Sharing information about Traffic Signals, Bicycles, Technology, and the Urban Form.
I work for the City of Portland. The views expressed on this blog are my own.
A fellow APBP member asked the following question: a topic that keeps coming up is the idea of using exclusive pedestrian phases versus other measures to improve pedestrian safety. I've seen mixed messages on this as an outcome, including the possibility that exclusive phases may have fewer, but more serious collisions, or that pedestrians won't wait for the phase to come up, or that it might not…
Traffic Engineers Are Wasting Trillions and what we need to do about it My initial response to this article was: where in the world have I put my last $1,000,000,000? Streetsblog clearly took some liberty with the original video titled: You’ve Been Lied To About Roads For 60 Years, which was published by the Global Cycling Network. Full disclosure, I watch most of the videos that GCN puts on as…
Thanks for starting the discussion Jerry, lots to unpack here. The ITE Bicycle Signals Resource Hub has some information at the following website . I will try to tackle a few of the ideas Detection Types for Bicycle and Micromobility Portland has moved away from pedestrian push buttons for bicycle detection, using inductive loops. Our past studies using all forms of video, radar, thermal, pucks,…
I haven't read the book, but did review the interview here. I would agree with the author and the premise that we aren't going to fix " our road safety problems based on what I was taught in engineering school ". That being said, I didn't learn a lot in engineering school that I use day to day in my multimodal transportation safety engineering practice. The good news is that the profession and the…
The 11th Edition of the MUTCD is out now! The role of the MUTCD has been something that I have thought a lot about in my 25 plus years as a professional. Several years ago when there was discussion about the potential to separate the Manual into two volumes, I agreed with the consensus that thought it was not a good idea. Yet upon more experience with its application as an engineer in the public…
An engineer wrote an article titled: "America Has No Transportation Engineers", critiquing the civil engineering education that many of my colleagues recieved. The point was that our lack of interdisciplinary studies leads to an over reliance on standards. As someone that's worked on encouraging the industry for some time, I agree with the author and those that argue that a civil engineering…
For developments coming in, we (like everyone else) require traffic studies to be performed for impacts related to streets, traffic and circulation. One of the ideas we are toying with is requiring those studies to have an element of bike/ped data baked in. So we have a more well-rounded answer on why we want this data, I'm curious if your municipality also asks for bike/ped data when traffic…
We gathered at the New Church at 9 AM and broke into two groups. Paul and Peter lead the tours. We exited Delft on Delftseweg on a newly opened rebuilt fietsstraat. There was a lot of #FreshElmo as we headed north with several different configurations. One treatment that isn't very common is head in parking, which suggests that most configurations work in the Dutch concepts. The Portland State…
The Portland State University Study Abroad program visited the City of Delft today. Our host was Jan Nederveen, who visited Portland and Boston a few months prior to our visit. The presentation he gave focused on the planning of Delft and how they have approached the challenge of getting people to cycle more. Traffic signals and intersections are designed specifically for cyclists. The City had a…
It was another successful year in collaborating with professionals involved in research or applications that are worthy of presenting at the annual Transportation Research Board meeting. Here's the list of papers that will be presented in 2016: Paulsen, Kirk, William Farley, Todd Mobley, Michael Ard and Peter Koonce, “Analysis of Active Warning Sign to Address Potential Bicycle "Right-Hook"…
NACTO held its annual conference in Austin, TX. Austin is a good city with the potential to be great. The National Association of City Transportation Officials meeting was a great chance to learn about updates from many of the NACTO member cities and industry leaders. Austin has spent a lot of effort making connections for multimodal travel in the past 10 years. The meeting set a record for…
The Oregonian had a nice write up on the 100th birthday of traffic signals in Portland. The column concluded with an email I sent awhile back thinking to the future of transportation. "Curious about what Portland's traffic and its growing signal system might look like 100 years from now, I recently asked Peter Koonce, the city's chief traffic signal engineer, to take us into the future. Here's how…
I asked our host Andre Botermans in Houten about their safety record. He answered promptly " Safety is no issue in Houten ". Andre Botermans addressing the PSU-Northeastern University class He went on to discuss the notion of traffic crashes and he said the following: "If we're talking about fatalities, we had one (1) fatal of someone on a bicycle in 20 years. A car was involved of course. There…
Houten may be the best example of bicycle oriented development in the world. The land use was carefully prepared to insure that the system worked as intended. The other factors that make this such a successful Bicycle Oriented Development community includes the following: Robust, safe bicycle network Convenient Parking for bicycles Support from the community The layout of the city is focused first…
I visited Houten previously and wrote up a summary of the presentation from 2012. There was a very nice write up by ITDP on Houten. A CityLab writeup provided a national audience for Houten in the last few months. On this trip, I wanted to dig deeper into the south part of Houten. The south part of Houten was under construction when I was here in 2012. The construction is still active in some…
We had a presentation from Mark Wagenbuur, who is the blogger of Bicycle Dutch. he provided an interesting perspective on Dutch cycling starting from the 1950s, it was the same as it was today. Cars were there in the 1950s, there was money and people able to afford the cars after WWII. As the country prospered, congestion increased and the parking was also congested. In the 1970s, it was similar…
As a trained engineer who became an advocate, then City bureaucrat, and now Ph.D. candidate, Jeff has a vast experience of what makes a city tick and how change happens. He has some great takeaways from his time creating Livable Streets, describing "What Advocates Actually Do?", he boils it down to three points: Convince government to do it Provide technical assistance Build grass-roots support…
I will start with the takeaways instead of the misconceptions, because not everyone will read the entire blogpost and the talk was really positive, but he used the misconceptions to drive the conversation for the students. He also described his role as an advocate which is a separate blogpost altogether. Streets are for people Cars need less space Traffic calming works Decisions are political…
Two stage queue boxes are an area designated to hold a queue of people waiting to finish two stage turn manuever. To use this design, a person would remain in the bike lane and veer right, turning their bike to orient towards making the turn. Two stage queue boxes are not used very often in the Netherlands due to the nature of how many cycletracks they have throughout the country. During our study…
A visit to Utrecht provided a pleasant surpise in the form of color on the street at a crosswalk. Pedestrian crosswalk (rainbow edition) Pedestrian point of view In addition to the rainbow crosswalk, there is a diagonal crossing for a movement for people using bicycles. This diagonal crossing provides an opportunity to eliminate what would be a two stage crossing in Denmark or most other cases. It…
The bicycle box was a treatment that came from European traffic engineering practice. The Delft community does not have that many bike boxes, but this is one in the north part of town that is constructed in different colored brick. The street these cars are on is Noordeinde and the intersecting street is Wateringsevest. The stop bar extends along the bike lane (mistake?) Left turn queue box for…
Delft recently reconstructed its train station. The train station was a lovely old building, dating from 1847 and rebuilt this past year (2015). The parking for 8,700 bicycles includes 5,000 underground immediately south of the train station. Start of the bike path to the underground parking The project included a 2.3 km tunnel under the city center includes a wonderful bike connection. The bike…
I get asked to speak at various events and I often have to search for introductory information on who is Peter Koonce? Here's what I am using currently, you can find past biographical sketches from earlier editions on this blog. Peter Koonce, P.E., has been described as one of the most progressive transportation engineers in the United States, dedicating his life to innovative treatments that…
I have been asked to speak for professional society webinars on occasion in the past several years. One of the recent webinars was for the Association for Pedestrian Bicycle Professionals on the topic of Level of Service and how engineers are (the industry) using performance measures (past, present, and future). It was a topic I have covered in several lectures. What was unique from this…
I have been studying this issue for what seems like half my career, both as the Principal Investigator for the Federal Highway Administration's Signal Timing Manual and as a practitioner who has worked all across the country from Seattle, WA to Lee County, FL and now is responsible for a City traffic signal system. Safety is the first goal with signal timing. As a consultant, I didn't always…