Monday, August 26, 2024

Public Comment Calls for more Attention to Speed and Speeding in draft Safety Plan: At the MPO

This summer Wes Marshall's book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System, came out.

via the former Twitter

One of its themes was the way safety is absorbed into and equated with congestion relief. High congestion equals low safety; low congestion and free flow equals high safety.

The old bromide, Killed by a Traffic Engineer

At the MPO last month a Salem transportation planner articulated just this notion, which is also a policy of appeasement. The driver stuck in traffic is on this view the safety problem. We must appease drivers in any hint of congestion and make it easier to go faster. The most dangerous thing, the thing to be avoided nearly at all costs, is the pissed off driver.

Rewarding aggressive, bullying driving

By contrast, in a preliminary review of public comment on the draft Transportation Safety Action Plan being presented to the committee on Tuesday, "the majority noted that reducing speeds on the roads is the main factor in creating safe travel...most felt that the plan does not address safety and speeding enough."

Its focus was not on drivers irritated by congestion. Its focus was on drivers going too fast.

More focus on speed and speeding please

Speed and speeding are not the same, and more attention should also be given to the lethality of legal, posted 40mph speed. With the way we enforce traffic laws, we tolerate an ostensibly banal level of speeding up to 50mph on such a road.

Why is this induced, supposedly licit behavior, not also considered "risky driving behavior"?

We really need to face more squarely the tension, even contradiction, between a primary frame of "congestion relief" and a primary frame of "safety."

Additionally, congestion is an infrequent factor in fatal crashes.

The driver who killed Selma Pierce was driving lawfully around 40mph inside the city in a residential neighborhood. Congestion was not a factor.

The driver who killed Denise Van Dyke in a downtown crosswalk right below the MPO's offices had come to a stop, and initiated a turn when they got a green light. The crash occurred at midafternoon, and congestion does not seem to be a likely factor.

The driver who killed Teresita Telesfora Millard last week in late morning may have been in congested conditions, but also appears to have shown a pattern of risky driving generally. Any congestion is not a good candidate for the primary cause of the crash and death.

And in a collision only involving cars back in February, a passenger, Lynda Rohrback Bush, died when her driver apparently tried to sneak across 12th street at Oak Hill in south Salem. It was a Friday evening at dinnertime, and traffic volumes may have been a factor, but "congestion" does not seem even here to be a very useful category for analysis or causation.

Take a look at actual deaths from the past few years. Drivers making risky choices in congested conditions is not the primary problem to solve.

"Don't hit" - via bluesky

Killed in 2024

Killed in 2023

Killed in 2022

Killed in 2021

Killed in 2020
Killed in 2019
Killed in 2018
Killed in 2017
Killed in 2016:
Killed in 2015:

And even when congestion might be considered a factor, appeasement, "might makes right" on our roads, institutionalized as "congestion relief," is not the moral strategy.

Significantly, the draft Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan doesn't even use the words "congestion" or "congested." Not in narrative or exposition, not in any table or analysis.

Congestion not a crash attribute

If we are going to appeal to congestion as prompting risky behavior, then we need to include "congestion" as an empirical category in crash analysis. We should surface the extent to which this is actually a problem. And if it's not a real problem, we should banish it from our conversation about safety.

It's also true that the way the draft plan handles "speed-related crashes" needs revision. Lawful speed, not just speeding, is too often fatal. We should also surface lawful speed as a factor in fatal crashes.

The Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan seems like a good start, but it really needs more thorough revision: More focus on safety generally; more attention to actionable policy; and less exposition, padding really, on process.

According to the current agenda,

Staff and the project consultant (DKS Associates) will meet with the Steering Committee and Project Management Team on September 5th to get their final feedback on the plan, and then prepare a final version of the plan for the Policy Committee’s adoption at their September 24th meeting.
This may not be enough time to give it the revision it truly needs.

The tension, even contradiction, between the frames of congestion relief and safety is a perennial theme here. See in particular:

Why is the target value declining?

Also on the agenda for this month, the MPO is also reviewing some performance targets, and it is surprising to see the target for "percent of non-single occupant vehicle travel" decline from the baseline of 25% in 2022 to 23% in 2026. That's going the wrong way! Two years ago this wrong-way trend in targets was visible, and it has not seemed to bother anyone since then.

The latest census estimates (table SO801)

Also, given the way we measure the value in surveys, a tenth of a percentage point is false precision, an example of trying to make something more "scientific" than it really is. For comparison, the latest table of the metro area (this is tricounty, not just city or UGB) has "drove alone" at 67.7%. The "non-SOV" value is basically 100-"drive alone." The margin of error on "drove alone" is 2.1, for a range of 65.6% to 69.8%. The tenth of a percentage point is not meaningful!

The Policy Committee for our MPO meets on Tuesday the 27th and noon. The meeting information, agenda, and packet is here.

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