Context Sensitive Design standards. In the words of Gary Toth of the New Jersey DOT ‘”context sensitive design is just a matter of common sense. If the designer understands the transportation context, and the safety and mobility needs to be addressed, and then uses common sense to fit sound engineering principles into the environmental and community context, a design will emerge that represents the best of both worlds.”

Design Speed vs. Posted Speed

Ironically one of the first examples we found of context sensitive design principles leading engineers to use the full flexibility in AASHTO guidelines turned out to be the 15th Avenue Project in Anchorage. Reid Ewing, Research Professor at Rutgers University and Research Director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project in Washington D.C. The design team for 15th Ave made a number of deviations from “standards” to come up with a quality project. To quote Ewing “The final exercise of common sense was to seek several design exceptions. Some stopping and intersection sight distances, curb return radii, shoulder widths and clearances to obstructions will remain substandard. However, the project will still improve safety and, with the design exceptions in place, cost about a third as much.”

In his closing for the article “From Highway to My Way” Ewing signals hope for the future in urban street design: “Because AASHTO has been responsible for, or at least blamed for, so much of what we don’t like about urban streets in this country, it seem fitting to end on a positive note from an AASHTO draft document, scheduled for publication soon.

‘The notion of designing a ‘high quality’, low speed road is counter intuitive to many highway engineers, yet it is in many cases the appropriate solution…Context sensitive design in the urban environment often involves creating a safe roadway environment (by encouraging drivers) to operate at low speeds.’” See appendix: Ewing, Reid for complete article.

Over-design seems safe and conservative to many engineers. Unfortunately it drives up construction costs, encourages speeding and results in higher maintenance and operation costs at the same time that it detracts from the neighborhood it is designed to serve.

OPTIMAL STREET WIDTHS: “Wider traffic lanes provide give vehicles more room to avoid collisions, but they increase traffic speeds, which increases crash risk and severity. Annual crash rates per vehicle-mile tend to be lowest for relatively narrow (about 10-foot) lane widths, and are highest on wider, lower volume, straight streets with higher traffic speeds (Swift, 1998; Zegeer, et al, 1994). Urban streets with 24-foot curb-to-curb widths appear to have the lowest accident rates.”

“Many towns are finding that narrower travel lanes in urban areas can also reduce speeds. Although there is no change in speed when lanes are reduced from 12 feet to 11 feet, a further reduction to 10 feet, and in some cases as little as 9 feet, is showing speed reductions and measurable improvements in personal injury rates and safety.” Dan Burden in his address to the Transportation Research Board, Jan 2001.

Ewing’s Article: Mobility Friendly Street Standards for Delaware has proposed collector standards with 10’ lanes for by the Delaware DOT. See Appendix.

An added benefit of the reduction in the distance between the backs of curbs, from 36ft to 24 or 27ft, would be significantly reduced costs of the roadway items of work. The magnitude of the cost reduction would depend upon the classification of the existing soils and the impact on the catch points in the cut and fill areas, but it is clear that there would be a reduction in at least the following elements of work:

Temporary and permanent easement acquisition

Clearing and grubbing

Asphalt and leveling course

Unsuitable, usable and surplus excavation

Imported classified fill and backfill

The reduction in the quantity of work would also reduce the time to complete the project.

Tree and Landscape Impact on Street Design

Trees and Landscaping

Even though the Municipality has agreed to replant 18-20’ trees to replace those lost in construction the sad fact is that for most of the one mile project there will be little room for any landscaping. Only by shrinking the foot print of the improvements will there be sufficient unpaved area for planting.

“Build Green Streets. For far too many years American cities have either allowed existing urban street trees to deteriorate and die, or they have failed to plant them on new streets. Pedestrians have great need for green, shade and ambiance. Motorists, too, are affected