AS SOMEONE who has spent more than 15 years as an advocate for people who walk and ride bikes, this is a difficult statement for me to make:
Motorists, please show less courtesy to pedestrians trying to cross Whitaker and Drayton streets.
As I’ve written before, well-meaning drivers who stop or slow in an attempt to anticipate people entering the crosswalks on these streets are placing them in peril.
That’s because for every thoughtful person there are 10 more who will not slow or stop, even as required by law when people are already in a crosswalk.
Drayton and Whitaker, as currently configured, encourage all sorts of bad behavior including speeding and abrupt lane changes. The results are predictable.
Between 2011 and 2015, eight pedestrians have been hit on Whitaker Street. Seven sustained injuries.
Drayton Street was even more dangerous during that same time period, with 13 people hit and nine injured.
People on bikes were not spared either, with 12 crashes on Drayton and five on Whitaker during those five years.
This does not include collisions between cars, nor between cars and buildings, both of which are common according to residents who live along these streets.
Last week when District 2 Alderman Bill Durrence proposed exploring methods to make Drayton and Whitaker safer, the need was grounded firmly in traffic crash data. The numbers don’t lie.
What’s more, the effectiveness of a Complete Streets design, which he suggested might merit consideration, is also well documented. Studies of streets configured to safely accommodate all travel modes have found reductions in crashes varying from 19 to 47 percent for all users — pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers.
The mere suggestion that Whitaker and Drayton streets could be made safer by eliminating a car travel lane and adding on-street parking and a bike lane — an approach that has been employed with success all over the country and here in Savannah on Price Street — generated a May 16 letter to the editor in Savannah’s daily newspaper calling it a “terrible idea” and recommending adjusting signal timing to increase motor vehicle speeds.
What’s more, even considering a Complete Streets approach, much less implementing it, has been branded “the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a while,” “insane,” and “ridiculous and useless” by people on Facebook, who obviously consider themselves experts on the subject.
A real expert, however, says the opposite is true.
“Whitaker and Drayton are some of the worst examples of street design and traffic engineering I have ever seen,” says Dr. Dan Piatkowski, formerly a professor of urban planning at Savannah State and now a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “In their current state they are potentially deadly for everyone, including drivers. They effectively punish residents and visitors by preventing them from safely accessing some of Savannah’s most beautiful locations, like Forsyth Park,” says Dr. Piatkowski.
The good news is plenty of smart people agree with him.
Still, critics allege that reducing lanes on Drayton and Whitaker would cause traffic congestion. Is this necessarily so?
In “Evaluating Complete Streets: The Value of Designing Roads for Diverse Modes, Users and Activities,” Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, explains that reducing motor vehicle speeds from 40 (many cars on Drayton and Whitaker are going at least this fast) to 30 miles per hour (the current posted speed limit within the National Landmark Historic District) “tends to increase roadway capacity” because lower speeds reduce the space required between vehicles, “so traffic is smoother and less congested.”
Reducing speeds, which removing car travel lanes would likely accomplish, and reducing congestion are not the same thing, it turns out.
In essence, those arguing to maintain the status quo are fighting to preserve their prerogative to speed. They want a quick way to reach their jobs in the city and to escape from downtown just as quickly when the five o’clock whistle blows. It’s understandable.
But how much punishment, as Piatkowski accurately describes it, should be inflicted on people to enable speeding? Should people of all ages and abilities be forced to literally run for their lives across Drayton Street for the benefit of those who are late for work (or who are just plain impatient)?
Is avoiding even minor inconveniences for drivers in a hurry more important than the safety of everyone else with whom they share the streets (including other motorists)?
Driving 10-15 mph above the posted speed limit (again, this is common) may indeed shave off a minute or two from morning and evening commutes. But at what price?
The cost is clear. People hit by cars travelling 30 mph have a 50 percent chance of surviving. Of those hit by cars going 40, nine out of ten will die.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2016.
There is no question that the Landmark Historic District is comprised of a mix of cars, bikers, and a majority of pedestrians. It is imperative moving forward for the safety, enjoyment, and overall efficiency of flow that we look to experts in traffic calming and planning. NO ONE needs to get anywhere in this one square mile two minutes faster at the peril of others. We often forget (until we take a trip to Atlanta) how lucky we are to live in this beautiful and relatively traffic free community. Slow down and smell the jasmine.
I walk from my office to Brighter Day several times a week for lunch, crossing Drayton on the way. I have almost been hit on several occasions (twice on the same day one time) by exactly what you are describing – one lane stopped, the guys in the other lane didn’t. It’s complete insanity out there. Something has to be done.
I live just off the corner where the picture was taken and the cross walks are considered optional at best by drivers. Enter at your own risk if there are oncoming drivers and signs be damned.
You think the mess on Price St. is a “success?” I live near there and have seen several people on bicycles get hit by drivers coming off streets like Jones St. who can’t see a biker coming, and of course the people on bikes disregard all laws and usually move at top bicycle speed. I have also seen two bikers collide, with one of them hurled out into moving automobile traffic on Price.
I also often observe drivers blasting along in the supposed bike lane full-tilt, either not knowing or not caring that it is supposed to be for bicycles, sometimes several cars in a row slamming merrily along like that.
It wasn’t all that long ago that an elderly motorist hit and killed a man on a motorcycle when the older driver tried to get onto Price. Unsafe at any speed, and now they want to spread this non-safety around. Choking off Savannah’s famed one-way streets will slow traffic to a creep throughout downtown
Living on a corner of Price, I can tell you that no lowering of speed has occurred however having one lane of speeding traffic rather than two is certainly preferable.
I think most of us have empathy for our fellow citizens and don’t think of the public space as an arena in which it is ‘us’ against ‘them’. I hope that public discussion on this issue can be focused on a model like Complete Streets that designs-in a good civic and neighborly policy, one which limits the competition between cars, bikes and people from the beginning. As a driver, bicyclist and pedestrian I can see all perspectives. I understand that a driver may feel that they are having something taken away from them when public spaces are shared more fairly. I can understand that a two-minute longer commute sometimes feels like an inconvenience. But as a good neighbor I understand that there is room for everyone in our public spaces and that taking the long view that values safety and livability will benefit the most in the end. People don’t fall in love with Savannah because they enjoy walking along Abercorn from Derenne to Eisenhower, after all.
Taking out traffic lanes on Drayton and Whitaker is a truly terrible idea. The “problem” is not nearly as bad as alleged in this article. The tour buses and other tourists cause tremendous problems, poking along at 15 mph in the left lane alongside the park. There is too much traffic on those streets for people to speed above 35. If the problem of speeding is that bad, put a couple of cops out there and enforce the already existing laws.
At the risk of sounding like I might be someone who thinks he knows better, I simply wonder what is in the minds of either motorist or pedestrian when they set out to travel/cross these streets. Now, lack of foresight is not an excuse for why we needn’t attempt to make such things safer but jeez, when someone congenially stops for me on a two lane, the next thing I do is check the OTHER lane. If it has oncoming traffic, I simply wait. If the driver is so obtuse as to be perplexed by this activity, I simply gesture to the OTHER lane. Usually, that suffices to wake him/her out of their oblivion. Personal responsibility, I think, is what will carry the day but I understand that this notion does nothing to remedy the predicament that is being debated…pity that this is the way that it is. Perhaps the way to approach this is not so much by redesign or reconfiguration but by education…early on. Maybe instead of more and over bearing roadway regulation, we can re-purpose that good intent toward the further regulation of driver license origination?
Bottom line; Until drivers are forced to get better at driving around our nations roadways, why not just wait for traffic to cease? That’s what I do and somehow, I get to where I’m going seemingly faster than most people who feel the need to stop traffic because they are in a crosswalk….