Two new brochures have been published by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program.  The  first brochure highlights best practices and policies among state departments of transportation (DOTs) for the scoping, design, and installation of raised medians and refuge islands.  Raised center, bull-nosed medians and pork-chop islands – in addition to reducing pedestrian crashes – provide additional benefits such as:

• Reducing motor vehicle crashes by 15 percent
• Decreasing delays (greater than 30 percent) for motorists
• Increasing capacity (greater than 30 percent) of roadways
• Reducing vehicle speeds on the roadway
• Providing space for landscaping within the right-of-way

The second brochure gives case studies on best practices and policies in state DOTs for policies and plans that promote good design and the installation of walkways and paved shoulders in roadway projects.  In addition to reducing pedestrian and other types of crashes, the benefits of well-designed and built walkways and shoulders can include:

• Improving roadway drainage
• Increasing effective turning radii at intersections
• Reducing shoulder maintenance requirements
• Providing emergency stopping space for broken down vehicles
• Providing space for maintenance operations and snow storage
• Providing an increased level of comfort for bicyclists

The Illinois Prairie Path Aurora Spur, between Batavia Road and Warrenville Road in Warrenville, will be temporarily closed for road work and associated path realignment at the intersection of Butterfield and Rockwell Roads.  The closure is expected to be in effect through November 11.  A detour route has been established and signed.

For more information on this closure and others in DuPage County, see the DuPage County Bikeways and Trails Closures and Maintenance Alerts webpage.

According to a report by the Chicago Park District and Active Transportation Alliance, Chicago’s lakefront trail gets nearly 30,000 users at its busiest points daily.  The total number of users per day on a typical summer weekend is estimated to be over 70,000.

Conducted in August 2010, these manual counts show that approximately 70 percent of persons who accessed the trail during the counts were on foot, 29 percent were on bicycles, and 1 percent were other users.

The results of the counts show clearly that path is heavily used by both bicyclists and pedestrians for both recreational and transportation purposes.

To learn more, see the Chicago Park District press release.

The U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released a report summarizing the results of five one-day regional livability workshops, one of the strategies in the FHWA’s livable communities project.

The goals of the initiative are to raise awareness of transportation linkages to livability and to provide resources to practitioners and the public to help them more effectively consider livability issues within the federal transportation planning process.

(An earlier blog post featured the related FHWA guidebook, “Livability in Transportation Guidebook: Planning Approaches that Promote Livability.”)

The Safe Routes to School (SRTS) National Partnership has released a 2011 policy report, Safe Routes to School: Helping Communities Save Lives and Dollars.  The report seeks to demonstrate the long-term financial benefits of the Safe Routes to School program and the projects it helps fund.  Among SRTS benefits, the report cites:

• Reducing school busing costs, alleviating the strain on school and local government budgets
• Decreasing short trips to school, easing traffic congestion, fuel expenditures and wear and tear on the roads
• Helping small rural towns and low-income communities access much-needed funds to improve safety
• Lowering medical costs from traffic injuries and fatalities and manage obesity costs

In conjunction with the publication of the policy report, the SRTS National Partnership has created fact sheet with excerpts and highlights from the report.

The Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has issued a request for proposals (RFP) to quantify the relationships between pedestrian safety and crossing treatments at uncontrolled locations. The project will also develop crash reduction factors by crash type and severity for unsignalized pedestrian crosswalk signs and pavement markings (including advance yield markings), high-intensity activated crosswalk signals (HAWK or Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons), rectangular rapid flashing beacons, pedestrian refuge areas, curb extensions, in-pavement warning lights, and high-visibility crosswalk marking patterns. Proposals are due November 3, 2011.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has published a new policy and design guide titled, Complete Intersections: A Guide to Reconstructing Intersections and Interchanges for Bicyclists and Pedestrians.   The comprehensive guide is intended to help practitioners (planners and engineer) identify actions and treatments which will improve safety and mobility for bicyclists and pedestrians at intersections and interchanges.  The handbook provides tools and techniques to improve bicycle and pedestrian transportation using basic guiding principles for common intersection types.  The focus is on intersections and interchanges since that is where multimodal transportation safety and mobility issues can be most challenging.

The guide is part of Caltrans strategy for implementing its Complete Streets policy.

The National Center for Safe Routes to School (NCASRTS) is accepting applications for the 2011 James L. Oberstar Safe Routes to School Award. The 2011 Award will recognize outstanding achievement by a local Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program that has greatly improved the safety or increased the number of elementary and/or middle school students who walk and bicycle to school.  Additional consideration will be given to applicants who have made active transportation to/from school an integral part of the school’s culture over time.

The application deadline is tomorrow, Wednesday, October 26, 2011.

The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC) announced new Walk Friendly Communities (WFC) in 10 locations across the nation. The three Gold Level communities were: Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.  Three more communities were given Silver Level status, and four were awarded Bronze Level.

The “Walk Friendly” title recognizes a city or town for their success in working to improve a wide range of conditions related to walking -- including safety, mobility, access, and comfort.

The National Center for Safe Routes to School (NCSRTS) announced 25 recipients of $1,000 mini-grants for projects designed to encourage safe walking and bicycling to school. The projects and programs funded by the NCSRTS mini-grants will be implemented during the fall semester of the 2011 to 2012 school year.  Many of the projects receiving funding were initiated by and will be carried out by students themselves.

Among the 2011 awardees is Sauganash Elementary School in Chicago, which will launch a year-round “Move-It Monday” program to encourage students and families to get to and from school using any active, non-motorized form of transportation, such as walking, bicycling, and riding scooters and skateboards.

The National Center also announced the call for Spring 2012 mini-grants applications.  As in 2011, there will be 25 grants of $1,000 each to enable and encourage children to safely walk and bicycle to school.  Applications are due by the end of the day today, Wednesday, October 19, 2011.

On Tuesday, October 11, America Walks and the National Center for Safe Routes to School (NCSRTS) present the webinar, “Location, Location, Location: New Guidance for Locating Schools in a Healthy, Sustainable Way.”

The webinar will consist of a panel discussion of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for locating school facilities and the model school siting policies for school districts developed by Public Health Law & Policy.  Panelists will also discuss how to use the Active School Neighborhood Checklist developed by the Arizona Department of Transportation and the policy recommendations in “Helping Johnny Walk to School,” developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  

The webinar will take place Tuesday, October 11, 2011 from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. CT.  The webinar is free but requires advance registration.

On Wednesday, October 12, the National Center on Senior Transportation and Easter Seals Project ACTION present the webinar, “Promising Practices and Solutions in Accessible Transportation: Public Involvement in the Transportation Planning Process," from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. CT.

The webinar will address the importance of public involvement in the transportation planning process and is designed for transportation planners and advocates, as well as aging, educational, and human service agency staff and administrators.

The webinar is free, but space is limited, and requires advance registration by October 7.

The University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) at Berkeley recently published two reports on issues related to sidewalks and pedestrian travel in its magazine ACCESS.  The first is titled “Fixing Broken Sidewalks.”  In this report, Donald Shoup describes the need for communities to maintain sidewalks and outlines a “point-of-sale program” to help pay for maintenance, calling such a program micro-loans for such public investments. 

The second article, “Vibrant Sidewalks in the United States: Re-integrating Walking and a Quintessential Social Realm,” looks at the history of sidewalks and argues for a broader, not merely functional, understanding of the role or purpose(s) of sidewalks in a community.  It concludes that -- though it may seem counterintuitive -- “if we wish to encourage walking for transportation, we need to make sidewalks places for more than just movement.”

An article published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) looks at the health impact of Barcelona’s public bicycle sharing initiative, Bicing.  Launched in 2007, by August 2009 Bicing had 182,062 subscribers, representing 11 percent of Barcelona's municipal population.  The average distance traveled by a Bicing subscriber on a working day was 3.29 km (approximately 2 miles), taking an average of 14 minutes.

The study estimates the risks and benefits to health of travel by bicycle, using a bicycle sharing scheme, compared with travel by car in an urban environment.  While using a Bicing bicycle for transportation did very slightly increase the chance of death from road traffic incidents and from air pollution, this was completely offset by the large health benefit resulting from the physical activity inherent in cycling.  Overall, the benefit to risk ratio was 77, with an estimated 12.28 lives saved each year through the use of the Bicing program.  In addition, the authors estimate that annual carbon dioxide emissions in Barcelona have been reduced by approximately nine million kg through the implementation of Bicing. 

The authors conclude that the health benefits for users of public bicycle sharing initiatives such as Bicing in Barcelona far outweigh the risks and contribute significantly to a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in the city.

See a related Chicago Tribune story about the City of Chicago's bike-sharing plans.  The CMAP Weekly Update from September 23 has more information.

A new report by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC) evaluates the bike boxes recently installed throughout the City of Portland.  The reportpresents a before-after study of bike boxes at 10 signalized intersections in Portland, Oregon. The bike boxes -- also known as advanced stop lines or advanced stop boxes -- were installed to increase visibility of cyclists and reduce conflicts between motor vehicle and cyclists, particularly in potential “right-hook” situations.  In the study, before-and-after videos were analyzed for seven intersections with green bike boxes, three intersections with uncolored bike boxes, and two control intersections.  In addition, user perceptions were measured through surveys of cyclists passing through five of the bike box intersections and of motorists working in areas where the boxes were installed.   The study concludes -- in answer to the question, “Do the bike boxes improve safety?” -- that, “after controlling for volumes, the number of conflicts decreased and yielding behavior increased.  In addition, user perceptions of safety improved.”

Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) released a research report, “An Assessment of Urban Form and Pedestrian and Transit Improvements as an Integrated Greenhouse Gas Reduction Strategy.”  Using data from a regional Household Activity Survey, the study models the association of urban form, pedestrian infrastructure, transit service and travel costs on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and carbon dioxide (CO²), controlling for household characteristics known to influence travel.  Although unable to isolate sidewalks themselves from other factors such as mixed land use patterns, shorter transit travel and wait times, lower transit fares, and higher parking costs, the study provides a foundation for further research into how pedestrian facility investment, urban form, transit service, and demand management (pricing) policy can interact to help achieve reductions in VMT and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

On Thursday, September 22, 2011 the Public Health Law & Policy (PHLP) will present the webinar, “Creating Pedestrian-Friendly Streets: A Short Walk Through Legal and Practical Issues,” from 12:00 to 1:15 p.m.  The webinar will cover key practical and legal considerations involved in creating pedestrian-friendly streets. Presenters will also describe policy tools that can help make walkable streets the ‘default’ in communities, including PHLP’s  new directory of municipal codes from communities across the country that make streets safer and more comfortable for pedestrians.

As a part of the Chicago Pedestrian Plan (featured in an earlier Soles and Spokes post), the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) completed an analysis of pedestrian crashes within the city.  The study will inform and guide the Pedestrian Plan, help in developing new engineering treatments to improve pedestrian safety throughout the city, and in ongoing pedestrian safety education efforts.

Download the “2011 Pedestrian Crash Analysis Summary Report” here.

For more information and maps analyzing pedestrian and bicycle crashes in the years 2005 to 2009 – both in the City of Chicago, as well as in the Northeastern Illinois region –visit CMAP’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety webpage.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) released the report, Public Perceptions on Transportation Characteristics of Livable Communities.  The special report presents the findings of a 2009 national survey, which asked participants about the importance of different transportation features for their communities.  The most important of the eight characteristics defined in the survey, supported by 94 percent of respondents, was major roads or highways, followed closely by adequate downtown parking, pedestrian-friendly downtown streets, safe sidewalks, and easy access to airports. Reliable long-distance bus or rail transportation, bike lanes, and local transit were found to be important by over two-thirds of respondents.  BTS surveyed about 1,000 households for this report.

One interesting finding of this survey is the variation of the importance of some transportation facilities by age.  Of respondents aged 18 to 34, 91.5 percent found sidewalks “somewhat important” or “very important,” declining to 73.0 percent of respondents aged 65 and above.  Bike facilities were “somewhat important” or “very important” for 73.8 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34, declining to 51.9 percent of respondents aged 65 and above.

The Transportation Research Board (TRB) National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) released the report (Synthesis 414) “Effective Delivery of Small-Scale Federal-Aid Projects.”  The report compiles and documents streamlined methods for meeting federal funding requirements for small-scale highway projects. A primary objective of the study is to explore ways that state departments of transportation (DOTs) work with local agencies to implement small projects eligible for federal funding.

For this study, “small-scale” is defined as projects administered by state or local transportation agencies that contain federal funding of $300,000 or less.  Information used in this study was acquired through a review of the literature, a survey of local program agency administrators in each of ten focus state DOTs, and interviews with representatives from several agencies and organizations involved at various levels with the locally administered federal-aid process.