Today we are taking a deeper dive into the Healthy Streets program that Ann Arbor implemented in response to reduced car traffic and increased demand for safe walking and biking space.
Links and references:
- Ann Arbor’s Healthy Streets website, and 2021 survey. You can also see the current 2021 survey results on a map.
- Dr. Destiny Thomas, ‘Safe Streets’ Are Not Safe for Black Lives.
- If you want to get deep into the data the city collected on the 2020 Healthy Streets program, it’s all here. Or you can just read the summary memo.
- A2 Council resolution for downtown street closures and citywide street closures in 2020.
Transcript
MK: Hi, and welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor AF, a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events in local politics and policy, governance, and other civic good times. I’m Molly Kleinman and my pronouns are she/her, I’m Michelle Hughes and my pronouns are she/her, and I’m Jess Letaw and my pronouns are she/her. We’re your cohosts to help you get informed, and get involved. It’s your city!.
JL: Before we move into today’s topic we want to take a moment to honor the victims of the mass shooting in Georgia, this week, you became ancestors too soon, we will continue the march in your names to make the world more loving and just for your children and grandchildren. Thank you. Today we’re taking a deeper dive into how the streets to help you and arbor follow along and get more involved and welcome to our new listeners thanks to concentrate for the first article on an arbitrary if for those who haven’t read it, you may not know that we’re famous now we’ll drop a link to it in the show notes let’s jump in.
MK: So today we’re talking about healthy streets, those of you who’ve been listening for a little while know that this is a topic near and dear to my heart we’ve gotten to cover some of these the agenda items, as this is the plans for the new round of healthy streets has moved through Council. And so we wanted to give everyone some context and background about what are healthy streets, what did this look like here in Ann arbor and what is it going to look like in this coming spring and summer. So first what are healthy streets in other cities they’ve been called things like slow streets or open streets, but basically they were a pandemic response to the simultaneous drop off in car traffic. The need for social distancing and increased desire for people to be outside because they were mostly stuck at home, and also an increased need for people to be using alternative forms of transportation to get to work, and a lot of places public transit shutdown or was like there were major service cuts, there was a lot of virus transmission happening on public transportation and so a lot of people were looking for other ways to get around and so there was this response which happened with varying degrees of speed in different places, but hundreds of cities all over the world took away lanes from cars and gave them to humans and they did this in a lot of different ways in Paris, it was hundreds of miles and a lot of the bike lanes that they put in are intended to be permanent in other places, it was a lot more temporary New York City was pretty slow to impose them here in Ann arbor we didn’t get our healthy streets up and running until August of last summer. But that’s the like that’s sort of the basic what, when we talk about healthy streets, what are we talking about we call them healthy streets here in Ann arbor here in Ann arbor the healthy streets program had three different components and I think one of the things I saw when I heard confusion about healthy streets last year was meet people mixing up what these different pieces were and what they were intended to do, and and how they work. So in Ann arbor we had the downtown St reconfigurations, some of which were total closures. We had neighborhood slow streets where the streets were not closed down completely, but there were signs place at the entrances of the street to say, this is a neighborhood slow street. Please drive more slowly or don’t drive through here and be on the lookout for more people walking and biking in the street.
MH: And then there were also majoring once they say. My slow streets ones actually say like that it was close to through traffic.
MK: yeah the sign said that they were close to through traffic um you know that only there was no there was no enforcement of that and that’s something we’re going to talk about a little bit more so it’s not like, there were police sitting there waiting to see if you drove through one end and out the other, and then they would ticket you there was there was no enforcement, but there was it, you know it was more of a recommendation to please not cut through the streets and for the neighborhood slow streets people had to request the slow street tweet treatment, so there was like a tool online and people had to request it, and if enough people who lived on the street objected, the slow street treatment didn’t happen. And there were these signs that were put up on the streets beforehand to sort of let people know that this has been proposed, let us know what you think about it, how you feel about it. That yeah there was it’s interesting because there was a lot that went like around the neighborhood slow streets, there were a couple of iterations of those signs members of City Council about the first signs were too ambiguous and unclear, so there was a second round of signage. But they were actually really popular and a lot of streets had people request the neighborhood slow steady treatment after they saw similar streets in their neighborhood so the number went up over time and then the last chunk of the healthy streets programming in arbor was the major streets inside and outside of downtown and those were mostly lane closures, to create bike lanes in places where there were not like facilities or were there were really insufficient like facilities. So we’re going to talk a little bit more about each of those chunks and we’re going to start, I want to have just talk about the downtown stories I think those were some of the most visible and that all happens through the downtown Development Authority and jess is our resident DDA expert.
JL: But if, by expert you mean somebody sits on the board, and yes i’m totally an expert so I will give our standard disclaimer that even with all the hats that we wear everything that we talked about the pipe on the podcast is our own thoughts and opinions and not intended to represent the organizations, for whom we work or volunteer. So, with all of that said, I did want to talk a little bit about what guided the DDA healthy streets projects. They were considered an extension of a set of street and sidewalk projects that the DDA has been conducting for years called people friendly streets. The values for the people friendly streets are developed in coordination with engineers staff and the board. And people from the streets are guided by safe and comfortable streets resilient and an energy responsible downtown equitable just access for all people. A connected community with streets as civic space a diverse and vibrant local economy and affordable and inclusive community and responsible design and implementation so those are values that have guided our people friendly streets projects for a number of years when the pandemic came up the great thing was we already had a lot of tools in the toolbox for street projects what we had to now do was become very quick and very agile. So we looked at the healthy streets response of the people from the streets projects as an opportunity to provide quick response support and response. While still working towards our city and downtown long term goals, we wanted to use short term interventions to support our Community long term desire for improvement. Safety access resilience equity sustainability and vibrancy and potentially use these short term interventions as a way to link to potential long term opportunities so some of the interventions that we proposed were in support of downtown businesses. To allow people to shop, especially given the rapidly changing executive orders of what could be open, what couldn’t where people could shop where they couldn’t. We wanted to make sure that there was plenty of space for people to walk for customer lines and for our town out our excuse me outdoor dining and retail that was organized, but still met the requirements for physical distancing. We also coordinated a number of pickup and dropoff zones and restaurants, in particular, but many, many downtown businesses really started to rely on curbside pickup and on doordash and grub hub and uber eats and all of the delivery services so much more than parking curbside demand became a really critical way that the DDA could support downtown businesses downtown users, we also looked at a pilot parking space reuse program where we took parking spaces and allowed businesses to turn them into. Little dining areas little seating areas, but a way to kind of extend the public space downtown. We also temporarily suspended fee collection for parking lots we wanted to encourage people to come downtown and spend their time and money in safe ways, and so did not collect fees for. Some of the lots for a portion of last year, we also used it as an opportunity for some art projects we did some way finding especially around like the state street area. To help people understand how to occupy the space safely, but also as a way of continuing to support artists and it particularly economically vulnerable time for them. We also installed temporary hand washing stations in at a few points in the downtown so there were a number of different ways that we tried to make the space occupy double attractive, but still very safe for the business owners for the residents and for people looking to spend their time and money and the downtown.
MK: Right and some of those were not officially part of the healthy streets program, but they were just about reconfiguring our streets to meet the needs of businesses and residents and visitors during the early stages of the pandemic rights right yeah um so and for the downtown streets, there were some reconfigurations and also weekend weekend closures or openings depending on how you want to think about this closed two cars, open to everyone else where it was I think Friday Friday evening through Sunday, there were sections of the downtown where there were no cars and that that really changed the dynamic the few times that I went downtown during the summer I really felt. Pretty vibrant despite everything that was going on, because.
JL: It did and we heard back from a number of businesses that said that have street side like floor ground level businesses that said they were able to survive because of those closures, especially retro restaurants, but some of the retail as well, so they they would not have been able to survive if the streets haven’t closed yeah.
MK: So the downtown healthy streets I think we’re we’re really important piece of this program and then the last piece where the major streets inside and outside of downtown, and these were mostly about filling crucial gaps in the bike network and pedestrian network in order to make it easier for people to get all the way from one place to another on bike facilities that were going to be safe for them to use, and so, for some of those those were sort of I think the most controversial pieces of the healthiest streets, because there were a couple of locations where car traffic seemed at least to be worse or where there was usually heavy car traffic anyway, so the two big examples are the broadway bridge on the North side of town and South Packard coming up to Eisenhower on the South side of town and those are two really major long standing gaps in the bike infrastructure, and this was an opportunity to try and fill those. So that’s sort of the overview of the Ann arbor program and we’re going to dig back into that a little bit more a little bit later on, but one thing that I wanted to make sure we really dug into was the question of healthy streets programs and equity, there was a lot of discussion happening in spring of last year about these really like quickly implemented healthy streets programs, and the way they did or did not contribute to racial equity and justice in their cities, this was happening at the same time as the uprisings all over the country and response to the murder of George floyd, and so the streets like we were using the streets for a lot of things during this time and the and there were some communities where healthy streets popped up quickly in ways that felt really disruptive to local communities and so we had some really like valuable essays coming out, I wanted to talk specifically about something that was written by destiny Thomas who’s a she’s an anthropologist and planner. And she sort of laid out all of the ways that these healthy streets programs can go wrong when it comes to equity and justice. And it’s not that healthy that programs like these healthy streets programs are fundamentally unjust, but just that, without careful attention to equity issues they can make things worse, instead of better.
MH: Full attention to equity issues a lot of things can make stuff worse, instead of better yeah I think that’s right that’s probably.
MK: True, almost always and so some of the things that she observed about them you know the quick build nature of the of these healthy streets programs meant that there wasn’t a good opportunity for public feedback and, in particular, there wasn’t an opportunity to engage with communities that are often excluded from the planning and participatory process of city governance and, by doing this really quickly, it was another way of excluding those same people from the conversation. And she talked about the ways that black brown indigenous people, people of color and trans people are disproportionately policed harassed and killed in our streets and that, if we were setting up programs that required police enforcement that meant that we were disproportionately exposing certain residents to potential violence from police, and so the Info, and this is this concern about enforcement is true anytime we’re talking about the transportation system and traffic safety. But it was particularly true in these healthy streets programs because oh we’re opening up the streets to the public well but which public who like who is really going to feel safe in these kinds of streets and who are we trying to make feel safe and who is not going to feel safe.
MH: Well, in Ann arbor we already talked about at least some of them, we went light on enforcement right.
MK: yeah I would say on all of them, we went really enforcement and that was intentional. But that’s not the case everywhere so, and I see in New York City police were enforcing social distancing and there was one so Dr Thomas cited one study that in brooklyn 87% of the people who were cited for social distancing violations were black. You know, New York City is different from Ann Arbor in a lot of ways, but that kind of disproportionate enforcement, so creating new rules to violate can create new ways to invite policing into the lives of people of color who are already over policed and I thought that those concerns were all really valid and um you know there were there were some key things that our city planning people did and creating the nr reprogram that I do think address some of the things that the Dr Thomas pointed out, but it’s just something that I wanted to be aware of, because to me. The healthy street like the potential of healthy streets from the beginning was to address some issues of injustice and an equity so, for example. Access to park space and outdoor space is disproportionate in most cities, including Ann arbor wealthier wider community communities have more parks and better parks. So, opening up street space for recreation is one way to help address that disparity, at a time when people are locked down at home and so it was really important to me that we pay attention to these concerns and that we try to address them it’s not about that I personally had control over what the city was doing around this but I was really pleased to see some of the things that that our city staff did when they were developing the program does MH I don’t know if you had anything you wanted to add on this part.
JL: I will say one thing in the downtown portion of the healthy streets programs, we were mindful of how we were evaluating and creating these projects so there’s a truism in city engineering called the three e’s which is engineering education and enforcement if you’re creating a new thing you’ve got to engineer it well you’ve got to educate the Community on the change and how to use it and you’ve got to enforce against improper behavior there’s a lot of conversation about whether those ease are appropriate still appropriate and the team our team added three e’s to those which is equity evaluation and encouragement, which is, are we creating programs that are truly accessible to the entire Community. How are we measuring this and how are we rather than enforcement, how are we encouraging people to use things well and healthfully for themselves. So the way that we developed a programs were a little bit different excuse me, the projects were a little bit different than how we’ve looked at them before and I have to say they felt both more incremental and more robust right like a little bit less of a big change, but a little bit more welcoming.
MK: yeah so let’s talk for a minute about how healthy streets went in that first year there were some big successes and some things that really did not go well, and I think it’s important to to think about both of them, especially when we look ahead to how we’re going to do it this coming year, I do want to point out, though, even as we’re going through with these critiques that the city staff who made this happen did it on an incredibly short timeline with out a dedicated budget at the start, like it was done very quickly and pretty cheaply during a time of great people, and so I think that it’s it’s pretty amazing what they were able to do yeah and and going into the second year they have a bit more time to plan, they do have a budget. For a consultant to help figure out how to do things differently, and they really did take a lot of the feedback to heart. But we’ll get there. So things specifically around equity some things that the planning for healthy streets took into consideration neighborhood streets the neighborhood slow streets had to be requested by residents city staff did not impose any neighborhood slow streets on streets where someone who lived there haven’t asked for it, so that was a way again to get to this idea of making sure that there’s opportunity for public participation. On the flip side if people didn’t know to ask or didn’t feel comfortable asking it’s possible that there were streets that didn’t get this treatment that where they would have benefited or where people would have wanted it. And that’s something we’re thinking about going into year two. Another piece is that when they were looking for especially these arterial streets to do reconfigurations they looked at things like census data of areas with lower rates of car ownership and generally, lower income areas with people with lower income, where people would be more likely to be traveling not in a car to get to work. And they intentionally were looking to fill gaps to link those neighborhoods with downtown and that’s how the south Packard route was selected this one that was really people really hated it. And in fact the City Council had it shut down after something like two weeks, it was not in place for very long. But the people who used it by bike did not hit it in fact they really loved it and it was an area that it’s an area that’s really lacking in bike facilities, and so it made a big difference So those are Those are some of the ways that our city staff. I think did attempt to address these equity concerns when they were doing the planning so.
MH: I always worry a lot about you know there’s people who think who, like their natural inclination is that the government is there to serve them, and you know they’ve got they’ve got the city council on speed dial and then there’s people who would never occur to them to ask the government for help, and so you know they. So yeah I think the requiring asking for it is a is a big deal, it makes some assumptions about who has access to it and stuff. yeah absolutely and.
MK: I think this sort of tried to split the difference so on one of the program one piece of the program people had to ask, but on another piece that we’re looking at the data to try and guess and see how they could better serve some communities that might not have known to ask. So, I guess, we can start with what didn’t work because that South Packard section was one of the big ones that didn’t work the broadway bridge was another one. For those installations and for installations around the city, partly because of how quickly this happened and what was available. They used construction barrels to mark off a lot of the bike lanes when they were creating bike lanes out of car lanes and it just looks like construction and people don’t like construction. The sort of knee jerk reaction is that this is frustrating and annoying. And it was confusing both to drivers who you could see people accidentally turning into the bike lane without realizing that it was not for cars anymore. And also people for people biking and walking who didn’t necessarily realize that that space was for them. Because it looked like construction and there was some signage but it wasn’t always clear or it may have been at the beginning and ending of a treatment, but not at the various feeder streets.
JL: In the middle.
MK: So if you’re coming from one of those feeder streets, you might not have seen it. In general, there are a lot of complaints about public engagement and communication and it, you know it’s it was difficult, you know the city was adjusting to not being able to do public engagement in person, and I think a lot of the sort of structures of the city had in place where for Community meetings where people could show up in person and figuring out, I mean it was several months before commissions were even able to meet because the State hadn’t figured out what the open meetings act if you could meet by zoom so there was just a lot of disruption in that in that regard.
JL: And i’d like to say something too about the feedback that was received the DDA really dug into the statistics of who responded and how they responded and one of the things that we observed, is that of people use the healthy streets treatments so specifically closures or pilot bike lanes. If you were user as a cyclist or a pedestrian between 85 and 95% of the users liked the program if you use those programs projects as a car driver 67% hated it. So how you moved through those treatments kind of determined how you thought about it and that kind of makes sense right like the point of these projects, not one single point was to move more cars faster. The point was to make more humans safer I think it’s clear that we did that but whenever I see critiques of projects i’m always really curious to know where were you in relation to the project and what was your expectation and I think those numbers matter yeah.
MK: And this was this way i’ll go ahead, MH.
MH: Oh, saying also like you mentioned that you know the broadway bridge and South packet were projects that were part of the parts of the project that didn’t work and i’m not sure that’s fair to say, because they were parts of the project that we close down there are parts of the project that we’re unpopular amongst drivers, but for the people who were using them, you know as cyclists – heck I mean I went over the broadway bridge several times and I thought that I thought that I thought that part of the project worked out great.
MK: yeah absolutely just were you gonna.
JL: say something I was gonna say um yeah I i’m going to disagree with MH a little bit on the frog with a bridge as a cyclist I hated that one I hated that one I hated being dumped out of division on to construction barrels I really hated the uncertainty and I don’t know i’m sure that this is like transference on my part, but I felt like the cars were like radiating anger. So I found that part of the project super hostile, and I have some other cycling friends who felt the same way, so I hear you, so I think that I was gonna say it was better than nothing i’m actually not sure that’s how little I liked that part of the project.
MH: wow yeah I always feel the anger and radiating from.
JL: That so that’s true that was not unique to that.
MH: Project right so yeah I was, I was happy that there was something to protect me from the cars there.
MK: And this, I mean this is a really tough thing about the healthy streets work, but also about any sort of reconfiguring the roads in general, which is that it is a zero sum game, there is a limited amount of square footage and in order to make space for people outside of cars, we need to take space away from cars, usually and so I understand drivers feeling frustrated, but I there’s also this way that I see I like this, you know, especially in the online discourse right the drivers take it really personally when they’re asked to give up some space to keep everyone safer and it’s hard, like you, we can’t be governed purely by that feedback, because nothing will ever change and the status quo is unacceptable.
MH: Because the question. Oh go ahead and question I had from the you know from from these deployments it’s like we had a lot of cars, you know, we had we had a lot of drivers that were really angry and and I wanted to know like Okay, how much were they actually slowed down like were they were they angry just because of perception or were they.
JL: That I saw and molly you may have different the numbers that I saw were in the areas where there were slow Downs which wasn’t everywhere, the average increase was somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes or, I think, on the broadway bridge or the light just off of the broadway bridge, I think the the hot the very, very high end was one and a half light cycles, or something like that.
MK: Had I had to and and so, when there were delayed, it was never all day because car traffic, for the most part, remained really, really reduced from from typical rates, and so it was mostly the end of the day, quote unquote rush hour the peak times when when there were delays, but they were most for the most part they were under a minute and and they it was not as bad as it felt I think two people who were driving um.
MH: yeah so I always take it personally when the driver is complaining about that kind of thing because i’m like wait you got we were slowed down, you were slow down by one minute, and for that you’re willing to put me at risk.
JL: yeah I do think to this is a little bit of a tangent, but I do think too that there’s a misunderstanding on a lot of on the part of a lot of drivers about the safety of the facilities that exist for pedestrians and especially for cyclists, we are so conditioned to take for granted that there are safe comfortable roads linking us from any place we want to be to any place we want to go that I think most of us don’t really register that that does not exist for bicycles, that the the facilities that we have are finite they’re very interoperable. And so you don’t have a guarantee when you’re on a bike for sure on a bike and definitely on float we’ve talked many times about sidewalk gaps on this podcast. You don’t have a guarantee if you’re not in a car that you have a safe place way to get from A to B, especially if you’re trying to take a direct route. And I think that that’s something a lot of folks don’t understand I talked to an irate driver about the broadway bridge problem, a few months ago, and when I put it in that context that what we’re trying to do is create a more continuous network for people, not in cars. It actually changed how he felt about it a little bit he’s like oh OK so i’m going slower, so they can be safer. I felt like I said that 10 times already, but, for whatever reason, that was the thing that made it click.
MK: Right and and a lot of times when things go in that look like just bike facility so i’m thinking here, especially about road diets the sort of four lane two three lane conversions where it goes from two car lanes in either direction to one carlene in either direction a middle turn lane and bike lanes. The people who benefit the most from those are pedestrians, it makes pedestrian crossing a lot safer it slows car seats down to where there’s a lower likelihood the pedestrians are going to die when they do get hit by cars. But because it looks just like a bike lane people think it’s just for bikes and the other thing that I think is important, just for in general for bike facilities and also specifically for the healthy streets in South is that cars take up a ton of space, so it doesn’t take that many cars to look like a traffic jam and bikes don’t take up that much space and they generally are moving freely through bike lanes, and so I heard a lot of people complaining about that these lanes are always empty there no no one’s ever using them. But the city did do counts, going back to the data some some of the more popular installations had over 200 people biking through them in a day. And that wasn’t necessarily visible to a driver on the 30 seconds that they went down some section of the road, but the cars are really inefficient just because they take up so much space.
MH: I stopped wanting time where a train was crossing you know over on liberty and there were counted six bikers and six cars, the bikers look like they like you didn’t even notice, they were there, and the cars it looked like a gigantic traffic jam.
JL: And I was gonna say one thing about the measurement. This has to do with the second of the the three e’s evaluation, the DEA measures of the program and I don’t know if this is consistent across healthy streets or if this was just the downtown portion. But saw an average of an average increase of six times the amount of cyclists that we’d seen pre pandemic, so it made a significant difference to the number of people using the facilities yeah.
MK: usage rates were way up, I wanted to come back to this data so in terms of what did go well last year. We had these really high levels of satisfaction among people walking and biking through those quarters that they felt safer, but they were more likely to use that space there were reduced car speeds and reduced crashes sometimes reduce the reductions were by as much as five miles an hour on average. Which again makes the road safe for everyone, including people in cars and these pilot projects really did work they were successful in filling critical gaps in the bicycle network and in some situations, they were so successful. That we’re now as we look into year two looking at making some of those things permanent because they were such a huge improvement So is there anything else you wanted to say about last year before we move ahead to what’s coming.
JL: Just to continue your last sentence, the division street bike lane is becoming a permanent installation, by the end of this year, so division between I think Catherine Miller and I don’t remember the south end of it, I don’t think it’s quite as far as Packard but close is going to see a to a bike lane permanently installed, by the end of this year, so that’s pretty exciting.
MH: Which is huge oh so.
MK: One way oh go ahead, MH.
MH: that’s awesome that’s all.
JL: really good.
MK: The One the one way streets downtown really like add a layer like an you know, a level of difficulty for like biking through the downtown and getting to certain destinations when you can only go in one direction, and so turn switching that to two way for bikes is going to be great I think it’s gonna be protected to right.
JL: that’s my understanding yep.
MK: yeah which is it’s going to be so great. So that’s one example of a way that the healthy streets were able to serve as a pilot in the first year to bring us some really awesome improved permanent infrastructure in year two other things that are happening differently in year two a lot more planning there’s a consultant involved there’s a there’s a budget there’s a plan to spend money on better barriers and signage and markings, including paint. dylan eaters and other just what are those things, full of water that you love so much.
JL: Oh, the water barriers forget about those yeah it’s basically like a big Lego filled with water. and the idea is that if a car hits it whatever is beyond the car a human on a bike a human on foot will get hurt. And it won’t do a ton of damage to the car and they’re cheap and easy to use, you don’t it doesn’t require specialized equipment, like the Jersey barriers which are the things that line decides of highways. And are typically what’s required in the downtown for street fairs and things like that, if you want to close the street up until 2019 you are required to use Jersey bear and right off the BAT That was a cost of like $15,000 just, not even for the various themselves, but for the equipment required to use it, which meant if you were just a kid on roller skates there was no way that you were going to be able to like barricade off the street, for a very small use now we can’t because of the water berries.
MK: yeah, and this was, I mean this was an issue, one of the issues last year, because it was mostly construction barrels it was really easy to move stuff or for stuff to get knocked into the lane or moved out of the way. So we’re going to have these things that are a little bit harder to to move, but are still cheaper and flexible we’re also talking about using paint in some places to like change road markings to make it clear when you’re turning onto a street with a new bike lane, for example. And there are other parts of the city where we’re looking at more permanent treatment, so the division bike lane is a great example, but also South main which was another area where. It was very popular for pedestrians and people on bikes drivers really didn’t like it, and the this year’s configuration is going to keep that Center turn lane that’s currently on South main so that it will. Because there’s a lot of left turns happening that section there’s like some hills there so there’s some more blind turns I think it’s going to be more pleasant to use for everyone, and my understanding is that the goal is for those changes to probably be permanent, I don’t think that’s approved yet, but that’s sort of it’s in the works to try a better a better setup to see if we can make that permanent. Another difference this year so for the neighborhood streets, the plan, rather than starting from scratch the neighborhood streets program is going to begin with. All the neighborhood healthy streets from last year, the neighborhood slow streets from last year, so that’s the baseline and then there’s an opportunity for people to request more neighborhoods low streets, and this was, and this was like a big thing for me is that staff is looking at. Considering neighborhoods more as networks, so one problem that sometimes happened last year was that if a street That was a cut through in a neighborhood got the slow street treatment it drove more spillover traffic to a different street in that same neighborhood.
One very clear example of this is then there’s an some neighborhoods between packer to the south and washing off to the north. And there’s always been a fair amount of cut through traffic and one by one, those streets have been getting traffic calming treatments So these are permanent treatments and once once we get the traffic calming then all of a sudden next street is the MID big cut through street, and so, then they need traffic calming and a similar thing is, I think what’s happening with some of the neighborhood slow streets and so there’s this attempt to say Okay, so if this one street from last year is a cut through.
MK: Can we also put these treatments on the three or four parallel streets so that that spillover effect doesn’t happen and i’m hopeful that that’s going to change the feeling, because when it’s just one street in a neighborhood if you’re out for a walk or a bike ride with your kids. It doesn’t change the overall experience you just get like a moment of calm and then you’re back into a situation where you’re fighting with cars, because there are no sidewalks or whatever, the situation is in that neighborhood um oh so I wanted to.
MH: say in the be any is there gonna be any like proactive. Slow streets are like outreach to neighborhoods.
MK: yeah so that idea is we’re in neighborhoods where there was maybe one where they were maybe one or two. Last year, to potentially put out some some way of communicating with with other parallel streets to say you know, we want to do this on your street to. All right, it’s gonna be a little bit more proactive.
MH: that’s like i’m still worried about like neighborhoods that you know were never aware of the program or never thought to contact City Hall or never thought that was for them, you know, like if I don’t want them to get skipped again.
MK: yeah, and for that i’m not i’m not sure I know that there are there, there is a goal of doing more and better public engagement around the whole program this year and so it’s possible i’m just not familiar with all of the with all of the different engagement pieces that are planned. um we so far, what i’ve seen has been mostly the design preview stuff.
MH: yeah and kind of how to address that problem is. That we could do a whole podcast episode about that.
JL: And I think that’s one of the things where we have to kind of trust staff to do their job as long as we’ve set the right policy directors, we have to trust staff to do their job and what I mean by that is that staff know the demographics, of the city extremely well, they tend to know what neighborhoods down to like a parcel of a block are underserved by different kinds of infrastructure, who doesn’t have access to sidewalks who can’t get from their neighborhood street on a bike to an arterial who can’t do that. And that’s the kind of thing that we’re probably even in the most just world possible we’re never going to get to and Community engagement we’re never going to get perfect representation of our Community and Community engagement, I mean maybe but failing that we have to trust that staff knows what is underserved by what kind of infrastructure and if they’re moving forward solutions that have not necessarily been accounted for and Community engagement that they’re fulfilling the the community’s values of policy objectives. In the best way that they know how that’s why we hire staff because they’re experts in the things that they do so, I hear what you’re saying MH I think what i’m saying is let’s not ask Community engagement to do all the work.
MH: That sounds like a good plan.
MK: yeah it can it’s it’s it’s a double edged sword it’s so important, but it’s also a really effective way to delay and block programs like healthy streets and the healthy streets program last year city engineering staff initially drafted a memo about potential transportation responses to the pandemic of April of last year, so like under a month into the shutdown. And it didn’t actually pass counsel, because there was a rule that that City Council had to approve any road reconfigurations even just simple and changes we didn’t actually get these things implemented until August of last year. You know, we missed the whole spring and summer, basically, and we really only had it for the fall and that was in part because of concerns brought up at the City Council table around making sure the public engagement was thorough enough and said things exactly the right way. So this year, one of the big differences is that it’s going to happen, a lot faster I think these deployments are going to go up in the next month or two and we’re gonna get. To whole seasons to enjoy more space for people outside of cars on our streets so i’m really excited about that we’ve got this nice early spring happening, and I know the kids in my neighborhood are in the street already. And it would be nice for them not to have to worry about the big pickup trucks that come flying through. Oh Another thing I wanted to make sure to say is that there is a survey, so the survey about requesting healthy streets. The current survey for this year is still going on and there’s going to be a link in the show notes and I encourage you to go in there and request healthy streets treatments in your neighborhood on your street. The way the tool is set up this year, last year, you could only put in places where you wanted to help the street, this year, you can put in, where you want to help the street and where you don’t want a healthy street. And it’s interesting to look at the data, you can see these treatments, we talked about the broadway bridge and South Packard. There are a lot of red flags, a lot of people who really didn’t like it, and there are also a lot of blue flags people who, who really did and who really want that to happen again. As I understand it, the broadway bridge is not going to be included this year but South Packard is and they’ve looked at ways to preserve more lanes of car traffic and still create lanes protected buffered I think buffered lanes for bikes in order to do really because that’s such a major gap Packard is one of the only routes to and from ypsilanti and you can’t bike washing off like. I mean you can people do but it’s even worse than biking Packard and so it’s a really, really important corridor for outside of the car transportation. Just did you it looked at you wanted to jump in on something.
JL: I was having thoughts about the roadway bridge and why it’s not being included in general. I like to go fast on things and iterate as we go. When it comes to the broadway bridge i’m actually glad that we’re holding off here at least a year on implementation, because it’s not as easy as just connecting division to the bridge there’s what’s that street that comes up that sharp hills at depot and then cars are very street. Carry street Thank you. yeah Thank you MH the one that’s got the real steep grade yeah.
MH: carrie Sir yeah.
JL: yeah and yeah and the way that cars are directed because that’s a one way street cars don’t tend to clock that that’s a pretty active cyclists path as well, and in addition there’s that berm that’s going in over by North main and ARGO pod so that area is.
MH: Oh that’s in.
JL: I know it’s in but the connections are kind of sucky.
MH: Okay.
JL: And, and so I see it as an area that’s seeing a lot of change and i’m kind of okay with us doing one big thing, like the two way division by claim letting that ending be a little bit awkward for a season and then doing something great on the broadway bridge that safer for cyclists. Within the next season, I hope so that’s all I was going to say is that i’m not usually a fan of not doing things, but in this case i’m i’m okay that’s going a little slower.
MK: yeah and a lot of the a lot of there’s been a lot of changes this year to the downtown streets in terms of where closures are happening and where they’re not happening. And downtown it was guided largely by the businesses and which sections of town wanted to have closures and which ones did not. But plenty of businesses still want those closures and they’re coming in, so a lot of them are coming back this this year. And in fact I think for downtown the closure is specifically for outdoor dining the sort of weekend closures, have already been approved by Council, so I don’t know when those are going in didn’t wasn’t them, I think I was on the Council agenda last week.
MH: yeah they told us when they’re going in I don’t have it off the top of my head because i’m in a park in lansing without my computer.
JL: On April one, I think, is the date for those two comments.
MK: awesome yeah that’s really soon. yeah um so you know that gets through most of the things I wanted to really touch on about healthy streets to help to help folks understand the bigger picture, a little bit. What the different pieces of the puzzle are what happened last year, what to look forward to this year, but I know you to probably have also some some thoughts and feelings about some of this that you wanted to talk about. Well i’m excited.
MH: i’m excited about these things becoming permanent that’s all.
JL: And I was gonna say I appreciate this episode because molly got to put on her Professor hat so learning from Professor molly has been really fun.
MK: I tried to keep it as non dissertation like as i’m there may or may not be citations in the show notes you’ll see.
JL: I honestly I did come into the podcast with questions, and I regret to inform you that you answered all of them proactively.
MK: So sorry.
MH: I should have held my questions back so you didn’t know what to incorporate them, that was the big I was my big thing was about the you know the perceptions of ours about how fast they’re going versus how fast they’re actually going and things like that.
MK: yeah yeah and I think you know there were some places where the backups were real and another thing that happened last year is that the because it was also a temporary. The designers made changes throughout the course of the deployment, there were adjustments made to signal timing adjustments made to how especially around intersections how things were set up in order to try and mitigate some of those problems and all of those lessons are coming into the second year so that I think the setup is going to be a lot smoother and we’re going to have hopefully fewer of those real dramatic backup situations and it’ll also just be clear or what’s going on the barriers and signage and markings are all going to be better and.
MH: yeah difference.
MH: I remember the brooklyn bridge when it started out, you know with the construction barrels but eventually, they started they put in something that was either glued or screwed into the road or something like that little plastic bollards and those were those took up a lot less space and made it seem a lot more friendly as the thing, so I wonder if those are going to be used in some places now.
MK: The those are the I think what you’re talking about are called delineated and there are going to delineate years are going to be, I think, in a few different places around around the city.
MH: During that’s great yeah.
MK: Great so, then we can wrap up the content of today’s episode, and I think move on to pod keeping.
JL: That sounds good, well, thank you for healthy streets, to be honest, I felt like I was elbow deep in thinking about them last year. Given that i’m not only on the DDA board i’m on the capital improvements committee capital improvements being our road and sidewalk projects, and so I had a front row seat. At the design of our downtown downtown projects, and I still learned a ton so thanks for customer molly. um okay so going into listener responses and corrections, thank you to the listener, who pointed out, I got a Budget Number wrong in our last episode, we were talking about different approaches to none armed Community response and I had noted that. The housing Commission had $234 left over from a pilot project bringing having non police responders respond to emergency emergency calls that’s actually not what that money was the 234,000 was had. A request by the city administrator to the housing commission to redirect it to such a pilot project being specifically an alternative response to people who are in a mental health crisis so that isn’t past money that’s future money Thank you listeners.
MH: And we’re going to see I just got word we’re going to see some another resolution about that expanding that program on the April 5 City Council agenda excited to see that goes through that.
MK: yeah that’s gonna be really exciting so um we wanted to thank all of you again, who have supported us through coffee. If you’d like to send us a few dollars to cover hosting which includes a website, which we hope to be launching in the next week, where you will find transcripts of all of our episodes along with show notes.
MH: You can find us it’s been saving the transcripts we just haven’t had a place to put them.
MK: I had to convince I tried to convince molly to put them in the show the script since but I guess it’s like limited and there’s a number of characters or whatever. yeah I don’t see so great, I really wanted these transcripts for all kinds of reasons, like but anyway, if you’d like to send us a few dollars to cover hosting, including a website where you’ll be able to find transcripts of all our episodes, you can find us at www.ko-fi.com/annarboraf
JL: And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF. We’re your cohosts Molly Kleinman, Michelle Hughes, and myself, Jess Letaw; and thanks as always to producer Jarod Malestein. Theme music “I dunno” by grapes. For questions about this podcast or ideas about future episodes, you can email us at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!
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