Deceptive Distance

I recently went to a coffeeshop I think is "close" to home, then on to work, which is also "close" to home, and then home, and realized I had put 15 miles on my car. So today I want to talk about the deceptive distance of car-centric design: the way we normalize going a long way and using a lot of gas/electricity/whatever to power vehicles without even realizing it.

1. Unintegrated space

Car-centric design tends to come with single-use zoning that creates huge swathes of space in a city where you can only live, or only do industrial work, or only buy and sell things, or what have you. This can be good! I don't really want to live next to an industrial park. But it also means that you always have to travel a long distance to do anything, because if you're at home your home won't be near anything but other homes, and same for work, shopping, etc. We sometimes block that out mentally (if there is no closer coffeeshop, this is a close coffeeshop!) but it's still true.

2. Flattened space 

This is a similar issue, but it's less about zoning and more about how we travel in cars. Our streets are fast (and often faster than they should be). Because of how this is designed, it often takes longer to get to nearby places than to further ones, or at least similar times. My partner and I have a joke that everywhere in town is fifteen minutes away. This isn't quite true, but it feels true, and it's a function of the flattening of differences in space. Nothing is too far but nothing is too close; a neighborhood coffeeshop still requires getting into the car, parking (even if it's easy to do), and walking into the shop. Cars are fast, but while they make far distances feel close sometimes, they also flatten space so that we end up experiencing longer trips because they seem equally easy.

3. As the crow doesn't fly

Finally, road networks also can warp space by making something "close" actually surprisingly hard to get to. Here in Davenport Duck Creek bisects the city. There are only a few roads that cross it. Likewise I-74 divides Bettendorf and Davenport, and the Mississippi divides Iowa and Illinois with very few crossings (this last one of course is not the fault of any urban planning other than putting the cities here at all).

Well sometimes we do make choices, like tearing down a bridge. But anyway...

Places that may seem very close as a crow flies can be surprisingly far as the car drives. The one-ways in Davenport can make this even worse. Walking is bidirectional, and can cross uneven terrain; a car can do that, but for obvious safety reasons we don't usually let them do it in crowded areas. No offroading in the city! But when we design around car safety (as we have to with cars as our dominant transportation method), we end up with a distinct difference between actual distance, perceived distance, and travel time.

All of these contribute to make it so that a city designed around cars creates longer and less-differentiated trips, and deceptive distances.

Speed and Streets

Recently, the City of Davenport held a community meeting about what to do with traffic that speeds off River Drive onto River Street in the neighborhood around McClellan Heights. This feels like a good opportunity, then, to talk about how we design our roads around speed and cars. While my thoughts are inspired by this discussion around River Street, I'm not going to focus directly on that because I'm not a traffic engineer and wasn't present for the meeting. Rather, I want to talk more broadly about how traffic speeds are managed around Davenport and the QCA.

1. Too much reliance on speed limits alone 

The article linked above mentions that the speed limit on River Street is 25 mph but cars have been measured up to 68 mph. This is emblematic of the general way speed is "controlled" in the QCA: all speed limit, no street design. The proposal to actually redesign some of the street with bollards may not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction, because any direction of actually changing street appearance from "giant open asphalt stretch" is the right direction. 

Basically, the speed limits and the street design don't match: roads with slow limits don't look any different from roads with high limits, and so drivers just drive fast.

2. Lane and speed limit mismatch

This gets worse in places like Brady and Harrison Streets, which can be as low as 25 mph while still having 4 lanes of one-way traffic. No wonder people zoom on through! It's as wide as the interstate. 

Does this look like a 25 mph road to you?

When the speed limit drops, lanes should drop out; and honestly some of these streets should just be fewer lanes. Give us some bike lanes or a bus lane or a tram or something. Parklets. Anything but a giant stroad. And the same goes if the speed doesn't drop but just is lower than the road is designed for.

3. Distinguishing roads and streets would help

The overly fast traffic on roads like River Dr, Brady, and Harrison is because these are among the main throughfares for the city. And there's nothing wrong with those roads being fast! But there isn't sufficient distinction between these roads used for fast movement of cars and streets, which should be more about people using the street for things other than moving through. In other words, we have a bunch of stroads. There's actually good potential here for distinguishing them, since we have a clear set of E-W and N-S routes in Davenport in particular and the QCA more generally. But this work hasn't been done; the roads and streets are designed basically the same and don't feel that different to drive on.

This is why people get so wrought up about road traffic going into their neighborhoods: because the cars will treat their streets like roads. And while they're not wrong that that's a problem, the issue is bigger than one intersection at a time. The problem is that we don't have clear design differences and visual (or even physical) cues to drivers that they're in a space they shouldn't be tearing through. Yes, some places have speed bumps, but that's an extreme and usually ad-hoc approach; comprehensive street design on every street is more helpful. That creates a consistent understanding by drivers of what is expected of them, and a larger set of non-driving options for transportation as well, making it more likely that traffic will actually both reduce in volume and in speed.

It's good to see Davenport considering options for River Street off River Drive--but it would be even better to see some more general overhaul of how we treat speed in the city and the QCA.