Stormwater Tuesdays: CSO LTCPU… GCCW… BMP… LID

by Marley Bice, MCRP '12

It turns out stormwater management in general and a large city’s water management program website requires its own glossary in order to navigate the myriad of acronyms. I first fell in love with BMPs (best management practices) and LID (low-impact development) as an AmeriCorps member working on watershed outreach in Coastal Oregon but my new internship with CHPlanning and PWD (the Philadelphia Water Department) will help me learn more about IWMPs (Integrated Watershed Management Plans) and SWMMs (Stormwater Management Models) while I work on the City’s GC, CW (Green City, Clean Waters) program and their CSO LTCPU (combined sewer overflow long-term control plan update).

I guess it is important to start with understanding the past of water management and sewer systems in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of the oldest cities in the United States. William Penn’s original plan for Philadelphia included an emphasis on green open space and a city that promoted walkability. Philadelphia quickly grew into a city of industrial and historical renown.  The city’s leaders were quick to realize that they needed to protect their drinking water resources. Therefore, Fairmount Park (a total of 9200 acres) was established around the upper Schuylkill River to protect the city’s drinking water resources. Today, Philadelphians are beginning to realize that we need to protect our waters for environmental and recreation reasons as well. It was the Philadelphia Water Department’s recent reevaluation of how the city’s physical infrastructure affects the quality of the surrounding rivers that led to their new green stormwater infrastructure program: Green City, Clean Waters. I am privileged to be working with them at the exciting beginnings of this project.

 

So, watch this series on The RAPPS Blog for ramblings about making our cities greener by slowing rainwater down and soaking it in. I truly believe rain water is a valuable resource and can also create artwork in the most unexpected ways.

Photos from top left: slow it down and bring it to people's attention: creative gutters (Seattle Office of Arts & Culture); you can harvest rain anywhere and it doesn't have to be ugly (Haver & Boecker); creative vegetation and rainwater detention can also create outdoor spaces for students or employees (Sustainable City Network); permeable pavers are not only pretty and more natural looking, they also slow down sheet flow and decrease dangerous ice on steep driveways (Singley Lay Designs).

Transportation Fridays: The Psychology of Safety

by Betsy Harvey, MCRP '12

Last week I wrote about the shared streets principle in which regulatory devices such as stop signs and curbs are removed and pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers navigate the same space. In a controlled environment – your average road – drivers assume that risk is low. Therefore they are less likely to pay attention to what is happening around them – any place beyond their immediate travel lane – because they assume that everyone else is following the same rules.

The shared streets concept (or shared space, as it’s sometimes called) rests on the idea that taking away regulations makes streets safer, and the experiences of many Dutch cities (where the most extensive work has been done) bears this out. Check out this CBS news clip: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5290564n

According to David Engwicht, the co-founder of the Australian-based Creative Communities International, there is a strong relationship between unpredictability and safety: the more uncertain the driving environment is, the safer it is. Safety depends not on the actual risk of the environment, but rather on the “perceptual actual difference” (PAD), commonly known a false sense of security. Your standard county highway on which there are few pedestrians or bicyclists may have fewer accidents than a busy street running through a downtown, but the false sense of security is much higher. The tightly-controlled road environment encourages drivers to feel the road is safer than it is, even though the actual risk is still quite high; therefore, the difference between the two, PAD, is high, and the road is more dangerous (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Intrigue and Uncertainty: Towards New Traffic Taming Tools

Source:  Creative Communities International

The unpredictability of a busy street forces drivers to slow down, which is what the design of a shared street is meant to do. Visual clues, such as children playing in the street, tell motorists that they must expect the unexpected and slow down. Just as predictability increases PAD, unpredictability decreases it, making the busy street safer. Drive through Manhattan or downtown New Brunswick’s George Street, and you can’t help but to drive slowly and to look out for pedestrians. Drivers know to expect the unexpected; walkers and cyclists are notoriously bad at following street regulations. So the next time someone jaywalks or a biker is riding on the wrong side of the road, remember that by acting unpredictable they may be making streets safer for all of us.

Links for further reading:

• Creative Communities International on human behavior on the street
• The Congress for the New Urbanism on why shared streets are effective
• World Streets profile of the Shared Space Institute in The Netherlands

More examples from across the world

Bain de Bretagne, France. Source: Wrington Website, North Somerset, UK

Lund, Sweden. Source: Hamilton-Baillie Associates

Newcastle, UK. Source: Hamilton-Baillie Associates

Transportation Fridays: No Curbs and No Signs, But Safer Streets

by Betsy Harvey, MCRP, '12

In New Brunswick, like all of the United States and much of the world, road travel is governed through road paint, signs and physical barriers that direct and organize traffic. These elements, enforced by national laws, have created an environment that we are all so used to that we rarely think about it. Navigating the streets has become second-nature, and we hardly think as we make a right turn on red or stop at a stop sign.

 

A shared street in Oosterwolde, The Netherlands                   

Source: “Shared Space: Reconciling People, Places and Traffic,” by Hamilton-Baille. Built Environment 2008.

An intersection in New Brunswick, NJ.

Take a look at these two photographs. The one on the top is a standard street in America. The one on the bottom is a road in The Netherlands designed with the “shared streets” principle, which strips roads of their regulations and hierarchy. Notice the elderly man walking in the middle of the road as cars pass by a few dozen feet away. Shared streets began in The Netherlands in the 1970s by the traffic engineer Hans Monderman. Instead of separating cars, bikes and pedestrians into their own travel lanes as was the norm, he eliminated curbs that divided them and removed most of the signs and lights. He believed that roads were over-regulated and were neither safe nor efficient because drivers ceased paying attention to the changing road environment. While this seems counter-intuitive – since cars are large and go fast, it seems safer to separate them from slow, small people – experience in The Netherlands and England show Monderman’s ideas work. While cars will always be larger and heavier than people, we can change their speed, for it isn’t a stationary car that kills, it’s a car moving quickly. And that’s why shared streets have been successful in decreasing accidents: they slow cars down, and do so more than a street crammed with signs and lights that tell drivers to drive slowly.

Shared streets do so by changing the both the level of risk and the actual danger level. By integrating travel lanes, shared street designs purposely increase risk, which, paradoxically, decreases the actual danger to a person. By taking away regulatory devices the road environment becomes less predictable, and our behavior changes when we are in an unpredictable situation. How exactly this happens will be the subject of next week’s post, as well as more examples of shared streets from around the world. It turns out that designing streets that take advantage of natural human instinct and psychology creates safer roads. This is what shared streets are designed to do.

Links for further reading:

-         The appeal of shared streets

-         Wired features Hans Monderman and the development of shared streets

-         Are shared streets safe? A debate in The Times of London

Transportation Fridays: "Street: A Life"

by Betsy Harvey, MCRP, '12

Welcome to the RAPPS blog and my first in a series – “Street: A Life” – on streets and transportation planning! This post will give you a taste of what I will be writing about over the coming months, and next week I’ll launch into my first topic with an exploration of a unique practice from across the pond that is changing the way many are approaching street design.

As a future transportation planner, I love walking the New Brunswick streets: they are a restless mélange of humanity; walk out the door and you soon see the communities’ needs and passions and dreams: what they value, who belongs, where they’ve been. The past few weeks I have found myself contemplating the encroachment of pedestrians onto roads that are traditionally the dominion of cars. This is especially true of French Street in my neighborhood: pedestrians j-walk to the extent that crosswalks are rendered nearly obsolete, while bicyclists ride on sidewalks and roads while disregarding the direction of traffic. Non-auto traffic is encroaching on the roads.

            So despite the rules that govern our roads and millions of dollars spent to enforce them, street navigation is a constant give-and-take. Streets are a source of conflict – but also of innovation, of creation, of spontaneity, and of beauty. As our predominant public space – 3.9 million miles of public roads traverse the country – how we design and use them impacts tremendously the quality of our lives and communities.[1]

We must always be developing, therefore, innovative ways to think about and design streets. They can no longer be thought of simply as arterials that shuttle people in their cars from one place to another. They are dynamic, interactive public spaces in which much of our lives are lived. Their design and use, too often just an afterthought in the planning process, needs to be considered carefully so that they maximize traffic flow and minimize harm to people and the environment. After all, once a road is built, it stays.

My weekly posts will examine many of the new ideas and controversies concerning streets design and use. If this sounds a bit dull, don’t despair – I will be sure to branch into other pertinent topics, ssuch as history, psychology and the environment whenever the opportunity arises. In particular, I hope to explore street design and its use as a public space: What is its purpose? Who is it being designing for? Who belongs there (and who does not)? Why do we need it? How do we measure its benefits and costs? And rest assured that the discussion will not be restricted to goings-on in America; in fact, my first “real” post next week will start in The Netherlands. So stay tuned – and please feel free to add your opinion so we can get conversations going. Thanks for reading!

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[1] www.nationatlas.gov/transportation.html

A Face Lift for the RAPPS Newsletter

Did you check out the new and improved RAPPS newsletter, yet? The Spring 2011 RAPPS Newsletter highlighted the ingenuity and energy of the first-year MCRPs (now rising second-years) as they have created yet another new student interest group; "Walk Bloustein - Bike Bloustein (WB3)." Check out the newsletter for information on getting involved with this group and with the newly formed International Development Interest Group (IDIG). IDIG was first introduced in the Fall 2010 RAPPS Newsletter. Also check out the newsletter for a walk down memory road ... Snowball 2011 ... Winter and Spring intramural sports ...

Do you have an article idea that didn't make it into the Spring RAPPS newsletter? Well, it's not too late... just send it to rappsmailbox@gmail.com for it to be highlighted here on The RAPPS Blog!

Thinking About New Brunswick as a Planner

by Marley Bice, MCRP '12

In case you didn't get a chance to read it, the very last page of the Fall 2010 RAPPS newsletter was actually an urban planner matching game. The article asked you to (a) identify the locations of the photos on the map of New Brunswick and (b) think about whether these were examples of good or bad planning.

Did you successfully identify all of the locations? Did you get a chance to think about whether these are things that add or detract from New Brunswick's character? Here is your chance to add your voice.

The locations were:

(A) The parking garage at the intersection of Plum and Somerset Streets

(B) New landscaping on a mid-century brick apartment complex on Hamilton Street

(C) The new modern-looking Rutgers School of Nursing building on Paterson Street

(D) The ubiquitous Gateway Center on Easton Avenue

(E) The Johnson & Johnson Complex at George and Albany Streets

(F) Deiner Park hidden behind the "River Dorms" on the College Avenue Campus

(G) Boyd Park bordering Route 18

(H) George Street and specifically the redevelopment and face lift the street landscape got this past year

(I) The southern intersection of Route 18 and Raritan Avenue - those of you who live in Highland Park probably know this intersection well

(J) Hope Manor affordable housing complex on George Street

So what do you guys think? Do these places add to the aesthetics of the area? Are they a good use of the land? Are you able to identify bike/ped or accessibility issues? Does the landscaping create attractive spaces for residents?

To be completely honest, the whole reason I started this exercise was because I hated how I passed the Frank M. Deiner Park (item (F) above) multiple times a week and never ever saw anyone using the facilities. It made me wonder why... the park is ideally located behind densely populated undergraduate dorms with amazing Raritan River views... but maybe it is too hidden. Does the park have a bad reputation or safety issues that deter students? Is there not enough to do there?

Just today I stumbled upon a five-year old Daily Targum article about the park. Even the reporter had a negative impression of the park and its prospects when saying "Deiner Park now features a cracked basketball court, a faded sign with no real entrance to the park and no greenery to attract visitors, despite several studies conducted over the past 10 years aimed to revitalize the park." The 30-year old park cost over $20 million to build so I think we need to be thinking about and doing something to make this a better and safer place for the students and community members that could benefit from it.

A City Frozen in... 25 Years Ago

by Marley Bice, MCRP '12

A sign reads Pripyat... you know you are in the Zone of Alienation (http://chernobyl1986.tombossi.com/)

It was twenty-five years ago today… the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster changed our planet forever. Almost two months ago, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the eastern coast of Japan experienced major malfunctions of its cooling equipment and controls as a result of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that devastated the area at the same time. As Japanese authorities have declared a 30 mile evacuation zone around the handicapped plant I can’t help but think of Chernobyl. Just as the Japanese evacuees are being told, the residents around the Chernobyl plant were told they would only need to leave for a few days, until the radiation died down.

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe?

Although Chernobyl is a well-known and fascinating study in nuclear power disasters, the USSR’s devastation of most of eastern Europe and of nature’s overwhelming power over humans and our minute understanding of “science,” it is also an interesting social, and believe it or not, urban planning study as well. Everyone has heard of Chernobyl… but have you ever heard of Pripyat? Pripyat was a city of almost 50,000 people that was established in 1970 to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and is now a ghost town home to wild animals and about 400 illegal resettlers.

We lived in Pripyat, near the nuclear station, that’s where I was born and grew up. In a big pre-fab building, on the fifth floor. The windows looked out onto the station. On April 26 – there were two days – those were the last two days in our town. Now it’s not there anymore. What’s left there isn’t our town.

I found it fascinating to learn that the urban layout of Pripyat is actually a study in Soviet Russian urban design – frozen in time. The triangular-plan was made up of a series of five-story buildings alternated with high-rises. The buildings were spaced so as to maximize open space and ensure a view of the horizon was possible from almost every place. It is a study in communist, modernist city planning that was never allowed to fully develop.

At first there was disbelief, there was the sense that it was a game. But it was a real war, an atomic war. We had no idea…

Pictures (or video) of Chernobyl do a much better job of expressing the feeling of emptiness and loss. This disaster happened to a people already devastated by war and has forever changed the landscape and dynamics of this region.

An aerial view of Pripyat from the city's tallest building (http://chernobyl1986.tombossi.com/)

This amusement park was built just for the city's May Day celebrations. But May 1, 1986 never came to Pripyat. But looking at the lack of safety considerations on these rides... maybe that is a good thing. (http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/chapter18.html)