Guest Column by Larry Cole.
The Montgomery County Council is currently considering approval of the county’s first Pedestrian Master Plan, intended to make walking more safe, comfortable, convenient and accessible. Pedestrian needs have been routinely addressed in the county’s master plans for many years, but this is the first standalone document to address them in a comprehensive way.
Writing a master plan is not an easy task. In addition to legal and procedural requirements, a lot of technical information has to be obtained, coordination done with agencies outside the planning department and last but not least, tremendous coordination has to take place with the public in soliciting opinions and providing information about the plan status and opportunities for input. Planning staff then makes recommendations about what should be done moving forward to achieve the goals of the plan. All of that has to be wrapped up in a package that’s consistent and makes sense.
This master plan falls short on a number of issues.
The plan has four main goals but they are not ranked. While this might not cause a problem with most plans, safety has always been paramount in every transportation plan. In fact, safeguarding the public’s health, safety and welfare is an engineer’s highest ethical requirement. Dethroning pedestrian safety as the primary consideration of a pedestrian master plan is a startling and unacceptable proposal by the planning department.
The lack of prioritization of the four overall goals and the associated 130 key actions is a huge problem when the price tag to fulfill these recommendations is more than $7 billion and it’s time to make funding decisions with limited resources. It’s also a particular concern because, unlike most master plans, most of this plan’s recommendations are not based on specific locations but instead on generic types of situations.
The proposed rating system for individual projects is also flawed, as it would give 18 potential points – out of a possible 100 – to pedestrian comfort but only 15 points for pedestrian safety. In effect, the Plan states how people feel – as determined in part by surveys – is more important than whether they are demonstrably safe.
A downgrading of pedestrian safety could make it harder for safety projects to compete for pedestrian funding. That’s of particular concern for the Vision Zero program to eliminate roadway deaths and injuries by 2030, which the Council adopted in 2016 to eliminate traffic deaths by 2030. More than half the time has elapsed but while pedestrian injuries have been reduced, pedestrian fatalities are now roughly what they were in 1999.
The goal of eliminating pedestrian fatalities and severe injuries is of the highest importance, but just keeping track of these numbers is a measure of failure to provide a safe system. Additional proactive metrics, such as monitoring the incidence of red-light running, speeding, and other misbehavior should be used by the County Departments of Transportation and Police to identify problems before they become pedestrian crashes.
Council staff recommends in addition to making pedestrian safety a higher priority than pedestrian comfort, that ADA improvements should also be a higher priority. I agree but we should also aim to meet ADA Best Practices rather than just the minimum ADA accommodation that’s required by law.
In the discussion of whether Montgomery County could achieve a more pedestrian-friendly roadway system if we just took over state roads, there was also discussion of whether we could get them to follow our standards. A better first step would be to get them to correct where they fail to follow state and national standards. Examples include:
- MSHA’s standard lane striping violates their own state version of the national Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, ignoring the presence of unsignalized intersections by continuing the standard striping right through the intersections, signaling to the driver that there’s nothing he has to slow down for, even the potential presence of a pedestrian who actually has the right of way to cross the road at such intersections.
- MSHA does not follow the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) recommendation to place guardrail at the curb line where there are sidewalks. Instead, guardrail is most often placed behind the sidewalk for ease of construction even though it makes the sidewalk potentially more dangerous when an errant vehicle mounts the curb and slides along the guardrail’s face.
- MSHA’s lighting policy of lighting only intersections – and typically only signalized intersections – does not conform to AASHTO lighting recommendations and is aimed more at cost-containment. Continuous roadway lighting should be provided to enhance pedestrian safety.
There’s not a single reference to AASHTO in the master plan despite the fact that the interpretation of AASHTO’s guidance by county and state engineers on the design of roads, guardrail, lighting, and pedestrian and bicycle facilities over the years has been the greatest source of disagreement with planning staff and with pedestrian advocates. Planners and engineers need to be able to speak the same language.
Lastly, out of over 700,000 traffic citations in Montgomery County in the past decade, only 3,300 have been for failure to yield to a pedestrian. That’s less than one per day and less than a half-percent of all citations while pedestrians are involved in 4% of all crashes and represent 27% of the severe injuries and fatalities. Greatly increased enforcement is needed to ensure pedestrian safety. Some of that additional enforcement can be automated but not all.
Summary
Here’s what I think should happen from this point forward:
Master plan structure
- The Recommendations section should include a list of all key actions at the start of the chapter so that they can be understood as a group.
- The plan should include a list of all references that were used and all that should be used in the master plan’s implementation, including design manuals by AASHTO, the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), so that all parties involved in the design and review are working from the same baseline.
Master plan content
- Pedestrian safety should be the plan’s primary goal and safety improvements that would further Vision Zero’s goals should be given the highest priority.
- All new construction should meet ADA Best Practices wherever possible and ADA considerations should outweigh all concerns other than safety.
- The rating system for individual pedestrian projects should be revised to reflect safety as the top priority.
- The plan should identify where implementing agencies are regularly not following nationally accepted engineering standards to the detriment of pedestrian safety.
Larry Cole is a registered professional engineer who was the highway and pedestrian coordinator for the Montgomery County Planning Department for 20 years, reviewing almost every publicly funded transportation project proposed during that time and serving on every County-sponsored pedestrian safety committee and working group.