The Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2190 is dedicated to bicycles and contains six papers that explore various topics related to bicycle transportation and planning, including:

• The influence of the built environment on route selection for bicycle and car travel
• Automated bicycle counts
• Multimodal travel choices of bicyclists
• Effects of gender on commuter cycling and accident rates
• On-street bicycle facility configuration effects on bicyclist and motorist behavior; and
• Parking lane width effect on bicycle operating space

This volume complements the volume on pedestrians, which we featured in an earlier post.

The U.S. Access Board has reopened the comment period on its proposed guidelines for accessible public rights-of-way (PROWAG) through February 2, 2012.  While the original comment deadline was November 23 (see our earlier blog post), the extension is in response to requests from interested parties, including government and trade associations, for additional time to submit comments on the rule, as indicated in a published notice.

The proposed guidelines address access to public streets and sidewalks, street crossings, on-street parking, and other components of public rights-of-way.  Comments can be submitted or viewed through the www.regulations.gov website.  Further information on this rulemaking is available on the Board’s website. 

A new Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) research report (FHWA-HRT-11-035) looks at methods to evaluate pedestrian and bicycle traffic control device.  The report, Pedestrian and Bicyclist Traffic Control Device Evaluation Methods, is part of a larger FHWA research effort to quantify the effectiveness of engineering countermeasures in improving safety and operations for pedestrians and bicyclists. 

This study focuses on existing and experimental engineering countermeasures that have not yet been comprehensively evaluated. The report describesmethods that practitioners can use to conduct reliable evaluations of pedestrian and bicyclist traffic control devices.  The report will be of interest to engineers, planners, and other practitioners who implement pedestrian and bicycle treatments and to state, regional, and local authorities responsible for public safety.

Los Angeles County has published a model street design manual entitled Model Design Manual for Living Streets (access requires a user agreement).   The manual was written by national experts in “living streets” concepts and focuses on accommodating all roadway users and all modes, seeking to achieve balanced street design that accommodates cars while ensuring that pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users can travel safely and comfortably.  Beyond typical engineering concerns, the manual also offers information and guidance on the street aesthetics, economic vitality, and environmental sustainability.

The manual is intended to be of assistance to cities around the country in updating current practice related roadway planning, design, and construction.  Cities may wish to adopt the entire manual, certain chapters only (in full or in part), or to modify or customize chapters to suit their own specific needs.  The manual can be downloaded in different file formats in order to simplify the editing and customization process.  The manual is intended for three major user groups:

• Municipalities who lack the resources to undertake a major revision of their manuals and are looking for examples to assist in re-tooling their current manuals.
• Municipalities that want to adopt the latest thinking in street design.
• Designers, planners, and engineers who are looking for tools to provide flexibility within their existing street design standards.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) has released the digital version of their Urban Bikeway Design Guide, laid out specifically for printing.  (See our earlier blog post on the online version of the guide.)

The Guide is now available for free as a PDF download (both low and high resolution versions).  In addition, a hard-copy, bound version is available free to NACTO members and for $40 to others.

An article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, seeking to quantify benefits from reducing automobile usage for short urban and suburban trips, finds that reducing these short automobile trips and replacing them with active transport would yield major health benefits.  The authors estimate that, for the 11 metropolitan areas of the Upper Midwest, shifting 50% of short trips (less than 8 kilometers) to bicycle would yield a yearly savings of approximately $3.8 billion from avoided mortality and reduced health care costs, and the combined benefits of improved air quality and physical fitness would exceed $7 billion per year.

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 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.”

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.

An updated and enhanced “Official Rulings” page on the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) website is now available.  The webpage -- which is a work in progress -- is a searchable database where you can obtain information about requests to FHWA for changes, experiments, and interpretations related to the MUTCD.  Users can search the database through a variety of fields, including keywords, with predefined selections that include “Pedestrians,” “Pedestrian Signals,” and “Bikes”.

The Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2198 is dedicated to studies on non-motorized transportation.  The volume contains 17 papers on incorporating bicycle and pedestrian topics in university transportation courses, high-visibility school crosswalks, safety effectiveness of leading pedestrian intervals, driver and pedestrian behavior at uncontrolled crosswalks, pedestrian traffic flow in confined passageways, roadway intersection characteristics and pedestrian crash risk, and pedestrian-vehicle conflicts.

The issue also examines pedestrian safety prediction for urban signalized intersections, a real-time system for tracking and classification of pedestrians and bicycles, use of pedestrian crash data to identify unsafe transit service segments, the effect of street network design on walking and biking, multimodal driveway design, shared-use paths adjacent to the roadway, signal timing optimization models for a midblock pedestrian crossing, pedestrian safety retraining for elementary and middle school students, and modeling the evacuation of crowded pedestrian facilities.

The New Zealand Transport Agency released a report exploring case studies at eight New Zealand sites where the implementation of new pedestrian facilities or the improvement of existing facilities led to increased pedestrian usage and improved perception of the sites.

The report examines pedestrian rates both before and after facility implementation and analyzes accompanying factors such as safety, delay, and directness. It also highlights an expected pedestrian-usage model, based on before and after data analysis, for planners and funding agents to use when planning new or improved facilities, as well as for use in project evaluation.

The report demonstrates study methods that can be replicated locally in the Chicago region.

As part of its Promising Practices and Solutions in Accessible Transportation series, Easter Seals Project ACTION, in partnership with the Transportation Research Board (TRB), is presenting a webinar on a recently released report by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) on the issues and design solutions for navigation of roundabouts and channelized right-turn lanes by pedestrians who have visual impairments.  (See our earlier blog post on this report.)

The webinar will feature panelists’ evaluation of accessibility at these complex intersection types and their understandings of the impacts of site geometry and operational characteristics on accessibility. The webinar will present the findings on infrastructure-based treatments aimed at improving the accessibility of roundabouts and channelized right-turn lanes. The panelists will include a certified orientation and mobility specialist, as well as a registered professional engineer.

The webinar will take place Wednesday, August 17, 2011, from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. CT.  The webinar is free but space is limited and advance registration is required.

The Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University released a report exploring the state of the knowledge related to integrating transit and bicycling, and proposes an analysis framework for communities and transit agencies to consider in efforts to maximize the integration of bicycling and transit.

The report also attempts to gauge preferences for bicycle and transit integration strategies among consumers, and suggests a preliminary application to evaluate four bicycle and transit integration strategies.

The U.S. Access Board has released for public comment proposed guidelines for accessible public rights-of-way.  The guidelines provide design criteria for public streets and sidewalks, including pedestrian access routes, street crossings, curb ramps and blended transitions, on-street parking, transit stops/shelters, street furniture, and other elements.  The specifications comprehensively address access that accommodates all types of disabilities, including mobility and vision impairments, while taking into account conditions and constraints that may impact compliance, such as space limitations and terrain, as indicated in an overview of the rule.

The deadline for public comments is November 23, 2011.  The proposed guidelines can be accessed, and comments submitted or viewed, through the Federal government's rulemaking portal.  Instructions for submitting comments are included in the proposal and on the Federal Register webpage.

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, the Access Board will conduct a public webinarto review the proposal on August 9, 2011.

On July 26, the U.S. Access Board will publish proposed guidelines for accessible public rights-of-way.  On that day, the guidelines will be posted on the Board’s website and will be available for public comment for four months.  The Board will conduct several events to present the proposed rule and to solicit comment, including a public briefing and press conference, a webinar, and hearings.

• Public Briefing and Press Conference (July 26, 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET)

Members of the public and the media are invited to attend a Board briefing and press conference on the proposal on July 26 from 11:00 – 12:30 at the Board’s meeting space at 1331 F Street, NW, Suite 800, in downtown Washington, D.C.  Board representatives will review requirements of the proposed guidelines, highlight information sought from the public on various topics, and field questions from the press. 

• Webinar (August 9, 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. CT)

The Board will conduct a public webinar to review the proposed rule and to discuss subjects where input from the public is sought.  To register for this free webinar, visit www.accessibilityonline.org.

• Public Hearings (September 12 in Dallas, and November 9 in Washington, D.C.)

The Board will hold public hearings on the proposed rule in Dallas, Texas on September 12 (9:30 to 11:30 a.m. CT) and Washington, D.C. on November 9 (9:30 to 11:30 a.m. ET).  Members of the public will have the opportunity to provide comments on the rule at these hearings.  Further details will be included in the published rule.