A Safer, More Efficient Way To Get Around: Smart Streets and Mode Choices

Objective

South Bend’s Smart Streets initiative is an effort to create safer, more efficient transportation by redesigning current street design in the city of South Bend, Indiana. The initiative aimed to enhance the current quality of life of its downtown to bring a more vibrant atmosphere and attract new economic developments.

The Project

The initiative implements a “complete streets” approach in the redesigning of the city’s streets. The philosophy of complete streets is a design and build strategy that enables safe access for all user types, including pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, and public transit commuters of every age and ability. The strategy also targets the needs of citizens who have experienced systemic underinvestment and those who have not had needs met from a traditional transportation design system. Smart streets also improve public health of the communities they are designed in. Smart streets motivate walking and biking to their users making it incredibly easier for citizens to build routine physical activities into their daily life.

The South Bend Smart Streets initiative main focus was to convert the currently mostly one-way streets into two-way streets. The initiative then put its secondary focus on enhanced pedestrian and cyclist facilities. The city incorporated new curbs, sidewalks, street lights, street signs, paving, trees, protected bike lanes, multipurpose trails, roundabouts, and increased the number of lanes of affected streets by reducing on-street parking availability. The new additions better accommodated all types of users and improved their overall safety during their commutes.

Review

This South Bend initiative was a picture-perfect implementation of a smart streets project. Not only did it achieve everything it set out to accomplish, but it was planned and executed with the community in mind. The original streets were researched and studied deeply before attempts were made to move the project along. I sifted through thousands of data points tracked about the original streets that were eventually used as key motivators in their proposals for the city. After approval, the city understood how this construction would affect the community and planned accordingly. They shut down only small parts of the city at a time, completely construction swiftly, generated efficient reroutes to not affect current businesses, and ran constant updates via their twitter and website to update citizens on closures and updates.

Outside of execution, the city focused their scope of the project efficiently to actually make a difference with the project. They focused on only very specific streets in need of renovations in the community. They did not expand the project into unnecessary territory, accomplished staying in-budget, and focused on their individual local context. The initiative has already made a long-lasting and impactful effect on the city and will continue to as new initiatives develop around it.

The initiative garnered national attention with its new outlook on street design and renovation. Pete Buttigieg led the initiative as the mayor of South Bend during the project’s formation and implementation. Buttigieg would go on to be pressed against challengers who campaigned against the initiative during his reelection bid as mayor. His success in this initiative shines through as he now sits as United States Secretary of Transportation. He now brings his people-centric street and transport philosophies to his key role in the United States’ transportation policies.

Boston Mass Ave. and Beacon St. Project

Objective

The Boston Mass Ave. and Beacon St. Project is using technology and data in order to better understand how people act on roads in Boston. The project’s goal is to capture aggregated data at the Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street intersection. The data aggregated from the project will be used to help better understand hazards on their roads and help make decisions on solutions improving future street design and safety.

The Project

Boston is a leader in the global Vision Zero initiative with the goal of ending fatal and serious traffic crashes. The project is a partnership with Verizon to test data gathering technologies at the Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street intersection. The project is testing a multitude of smart cities services at the intersection. The data collected could influence decisions on anything from developing better streets, to how traffic rules are enforced, to more in depth public education.

The pilot program is utilizing video cameras, LED lights, and underground road sensors to capture different data to be aggregated together. The project is tracking data on how vehicles and cyclists move during different traffic signals, vehicles staying in the intersection for extended periods of time, pedestrian crossing patterns of the intersections with different pedestrian traffic signals, where pedestrians cross using the marked crosswalks, vehicle and cyclist yielding to pedestrians within crosswalks, cyclists’ use of bike lanes, and situations that cause cyclists to drift outside of bike lanes. The data collected is then input into a web-based platform for data analysis, dashboard creation, visualization, and reporting.

The project is bundled in a larger effort by the city to become more educated on modern technologies and how they can be integrated into the city’s work and policy choices. The larger effort is exploring and experimenting with a wider variety of new smart city technologies such as autonomous vehicles, smart parking sensors, and more.

Review

While the project does not immediately affect individuals, it has the potential to generate much safer streets for the future transportation infrastructure developments of Boston (and other cities). Boston obviously is taking a people-centric approach to their street strategies and genuinely wants to improve their efforts in public safety. It is taking a proper approach by going about the development of its streets slowly to gather proper evidence before allocating resources. Not only will it improve street design and safety in the future, but this Boston project is a prime example of secure, thoughtful data collection with an impactful mission. The city’s online documentation of the initiative fully describes the secure data collection policies in place to protect inevitable individuals who become data points in its system. The project takes an ethical approach in protecting the privacy of these individuals. Documentation is transparent in outlining what is collected, how it is collected, what is being done with the data, and where its being sent/stored. The documentation outlines secure data practices such as private storage, no access to video footage (the city only has records of counts of events), license agreements, prohibition of selling/giving away video taken in the program, the focused non-use biometric and license plate reading software, and the prohibition of using video for law enforcement means (unless required by law or court order). The city office also collaborated with local Boston startups, researchers, and nonprofits to create a cooperative during the project’s formation. The cooperative was created with a goal in mind of helping the city think more broadly about the ethics, impacts, and analyzation of sensor technologies. The city and Verizon is clearly being thoughtful in how they are collecting and using the data necessary to analyze street behavioral patterns.

KC Streetcar

Objective

KC Streetcar is a public transportation mode choice made available in Kansas City, Missouri with the goal of connecting, developing, thriving, and sustaining its downtown areas. The free, public transportation was created to sustainably connect all Kansas City downtown neighborhood to one another and local businesses within the greater metropolitan area.

The Project

This Kansas City project is a two mile long streetcar located in the heart of the city’s downtown area. The route has 16 platform stops (around every two blocks), spans across local businesses and locations, and is completely free to patrons. The project not only aimed at connecting its community, but also at getting its residents on their feet within the city. The project envisioned a future Kansas City where more residents walked to work, shopped local, dropped their daily commute between work and home, and enjoyed the public offerings of the city more often.

The streetcar is an electric, fixed-rail system that utilizes a fixed path to navigate. It was built in existing street lines and operates alongside other vehicles on the road. Streetcars are specifically designed to serve short, local trips just like the two mile stretch of the KC Streetcar. The route was designed to coexist with the current public bus system in the Kansas City and was part of a more complex transit system initiative in the Kansas City region.

The system currently has six streetcars that can hold approximately 150 riders each (has been expanded from an original three). Each vehicle can be tracked via a mobile device and even provides Wi-Fi access to riders during their transit. The streetcars run at different times depending on the day but on peak days operate from 6:00 A.M.-1:00 A.M.

The project has spurred economic development within the city. The public transportation services has created a more livable urban hub with its attraction of new residents, new jobs, and connection to sustained businesses. The streetcar has even brought new, large investments encouraging more urban development.

Review

The KC Streetcar has been a wild success in Kansas City. Not only has it delivered its mission of getting residents out of their cars, but it has also spurred huge economic activity in the city. Over 40 development projects totaling about 1.8 billion in economic activity have been welcomed with credit to KC Streetcar since its implementation. The project has exceeded initial expectations of the system. The project has also won countless sustainability and smart city awards since its introduction. The system now provides over ten million rides annually to residents and visitors.

Criticism has come about with this new service, however. Since the introduction of the streetcar, the public bus system has seemed to begin to suffer with the city’s new focus. Reports have been made for the city on failures of the bus system, but the city has continued to put resources towards the streetcar and neglect the bus system. While I believe the KC Streetcar is a great local option for downtown residents and visitors, the greater public transportation systems cannot be neglected. The smaller, short-term transport systems will eventually suffer without a larger transport system around it.

Sources