A Complete Street is a Safe, Smart, Street

Our Executive Director's Weekly Planet Column

A complete street is a safe, smart, street

With today’s economy and the price of keeping a car exceeding the cost of food, many folks are choosing to get around by other means. That translates to more ride sharing and public transit patrons, and a growing number of pedestrians and cyclists.

But with the ranks of bikers and walkers increasing in Vermont, we’re beginning to realize how unfriendly some roads can be for those who choose non-motorized forms of transportation.

A case in point — and close to home — is my husband. Biking to a local farm stand two summers ago, he was run off the road by an oblivious driver who did not stop to assess the damage. Fortunately my husband was rescued by a Good Samaritan who brought him home to a horrified wife. Smashed helmet, mangled rear wheel and badly injured hip were among the list of insults. We were thankful for the helmet’s heroic role. Not everyone is that lucky in such an encounter.

There was no bike lane and no shoulder on the street where my husband had his accident, a surefire recipe for conflict with motorized traffic. That street, like many others in Vermont, is known as an incomplete street. An incomplete street serves one category of transportation alone — motorized vehicles — otherwise known as cars and trucks. Complete streets, on the other hand, can accommodate bikers, pedestrians and a variety of transit options, so that all who use the roads can be safe and travel smart.

The National Complete Streets Coalition reports that roads lacking provisions for walkers and bikers are dangerous, represent missed opportunities for commerce, and are costly to communities and ecosystems:

•    A recent review of bicyclist safety studies found that well-designed bicycle-specific infrastructure tends to reduce injury and crash risk. On-road bicycle lanes reduced these rates by about 50 percent.

•    A recent comparison of the United States with Germany and the Netherlands — where pedestrian, bike and car shared streets are common — found that bicyclist and pedestrian death rates are two to six times higher in the United States.

•    Most families spend far more on transportation than on food, and transportation costs continue to rise. When gas prices rose to $3 per gallon, the Brookings Institution estimated an increase in the average household’s transportation spending of 14 percent per year. With higher energy costs, families are cutting back on weekend outings, restaurant meals, and long-distance travel.
•    Boulder, Colo., is creating a network of complete streets, with over 350 miles of dedicated bike facilities, paved shoulders and a comprehensive transit network.  Between 1990 and 2003, fewer people in the city drove alone, more people bicycled, and transit trips grew by a staggering 500 percent — with a net reduction in annual CO2 emissions of half a million pounds.

This year, with a broad coalition of backers, the Vermont Legislature is taking up a bill (H. 198) to promote diverse transportation options for all Vermonters, while saving municipalities money!  The Vermont Complete Streets Bill has several key provisions, such as integrating bike lanes, sidewalks, cross walks and traffic calming into road and highway upgrade projects; and designing roads for multiple modes, rather than expanding highway capacity solely for automobiles. It also provides more transportation options to help save money for Vermonters. Perhaps most importantly, the bill has an “opt-out” provision for projects in which accommodating multiple modes of transit would be cost-prohibitive or unnecessary.

Please let your legislators know that you care about safe, smart streets.

I surely care — as does my husband and many other Vermonters who share the roads with cars and trucks.

Elizabeth Courtney is the executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont’s leading statewide environmental organization. She can be reached at ecourtney@vnrc.org; see also www.vnrc.org.


ON THE NET
National Complete Streets Coalition
www.completestreets.org/