Conscious Choice: Traffic Calming

June 2001 | Citizen at Large

Traffic Calming

by Jay Walljasper

As the mother of two toddlers, Ellen Vanderslice worried about the traffic rushing through her neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. "We’d often be on our way to the park in the afternoon," she remembers. "And there would be this incredible traffic. Sometimes we couldn’t even get across the street."

Children’s safety concerned many of Vanderslice’s neighbors, too, and they pulled together a meeting at the local elementary school to do something about the speeding automobiles. "Someone suggested," she recalls, "that we try these things they have done in Europe and Australia to slow the traffic."

That’s exactly what happened. Borrowing an idea from the Netherlands, the city installed traffic circles around the neighborhood — big, attractively-landscaped planters sitting in the middle of residential intersections that force drivers to slow down in order to get around. It worked marvelously not only in making the neighborhood safer but making it a more pleasant place to live. Many drivers stopped using the residential streets as a shortcut, and those remaining travel at reduced speeds. Ten years later, there’s a richer sense of community in the area because kids can play more freely and the street no longer creates an impassable barrier between neighbors.

Now, in city after city all across North America, citizens are speaking out, holding meetings and fighting city hall over the issue of traffic. They are fed up that the simple act of taking a walk has become a frustrating, unpleasant, and dangerous pastime. They are tired of worrying about the safety of their children, their pets, and their elderly and disabled friends at the hands of speeding drivers. They are determined to restore community to their neighborhoods by taking the streets back from the automobile. And like Vanderslice and her neighbors in Portland they have discovered a creative, effective, and inexpensive way to accomplish their goals: traffic calming.

Traffic calming encompasses a whole set of street designs that increase safety and aesthetic satisfaction for pedestrians. The aim is twofold: to slow the speed of traffic and give drivers a visual reminder that they must share the street with people — on foot, on bicycles, in wheelchairs and baby strollers. Traffic circles like those in Portland are one way to do the job. So are narrower streets, bike lanes, speed bumps, brightly-painted crosswalks, on-street parking, median strips in the middle of streets, four-way stop signs replacing stoplights, bans on right turns at red lights, crosswalks that rise a few inches from the street, and curbs that extend out into intersections in order to shorten the distance pedestrians must cross.

Numerous studies have shown that the speed of traffic, much more than the volume, is what poses a threat to pedestrians. One, conducted by the British government, found that in auto accidents involving pedestrians, fatalities occurred 85 percent of the time when cars were traveling forty miles per hour, compared to only 5 percent of the time when cars were traveling twenty miles per hour. Questions of safety aside, people also feel less inclined to venture out on foot or bicycle if they must constantly cope with roaring traffic.

These are the reasons why most German cities have posted thirty kilometer-per-hour zones (nineteen miles per hour) on all residential streets. But Mike Coleman, former Traffic Calming Program Supervisor for the city of Portland, notes that people pay less attention to speed limits than to the look of a street in determining how fast they drive. Wide, open streets send motorists a clear signal to zoom ahead.

That’s why the Traffic Calming department has installed traffic circles, added speed bumps (more like ramps actually with a three-inch rise over fifteen to twenty feet), built median strips, and extended the curb into intersections all across Portland. When planning new residential streets in undeveloped parts of the city, they now build them much narrower than in the past. "The culture has really changed here in City Hall," Coleman notes. "We now consider mobility [for cars] as just one purpose of the street."

The presence of a vital downtown, good public transit, including an expanding light rail system, and limits on suburban sprawl all enhance Portland’s character as a pedestrian-friendly city. But a lot of the credit for Portland’s success in making its streets safer and neighborhoods more pleasant goes to community activists like Ellen Vanderslice. After seeing the benefits of traffic calming on her block, she joined the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition to push for the idea all over the metropolitan area. "Most of what we do is get ourselves on committees and write project papers," she explains. "But we also do pedestrian actions. Carrying signs that say‘Pedestrians are not targets’ and‘Don’t tread on me,’ we all cross the street together, legally, and stop the traffic. It’s really fun. We usually do it around five o’clock and wind up on the TV news."

She notes that pedestrian activist organizations are popping up elsewhere including the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and Ottawa, Ontario. There’s even a national organization, America Walks. Here in Chicago, The Center for Neighborhood Technology has a project called Walkers Win! You can learn more at their Web site (click on the Projects menu and you’ll see Walkers Win! near the bottom).

As happened in Europe and Australia, traffic calming has gone from an activist crusade to public policy in Portland, as witnessed by Ellen Vanderslice’s career path. In 1995 she was enlisted by the city of Portland to help devise a master plan to make the city more walkable. Now, with that plan done, she’s the president of America Walks.

America Walks will host the National Congress of Pedestrian Advocates, August 16-18, in Oakland, California. For more information on America Walks, write Box 29103, Portland, Oregon 97210 or info@americawalks.org, or visit their Web site.

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