Scofflaws by Design

I recently attended an event on bicycle facilities in San Francisco at which Andy Thornley, Policy Director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition, gave a great presentation on how our challenge is to design bicycle facilities that work not just for serious cyclists, but for everyone. In order to draw this distinction, he showed a few slides distinguishing between people on bicycles—businessmen and women in work clothes on their way to the office, a mother toting her kids on an Xtracycle—and spandex-clad racers and tattooed bike messengers. One of these compared a “scofflaw,” riding the wrong way up a one-way street, to a “lawmaker,” bike-riding Supervisor Eric Mar. I nodded in agreement. After all, in order to meet our climate goals, we’re going need a significant shift away from driving toward other modes, including bicycling, and cycling is never going to take a bite out of driving unless we re-design our streets to appeal to normal, law-abiding citizens who are currently intimidated by the prospect of riding in traffic.

Then, on a ride the other day, I ran a red light. And not just any red light: it was a red light at the intersection of Scott and Fell Streets, which is located along one of San Francisco’s most popular bike routes, the Wiggle. 

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The city has done a lot of work to improve this intersection for cyclists. Fell is a busy one-way street running east with a bike lane on the left side of the street, and the city has striped a dedicated left turn lane for the many cyclists who head north on Scott and turn into the bike lane on Fell to head toward Golden Gate Park. However, the city overlooked a crucial detail: the light at Scott and Fell doesn’t stay green for traffic on Scott very long, and there is often a queue of southbound cars heading straight through the intersection that makes it difficult or impossible for cyclists to turn left during the green cycle.

Most riders seem to do what I did that day, and took an illegal left on red. When I looked around, most of my fellow lawbreakers didn’t look like the bike punk scofflaw in Andy’s presentation. Instead, they were what I’ll call “scofflaws by design:” riders who are generally law-abiding, but who end up breaking the rules on poorly designed streets.

This distinction between illegal behavior where the traveler is to blame and illegal behavior where the designer is at fault has a precedent in the world of transportation. Traffic engineers distinguish between the posted speed limit and the design speed of a road. The former is a number on a sign, while the latter refers to a set of physical variables, such as the sharpness of curves and the length of sight lines, which determine the maximum speed at which a vehicle can be operated. Though police can hand out the occasional tickets to drivers who exceed the speed limit, if you really want to slow down traffic, you have to change the design speed.

Likewise, if you want to get normal people bicycling, you have to design your bicycle facilities for normal people. The City of San Francisco has determined that the design speed for utilitarian bicycle travel is a steady 13 MPH, and has timed the signals on an eight-block stretch of bike-friendly Valencia Street accordingly. Contrast that to California Street in Berkeley, which is designated as a bicycle boulevard, but has stop signs every block or two, requiring cyclists using the street to either expend much more energy and travel slower, or roll through the stop signs. The former option isn’t that appealing, particularly to normal people who have places to go and don’t necessarily want to show up all sweaty, so they become scofflaws by design.

Once I started noticing scofflaws by design, I realized that they’re everywhere—rolling through stop signs, maneuvering through crosswalks in complicated intersections, and hopping onto the sidewalk when a bike lane disappears on a busy street. While I wouldn’t necessarily argue against a police officer ticketing any individual cyclist who risks taking the law into her own hands, I do think that planners, engineers, and designers need to recognize the distinction between plain old scofflaws and scofflaws by design. Understanding where our bike facilities fail normal, law-abiding people is an important first step in designing cities that get more normal, law-abiding people riding.

If you have examples of bicycle facilities that encourage scofflaws by design, please reply to this post with pictures or links to Google Map views. I’m interested in collecting other examples of cases where our cities turn normal cyclists into lawbreakers.

Why we walk

One of CREC's primary goals is to create tools that help planners assess the pedestrian environment and identify what changes to make in order to allow residents to walk instead of drive.  Fortunately, this is a hot topic these days, and there are a growing number of websites that provide information about how well-suited a given location is for walking.  Taking a spin through a few of these websites is a good way to investigate in more depth what a "walkable" neighborhood means.

Probably the most well-known web-based walkability tool is Walk Score.  According to Walk Score, we walk if there are places nearby to walk to.  The site rates a location on a scale from 0 to 100 based on its proximity to amenities across several different categories, including stores, entertainment districts, banks, schools, and libraries.  Below is a screen shot showing Walk Score's assessment of the area around CREC's headquarters in Berkeley:

Researchers often talk about the "four Ds" of land use--density, diversity of uses, pedestrian design, and access to destinations--that studies have shown to reduce driving, and implicitly, to increase walking.  Of the four Ds, Walk Score addresses access to destinations most directly, but also density and diversity of uses, since presumably more compact and mixed use neighborhoods will have shorter distances between homes and the amenities that Walk Score examines.  Of course, whether you actually visit the destinations that Walk Score looks at is another question--as a lunch spot, Adagia is out of our price range, and Urban Outfitters doesn't quite offer the professorial tweeds favored by researchers--but I generally find it to be a pretty accurate tool regardless, because of the way that amenities cluster together in commercial districts.

Another tool that Walk Score has recently unveiled focuses more narrowly on accessibility.  Its Transit Time Map shows you all the places that you can reach within 45 minutes of a given point by walking and taking transit.  According to this tool, you're more likely to walk if you can get farther without a car.  Since CREC headquarters is a pretty long walk from the Downtown Berkeley BART station, we can only make it a few BART stops in either direction, even if we head out during the evening rush hour, when trains are running most frequently:

Mapnificent is another tool that measures accessibility.  Unlike the Transit Time Map, Mapnificent uses average transit headways and travel times, rather than adjusting your range depending on when you take your journey.  But it makes up for this lack of precision by allowing you to adjust your travel time and other factors, including whether or not you have a bicycle, as well as including some nice rainbow color-coding.  Mapnificent confirms a hypothesis that I've come up with in the course of my commute, which is that I need a bike in order to get from my neighborhood in San Francisco to CREC's offices in under an hour.  Here's my 55-minute travel radius with a bike:

 

And here's the same radius without a bike:

The one D that these tools leave out is pedestrian design.  As far as the Mapnificent and Walk Score are concerned, it doesn't matter whether there's a wide pedestrian-only path or an interstate highway connecting you and the nearest coffee shop (fortunately in our case it's the former, which helps to prevent accidents on drowsy Monday mornings).  The Walk Score team readily acknowledges this shortcoming, and is working to overcome it, but critics of the tool claim that the lack of consideration for design is a fatal flaw--see the Conservative Planner's post on the topic for a number of examples where Walk Score gives high rankings to neighborhoods in which walking would be tantamount to suicide.  However, the designers of tools like Walk Score and Mapnificent are doing the best they can with the data that is readily available, and currently there's no database of sidewalk conditions or other pedestrian amenities out there--nor is there even a standardized way for cities to collect this data.  This is something that we're working to develop here at CREC.

In the meantime, Walk Score has caught on with real estate agents, who frequently use it to promote properties in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, and both the designers of the Transit Time Map and Mapnificent express hopes that their tools can help people locate neighborhoods in which they can live a car-free lifestyle.  More importantly, these tools continue to foster a lot of discussion about the benefits of compact, walkable neighborhoods, which is an important first step in reversing several decades of car-oriented planning.