Utah lawmakers shouldn’t get in the way of safer streets

It came as a shock when the Utah Legislature, late in the last session, put the brakes on Salt Lake City’s efforts.

Unless you are bedridden in Salt Lake City, you have certainly noticed the large number of streets closed for resurfacing, rehabilitation or reconstruction. What you may not be aware of is that many of the reconstruction projects are transforming the city from being auto dominant to being much more walkable, bikeable, livable and sustainable.

Prior to 1990, roadway projects were largely judged on the basis of roadway level of service, that is, for moving as many cars as possible as fast as possible. Roads were graded on a scale of A to F, which depended on the speed of traffic. The passage of the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 caused cities like Portland, Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Cambridge, Arlington and West Palm Beach to pursue broader goals, including those mentioned above.

Salt Lake City has followed in their footsteps, as have many highway-oriented organizations such as the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

As a former member of the city’s Transportation Advisory Board, it came as a shock when the Utah Legislature, late in the last session, put the brakes on Salt Lake City’s efforts to slow speeding traffic through its Livable Streets program. While the law is complicated (and could have been much worse, as it was in earlier drafts), it basically stops the city from narrowing lanes, installing raised crosswalks or traffic circles, doing road diets where four lanes are reduced to three (one in each direction with a center turn lane), and other “highway reduction strategies,” defined in the law as “any strategy that has the potential to permanently decrease the number of vehicles that can travel on an arterial or a collector highway per hour.”

Space limits my ability to describe the law in more detail, but you get the idea. It is a fascinating case study in the “sausage making” process.

The obvious causalities of this law are walkability, bikeability, livability and sustainability, but also sacrificed is the city’s Vision Zero program, which strives to eliminate fatal traffic accidents within the city. With high speed comes less time to react and brake for pedestrians, bicyclists and other motor vehicles. And when an accident occurs, there is a much greater likelihood of death since the force of impact increases with the square of velocity.

I am going to back up these assertions by citing three studies we have conducted in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah.

The first, done for the New York Department of Transportation, showed that, in New York City: Traffic calming measures, including road diets, had significant safety benefits.

The second, done for Salt Lake City’s Transportation Division, showed that, in Salt Lake City, existing traffic calming measures, such as speed humps, dramatically reduced vehicle speeds — not only at the devices, but upstream and downstream from them.

The third, done for the Utah Department of Transportation, showed that on state owned urban arterials, narrow lanes produced significantly lower speeds and crash rates.

Perhaps most interesting: On surface streets, counterintuitively, research shows that slowing traffic from 40 to 30 mph does not reduce throughput (capacity) because vehicle headway (spacing) is also reduced. An anti-Livable Streets piece written by two U. professors — that was shared with legislators but not made public — titled “Roadblocks to Quality of Life,” would have you believe otherwise, as if we are stuck back in 1990. Neither author is a transportation planner or engineer. But, sadly, they did have the desired effect of influencing legislative thinking and action, at the expense of the broader values pursued by the city.

In the House Transportation Committee on Feb. 27, Rep. Kristen Chevrier expressed concern about the bill compromising bike and pedestrian safety. She was right, so I would urge the public to be patient as we rebuild the city and urge the state Legislature to let the locals set local priorities.

Reid Ewing is a distinguished professor of city and metropolitan planning and distinguished chair for resilient places at the University of Utah. In the 1980s, he represented northwest Tucson in the Arizona Legislature.

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