Safety at the MPO

A year ago the MPO project to write a Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan held an open house and survey. They've published a summary now, and it is interesting to consider a little.

The Policy Committee for the MPO meets on Tuesday the 28th, but there's not really anything much to say on that agenda, so we'll talk about that safety plan instead.

Survey summary

The results in general do not seem very surprising: People feel more safe walking than biking, people really feel vulnerable while on bike, intersections are a problem, and people feel safe in their cars.

Leveraging the precarious feelings of being on bike to support better bike lanes is wholly warranted.

But should messaging also underscore that you are not as safe in your car as you might think?

A few days ago

Just a few days ago the husband or relative of retired Librarian Judy Brunkal lost control of his vehicle on Croisan Creek Road, and she died in the crash.

In February a passenger, Lynda Rohrback Bush, died when her driver apparently tried to sneak across 12th street at Oak Hill in south Salem.

The lethality of autoism claims as many lives as gun violence.

It's not just those on foot, on bike, or otherwise rolling, who are at risk.

When he was at the paper, Dick Hughes used to say "Driving is the most dangerous thing that many of us will do in our lifetimes." 

Maybe in a strict actuarial sense this isn't the best way to put it, but he was right to underscore the dangers of driving! Drivers are the author of calamity.

One of the best things a transportation safety plan could do is say loudly and often, "Driving is dangerous and employs lethal force. The drive not taken is the safest drive. As often as you can, don't drive." Not-driving meets the exigencies of our moment: Climate as well as safety.

Pushing back on the illusion of safety when a person is inside a car would be salutary.

Another thing the plan could do is face more squarely the tension between a "congestion relief" paradigm and a "safety" paradigm.

Zooming cars along hinders safe speeds
(Minutes for April TAC)

One of the ways we preserve the congestion relief paradigm is by trying to see safety as a series of spot problems and spot solutions.

So we get things like this list of most dangerous intersections.

Earlier this month

But in fact what we have is a system problem, and our paradigm of "congestion relief" is at the center of it. Urban stroads designed and optimized for flow induce speeding and jaydriving, and are incoherent as Strong Towns points out over and over.

Strong Towns

It is of course appropriate for countermeasures to go in at the worst places. This is a reasonable triage. But spot treatments need to be paired with system changes, and this we are not much doing.

A de-stroadification policy should also be at the center of a safety plan!

But instead we might see more of the same victim blaming.

At the March meeting two consecutive presentation slides show potential disconnect.

March slides (comment added)

They shared a story from one of the online Open Houses about drivers bullying and endangering people on foot.

The "solutions" slide that immediately follows submerges the problem of drivers and speed into pabulum about "safer people" and "safer speeds." The bullet on "safer roads" doesn't say "design slower roads"; instead it calls for more forgiving design, which seems to end up being forgiveness for driver error only and not so much forgiveness for any errors of other road users or forgiveness for other road users in the path of drivers and their errors.

Wearing a high-viz jacket and using a bright flashing light did not save Marganne Allen from a jaydriving Federal cop. She employed model "safer people" tactics and it was not enough. Cars and drivers are the keystone for safety!

The framework, especially as interpreted here in the US, risks preserving too much of our autoism.

On pause now (April minutes for TAC)

Separately, last month at the Technical Advisory Committee, work on setting greenhouse gas targets was paused.

And May brought a revival of Bike Safety Education programming; a revival of a Bike Bus, hopefully recurring and not just a one-off; and multiple Bike to School Day events. It's great to see, but it was striking how much cops were centered in the imagery on social media. Are they really working for safer streets, or are they pursuing some other aim, like copaganda for example? This trend is something to watch. We should always remember the coverup over Marganne Allen's death by a jaydriving cop. Police could instead be lobbying for slower driving speed, for more photo radar, for a legal structure that allows ticketing for speeds less than 11mph over posted limits. There's all kinds of advocacy and policy more direct and more effective than being "Officer Friendly" on Walk to School days.

(via FB, from SBC and Salem PD)

The Policy Committee for the MPO meets on Tuesday the 28th at noon. Meeting information along with the agenda and packet is here.