Robson Street, a major arterial in downtown Vancouver, BC, can be two very different places. On a Saturday in late summer, I found an entire block of Robson closed to cars and filled with people, some lounging on wooden benches under big yellow umbrellas. Amazing smells wafted from nearby food trucks, and a crowd gathered to watch an artist create a replica of the Mona Lisa on the pavement. The following Monday, the block had reverted to its typical configuration, with car traffic on the roadway and pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. I could make out only a hint of the artwork painted on the asphalt just two days earlier.
Collection: Family-Friendly Cities
Photo Essay: A Family’s Vancouver Bicycle Cruise
When my husband Jason and I planned a trip to Vancouver, BC, we decided to bring our family’s bikes just in case. With our eight-year-old son Orion in tow, I wasn’t sure we’d have the chance to ride unless we sought out an off-street trail. To my surprise, we were able to ride—and not just on trails we had to drive or take a bus to, but through the heart of downtown Vancouver on a mixture of greenways and separated cycle lanes.
The last time we were able to ride in such an urban environment was when we lived in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then, Orion was nearly 2 years old. We bought a bike with a child seat in the rear and made our way through Copenhagen’s neighborhoods on a daily basis. The city’s network of traffic-calmed neighborhood roads, cycle tracks on main streets, and an off-street greenway network made bicycling with a small child comfortable and easy.
At that time, North American cities were taking a different approach. Bicycling advocates wanted to be treated as equal road users and argued that the safest place for them was to take their rightful place on the road in traffic. While I am all for equality, I definitely didn’t feel safe riding on roads in Seattle with or without my toddler. I kept to Seattle’s buses and sidewalks, not really seeing bicycling as an option for me or my young family.
Fast-forward to today, and Pacific Northwest cities are now embracing the “interested but concerned” bicycle demographic, residents like me who might ride but need better infrastructure. Prominent projects have shifted from sharrows to separated bicycle lanes, local bikeways, and neighborhood greenways. Transportation planners are developing street networks that serve people of “all ages and abilities,” where pedestrian and bicycle traffic is prioritized over cars.
Seattle’s Vision Zero Plan
Seattle became the second major Northwest city this week to promise to end all traffic deaths and serious injuries by embracing Vision Zero, a transportation approach that prioritizes keeping people alive and building streets that work for everyone.
The biggest changes for the next year are: Reduce downtown speed limits by 5 mph to 25 mph, improve 10 downtown intersections to benefit people walking, create slow “20 mph zones” in 5-10 neighborhoods where too many crashes happen, lower speeds on a dozen city arterials to 30 mph or below, improve the city’s most dangerous corridors, add 12 cameras to catch school zone speeders, add nearly 20 miles of safer bikeways, build 14 blocks of new sidewalks, and improve street crossings in 40 locations.
The city’s long-term goal is to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, in part by using data to drive investments and enforcement efforts to where they’re needed most.
[prettyquote align=”right”]”We should not accept death as a byproduct of commuting. It’s time to slow down to the speed of life.”—Seattle’s Vision Zero Plan [/prettyquote]
Vision Zero holds that people driving, people walking, people biking, people driving trucks, people using wheelchairs on our streets will all, from time to time, make mistakes. And that cities should design roadways so that those groups of people don’t come into conflict as often, and when they do, the consequences shouldn’t be fatal.
Portland’s Vision Zero Plan
Last week, I outlined some of the key principles of Vision Zero—an approach to designing streets that prioritizes safety and human life above other considerations. Today, the city of Portland rolled out its Vision Zero commitments, including an ambitious goal of working toward zero traffic deaths and serious injuries within the next decade.
Seattle District Loses Bid for Downtown School
Seattle Public Schools officials confirmed this weekend that the district lost its bid to acquire a surplus federal building and turn it into a downtown elementary school. (For more background, see our earlier posts here, here, and here.)
The federal General Services Administration did not immediately disclose who submitted the winning $16 million bid for the former Federal Reserve Bank Building at the corner of Second Avenue and Spring Street, and it’s unclear what plans the new owner has for the building.
Opening a downtown elementary school has been a top priority for downtown advocates and parents, whose children currently have long bus rides to “neighborhood” schools on Capitol Hill or near the Central/International District. Seattle Public Schools had the opportunity to acquire the 90,000-square-foot empty bank building—for free and with little competition—through a federal disposition process that awards surplus buildings to agencies that will put them back into public use within three years.
That three-year timeline spooked school board members, who rejected the option because the district had no renovation funds in its current budget. They decided to try to acquire the building at a public auction, which would have provided additional time and flexibility to line up funding. But it opened the district up to competition from other agencies and private developers, at least one of which had deeper pockets. The district had an upper limit of $5.8 million, officials said Monday, based on the available funds that were included in the last school construction levy for downtown school planning.
What is Vision Zero?
When you ask people to estimate how many people are killed on American roads each year, the answers vary widely: 1 million? 500,000? 40,000? 2,000?
As the video below shows, when you ask them what Washington state’s traffic death goal should be, most people have no idea. They offer tentative guesses, ranging from fewer than 100 to 5,000. (For context, there are actually about 33,000 annual US traffic deaths now, and 437 people lost their lives on Washington roads in 2013.)
But watch the video until minute 2:22, when the interviewers ask people what the traffic death goal for their family should be. Everyone knows immediately: Zero. Zero. Zero. None. Absolutely zero. Zero, of course. I would want zero. (Except for the funny guy: “A couple of them I’d like to run over if that would help your numbers any.”)
When the same people are asked again what the state’s traffic death goal should be, everyone smiles. Now they have an answer they believe in: Zero. That should be the goal for everyone.
That’s the driving principle behind Vision Zero, a movement that started in Sweden in 1997. More recently, it’s spread to US cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and even Los Angeles. Both Portland and Seattle plan to roll out local Vision Zero plans too. So it’s worth examining what Vision Zero is—and what it is not.
Seattle’s Downtown School Is Back in Play
The prospects for a downtown Seattle school brightened somewhat yesterday, with a unanimous school board vote allowing the district to bid on the empty Federal Reserve Bank building at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Spring Street.
The federal government is auctioning off the vacant building—which is the right size to house 660 students—to the highest bidder. With the auction closing next Wednesday, no one has submitted a bid so far. But the school district will likely have competition—at least one other entity has paid the auction’s $100,000 registration fee, officials have said.
The feds reduced the minimum bid from $5 million to $1 million last week, and buying the building outright would remove timing and funding issues that were earlier stumbling blocks for the district.
Seattle remains the largest Northwest city without a downtown public school, and opening one has been the top priority for a growing number of urban parents who want to raise families in downtown Seattle. Many move to the suburbs or other Seattle neighborhoods before their kids enter kindergarten. The ones who plan to stay argue their kids should have the same access to a convenient neighborhood school as families living elsewhere in the city. As downtown parent Michael George put it:
This would be a gamechanger for us. A downtown school is more important than any other issue. Its not just about having a school. Right now having a family with kids downtown is difficult because there aren’t many playgrounds and there isn’t a place to create a community around. What a school would do is help kids and parents from throughout downtown connect around something. I think that’s what we’re really looking for.
Why 20 Is Plenty on Neighborhood Streets
Next time you’re in a car driving through a residential neighborhood, try this experiment. Glance at the speedometer when you’re in the middle of a block. You’ll probably find it’s pretty easy to reach or top 25 mph, the standard residential speed limit for cities in Oregon and Washington.
I did this yesterday on my way to pick up my daughter from elementary school. And you know what I got from other parents walking on the sidewalk, often with a toddler or two in tow? Super dirty looks.
To someone on foot navigating narrow streets with parked cars and unprotected intersections, it feels like you’re driving too fast. And they’re probably not wrong. As I was cruising up to 25 mph (on streets outside the school zone), I tried to imagine that a ball rolled right in front of me with a kid chasing it. Or that someone with an armful of groceries opened a car door without looking, or that a pedestrian in dark clothes stepped into a poorly lit intersection. Would I be able to stop in time? Maybe, maybe not. It would depend on how soon I saw whatever I was about to hit.
Then drop your speed to 20 mph. With that small change, it becomes much easier to halt the momentum of 3000 pounds of metal. When I drove through the neighborhood at 20 mph, what reaction did I get from the moms and dads? Smiles. Polite waves as I stopped easily to let them cross in front of me. Like I was a safe, respectful driver (probably a parent!) who wasn’t trying to kill their children.
It turns out that the mom scowl is grounded in science. That’s why cities that are getting serious about pedestrian safety and creating family-friendly cities are lowering speed limits in residential neighborhoods to 20 mph. And thanks to recent changes in Washington and Oregon state law that made it easier for cities to do so, a handful of Northwest cities are beginning to explore or implement the change.
How Portland’s Neighborhood Greenways Evolved
In my last post, I focused on Seattle’s nascent neighborhood greenway system, which aims to create a network of residential streets that elevates the needs of kids, cyclists, parents pushing strollers, elderly shoppers with carts, pet walkers, and other foot-powered travelers.
To get a sense of how that works, we only need look to the city that Seattle stole many of its ideas from: Portland. It’s been building some version of greenways since the 1980s. There, they evolved from traffic-calming projects to bike boulevards to what the city now calls neighborhood greenways.
In their most modern incarnation, family-friendly greenways elevate the needs of pedestrians and cyclists by making it difficult for cars to mindlessly speed through residential neighborhoods—usually through some combination of lower speed limits, speed humps, intersection art, other calming techniques, or traffic diverters that force vehicles off the greenway.
They also aim to reduce the chances that a walker or cyclist will be hit by a car. Typically, the city installs stop signs that force drivers to stop at minor intersections before crossing the greenway. A range of improvements—from signage to refuge islands to activated traffic signals—are installed to help pedestrians and bikers safely cross major intersections.
That formula wasn’t locked in overnight, though. It took years for Portland to learn how to build great greenways. Here are a few of the key takeaways:
A Mom Rediscovers Her Bike
Editor’s Note 5/3/16: Does the record-warm spring have you craving to hop back on your bike… but still a bit nervous to navigate busy city streets? In this popular article, former Sightliner Jennifer Langston shows how you can get around on neighborhood greenways, a network of family-friendly roads. Read (and ride) on!
I haven’t used a bike to get across town in six years. I know because that’s how long it’s been since I had a baby.
It wasn’t entirely the baby’s fault—options and resources for family biking in the Northwest have exploded. But having less time, a rotting garage door (now fixed!) and an inconvenient daycare in automobile-choked Amazonia were barriers to using my bike more often.
I’m somewhere on the spectrum between the “enthused and confident” and “interested but concerned” bike user that so many cities are trying to win over. During the pre-baby year I spent in Cambridge, Mass., my bike was a main mode of transportation. Since then, I’ve bought a used Burley trailer, biked recreationally, and occasionally hauled my kid a few blocks to the grocery store or playground. But I assumed Seattle’s bike infrastructure was too unintuitive and stressful to meet my needs for getting around. From my pre-baby days, I recalled bike lanes to nowhere, frequently having to pull over to check a map, not being sure I was in the right place, thinking sharrows were a mean joke, and being thankful if you had a white stripe that separated you from oblivious drivers in cars that were moving pretty fast.
So I was genuinely surprised last week when I discovered it was relatively easy to take a mapless bike ride from my house near Woodland Park to I-5 to Puget Sound, with only a vague goal of testing the two neighborhood greenways in my neck of the woods.
Children give you an easy benchmark by which to measure how much things change. And I can unequivocally say that in the last six years, Seattle’s bike infrastructure has gotten noticeably better for someone like me. In this post, I’m going to focus on neighborhood greenways—a tool that Portland has used widely (which I’ll discuss in a future post) and that Seattle is now banking on to attract left-out bikers, create a family-friendly network of calmer streets, and make the city safer for people of all ages and abilities.
