A Complete Road

Yesterday's post about the difference between a Complete Street and a Complete Road was screaming for an example. Here is the Complete Road section being used by my hometown of Brainerd, MN, for My Hometown's Last Great Old Economy Project.

Yes, this section has a dedicated bike path. And yes, this section also has a dedicated walking path. Throw in some decorative lighting and trees and you have yourself a Complete Street. Right?

Not really. Take a look at those driving lanes. There are two lanes in each direction, one that is 14 feet wide and the other at 13 feet. Those are highway dimensions used for high speed travel. Thus you have a Complete Road, the dream of every engineering contract.

Right now, students that live on one side of this road routinely get in their cars and drive to the college on the other side of the road. I know - I went there for a spell. That and they don't even bother to shovel the walks when it snows. And that is with the current road, which is only three lanes. I don't care if they do build a pedestrian bridge or a tunnel, nobody is going to cross this street using anything but a car.

And because of that, there will be no intensification of the development around this corridor. No private-sector investment. No urbanism. This is simply a monster dump of money for one purpose: to move more cars, more quickly. The bike path and walking path, in this application, are just expensive ornamentation that will be little used. People -- and money -- will generally flee from this auto-centric corridor.

So how do we make it better? How do we make this Complete Road into a real Complete Street with a corresponding Complete Neighborhood?

My recommendation to the city was that they make this a two-lane street. With roundabouts at the key college entrances, traffic would flow just fine, albeit much slower than it does today. Such a design, with 10-foot lanes, would be easy for pedestrians to cross, especially with a nice, wide median and periodic jut-outs of the median and walk to lesson the distance people have to cross. You could put large walks along both sides and they would actually be used as the slow-moving cars would not threaten pedestrians. You could also skip the bike lanes as the bikes could actually ride right in the traffic stream. Imagine that!

And not only would this cost millions less, but it would provide a platform that would connect the tremendous housing demand from students and professors with the underdeveloped and declining neighborhood on the opposite side of the street. In other words, there would be a reason to invest there because there would be a reason to live there.

But even if engineers insisted on a four-lane design, 10-foot lanes are more than adequate for the speeds you are going to want through this section. Going to 10-foot lanes would save a full 14 feet of bituminous width, the cost of cutting one entire lane, not to mention all the money the city had to spend aquiring land and easements to accommodate such a wide section.

Ah, but what about the cars? They'll be so unsatisfied if it takes them an extra 37 seconds to travel this stretch of road. A pity, indeed.

Spend less money. Get more return. That is the essence of a Strong Towns approach. I'm just grateful that this will be the last of these mega-projects my hometown will be able to afford. I only wish we were using our final hoorah on something more productive and beneficial to the community.

If you are from Minnesota and are as depressed about the futility of our baseball team as we are, consider lifting your spirits with a donation to help expand the Strong Towns movement. When it comes to analyzing the financial implications of our development pattern, we're consistently hitting the ball out of the park. Your donation will help us do more and reach more people in the process.

Comments

[Edward Erfurt]

Thank you for this post. I work in the public sector, and I work with numerous engineering firms. Many of these firms describe complete streets as streets that the engineering firm has been able to fully design within their company, or a project that is fully funded. For example, I was recently shown a project by an undisclosed engineering firm who explained that the project was a complete street. The image looked identical to the above image.

I asked what made this street complete, and the response was shocking. They explained that their firm was able to to all the engineering in their company, complete all the storm-water and utility service design and permits, and able to design all the streetscape (sidewalks and landscaping). They then explained that it is very hard to fit all of this into a 60 foot right of way. Over-sized or excessive lanes, speed driven clear-zones, and stadium style street lights, sacrifice the place and the people that use it.

[Cap'n Transit]

I notice also that there's no "walking path" (aka sidewalk) on the other side of the road, next to the bike path. That means that pedestrians will be in the bike path. So it's not a bike path, it's a shared path.

[Nathaniel]

"If you are from Minnesota and are as depressed about the futility of our baseball team as we are, consider lifting your spirits with a donation to help expand the Strong Towns movement."

Although I do not want to deter any Minnesotans from donating to Strong Towns, it must be said that the St. Paul Saints are, in fact, off to a great start and stand a good chance of winning the North division!

[Alexis]

Cap'n Transit already made one of the points I was going to, which is that effectively both 'paths' are shared because people will not cross to use the 'correct' one. With the 14 feet of width-saving, unless you project speeds under 25mph (which most two-lane + median roads will not have), I'd use the extra to build out proper on-road bike lanes and another pedestrian sidewalk. I think with the redistribution that the bike lanes might even be wide enough to buffer (adding additional comfort for novice/slower cyclists).

[Reuben]

Setting aside questions about the number of lanes this roadway should have, it is probably worth pointing out the source of the 14' and 13' travel lanes, as many readers will be unaware.

The designers started with two 12' lanes. Mn/DOT State-Aid then requires (at the direction of the State Legislature) a 1' clear zone to the median, and a 2' clear zone to the outside curb, which results in 14' and 13' lanes. Had the designers wanted to trim the design, to the best of my knowledge, State-Aid will allow nothing less than 11' lanes without a variance, which would then result in 13' and 12' lanes once you add in the State-Aid required clear zones.

[Charles Marohn]

Reuben is 100% right - it is the funding that drives the design. If you want the money, you must over-engineer the section. It is actually cheaper from a cash standpoint for the city to build this terrible road because it costs them less out of pocket. The rest is covered by State Aid funds. If they did not accept State Aid funds for this route - or appropriated them to a different route - their out of pocket expense would actually be more. That is a perverse and destructive incentive.

Incidentally, I call this My Hometown's Last Great Old Economy Project because they are borrowing against the next three years worth of State Aid funds to do it. Anyone think the budgets for this type of construction will be there in four years? Also, this is a city where over 40% of their budget is aid from the state, itself a very unreliable funding stream. There is a lot of wishful thinking and purposeful delusion going on here.

I don't know if two, 12-foot lanes was the starting point, but even that is a huge over-design for this section, unless you are trying to induce high speeds (which they are).

It should also be pointed out that it was not politicians but engineers that developed the State Aid standards, it is engineers that resist changes to these standards and it is engineering organizations like ASCE that lament the state of our infrastructure and demand more money. Oh, and there are few incentives for engineers to lobby for changes since the larger the project, the larger the contract. That is the kind of light corruption that allows them to remain "professionals" w/o taking on a system that currently rewards them generously.

This project could be done at 20 cents on the dollar if the incentives did not drive such a terribly expensive design. And that 20 cent project would actually attract private-sector investment, improve the neighborhood and show a return where the expensive project will simply create further decline. This, in essence, is the insanity inherent in our current approach.

It is also why we are broke.