The City of Eugene is in the middle of a planning process to redesign Franklin Boulevard along the University of Oregon campus. Tomorrow they have a formal Open House to discuss the latest proposal. As an absolutely current, up-to-date discussion of roundabouts, it's worth considering some.
In an ostensibly bike-friendly town, the proposal is still hampered by autoism, it turns out, perhaps even self-negating.
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| Franklin Boulevard at 13th and Matthew Knight Arena |
We're spearheading a planning process for Franklin Boulevard from Alder Street to Interstate 5, including Garden Avenue. The purpose is to transform Franklin from an auto-focused state highway to a pleasant, multi-modal urban street that is safe for people walking, biking, riding the bus and driving.
Franklin Boulevard, with its wide lanes, can be an unsafe and uncomfortable street. For people who walk, bike, or ride the bus, Franklin Boulevard can be a significant barrier to getting from place to place. Because of that, fewer people choose to walk or bike to make connections between the University of Oregon, surrounding neighborhoods and Willamette River trails to the north, hindering the our long-term efforts to reach climate reduction goals. The project will also encourage new ways for businesses and neighborhoods near Franklin Boulevard to redevelop the boulevard into a more comfortable connector of places, rather than a divider.
That sounds pretty good!
The current proposal includes three primary roundabouts, at Onyx Street, 13th Avenue, and Walnut Street, staggered at every other intersection in the university district. (Nearer I-5 there are two other secondary roundabouts also, for a total of five in the current concept plan. The Glenwood area, nearer to Springfield, already has a couple in a compound intersection and weird figure eight.)
In the latest analysis and recommendations report, they talk about how people biking would us the roundabouts.
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| Analyzing a roundabout for biking |
The intersections are complex. There are in most of them two auto travel lanes in each direction and also a bus-only lane for the EmX, the bus rapid transit system.
The mixing concepts for bike travel in the roundabouts seem to rely on "confident" biking styles and dispositions, and do not on the surface appear to meet any "all ages and abilities" standard. If you have to "circulate the roundabout in the same way as people driving cars" and you have to "look for yielding drivers," it requires some degree of comfort and confidence with "taking the lane" concepts.
Maybe here it is truly not possible to carve out full protection and separation, and some people will still want and need to use the sidewalk for bike travel. We'll put that aside for the moment.
The greater problem is with the analysis of walking.
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| Analysis still privileges car travel |
In the analysis and recommendations report they write:
To better understand how many people walking it takes to negatively affect roundabout operations to unacceptable levels, a sensitivity analysis was completed....
Due to the proposed EmX station at the Walnut Street roundabout, this roundabout would be the first one to fail [from excessive walking]....once the volume of people crossing Franklin Boulevard at Walnut Street exceeds 255 during the PM peak period [the intersection will fail].
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| More walking should equal success! Here it would mean failure |
Seriously: How effed up is that?
More people walking and biking is a measure of success! Our climate goals call for more walking and biking, and land use is supporting that. Moreover, this is in a University district! Of course students will be walking and biking.
Overwhelming Franklin Boulevard with non-auto travel would be a wild success, and should be the goal, the aim of planning.
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| Shifting from counting cars to "person-trips" (Moving from Cars to People) |
But it's not in fact the desideratum. The process is still planning for automobile levels of service on Franklin Boulevard, which necessarily limit and check the possibilities for walking and biking. Instead of counting people, the project is mainly counting cars. Why don't we look at the numbers of cars that create operational failure for people on foot, on bike, and on bus?
In this process for roundabouts in the University district, an area where walking and biking should be plentiful and easy, the roundabouts still function to prioritize car travel. They may slow it some and make the intersections somewhat safer, but the primary benefits still accrue to those in cars.
This is why large, multi-lane roundabouts are very imperfect solutions and not panaceas. They are a useful tool to have, and there will be times they truly are the best solution, but in urban contexts, they fit uneasily with goals for non-auto travel, and risk being overused.
1 comment:
Eugene Weekly has a piece on it, "Going Roundabout," and the quote from Rob Zako, Director of advocacy group Better Eugene-Springfield Transportation, is a little tepid, focusing on intent and hope rather than the design that is on the table:
"'We support the intent of the project and its purpose,' Zako says. 'We are hoping to see a sign that’s going to make the street better for everyone, no matter how they drive or how they get around.'"
There's also some funny fear-mongering from a business, undercut immediately by a contrary assessment from a different business next door.
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