Kenebrew, Jerice
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Thomas Priestley
Tuesday, February 13, 2024 2:05 PM
Kenebrew, Jerice
Comments on Item 3 on the Agenda of Tonight's MSC Meeting Item 3 - Comments - Tom Priestley.pdf
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Attached is a file with my comments on Item 3 on the agenda of tonight's Municipal Service Committee meeting.
Please confirm your receipt of this email and the attached comment file and please provide a copy of my comments to each of the members of the MSC.
With best regards,
Thomas Priestley
1 Comments to the Pasadena Municipal Services Commission Regarding Item 3 on the February 13, 2024, MSC Meeting Agenda Thomas Priestley Ph.D., AICP
Introduction and Bottom-Line Summary
Because I have submitted comments to you about the proposed Pedestrian Plan before, I have a deep interest in this document and want to ensure that the final version of it that is adopted provides a strong framework for both short-term and long-term actions to improve conditions on Pasadena's streets for those who walk.
My request to you, which I support with my comments below, is that at tonight's meeting, you do not approve the current draft of this plan and send it on to the full City Council for adoption. Instead, task that you send the document back to DOT staff with a request that they change its title, and most importantly, rewrite the Implementation section to address the many issues it presents in its current form.
To provide an example of how I think that the Implementation section can be revamped to address the issues in the current section, I have drafted a replacement Implementation section that I have attached as Appendix 1 at the end of this comment set. Please provide this alternative Implementation section to Staff for their consideration while revising this portion of the document.
A key fact that looms large for me in reviewing this plan is that between 2018 and 2022,13 pedestrians were killed on Pasadena's streets and 34 were seriously injured. This toll of death and severe injury is unacceptable. For me, it underscores the urgency for revising the plan's Implementation section to take an approach that is more strategic than the one that is in the plan now and which has a greater sense of urgency to target conditions at Pasadena's most dangerous intersections. Given the deaths and severe injuries occurring on our city's streets, the unfocused, snails-pace implementation program the current Implementation section proposes is unacceptable. Please direct staff to come back with a document that is focused on taking strategic actions to save lives by using quick-build techniques to rapidly install low-cost, high impact safety measures at Pasadena's most dangerous street locations.
Issues with the Plan
It is not a comprehensive pedestrian plan
In the Department of Transportation's 2018 application to the Southern California Association of Governments for funding, the Department of Transportation said that it was applying for the grant to "...develop an update to the 2006 Pasadena Pedestrian Master Plan." In response to SCAG's request to "list the strategies your project will implement", DOT listed:
Transit Integration
First/Last Mile (to rail)
Sidewalk quality
Safe Routes to School
5afety/Encouragement Campaigns
Sadly, the December 2023 Pedestrian Plan that you are now reviewing is not an update of the 2006 plan, which was a true comprehensive pedestrian plan. The policy areas addressed in the 2006 plan were:
1. Establishment of a network of public spaces and paths that are safe and accessible to all to connect the community.
2. Making streets safe
3. Modifying streets to include amenities for pedestrians
4. Treating streets as public space
5. Taking into account the need for strong community identity, including the presence of recognizable districts, landmarks, and places of interest.
6. Creating an easy transition between exterior and interior space
7. Building design that contributes to a more pleasant and humane living environment and adds interest and variety to its settings
8. Design of public transportation facilities to promote pedestrian safety and access.
The earlier, 2022 draft of the Pedestrian Plan did not even mention the 2006 plan and the comprehensive suite of policies and implementation measures that it recommended, and which were adopted to address the many variables that make a community livable and walkable. These were only added to the plan's introductory section later, in preparing the version of the plan now under review.
The 2006 Pedestrian Plan and its policies are now mentioned in the document's Introduction, there is no further reference to these policies elsewhere in the document.
The only policy area addressed in the implementation section of the version of the Pasadena Transportation Pedestrian Action Plan we are now considering is safety, through a proposed program of improving pedestrian crossings along 10 selected arterial streets at the rate of two arterials per year. No measures are proposed to implement the 2006 Plan's seven other policy areas. In addition to ignoring the full suite of policies adopted in the 2006 Pedestrian Plan, the implementation program's narrow focus on the modification of crossings on the selected arterials is also inconsistent with the commitments made in the grant application to SCAG to address transit integration, first/last mile (to rail), sidewalk quality, safe routes to school, and safety/encouragement campaigns. Although some handwaving about some of these issues was added to the Introduction section of the current version of the document and some of these issues are mentioned in passing in the body of the text, none of them are analyzed in a specific way, and most importantly, they are not addressed in the plan's implementation section.
The plan documents public participation activities that were undertaken during plan preparation, including a project survey, focus group sessions, advisory committee and community meetings, stakeholder workshops, and community pop-ups. In addition, the plan summarizes the results of walk audits conducted with the advisory committee in three neighborhoods. The outreach efforts revealed a wide range of concerns: safety conditions at specific street crossings, the low level of comfort and pleasantness of walking along major streets, the need for better lighting, the need for more street trees to provide shade, the adverse effects on walking created by high traffic speeds, and the need for safer pedestrian access to schools and transit. Somehow, the plan's implementation section fails to address most of the specific concerns that the public expressed, and instead provides long and seemingly mindless lists of intersection improvements with no indication of which improvements at which locations are most strategically important to respond to the public's concerns, or to increase safety for that matter.
It is incorrect for this document to have a title that suggests that is a "pedestrian plan". A true pedestrian plan lays out a comprehensive set of goals, policies, guidelines, and implementation measures to achieve a vision of vastly improved conditions for pedestrians throughout the city. That is not what this document does. Instead, it presents a narrowly defined analysis based on questionable assumptions and a mechanistic analysis approach that quickly focuses its attention on a limited number of arterial streets where it makes generalized suggestions that future pedestrian safety features be installed at an unprioritized list of pedestrian crossings. Preparation of this plan appears to have taken place in a silo environment that was largely disconnected from the city's current pedestrian-related planning and implementation efforts. Consequently, the implementation program that it proposes does not relate to current on-the-ground efforts to improve conditions for pedestrians. For examples of more complete pedestrian plans that reflect more up-to-date thinking about improving the pedestrian environment see
Oakland's Pedestrian Plan update prepared in 2017 (https://www.oaklandca.Rov/resources/pedestrian- plan-update), and closer to home, Glendale's Pedestrian Plan (https://www.Rlendaleca.Rov/Rovernment/departments/community-development/planninR/plans-for- mobility/pedestrian-plan)
The proposed Implementation Plan is Unacceptable as Now Written As it is now written, the plan's Implementation section is not acceptable: it is incomplete and lacks any sense of prioritization.
The implementation plan is devoted entirely to potential design changes at intersections along 10 selected arterials, presumably to enhance safety, but is silent on most of the suite of policies and actions that were considered in the 2006 Pasadena Pedestrian Plan, and which are an essential part of any pedestrian plan. These policies and measures can't just be left missing in action. They need to be mentioned and an indication needs to be made about how, moving forward, they will be addressed and turned into action items.
What is in the Implementation plan now is simply a list of 10 arterial streets that are deemed to be "high priority" for intersection improvements to improve safety, supplemented by a spreadsheet for each of the arterials that lists every single intersection on the street and the potential design measures that might be installed at each of those locations. There is no indication of which arterials and which intersections have the most critical issues and are most in need of safety treatments. In addition, there is no indication of which safety treatments would be most critical or strategic for improving the safety conditions at each specific intersection. Without providing any rationale for this approach,the Implementation section proposes that each year, two arterials be selected for the development of intersection improvement programs with the goal of implementing the changes to the corridors over a 10-15-year period. Given that fact that from 2018 to 2022, the last five-year period for which data is available, 9 pedestrians were killed in crashes on Pasadena's streets, and 34 were seriously injured (data from the UC Berkeley TIMS-SWITRS website at: https://tims.berkeley.edu/) this unfocused, plodding approach to implementation is not only unacceptable but it arguably places the City in jeopardy for liability in not taking action to correct conditions that have led to death and serious injury.
The implementation program must be changed to be structured in a way that is more strategic and focused on immediately addressing safety issues at locations where deaths and serious injuries have occurred during recent years. This effort needs to begin with a detailed analysis of each of the crashes that occurred to pinpoint the roadway design issues at the crash location that contributed to the crash and to identify the design measures that would be most effective in making the locations safer for pedestrians. These analyses should be conducted using the crash analysis studio protocols developed by the Strong Towns organization (https://www.strongtowns.orK/crash-studio).
In addition, the overall approach to implementing the safety improvement measures not only at the sites of fatal and high-injury crashes but at any other locations as well must be radically changed. What the Implementation section appears to be proposing is a planning, design, and implementation process that has been followed in the past that has tended to be slow and has resulted in projects that have taken years to implement and that have at times been overbuilt and criticized by the public for their costliness. What is being proposed needs to be rethought and reimagined in terms of tactical urbanism.
Tactical urbanism is an approach that cities are increasingly using to make street improvements to benefit pedestrians, bicyclists, and neighborhood residents. This approach emphasizes strategic low- cost, high-impact street improvements, often installed using quick-build methods to create flexible, temporary projects that enable communities to test potential infrastructure changes intended to create safer, more livable public spaces. These projects are designed to be less resource and time-intensive than conventional projects, enabling cities to implement the improvements more quickly. Quick-build projects can be readily tailored to address the specifics of the situation related to the location's roadway and land use patterns, and the people who live in and use the area and their circulation patterns. They can also serve as demonstration projects to evaluate their effectiveness and their acceptance by the area's users. Videos by Mike Lydon a leading tactical urbanism practitioner that explain and provide examples of the use of the tactical urbanism/quick-build approach include https://www.voutube.com/watch?v=-GGK54zchLU and
httDS://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlmDYYQ.kZ8k. Both videos include coverage of the application of this approach in Culver City. Resources for understanding quick-build projects and how to implement them include a quick-build guide prepared by the City of Orlando: https://www.orlando.Eov/Our- Government/Departments-Offices/TransDortation/Quick-Build-Proiect-Guide and a manual on tactical urbanism materials and design created by the Street Plans Collaborative and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation:
https://issuu.com/streetplanscollaborative/docs/tu-guide to materials and design vl Although tactical urbanism/quick build approaches have been used in many jurisdictions, including New York City, Jersey City, Oakland, and Long Beach, one of the currently most talked-about examples of the success of tactical urbanism/quick build projects has been Hoboken New Jersey where installation of these projects (https://www.bloomberR.com/news/features/2023-ll-20/this-new-iersey-mavor-ended- traffic-deaths-with-a-vision-zero-plan) has enabled the city to go for 7 years without a pedestrian fatality (https://www.hobokenni.Rov/news/citv-of-hoboken-reaches-new-vision-zero-milestone-seven- consecutive-vears-without-a-traffic-
death#:~:text=From%202022%20to%202023%2C%20there,ml]estone%2C%E2%80%9D%20said%20May or%20Bhatla.)
Changes Required
Although I have raised some fundamental issues about this document, I am not suggesting that it be discarded. Instead, I strongly urge you, before sending it on to the full City Council, to send it back to staff to make a few changes that will make the plan clearer about what it is and make it more useful in meeting its objectives. I envision that the time needed for the revision can be very short, causing relatively little delay in the timeline for Council submission.
Change the title of the document
I think that the most accurate title for this document would be something like "Pasadena Pedestrian Safety Improvement Plan". This would be a more accurate characterization of what this document is and would avoid giving the false impression that this is a comprehensive plan for the improvement of conditions for pedestrians in Pasadena.
Send the plan back to Staff for a rewrite of the Implementation section on page 59 Staff needs to be directed to rewrite the Implementation section on page 59 of the plan to account for all of the policies and measures that were included in the 2006 Pedestrian Plan and subsequent City plans and policies related to pedestrian issues. To do this, the Implementation section can be reframed to make it clear that the focus of the implementation program presented in the plan is on bringing about improvements to pedestrian safety, and that the larger suite of pedestrian-related initiatives will be treated as an integral part of the Active Transportation Plan whose development will be starting shortly.
The implementation program for the safety improvements must be changed to be structured in a way that is more strategic and focused. This includes immediately addressing safety issues at locations where deaths and serious injuries have occurred during recent years. It also includes adopting a quick-build approach that will allow safety improvement measures to be installed quickly so that they can start providing safety benefits and a basis for assessing their effectiveness and public acceptance.
I have prepared a rewrite of the Implementation section that I have attached to these comments as Attachment 1.1 think that this rewrite addresses the issues that I have raised and results in an implementation program that is more complete and more targeted and will lead to the reasonably rapid installation of safety improvements that are low cost and high impact. Please provide this revised Section to Staff and direct them to consider drawing on it in making their revisions.
My Qualifications for Making These Comments
My interest in the plan and its success is related to the fact that I am a pedestrian - I walk the streets of Pasadena both for recreation and to go about many of my activities. My interest also stems from my professional training and experience. During my years in graduate school at UC Berkeley, my mentor was the urban design theorist and researcher Donald Appleyard, who was particularly interested in street design and the quality of life. His book Livable Streets has had a major influence on thinking about how streets can be designed to improve the quality of life of non-automotive users (https://www.pps.orK/article/daDDleyard.)
While working on my Ph.D., I had the opportunity to spend a year in France, where in addition to teaching at the National School of Bridges and Highways, I also served an internship at the Center for the Study of Urban Transit. At that research center, I was involved in Villes plus Sures, Quartiers sans Accidents (Safer Cities, Neighborhoods Without Accidents), an innovative program of demonstration projects that used urban design measures to improve pedestrian safety and quality of life along national highways in areas where they traveled through communities (https://www.securite-routiere- az,fr/v/villes-plus-sures-quartiers-sans-accident/).ln the succeeding years, I have kept in touch with the network I developed while working on this project and now follow Rue de I'Avenir (Street of the Future) a French group that advocates for the redesign of urban spaces to better meet the needs of pedestrians.
Rue de I'Avenir's newsletters and reports have provided me with a window for staying informed about current activities to improve conditions for pedestrians in France and the rest of Europe (httDS://www.ruedelavenir.com/lassociation/).
I have been living in Pasadena since 2013, and since 2019, I have been following and reviewing the City Planning Department's Specific Plan planning efforts and have analyzed and commented on the treatment of public spaces and pedestrian issues in proposed plans for the South Fair Oaks, Lamanda Park, and Central District Plans. Although I had been monitoring and commenting on these other planning efforts, somehow, I did not become aware of the Pasadena Walks! Pedestrian Plan planning effort until early 2022 after the plan's initial draft had been completed. Since then, I have been monitoring the plan closely and have provided comments on it to the Transportation Advisory Commission, the MSC, and DOT.
ATTACHMENT 1 to comments on Item #3 submitted by Thomas Priestley, Ph.D., AICP Replacement for the Implementation Section on Page 59 of the Proposed Pasadena Pedestrian Action Plan
IMPLEMENTATION
As stated on pages 4 and 5 of the About the Plan section, this Pedestrian Safety Improvement Plan aims to make walking in Pasadena safer, more comfortable, convenient, and accessible for pedestrians of all ages and abilities. More specifically, this document and future project implementation efforts as a part of this Plan look to:
Improve conditions for people walking. Residents consulted in preparing the plan stressed that improving safety for pedestrians should be a priority for the community.
Throughout the planning process, residents indicated specific locations and issues where they felt that improvements to the pedestrian environment were needed.
Increase the percentage of walking trips. Increasing walking trips can have compounding, positive effects. Aside from the health benefits associated with walking, some areas of Pasadena are known for heavy pedestrian activity, encouraging local residents and visitors alike to identify Pasadena as a walking city. This plan should continue to foster a safe, active, and supportive walking environment to increase walking trips.
Improve connections to surrounding destinations. Pasadena residents indicated that they would tike to walk more and that a more walkable Pasadena would improve their ability to access destinations such as schools and parks. They also stated that more walkable environments would promote social interactions and lead to more activity in the city.
Reduce the environmental impacts of driving and the number of miles traveled by people who drive. One approach in the development of this Plan is to eventually replace driving trips with walking trips, especially for short distances. Paired with residents who take transit service, this strategy can help reduce the environmental impacts of people who drive and help reduce congestion.
The discussion in the About the Plan Section indicates that since 2015, the City has followed these policies and pushed these initiatives in:
Regularly coordinating pedestrian-related traffic safety outreach efforts.
Including 2015 City of Pasadena General Plan Mobility Element objectives and policies in updates to the 2015 City of Pasadena Bicycle Transportation Action Plan, 2016 City of Pasadena Pedestrian Crossing Design Guidance Report, and 2017 Pasadena Street Design Guide.
Continuing to fund annual operating programs to better meet the needs of pedestrians through Complete Streets-focused Capital Improvement Projects.
Continuously monitoring the effectiveness of safety efforts through coordination between the City's Department of Transportation and the Police Department.
Continuously seeking grant funding for pedestrian-oriented projects.
To achieve the objectives entailed in making walking in Pasadena safer, more comfortable, convenient, and accessible for pedestrians of all ages and abilities, the adoption of this plan commits the city to continue following the policies and pursuing the initiatives listed above. In addition, the objectives that have been defined for this plan, the policies that have been previously adopted, and the pedestrian-related initiatives that have already been undertaken will be integrated into the larger vision of the Active Transportation Plan (ATP) that the City will be preparing later in 2024.
In the meantime, as the more comprehensive and integrated approach to achieving the city's pedestrian transportation objectives is developed as a part of the Active Transportation Plan, the implementation of this Pedestrian Safety Improvement Plan will focus on improving pedestrian safety by making changes to the design of all the high priority corridors identified on Map 3 in Appendix D. The potential changes to these corridors could include but will not be limited to the potential intersection improvement measures identified in the spreadsheets for the top 10 high priority corridors presented in Appendix E.
The implementation of the improvements to the high priority corridors will be driven by a commitment to prioritizing improvements to those locations where the risks to pedestrian safety are the greatest and the use of quick-build measures that will put the safety improvements in place as rapidly as possible. Because the quick build measures can generally be implemented at a reasonable cost, this approach will allow the available funds to be used to improve safety at more locations than would be possible with more conventionally designed improvements. Quick build projects in other cities have demonstrated that quick build approaches can be implemented in a way that shortens lengthy public involvement processes by providing street users the opportunity to experience the changes and base their evaluations of them on that experience. The quick builds can also provide a basis for performing post- installation evaluations that allow the effectiveness of the measures that were applied to be assessed, providing feedback that can be used to modify what was done and guide further applications of the measures.
Implementation of this Action Plan will begin by use of the crash data from the most recent 5- year period for which it is available to identify the locations where crashes have resulted in the death of or serious injury to pedestrians. The locations of crashes involving pedestrians and data that documents the specifics of the crashes will be obtained at the University of California Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies TIMS-SWITRS website at:
https://tims.berkeley.edu/. This data will be supplemented by crash reports obtained from the Pasadena Police Department. For the crashes at each of these locations, crash analysis studio evaluations will be performed using the protocols developed by the Strong Towns organization (https://www.strongtowns.orfi/crash-studio). Based on the results of these crash studio analyses, quick-build measures to eliminate or mitigate the roadway conditions at each of the crash locations that contributed to the crash risks will be identified. These measures may include, but wilt not be limited to, quick-build versions of the potential intersection improvements identified along each of the top 10 high priority corridors in Appendix E. These measures will be implemented as rapidly as possible at each of the crash locations and the effectiveness of the measures and the public response to them will be monitored and evaluated.
The identification of the sites of recent fatal and high-injury crashes, the implementation of quick-build measures to address their safety issues, and the monitoring of their effectiveness will be used to provide a point of departure for moving ahead with measures to improve safety at other, strategically important locations along all of the high priority corridors that are identified on Map 3 in Appendix D. These strategically important locations will be identified using the criteria established in Tables 1 and 2 of Appendix D and the analysis results displayed on Appendix D's Maps 1 and 2. It should be noted that the selection of the strategically important locations should not be restricted to the Top 10 Priority Corridors but should be selected based on consideration of all of the high-priority crossings identified on Appendix D's Map 2, with particular weight given to crossings identified as high-stress crossings that are located more than 600 feet from the nearest low-stress crossing. Following the adoption of this Plan, the City will seek to incorporate improvements to these strategically important crossings into Pasadena's Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) list. The list of strategically important crossings should be used to determine where to invest additional staff resources in developing and implementing projects that have the greatest likelihood of impact. Future implementation will require additional field work, feasibility analyses, and warrant studies to further assess the applicability of improvements.
The approach taken in addressing the issues at the strategically important locations will emphasize measures that can be put in place as rapidly as possible, including quick-build changes to the roadway and crossing configurations, measures to slow traffic speeds, and changes to traffic signals to provide pedestrians with additional time to cross the street.
As it develops its plans for modifications to improve safety and the pedestrian experience at the strategically important locations, the City will undertake further public engagement, similar to its existing Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP) but modified based on the experience of other jurisdictions where the use of a quick-build approach has permitted an expedited participation process that emphasizes assessment of the measures after they have been put in place, allowing citizens to evaluate them based on their actual experience with them. The goal of this revised public engagement process will be to put the improvements put in place as quickly as possible, to permit the public to provide their feedback on the measures after having experienced them and to modify the treatments at each location based on that feedback. This engagement will reflect an equitable process (prioritizing input and participation from those least likely to participate in traditional processes) and aim for equitable outcomes (prioritizing projects that meet the needs of people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds).
Pedestrian improvements should also be integrated into a Local Road Safety Plan (LRSP) under the Safe System Approach (see pages 46 and 47) to be further evaluated for effectiveness in improving safety, mobility and access. In monitoring effectiveness in improving safety, crash data will be closely monitored and the degree of success will be measured against the goal of eliminating all pedestrian fatalities in Pasadena and eliminating or at least significantly reducing the number of crashes that result in serious injuries.
It is important to acknowledge that implementation progress can be and is often iterative and nonlinear. As a goal, the City should pursue implementation as funding opportunities are available, and in fact should aggressively look for and apply for funding from regional. State, and Federal agencies to permit the quick-build measures to be installed as rapidly as possible.
In addition, improvements should also be implemented in alignment with other City investments, planned and programmed street improvements, or considered alongside other multimodal projects. While corridor-wide safety and traffic calming measures will require a dedicated funding source to implement, many pedestrian improvements can be implemented as a part of existing street improvement or maintenance projects, and full advantage should be taken of these opportunities. Pedestrian facilities themselves are typically a relatively small portion of a large roadway improvement project (e.g. restriping, resurfacing or reconstruction).
As a result, while multimodal projects often take longer to design and implement, it can also often be more cost-effective to do so with limited local funding. Implementing larger corridor- wide pedestrian or multimodal projects is a collaborative process that requires the involvement and support of City elected officials and staff, the public, community institutions and businesses, funding agencies, and others.