Our Highways are NOT crumbling

[webny99]

Like Oscar says in reply #93 ...

Goodness gracious. The original post is not yet 24 hours old. This has to be a forum record.

[jeffandnicole]

I can't imagine depending on Amtrak for a regular commute along the eastern seaboard, the way Joe Biden did traveling between Wilmington and DC on a regular basis.

Wilmington is almost within commuter rail range of DC (the commuter rail line ends at the east side of the Susquehanna River in Maryland). It's not a long trip.

Well...it kinda is. 

A 1 way trip on Amtrak is, at minimum, about an hour and a half.  It's only that fast due to limited stops, unlike a commuter train.  A one month pass costs $876.  And unless you live and work at the train stations, you will need to extend your commute to get to the station, and then from station to office.

If you haven't looked up the schedule for Amtrak from Wilmington, you're not going to like the timing.  There's one train that leaves Wilmington to get you to DC by 7am.  The next train doesn't get you there until 9:30am.  Then 10:45am.

Maryland's commuter train may reach up to the Susquahanna River.  But how many people truly ride it from there all the way to DC?  Just because the commuter train extends to an area, doesn't really make the trip worthwhile.

I've often thought, the worst thing NJ Transit did was build the Hamilton, NJ train station.  It made that area a bedroom suburb of NYC. Heck, it made Bucks County, PA a bedroom suburb of NYC.  And those people grumble about the cost of a train ticket, while ignoring that they have a one seat ride for 60 miles into the city. And along with that, people that move into the area to take the train to NYC may ultimately find other jobs that require driving, further congesting the roads.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not against mass transit.  But the reasonableness factor for such long commutes tends to be an issue.

[jeffandnicole]

Like Oscar says in reply #93 ...

Goodness gracious. The original post is not yet 24 hours old. This has to be a forum record.

If the arguments were constructed slightly different, this would be a very good thread.  I wouldn't call it a train wreck, but more like a Red MTA car in the 1980's...not very pretty to look at.

[kphoger]

Hey, what happened?  Can we please get back to quoting huge blocks of text and replying with a single sentence and link to a clearly biased article?

[index]

With 91% of Americans owning a car, we don't lack that.

91% of Americans don't own a car.  91% of American *households* own a car. 

...Less people on the road, less miles driven, and an incentive to save money by not driving, generally equals safer roads by virtue of there being less cars and people driving only out of absolute necessity. Not to mention the whole host of other benefits from new urbanism/mixed use.

Well, that actually hasn't proven to be true, and we only have to look at the first 6 months of this year.  While the link below isn't my favorite due to the source, it apparently is factual.  Fewer people on the roads equaled more accidents and deaths when Covid-19 forced many to stay at home.

https://www.nsc.org/in-the-newsroom/nsc-estimates-us-saw-a-20-jump-in-motor-vehicle-death-rates-in-first-six-months-of-2020-despite-quarantines

If drivers are taking more risks due to emptier roads, that is fixed by educating drivers. Easy solution. Cramming cars onto roads to force drivers to not take as many risks is a workaround, not a solution.

...I have to walk an hour just to get out of residential zoning here and to any point of interest at all, that just can't be called pedestrian accessibility, and the same situation goes for a lot of the country too.

I take issue with this because either you or the people you live with (friends/parents/whomever) made a very specific choice to live there, knowing full well that businesses were not in that area and may not be in that area in the future.  However, that does not make pedestrian accessibility an issue in this country.  Everyone has a choice where they want to live.  Some areas may not meet their needs in safety, affordability, etc, but that's a choice you have to weigh when looking for a home. In fact, maybe for some people, being away from businesses was the appeal of the area.  Maybe, even, you're complaining to us because you couldn't win your argument with the people you live with who wanted to move where you moved to. 

The good news...guess what - you're 18!  You can make that decision on your own to move out now!

I moved here in 2005, smartass.

In what world are you living in where you think people fresh into adulthood can suddenly just start instantly living on their own? Have you been living under a rock since the Great Recession? The COVID-19 Recession? The world is a very different place than your experience in the early 90s. You know, that crazy event that did things like trapped homes on the rental market, created the worker's hellhole known as the gig economy that we know today, further reduced the amount of use that college degrees have, hit youth as soon as they were coming of age, and shut many young people out from upward mobility in the near future? And in what kind of world is that an argument against inadequate infrastructure? This isn't the 20th century anymore. People can't just catapult themselves out of their mother's womb, shake someone's hand, and immediately get a job and a house wherever they want. The world that this country is in simply does not work like that.

Also, your one-off examples are not necessarily representative of the country as a whole.  Yes, it's stupid whenever a sidewalk isn't 'wheelchair width'.  I cringe when I see a utility pole or traffic light post stuck in the middle of a sidewalk.  But citing 1 area in an entire city shouldn't be used as an example of the city as a whole.  Same thing with this person you know that had a bicycle accident. It's very unfortunate, but again, not something that's exclusive to the US.

There is a pattern that has been clearly pointed out that is detrimental to those who travel on foot.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/it-s-time-to-fix-america-s-urban-sidewalk-gap
https://americawalks.org/americas-worst-walking-city-gets-back-on-its-feet/
https://archive.curbed.com/2018/2/7/16980682/city-sidewalk-repair-future-walking-neighborhood
https://www.popsci.com/politics-versus-sidewalks/
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/05/24/dangerous-by-design-how-the-u-s-builds-roads-that-kill-pedestrians/
It is also no coincidence that the states with the roads worst for pedestrians are in the Sun Belt...which has been experiencing lots of suburban sprawl in its growth. Some of the cities with the worst sprawl are located in this region.


It is impossible to deny this issue exists.

[1995hoo]

I can't imagine depending on Amtrak for a regular commute along the eastern seaboard, the way Joe Biden did traveling between Wilmington and DC on a regular basis.

Wilmington is almost within commuter rail range of DC (the commuter rail line ends at the east side of the Susquehanna River in Maryland). It's not a long trip.

Well...it kinda is. 

A 1 way trip on Amtrak is, at minimum, about an hour and a half.  It's only that fast due to limited stops, unlike a commuter train.  A one month pass costs $876.  And unless you live and work at the train stations, you will need to extend your commute to get to the station, and then from station to office.

....

In Biden's case, as I type this Google Maps is estimating it's a 15-minute drive between his house and the Amtrak station. (How do I know where he lives? A few years ago when some guy was sending mail bombs or something to various officials, the one that was sent to him appeared on the news and they inadvertently failed to fuzz out his address.) That's not too bad.

A lot of people who make those longer commutes use the time to work. I certainly do when I take the train to and from New York. That is indeed one reason why I typically opt for the train instead of driving.

[1995hoo]

Hey, what happened?  Can we please get back to quoting huge blocks of text and replying with a single sentence and link to a clearly biased article?

[jmacswimmer]

As for the media -- yes, they're always looking for shock value in a story. I remember several years ago when a bridge collapsed in one of the west coast states. It was a truss bridge on I-5, I believe. It wasn't that long after the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota. We got all sort of press calls about that from reporters wondering if we had any bridges in danger of falling in. Once word got out that the collapse was caused by an oversized load hitting a truss beam, those calls ceased. The alarm factor of a "crumbling infrastructure" story got destroyed.

I'm not sure what role, if any, the media played in this, but our Bay Bridge was built in the same year as the I-35W one that collapsed, and I once had a co-worker who literally carried a life vest every time she crossed it because she was so scared the same thing would happen while she was on it!

Reading these 2 posts reminded me of a segment John Oliver once did about infrastructure, where he used the since-replaced Greenfield Bridge in Pittsburgh as a poster child for decaying infrastructure.  Obviously the old Greenfield Bridge was an absolute extreme (what with the netting around the concrete arch and "bridge under a bridge" to catch loose concrete before it reached I-376 below), but I remember thinking it was an interesting piece when I first watched it.

But at the same time, it is indeed a media piece that used an extreme case to further the point, so there is also that side to it.  Not every structurally-deficient bridge is as severe (or dangerous) as that old Greenfield Bridge - if it was, we'd have ourselves a much bigger problem!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&list=PLgiGp52farbZWWVIfrIw1bQ50lt0RObO9

[kphoger]

Ooh!  A color-coded map!

[kernals12]

With 91% of Americans owning a car, we don't lack that.

91% of Americans don't own a car.  91% of American *households* own a car. 

...Less people on the road, less miles driven, and an incentive to save money by not driving, generally equals safer roads by virtue of there being less cars and people driving only out of absolute necessity. Not to mention the whole host of other benefits from new urbanism/mixed use.

Well, that actually hasn't proven to be true, and we only have to look at the first 6 months of this year.  While the link below isn't my favorite due to the source, it apparently is factual.  Fewer people on the roads equaled more accidents and deaths when Covid-19 forced many to stay at home.

https://www.nsc.org/in-the-newsroom/nsc-estimates-us-saw-a-20-jump-in-motor-vehicle-death-rates-in-first-six-months-of-2020-despite-quarantines

If drivers are taking more risks due to emptier roads, that is fixed by educating drivers. Easy solution. Cramming cars onto roads to force drivers to not take as many risks is a workaround, not a solution.

...I have to walk an hour just to get out of residential zoning here and to any point of interest at all, that just can't be called pedestrian accessibility, and the same situation goes for a lot of the country too.

I take issue with this because either you or the people you live with (friends/parents/whomever) made a very specific choice to live there, knowing full well that businesses were not in that area and may not be in that area in the future.  However, that does not make pedestrian accessibility an issue in this country.  Everyone has a choice where they want to live.  Some areas may not meet their needs in safety, affordability, etc, but that's a choice you have to weigh when looking for a home. In fact, maybe for some people, being away from businesses was the appeal of the area.  Maybe, even, you're complaining to us because you couldn't win your argument with the people you live with who wanted to move where you moved to. 

The good news...guess what - you're 18!  You can make that decision on your own to move out now!

I moved here in 2005, smartass.

In what world are you living in where you think people fresh into adulthood can suddenly just start instantly living on their own? Have you been living under a rock since the Great Recession? The COVID-19 Recession? The world is a very different place than your experience in the early 90s. You know, that crazy event that did things like trapped homes on the rental market, created the worker's hellhole known as the gig economy that we know today, further reduced the amount of use that college degrees have, hit youth as soon as they were coming of age, and shut many young people out from upward mobility in the near future? And in what kind of world is that an argument against inadequate infrastructure? This isn't the 20th century anymore. People can't just catapult themselves out of their mother's womb, shake someone's hand, and immediately get a job and a house wherever they want. The world that this country is in simply does not work like that.

Also, your one-off examples are not necessarily representative of the country as a whole.  Yes, it's stupid whenever a sidewalk isn't 'wheelchair width'.  I cringe when I see a utility pole or traffic light post stuck in the middle of a sidewalk.  But citing 1 area in an entire city shouldn't be used as an example of the city as a whole.  Same thing with this person you know that had a bicycle accident. It's very unfortunate, but again, not something that's exclusive to the US.

There is a pattern that has been clearly pointed out that is detrimental to those who travel on foot.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/it-s-time-to-fix-america-s-urban-sidewalk-gap
https://americawalks.org/americas-worst-walking-city-gets-back-on-its-feet/
https://archive.curbed.com/2018/2/7/16980682/city-sidewalk-repair-future-walking-neighborhood
https://www.popsci.com/politics-versus-sidewalks/
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/05/24/dangerous-by-design-how-the-u-s-builds-roads-that-kill-pedestrians/
It is also no coincidence that the states with the roads worst for pedestrians are in the Sun Belt...which has been experiencing lots of suburban sprawl in its growth. Some of the cities with the worst sprawl are located in this region.


It is impossible to deny this issue exists.

I feel much safer in the streets of my suburb than I did when I lived in Manhattan because the low density means there's hardly on cars on my street.

[kphoger]

A lot of people who make those longer commutes use the time to work. I certainly do when I take the train to and from New York. That is indeed one reason why I typically opt for the train instead of driving.

The Living Bible was written on Metra.

Ken Taylor noticed his kids weren't really tracking during family devotions at home.  So, on his commute from Wheaton to downtown Chicago and back, he sat with a bible on one leg and a notebook on the other, paraphrasing scripture.  When he first started selling copies, the "warehouse" was the space underneath his eldest son's bed.  That eventually turned into a multi-million dollar Christian publishing company.

[index]

Ooh!  A color-coded map!

Almost as if the colors have a clearly implied meaning, associated with the graph, unlike the map you posted to try and take my point down, which lacks any of that. You should really look closer, man.

https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2019/01/29/sun-belt-states-top-20-most-dangerous-states-pedestrians-again

https://smartgrowthamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Dangerous-by-Design-2019-FINAL.pdf

I feel much safer in the streets of my suburb than I did when I lived in Manhattan because the low density means there's hardly on cars on my street.

And cars are safer than planes because I feel safer when I'm driving than I do when I'm flying. Statistics don't matter, it's all about feelings.

[Flint1979]

[img snipped]

I saw a street sign about a month ago it was either in Tuscola County or Genesee County. The road name is called Bray Road but the font on this street sign looked exactly like the Craig County sign font.

Is this the one you're thinking of? If so, it was a very easy/lucky find. It was the first sign I encountered after I searched Bray Road. The font does roughly match, but the big difference is that the Craig County sign is essentially a variant of aLtErNaTiNg cApS.

That's one of them I think there's more than one. Check out the one about 3 miles north of there at Ormes Road.

[Scott5114]

2. I have convenient public transit near my home. In fact, it's in my driveway. And as the survey predicts, I do use it frequently.

check it out, this dude stole a bus

[kphoger]

Almost as if the colors have a clearly implied meaning, associated with the graph, unlike the map you posted to try and take my point down, which lacks any of that. You should really look closer, man.

My map is the same as yours.  Just with less-scary colors.  I could add a bar graph to go at the bottom too, if I felt like taking the time.

The fact that states are colored red on a map doesn't make them inherently "dangerous".  More dangerous than another state, OK.  But that's not the same thing as objectively dangerous.

In a similar way...  Saint Louis has a murder rate more than twice that of KCMO.  But that doesn't make it "dangerous".  It just makes it more dangerous than KCMO.  Yet, if I put a red dot there on a map of Missouri and titled it "Most dangerous cities", can I expect you to be convinced that Saint Louis is "dangerous"?

[hotdogPi]

The fact that states are colored red on a map doesn't make them inherently "dangerous".  More dangerous than another state, OK.  But that's not the same thing as objectively dangerous.

Thank you for admitting states colored red are more dangerous than other states.

On the other hand, Georgia and Arizona may have stopped being red on one specific map, but nothing changed at the state level...

More dangerous than another state, OK.

Scott5114, what is your opinion on this?

[index]

Almost as if the colors have a clearly implied meaning, associated with the graph, unlike the map you posted to try and take my point down, which lacks any of that. You should really look closer, man.

My map is the same as yours.  Just with less-scary colors.  I could add a bar graph to go at the bottom too, if I felt like taking the time.

The fact that states are colored red on a map doesn't make them inherently "dangerous".  More dangerous than another state, OK.  But that's not the same thing as objectively dangerous.

In a similar way...  Saint Louis has a murder rate more than twice that of KCMO.  But that doesn't make it "dangerous".  It just makes it more dangerous than KCMO.  Yet, if I put a red dot there on a map of Missouri and titled it "Most dangerous cities", can I expect you to be convinced that Saint Louis is "dangerous"?

This isn't a valid point. How do you know that the color orange was chosen to "scare" people? It's baseless speculation that has nothing to do with the facts at hand. By this logic, the map that Wikipedia uses to show daily COVID cases is using purple to symbolize that the more COVID cases a country has, the more royal it is, because purple is associated with royalty and I know that that's why they picked the color because purple is royal.


Perception of danger or the way data is shown doesn't make things more or less of a problem. I really do not see how any of the maps I've posted and sources I've used are somehow manipulating things.


The pattern is pretty clear, states with prominent sprawl and car-centric infrastructure usually have issues related to other forms of transportation, in this case, on foot. That is all there is to it. It isn't sensational. It isn't based on whims and feelings. It isn't based on stuff I'm pulling out of my ass. This isn't even a topic that's covered very much by the public at-large compared to other things. (And that is also not an argument against it being an issue or not) I am backing up my claims by far more than what you've claimed I'm using to support them, like "colorful maps". There exists a general consensus in circles that exist within the fields of urban planning, engineering, etc, that these are related to each other. I don't even need to prove this, Google things like "urban planning pedestrian safety" or "pedestrian deaths suburban sprawl" on Google Scholar and you will find a number of research done on this topic.

In fact, there is a pretty pronounced difference between states with low and high numbers for this category. https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/States/StatesPedestrians.aspx So the whole slight differences in danger thing determining whether something gets colored or not pretty much goes completely out the window. In fact, if we can use that logic mentioned earlier, I can say that this table is trying to minimize the problem because it uses numbers that are small to show the proportion between states.

Rhode Island, a pretty urban state, with a lot of older, pre-World War II development in an area with better alternate transit options than the rest of the country, has proportionally some of the lowest rates in the country. Compare that to the top states. Almost all of them are in the Sun Belt and have the same characteristics to their development. Postwar, suburban, sprawling, and car-centric.

[kphoger]

Because the connotation of the color red is obvious.  Danger!  Bad!  OMG!

[hotdogPi]

To me, it actually looked like simply dark/light/none, with the specific color not mattering much.

[Scott5114]

Scott5114, what is your opinion on this?

I think kphoger meant OK to mean "Okay" and not "Oklahoma" there, but I already wrote a long-ass post on the topic. Hopefully you're still interested 

Oklahoma is not great at accommodating for pedestrians. Our largest cities have many miles of roads with no sidewalks at all, including at key points where they're safety-critical. Bobby5280 has posted repeatedly about an overpass over I-44 in Lawton that has no sidewalks, leading people to try to cross the interstate on foot at-grade, with predictable results. In Norman, there seems to be no planning/zoning requirement to install sidewalks until a property is developed, meaning that in some neighborhoods sidewalks will start and stop at random every time they encounter a lot line for a vacant property.

More newly developed areas and projects are better about including pedestrian accommodations, but there seems to be no will to go back and upgrade older areas (like the OKC urban core outside of the CBD) to modern standards.

This is not strictly ped-related, but bike infrastructure is close to non-existent here. Norman has installed a few bike lanes on newly reconstructed streets, but these projects are not connected to each other and therefore don't really do anything to provide a meaningful network one could use to actually get anywhere. (For instance, there is a bike lane outside my house, but it only connects to two other streets with bike lanes, none of which continue past the mile-grid roads surrounding my development.) Because of this, your options in most areas are to ride on the sidewalk, which is both illegal and has all the downsides of sidewalks here mentioned above, or riding in the street, which seems like a great idea if what you want most for Christmas is to become flat like a pancake, since I don't trust Oklahoma drivers to know how to properly handle a bike in the street.

That being said, the importance of this is kind of diminished by the fact that you don't really see a whole lot of pedestrians here, even in the densely-developed areas like downtown Norman (the OU campus area is an exception to this, and is well-served by pedestrian accommodations). One could argue that this is because of the bad infrastructure, but I suspect the real reason is the climate–we tend to have cold, windy winters and hot, humid summers, so I'd estimate there's probably about 28 days a year (two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall) where direct contact with the outdoors for an extended period of time is actually comfortable for the lay person. Going outside to do a leisure activity is one thing, but nobody wants to find themselves forced to walk or bike to work on a 40 degree day with a 30 MPH headwind, and if you're going to have a car, you may as well drive it to work every day of the week anyway.

[US 89]

map

map

I would be curious to know how much of a factor weather plays in this analysis. The states that are marked as "more dangerous" (or "less safe", depending on which way you look at it) also as a general rule have much more ideal weather year-round and I'd imagine have more pedestrians as a result. All else being equal, more people out on the roads will unfortunately result in more pedestrian accidents.

[hotdogPi]

map

map

I would be curious to know how much of a factor weather plays in this analysis. The states that are marked as "more dangerous" (or "less safe", depending on which way you look at it) also have much more ideal weather year-round and I'd imagine have more pedestrians as a result.

I think it's building up vs. building out. The southern US (this includes the Southwest, unlike many definitions) has many multilane roads, while dense city centers in the Northeast (plus Chicago) predate the automobile and therefore already had pedestrians in mind when building roads for cars. Portland and Seattle came later, but they made a conscious decision to be bike- and ped-friendly. I can't explain Delaware.

[kernals12]

Ooh!  A color-coded map!

Almost as if the colors have a clearly implied meaning, associated with the graph, unlike the map you posted to try and take my point down, which lacks any of that. You should really look closer, man.

https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2019/01/29/sun-belt-states-top-20-most-dangerous-states-pedestrians-again

https://smartgrowthamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Dangerous-by-Design-2019-FINAL.pdf

I feel much safer in the streets of my suburb than I did when I lived in Manhattan because the low density means there's hardly on cars on my street.

And cars are safer than planes because I feel safer when I'm driving than I do when I'm flying. Statistics don't matter, it's all about feelings.

Maybe Florida has a lot of a demographic that is especially vulnerable to pedestrian collisions

[kernals12]

2. I have convenient public transit near my home. In fact, it's in my driveway. And as the survey predicts, I do use it frequently.

check it out, this dude stole a bus

I didn't steal it, but it's a very small bus that only seats 5 passengers.

[index]

Ooh!  A color-coded map!

Almost as if the colors have a clearly implied meaning, associated with the graph, unlike the map you posted to try and take my point down, which lacks any of that. You should really look closer, man.

https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2019/01/29/sun-belt-states-top-20-most-dangerous-states-pedestrians-again

https://smartgrowthamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Dangerous-by-Design-2019-FINAL.pdf

I feel much safer in the streets of my suburb than I did when I lived in Manhattan because the low density means there's hardly on cars on my street.

And cars are safer than planes because I feel safer when I'm driving than I do when I'm flying. Statistics don't matter, it's all about feelings.

Maybe Florida has a lot of a demographic that is especially vulnerable to pedestrian collisions

Almost of the other states with a high elderly population are not on the same list as states with high pedestrian deaths or in the Sun Belt. Correlation does not equal causation.

In fact if you just looked at a list of states by elderly population you would see that states with high pedestrian fatalities and sun belt states are equally distributed throughout. https://www.prb.org/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/