WalkUP Testimony at City Vision Zero Hearing

The Boston City Council held a hearing today on Vision Zero and traffic calming in the city. WalkUP Roslindale attended and submitted testimony, reproduced below and available as an official PDF. The preliminary take-home is it’s going to take a lot of work and pushing our officials zealously to really turn the ship in the right direction.

Update 1: Video of the hearing now available.
Update 2: Check out this comment letter from our friends at the Longfellow Area Neighborhood Association.
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Two Immediate Opportunities to Speak Up for a More Walkable Roslindale


To achieve our goal of making Rozzie the most walkable neighborhood in Boston, we need to seize every opportunity to speak up. We are leading some efforts ourselves (such as the Gateway Path initiative) but others require attention, leadership, and vision from our Mayor and City Councilors. Two upcoming events present opportunities to be heard on important walkability issues:

  • Mayor Walsh recently announced the dates for his 2016 “coffee hour” series, where the Mayor will visit each neighborhood to hear from residents. All participants will enjoy coffee[1] and breakfast provided by Dunkin’ Donuts and fresh fruit from Whole Foods. In addition, each family in attendance will receive a flowering plant grown in the city’s greenhouses and a raffle prize from Dunkin. The Roslindale event is this coming Wednesday, May 18 at Adams Park, from 9:30am-10:30am. Show up and tell the Mayor we need safer streets for walkers, better transit and bicycle infrastructure, improved parks, and the like!
  • The City Council hearing on the city’s Vision Zero efforts is scheduled for this coming Monday, May 16th, at 3pm in the Iannella Chamber, 5th Floor, City Hall. The order for hearing was sponsored by Councilor Matt O’Malley. The docket to be discussed is item 0509, “order for a hearing regarding traffic calming measures and the Vision Zero Boston program.” Show up to testify if you can; written comments may also be made part of the record and available to all councilors by sending them to ccc.prt@nullboston.gov and daniel.shea@nullboston.gov.
Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Speaking of coffee: Roslindale just took a big step up, going from zero to two full-blown coffee shops. Both P.S. Gourmet Coffee and the Green T Coffee Shop opened in the past week or so. Be sure to visit both by foot or bicycle and welcome them to the neighborhood!

Roslindale Bulletin on 20 MPH City Speed Limit

City Speed Limit could Fall to 20mph
Roslindale Bulletin: City Speed Limit could Fall to 20mph
We appreciate how well the Roslindale Bulletin continues to cover WalkUP Roslindale’s core issues. Earlier this month, Christopher Roberson wrote this piece about the Boston City Council’s move to set the default Boston speed limit to 20 mph. This will save lives, as the survivability of a pedestrian-automobile crash is mainly a function of speed: 90% of
pedestrians hit by cars die when struck at 40 mph compared to 5% at 20 mph
.

Our own District 5 City Councilor Tim McCarthy had some nice quotes in the piece:

District 5 Councillor Timothy McCarthy said the last speed limit change was implemented by a transportation commissioner who was from Ludlow, where higher speed limits are more common.

“If you go 20 mph in Ludlow, you probably wouldn’t get out of Ludlow for a few days,” said McCarthy. “But in our area, 20 mph is plenty.”

He said that West Roxbury Police Sgt. Michael O’Hara has done demonstrations in the past to show the actual speed of a vehicle traveling 30 mph relative to a pedestrian. He said O’Hara would ask residents to stand on the side of the road while a he drove by at exactly 30 mph.

“If you’re standing on the edge of the road and a Crown Vic goes by at 30 mph, you might as well be at NASCAR, you’re not getting out of the way,” said McCarthy.

Kudos to Councilor McCarthy for helping push this walkability initiative.

See also this video of the City Council’s Government Operations committee hearing on the initiative from last week.

We should remember that setting a safer speed limit is only a starting point. Most drivers will follow road design more than posted limits, so the ultimate solution must involve safer road design including narrower car lanes and other traffic calming measures (all key aspects of Vision Zero). A recent letter to the editor in the Boston Globe makes this same point. But we need not let these broader infrastructure challenges get in the way of a common-sense first step.

Breaking news (4/27/16 afternoon): From City Councillor Michelle Wu‘s summary of today’s city council meeting:

Speed Limits: We voted unanimously to pass Councilor Baker’s home rule petition to lower the default unposted speed limit from 30mph to 20mph in thickly settled areas and business districts and from 20mph to 15mph in school zones, as well as giving the City the authority to post speed limits without state approval and the requirement for a traffic study. Councilors Baker and Flaherty noted that speeding is one of the top issues councilors hear from residents. The matter now goes to the Mayor for his signature and then the state legislature for approval.

Dante Ramos just nailed it in last Friday’s Globe

We’ve all been following the tragic spike in deaths resulting from car-on-human-being-walking crashes in our city, including our neighborhood, to start this year. As Dante Ramos asserted in an opinion piece in last Friday’s Globe (“If jaywalking is wrong, I don’t want to be right“), the answer to the carnage is not, as one of our state legislators has reportedly proposed, to jack up jaywalking fines. Instead, we need to reorder a badly disordered transportation system and reclaim the right of human beings on foot to safely use and inhabit our streets, intersections, and squares throughout Boston and here in Roslindale. It’s worth quoting from Dante’s piece at length as he talks about how Vision Zero will work here:

Ironically, [Sen.] Chandler’s legislation comes up at the State House just as Boston is embracing Vision Zero — a strategy for eliminating all motor vehicle deaths and serious injuries by 2030.

Heightened law enforcement may be part of the strategy, at least at certain key intersections. But according to Chris Osgood, Boston’s chief of streets, the city will rely more on education and on a deeper analysis of street-level conditions: the physical design of intersections, the timing of traffic and walk signals, the movement patterns of people and vehicles not just at individual intersections but throughout the surrounding blocks.

Of course, the gradual fine-tuning of a city’s overall transportation system may not seem emotionally satisfying to a driver who’s been delayed by a jaywalker. And when you’ve grown up in a world where transportation laws primarily serve cars’ needs, it’s easy to persuade yourself that stiffer jaywalking fines — what Chandler calls “the stick approach” — are for pedestrians’ own good.

Never mind that pedestrian fatality rates are lower in places where jaywalking enforcement is lax than in Los Angeles, where it’s been far more aggressive. Motorists don’t need greater protection from the supposed threat of wayward pedestrians, and, anyway, not every annoyance in life can or should be fixed through tougher laws and stiffer tickets.

WalkBoston offering Ped 101 Advocacy Training – Multiple Dates/Times in Jan-Feb-Mar – FREE

Here’s WalkBoston’s brief announcement at the EventBrite page:

In 2016, WalkBoston is rolling out free, beginner advocacy trainings called “Ped 101” – and we’d love you to come! Our office is located at 45 School Street, Boston, MA 02108 in Old City Hall. Sessions are small group conversation over lunch or drinks and are hosted in our conference room – so please make sure to sign up in advance!

This session is helpful if you’re interested in learning about: 

  • walkability, urbanism & the associated lingo (what’s a “tight turning radius”?),
  • making neighborhoods safer for people walking & running, and
  • how you can advocate for change in your own community.
  • SIGN UP BY GOING: HERE.

Late-addition to the Roundup List: Arboretum Gateway Path

Rozzie Gateway Path Entrance (image courtesy Halvorson Design Partnership, Inc.)
Rozzie Gateway Path Entrance (image courtesy Halvorson Design Partnership, Inc.)

I have fielded more than one note that I left the Arboretum Gateway Path off the top-of-mind list for WUR’s 2015 roundup. This is an accurate critique and so: mea culpa. The AGP was a major initiative in 2015 and, I strongly suspect, will be a major initiative this year and going forward until it’s done. In brief: We love this idea of a new Arboretum gateway and path at the Roslindale commuter rail station that would provide an alternate ped/bike path to the South/Archdale bridge area, where it would link to an extension of the existing Blackwell/Bussey Brook path (and on to Forest Hills and the Southwest Corridor path) and allow for a new, more welcoming entrance to the Arboretum at Archdale as well. We are furthermore delighted at the receptive potential partners we’ve found in our own City and State government, the Arnold Arboretum, the Arboretum Park Conservancy, RVMS, Livable Streets, and our friends at Tufts University’s environmental program who are currently conducting an initial feasibility analysis for the path. It’s also been a great way to connect early with our friends at Rozzie Bikes.

So — as we head into 2016, expect the Arboretum Gateway Path to be something we continue to talk about and organize around, a lot.

We can learn a couple of things from New York

Going in reverse order from when these things came over the transom:

POINT THE FIRST

“25 keeps us all alive!” — To be clear, I do not believe this is really the slogan, but I was in New York over the past weekend and snapped this picture:

IMAG0008

You’re reading the sign right. New York has had a city-wide 25 mph speed limit for more than a year now. The world has not ended and their economy has not crashed, but traffic fatalities of all kinds of down year over year: 241 this year against 269 last year. The new Boston Vision Zero Action Plan is finally pointing us in this direction. But let’s be honest: it is long, long past time for our city to take the same kind of step — let’s make 2016 the year it happens.

POINT THE SECOND

Why 9 or 10 is better than 12. I commend to everyone the following article from Rob Steuteville over at Better Cities & Towns about how the humble Williamsburg Bridge’s rehabilitation back during your correspondent’s youthful years in the big city led to some of the first research into why narrower vehicle travel lanes are safer than wider ones. Worth a read: The New Science of Traffic Engineering. Challenging a misguided orthodoxy only sticks when you gather the data to show why that orthodoxy is wrong.

Boston’s Vision Zero Action Plan and sharing the Arboretum Gateway Path with our friends at LivableStreets’ 10-in-1 Street Talk

As part of our effort to spread the word and gather more support for the Arboretum Gateway Path concept, I was excited to have the opportunity to do a 7 minute presentation at LivableStreets Alliance’s 10-in-1 Street Talk last Wednesday night at the Old South Meeting House downtown. This is the 10th anniversary for these talks, and they’re a great way to connect with folks who have similar interests and advocating for making our streets and public places better and safer for everyone. LivableStreets has posted some photos from the event on their facebook page. I’ll share the video of the whole thing as soon as I see it posted in a public forum, but I was most struck during the evening by the presentation from Mark Chase of Somerville Neighborways. You should check out the images on the website, especially the concept of stressing the importance and local ownership of key intersections with resident-organized and applied graphics painted directly on the pavement. Pretty impressive and something that we should look into doing here in Roslindale – I have my own thoughts on where, and I’m sure others in our neighborhood do as well.

The evening got off to a great start with the semi-surprise of the Mayor’s announcement of the city’s Vision Zero Action Plan in a short video, which was followed by reinforcing remarks from BTD Commissioner Gina Fiandaca. Chief of Streets Chris Osgood was also personally in attendance to emphasize the importance of the announcement. The whole action plan is worth looking at and taking part in as it moves forward. But I would say that among the most interesting  and important early action items is the institution of neighborhood slow speed zones in the Talbot-Norfolk triangle near Codman Square in Dorchester and between Washington Street and Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain’s Stonybrook section. My own understanding is that this is mainly a matter of lowering the speed limit from 30 to 20 mph and highlighting that fact with signage and enhanced crosswalk treatments and related measures. Bottom line: The pilots are a great idea, long past due, yet fundamentally every residential area in the city should get the same treatment, as soon as the city can get the standard package set next spring and summer through the pilots and then roll them out. The data on vehicle speed vs. fatality rates for pedestrians are uniform on pointing to the shift from 30 to 20 pm as being absolutely essential. If we can get actual vehicle speeds to that lower level on our neighborhood streets, we will have accomplished something of real and lasting value.

Healy Playground

Healy Playground – Public Meeting – Monday 12/14/15 6:30pm at Archdale Community Center

Healy PlaygroundQuality parks and playgrounds are another essential element to our WalkUP vision. There’s an opportunity next week to make your voice heard and show the city that we care about better facilities in Roslindale. Attend this meeting about planned improvements to Healy Playground (the playground at 160 Florence Street, off of Washington Street). Details:

Time: Monday, December 14, 2015 6:30pm-8pm
Location: BCYF Archdale Community Center, 125 Brookway Road
Contcat: Cathy Baker-Eclipse at Boston Parks and Recreation Department, 617-961-3058, Cathy.Baker-Eclipse@nullboston.gov

See also this full-page flyer for the event.

Spread the word!

Centre and Walter Intersection

Official WalkUP Roslindale Comment Letter – Centre Street Corridor Study

Centre and Walter Intersection
Intersection of Centre and Walter Streets

We sent our third WalkUP comment letter today, providing feedback on the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Centre Street Corridor Study, focusing specifically on the intersection of Centre and Walter Streets, quite likely the most crash-prone intersection in all of Roslindale. We hope DCR will consider our comments seriously and ensure improvements to this area benefit users of all modes of transportation. In addition, because the redesign and construction are likely years away, we emphasize the need to make common-sense easy improvements today, such as flexi-poles and  lane-narrowing, which will save lives and prevent serious injuries while we are waiting for the longer process to complete.

The comment period is open until November 30, 2015. Please add your voice (select “Improved Multi-Modal Safety and Access to Emerald Necklace Parks in Jamaica Plain (Centre Street)” from the drop-down list)!

The content of our letter is reproduced below.

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