Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering

By Lynn Peterson, Elizabeth Doerr and Janette Sadik-Khan

 “Seventy years of a car-only approach—not car-centric, it’s car-only—is actually not just non-driver hostile, it’s driver hostile. No one benefits.” —Beth Osborne, Director, Transportation for America

The car-only approach in transportation planning and engineering has led to the construction of roadways that have torn apart and devalued communities, especially Black and Brown communities.  Forging a new path to repair this damage requires a community solutions-based approach to planning, designing, and building our roadways. When Lynn Peterson began working as a transportation engineer, she was taught to evaluate roadway projects based only on metrics related to driver safety, allowable speed for the highest number of cars, project schedule, and budget. Involving the community and collaborating with peers were never part of the discussion. Today, Peterson is a recognized leader in transportation planning and engineering, known for her approach that is rooted in racial equity, guided by a process of community engagement, and includes collaboration with other professionals.

In Roadways for People, Lynn Peterson draws from her personal experience and interviews with leaders in the field to showcase new possibilities within transportation engineering and planning. She incorporated a community-solutions based approach in her work at Metro, TriMet, and while running the Washington State Department of Transportation, where she played an instrumental role in the largest transportation bill in that state’s history. The community solutions-based approach moves away from the narrow standards of traditional transportation design and focuses instead on a process that involves consistent feedback, learning loops, and meaningful and regular community engagement. This approach seeks to address the transportation needs of the most historically marginalized members of the community.

Roadways for People is written to empower professionals and policymakers to create transportation solutions that serve people rather than cars. Examples across the U.S.—from Portland, Oregon to Baltimore, Maryland—show what is possible with a community-centered approach. As traditional highway expansions are put on pause around the country, professionals and policymakers have an opportunity to move forward with a better approach. Peterson shows them how.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642832242

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Roadways for People

Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering

Lynn Peterson

With Elizabeth Doerr

Washington

Covelo

© 2022 Lynn Peterson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932265

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Keywords: Community benefits agreement, community engagement, community solutions–based approach, context-sensitive design (CSD), context-sensitive solutions (CSS), demand management, gentrification, least-cost planning, performance-based Practical Design, plangineer, racial equity, transportation engineering, transportation planning, urban renewal

ISBN-13: 978-1-64283-224-2 (electronic)

In loving memory of John Fregonese

Stand in the place where you live

Now face north

Think about direction

Wonder why you haven’t before

Now stand in the place where you work

Now face west

Think about the place where you live

Wonder why you haven’t before

—R.E.M., Stand

Contents

Foreword by Janette Sadik-Khan

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Why Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift

Chapter 2: The Evolution of Approaches to Transportation Engineering and Planning

Chapter 3: Addressing the Legacy of Racist Transportation and Housing Policy

Chapter 4: Getting Out of Our Silos

Chapter 5: The Community Solutions–Based Approach in Practice

Chapter 6: Building Communities of People’s Dreams

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

Foreword

By Janette Sadik-Khan

The year 2020 said the quiet parts about transportation out loud: transportation policy is health, economic, environmental, and equity policy.

The pandemic, economic shocks, and racial justice protests that convulsed the United States exposed long-standing structural inequalities and challenged cities to do better. While millions of office workers transitioned to Zooming from kitchen tables, workers in the face-to-face economy still had to travel long distances, often by public transportation, to reach jobs in medical offices and in warehouses and grocery stores so food and supply chains didn’t break. Many public transportation operators slashed service in the face of a nationwide 79 percent drop in passengers, squeezing transit-dependent workers and leaving swaths of cities without reliable and affordable access to shopping, COVID-19 testing, or health care.

While the pandemic was a once-in-a-century development, the inequality of transportation access was anything but. In American cities from New York to Chicago to Houston to Los Angeles, non-White and less affluent neighborhoods have historically been more likely to have the fewest transportation choices; more likely to have mobility obstacles to reaching jobs, schools, and opportunities; and more likely to be exposed to pollution and the danger of vehicles speeding on un-crossable roads. Government policy for many years has reinforced this, building highways through historically Black and Brown neighborhoods, displacing communities and cutting them off from one another.

In the wake of the events of 2020, transportation leaders must view their obligation to meet the mobility needs of their cities within this greater context, with a duty to identify and reverse historical patterns of transportation disinvestment and injustice.

What is accepted and what is ignored in the physical design of cities reinforces (and to some extent defines) the spectrum of opportunities in the lives of the multitudes who live in cities. A multimillion-dollar bridge allowing office workers to drive five miles downtown is meaningless for a carless resident trying to reach her job at the supermarket two neighborhoods in the opposite direction—a trip that may be an unwalkable, unbikeable, two-bus odyssey. A city where almost every trip, whether to work, school, or shopping or to see family, can’t be completed without a car commits residents to the cost of vehicle ownership and reinforces the lack of community and physical activity.

City planners must also recognize that the process is the project. It isn’t a necessary evil or a means to an end. Good projects can fail when community residents distrust the people who proposed them or feel their input was ignored.

In many cities, the review process for public projects is fraught with fights over agency—who ultimately does and doesn’t have the right to make decisions for a community. In the archetypal public meeting room, be it an elementary school assembly room or a public meeting hall, there’s a cadre of public officials armed with PowerPoint presentations, flip charts, and artistic renderings that depict happy people enjoying the proposed project. Officials invoke a litany of statistics and assertions that this proposal—a new residential development, a library or halfway house, a minor traffic change—is the best solution, perhaps the only one, and that any alternative would come only with delay and great expense.

Observing this from below the dais are community members who do not recognize these presenters and do not understand how the proposal at issue came to top the agenda while long-standing neighborhood concerns are ignored. It’s likely that the most important community voices aren’t even in the room: Who even knows the meeting is happening, and who has time to travel across town on a school or work night to wait patiently for a chance to make a few seconds of comment about something that seems like a done deal?

I titled my book for the conflict sparked when these two misaligned forces meet Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution. Too often, planners plan too big, starting with a too-large proposal and viewing public outreach as a perfunctory step, assuming that community residents will oppose any proposal and not doing enough to address skepticism. On the other side are neighborhoods that think too small, reflexively rejecting even modest changes to the status quo and then looking for reasons to affirm their decision. Both cases are symptomatic of long-term disengagement and a lack of shared vision and common language.

The lesson from this isn’t to do nothing, for planners to ignore local concerns, or for residents to oppose projects whenever they feel slighted. The lesson is to begin the process by building a relationship, by listening and communicating to build trust and shared purpose. This process doesn’t have to begin with a big transportation idea but can start with a simple question: What is the problem in your neighborhood that you want to solve?

For idealistic planners committed to using their power to help improve the lives of city residents, it’s not enough to have their heart in the right place or to resolve to cut red tape. Any commitment to action is primarily a commitment to community openness, transparency, and reciprocity—to learn from the expertise of the people for whom they are working. Residents in a neighborhood know their communities best, and while they may not have all the answers, if you help, you may be able to help them make the best decisions.

As New York City’s transportation commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in my work with mayors around the world through Bloomberg Associates, and as chair of the largest consortium of transportation leaders through the National Association of City Transportation Officials, I have seen too many good projects suffer from a lack of community connection with the resulting product. Meanwhile, bad projects—like wasteful highway construction and archaic roadway rehabilitations—are rubber-stamped, eating up the vast majority of scarce resources while reinforcing traffic congestion and car domination of most city space.

We broke that cycle in New York City, creating many projects across the city quickly by using provisional materials such as paint, planters, and stone blocks left over from bridge projects. Offering residents projects that they could see, touch, and feel using only easy-to-remove materials reduced anxiety and won us the leeway to try out plazas and bike lanes on a demonstration basis. Our outreach teams reversed the traditional community meeting model, facilitating tabletop discussions where stakeholders could speak face-to-face with city officials instead of being lectured to. This also allowed everyone in the room to be heard, not just those with the strongest opinions and the loudest voices.

The data and operation of our initial projects in New York City neighborhoods helped convince communities to build these projects with permanent materials such as pavers, benches, trees, and barrier protection—and inspired other neighborhood residents to seek similar transformations. After all, who wants to be left out of a valued community benefit that they see other neighborhoods enjoying? This virtuous cycle has brought more than seventy plazas to all five city boroughs, including opening Broadway through Times Square to pedestrians, creating nearly four hundred miles of bike lanes and the nation’s largest bike-share system, implementing seven rapid bus routes, and building the safest streets in a century, with the fewest traffic deaths. This doesn’t mean there was unanimous support and that everyone was happy with the changes, though broad majorities supported them. But it revealed that most people were united in their dislike of the status quo and that if you give people a choice, they will choose better streets.

Deferring to community knowledge doesn’t mean granting veto power to obstructionists. Reflexive not-in-my-backyard attitudes have stymied plans to address traffic congestion, traffic safety, and environmental racism. Many project opponents claim that projects would actually worsen or cause the very problems that they are designed to solve—affordable housing would bring undesirable people to neighborhoods, bike lanes would prompt pollution by reducing car lanes. While agreement is difficult to achieve, governments can’t just give up in the face of misinformation or unsupported fears, and they must enlist communities in a bias toward action.

The greatest community power isn’t the ability to say no and halt an unwanted project. It is the power to say yes that is the highest of civic virtues. It is the power of communities to apply their insights to frame the problem and then move toward designing and developing the solution. It’s the power of shared ownership when the project is complete and neighbors recognize it as a product of their efforts. It is the power of understanding what the possibilities are and knowing what to ask for that transforms neighborhoods and the people who live within them.

On the other side of the room, the highest civic virtue for city planners isn’t to deliver a perfect proposal or to succeed in steering a worthy project to completion over community opposition. The greatest civic virtue for planners is to expand the scope of the street—what both residents and city officials alike conceive as possible.

In recent years, there’s been a revolution in cities to reclaim roadways from cars to allow people to walk and bike and to clear the way for buses, using designs in use in cities such as New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, but also increasingly in car-dominated metropolises such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Austin, and Salt Lake City. There is still a long way to go before American cities can truly become walkable, bikeable, and transit friendly again, but there have never been more powerful examples to argue for their expansion.

We’re also seeing more examples than ever of converting legacy infrastructure and reallocating public space to connect communities—a twenty-seven-mile greenway in progress in Detroit, the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, the surge of investment along Atlanta’s BeltLine, an entire bridge across the Willamette River in Portland devoted to transit, walkers, and bike riders.

We must now bring the same principles of transformative design for our cities toward reimagining community engagement based on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and rebuilding of trust. There are few authorities as equipped to achieve this as Lynn Peterson. This book distills her thirty-year career, her personal journey, and the power of examples from transportation professionals and public servants across the country working toward a community solutions–based approach. This expertise spans decades and also her roles in city, metro, county, state, and national positions of influence to make transportation work for the sake of people.

If planners dare to change their cities, and if they intend to fulfill their promises to reverse structural inequalities, then the public’s projects and processes must be brought in line with principles of collaboration, justice, and equity. They can start not with a big idea but with a question and with the deep experience reflected in these pages.

Preface

Who do you consider to be within your close circle of trusted friends, family, and colleagues? For many of us, that circle has probably changed as we’ve grown up. We begin our childhood with circles of parents, family, friends—typically the community in which our parents raise us. Then, in school, our circle expands a bit more to include classmates and teachers. When we enter the workforce, our circle includes colleagues, supervisors, and mentors. Our personal adult circles include friends and our children’s friends and their families.

In those early days, our close circle is largely out of our control. And often it’s within the close circle of childhood that we learn the cultural norms of our community. It’s where we develop place-specific and culturally specific language based on where we live, who our parents are, and the community within which we are raised. It is the foundation on which we build our worldview.

But as we grow up, we begin to have more control over those circles. We have opportunities to expand our lens in either work or higher education. What we know about the world evolves. And in our professions, even though we might seem to have control over our circles, that evolution still takes place within the confines of a profession combined with lived experiences.

I believe that even though we have control over our circles and our learning as we grow older, we often let the environments we put ourselves into do the work for us. I think we can do more to break out of what the cultural norms have taught us and do things differently in our professions. This is something I’ve realized throughout my profession and continue to grow into.

My lived experience while growing up centered on small-city life near a large, diverse public university and dairy farms in rural Wisconsin. It was a place where the number of generations of farmers in one’s family was valued as highly as pursuit of a secondary education. The generations of farmers in your family acknowledged the intrinsic merits of working with the land.

It was the land ethic and the family of public servants I grew up with, in fact, that led me to civil engineering.

I chose the career at the ripe old age of twelve because it sounded cool to build things. As I grew up and started my career, the way I saw my work was influenced by Wisconsin land conservation values, guided by Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, specifically these words from A Sand County Almanac:

A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.¹

However, as I pursued my career, I found that my chosen profession seemed to disregard the idea of a land ethic in deference to gold standard engineering guidelines that tended to remain static and relied on numbers and assumptions. And the performance metrics used to measure narrowly defined outcomes did not always consider the people, the land, and the context.

Engineers like to solve problems. We are presumably given tools to help solve those problems. Many of those tools are mathematical. Many of them simply involve defining the outcome we want and then working backward to find out how to get that outcome.

The problem is that we each have an understanding in our head of what we think the problem is. And we define that from our own lived experience rather than the experiences of the people whose problem we want to solve.

At the beginning of my career, I didn’t often question the idea of these guidelines despite feeling conflicted by the approach. In the mid-1990s, when I was confronted with a particularly contentious highway project from Madison, Wisconsin to the Wisconsin Dells (which I discuss more in chapter 2) that seemed to upend land conservation efforts and conscious development practices and severely impact the region’s farmers’ businesses and way of life, I couldn’t continue in that mode.

I didn’t yet have the framework or terminology to make it better, but I knew enough that I didn’t want to be a part of the problem.

But then, in 1997, I heard Walter Kulash speak at the third annual RailVolution conference in St. Louis. He was a consultant traffic engineer for the advocacy coalition working to decrease the impacts of the project (the very one I had left) on farming, environment, and urban sprawl. Having seen the same problems that drove me to decline the project, Kulash seemingly hit on a different approach that I hadn’t yet understood.

His presentation, Alternatives to Roadways as Usual, described how he looked beyond the initial state proposal to expand the roadway and design it to a more modern highway design speed of 75 miles per hour (with the intent to post the speed at 55 or 60 mph) and instead found a more community-inclusive approach that created a solution that almost everyone could be happy with while achieving the intended goal of creating a safer roadway. He showed that the process of understanding the safety problem went beyond the assumption that design speed must be exactly the same for every similar roadway type, no matter the context. Unfortunately, the State Department of Transportation didn’t take his recommendations and instead proceeded with its plan. I’ll go into more detail about this project in chapter 2.

Hearing his perspectives, though, was illuminating for me. I was fairly fresh in my career, and the context-sensitive approach he spoke about, quite frankly, blew my mind. Before seeing Kulash’s presentation, I knew there should be other ways to achieve engineering and community outcomes at the same time, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. Part of that was because my engineering education didn’t prepare me to think outside of the stated guidelines.

For example, I was taught as a young engineer how to determine the speed to be displayed on an advisory sign for a curve. In what is called the ball-bank indicator test, a technician drives through the curve with a device on the dashboard that indicates comfortable or uncomfortable in relation to speed, friction of pavement and tires, and the level of comfort a passenger would experience at certain speeds and turns. The test requires driving along the roadway segment several times at increasing speeds to determine the most comfortable and safe speed for a sedan.

Until recently, the definition of comfortable relied on a really old assumption related to the friction between a macadam road and a Ford Model T tire, the driver’s height above the roadway (it is much lower now), and the wheel spacing of the vehicle. Additionally, although the transportation field is working to modernize the caution signs, we’re doing so on the basis of very outdated assumptions. The risk is that when people no longer find the signs useful, they will stop paying attention. More important, the lag in challenging the effectiveness of the highway signs highlights how one assumption that was not updated or challenged for more than sixty years can affect the user’s perception of usefulness of the information being provided, in this case the posted speed.

It made me wonder: How many other assumptions need to be challenged annually on the basis of new research?

This is how I realized that my engineering education was only the beginning of a journey of learning. I’ve come to see that having a professional license does not mean that you know all or you know better. It says that you know a good amount about the fundamentals of materials science, physics, and math. And I worry that in our field of perceived concreteness of facts, we aren’t expanding our knowledge from our real-world applications sufficiently and updating old assumptions fast enough.

Only in the past fifteen years has the field started collecting and researching transportation safety data. Earlier interpretations of data seemed to assume that all roads should be high-speed, and that meant the higher the speed of a roadway, the less access and the fewer multimodal transportation options it should have in order to be defined as safe.

While it is true that higher speeds are not safe for multimodal environments, the premise fails to bring in the context. This assumption would be applied to a vibrant downtown main street in the same way it would be to a six-lane highway. The nuance was ignored.

However, more recently, organizations such as the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) have studied and researched safety information and how to make decisions that are community led.

However, engineering professionals aren’t consistently being trained to use the new data. While some training is taking place inside professional organizations, the information is dispersed among reports by the Transportation Research Board’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program and papers by the ITE. Entry-level engineers are still being trained by existing staff relying on sixty- to seventy-year-old assumptions and ways of doing business. We will never be able to apply or think through new methodologies and their applications if we don’t understand the foundational ways to make decisions as individual engineers or as a community.

On top of the limits to our training that have led to professional silos, transportation professionals also find themselves in racial and economic silos. To be frank, planners and transportation engineers do not accurately represent the communities they serve. Given that 87 percent of planners² and 80.3 percent of civil engineers³ in the United States are White (according to the 2013 Census), their lived experiences do not give most of them the tools to accurately understand and define solutions for Black and Brown communities.

While my lived experience taught me about the land ethic in the context of a White rural farming community, I started to realize I had large gaps in my understanding of communities of people who didn’t look like me. As a White woman, I’ve never experienced the systemic racism inherent in the planning process. My family was never redlined out of neighborhoods by city zoning, realtors, or deeds to properties not allowing a sale to anyone of