Maryland to Mandate Helmets for Cyclists

On Tuesday morning, the Environmental Matters Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates will hold a hearing on House Bill 339 to require that every person operating a bicycle in Maryland wear a helmet to protect them from crashes.  

As a result of this bill, quite a bit of discussion began rattling around the internet regarding the value of bicycle helmets with the bike advocacy groups generally opposing the proposition that mandates helmet use to “increase safety”.  Their counter argument relies on multiple statistical studies showing that as the number of cyclists increases the risk per cyclist goes down (although the number of crashes goes up).  Researchers refer to this as the Safety in Numbers effect.

Equally important is the research that shows mandatory helm laws reduce the number of cyclists on the road because wearing a helmet presents a psychological barrier to entry for new riders.  Decreases of up to 37% have been recorded after the passage of mandatory helmet laws.  This dovetails well with the previous argument and shows that, while well intended, the unanticipated consequences of this bill are a decrease in overall bike safety and ridership.

Of course, we also need to evaluate the actual protective value of helmets.  Their essential function is to prevent skull fractures during crashes, falls, spills, and other mishaps in a manner similar to that of helmets worn by NFL or NHL players.  Unfortunately, the standards for bicycle helmets don’t involve any requirement to protect the skull from damage while being hit by a car at 40 mph (the type of on road crashes I might be involved in).  Instead, the tests involve impacts from less than 4 feet at less than 12mph which are more suitable for off-road shared use paths where children might fall from their bike.

The issue then becomes even more complex when you consider the catastrophic costs of not wearing a helmet to the individual cyclist. Traumatic brain injuries change lives forever, with staggering medical and rehabilitation costs on top of lost wages.  However, the chance of such an injury is fairly small for the average cyclist so it is ignored in the same way the potential for an earthquake and tsunami were ignored in Japan.   

In the end, most cyclists won’t ride on the streets of Baltimore the way I do and therefore face significantly less risks.  Their need to wear a helmet could be much less and given the health benefits to riding we should allow adults to make their own decisions regarding helmet use.  The real question to come out of the current discussion is why helmets aren’t constructed to higher standards in the first place.

 

A Deeper Reading: Isn’t Every City Prettier in the Fall?

This week the Atlantic Cities website posted a piece by Kaid Benfield that collected a variety of fall themed photographs from cities across the United States and presented a softer side of the asphalt jungle.  While I almost always enjoy carefully chosen photographs of cities, today I thought a deeper reading of the images would offer an interesting exercise in the design of urban spaces and the assumptions we have about them.

The 23 images are remarkable in several ways, but the most important and visually arresting items are the trees contained in each photograph. Naturally, deciduous trees provide a fantastic array of colors in the autumn but in virtually all the shots what strikes one the most is how the trees provide a human-scale environment for the people and everyday objects in the larger context of the city.  Some of this is obviously due to the photographer selecting settings where the trees form provided a framework for the details of the city, thus biasing the image in favor of the tree’s prominence in the cityscape.  But bias aside, many of the images are of human beings congregating under, around, and beside the trees rather than against buildings or on benches in the open spaces (Tokyo in particular).  This is where the subjects felt comfortable and  not only do the people in the images appear comfortable amongst the trees, the photographers and the author of the article also demonstrate a profound preference for these types of images. Images which were selected not once but twice and clearly represent an ideal of what the fall season in the cities across the world looks like.

It must be noted that the images don’t represent fall in all regions of the world, although we do see locations such as Paris, Santiago, Tokyo, Beijing, Vienna, and Dublin represented with variety of deciduous landscaping. However, cities in locations such as the American southwestern, the islands of Hawaii and Guam, or even the Mideast are not represented.  Many of these absent locations do have seasonal variation, but one can imagine a xeriscape in Arizona being much more static then the deciduous forests of the eastern seaboard. This is, however, the nature of these regions and surely there is beauty to be found in their cities as the seasons change. What is interesting is that these versions of fall are not represented and therefore not part of the cultural construct the author describes as “fall”.

Another detail one might pull from the collection of images is how the trees in the images often form a linear edge along the hardscape features of the city rather than being loosely gathered as they might be in a park environment.  All of these trees are clearly unnatural in their placement (although for the most part their growth habits have not been seriously altered by harsh pruning in these images) and only a few scenes show a variety of species and canopy heights.  These sets of linear trees serve as fences or as sentries marking territories, and sometime emphasize the hardscape rather than softening it.  And only one photo avoids showing linear structure and is clearly taken inside a park rather than from inside a city.

That so many of these types of images appear in the set of photographs demonstrates how the author and the photographers have internalized “trees as infrastructure” for the city.  Trees appear as decorative items that are replaceable discrete units of nature, just like the lamps, signs, and guardrails in the photographs while the frame and form of the city are given priority in the design of the environment.  Perhaps the trees, even in linear presentation, simply preserve the facade of seasonal change for a human construct that resists the seasonal rhythms with steel and concrete.

Finally, it is remarkable that the urban forest captured in these photographs strays so far from the idealized “nature” and yet resonates as clearly as it does with the public’s concept of fall and fall in the city in particular.  If these photos represent a curated collection of the best “Cities in the Fall” photos than as planners we need to do a better job with the urban forest because we’re missing the mark.

 

Progress: No Excuses

Humans have collectively known for thousands of years that some of our activities render the land and water unfit for life.  In the past we could migrate to new valleys or forests. Sometimes we screwed up and entire civilizations died.  But now, we’ve touched the entire globe. We reach for a dream of first world consumption for all humanity while ignoring the costs embedded in our way of life. Take a look at some of the costs associated with cheap plastic in this video.  And then make some damn changes.

 

Climate Change – An Engineer’s Point of View

Recently, I had a most interesting conversation with an engineer regarding the issue of climate change and design standards for bridges.  This discussion arose from the need to replace a bridge in Crystal County where rising sea levels are going to be a substantial issue over the life time of the proposed new structure (75 years).   The new design had raised the bridge two feet to accommodate larger boats from an upriver marina, however projected increases in sea level might required an additional two feet of clearance.

As I had been the point person for the initial climate change adaptation project (meaning I scoured hundreds of pages of reports on global forcing and sea level change modeling for a ten page briefing paper), the question of sea level rise appeared settled.  But it quickly became clear the engineer offered real, substantive concerns regarding the data offered and the likely consequences of the climate change adaptation policy. Rather than attempt to refute and argue, I drew him out and requested he elaborate on his concerns. In the end I learned quite a bit about how he approached a policy decision from the point of view of someone who had to implement it.

His first point, one I’d heard before, asked the essential question, “what is the point of raising the bridge if the next three miles of the road will be submerged when it floods or as sea level rises?”  The answer wasn’t explicit in the policy documents because the staff had concluded that this was a decision best made on a case by case basis for each bridge rather than arbitrarily raising each bridge.  But the internal decision-making process for each bridge remains a complicated beast with substantial political ramifications because each project added to the Consolidated Transportation Program comes at the cost of another.

The process for bridge replacement works as follows.  A bridge is scheduled for replacement when the regular evaluations by the DOT determine that the bridge has become structurally deficient and functionally obsolete (not the same thing as being unsafe).  In this case, the roadway adjacent to the bridge will also be undergoing minor improvements (grinding and repaving). But no plans are in place to raise miles of roadbed  across the relatively flat section of the State because no pressing needs to increase capacity or address safety exist in the same way the bridge presents as a needed infrastructure upgrade.  Even if those needs existed, the DOT would have to weigh them against a host of other valuable (and politically important) projects across the State, before committing to a multi-year planning corridor planning study.  So, while the road may flood regularly at some future point, the bridge requires replacement now for reasons other than rising sea level.

His next series of points related to the design of the bridge.  If he assumes sea level rise is going to occur and the design needs to account for that, then what data can he depend upon for his modeling efforts.  Historic stream flows depend upon monitoring gauges across the watershed and those are limited in number with specific issues related to reliability. The forecasts show a trend towards more frequent and intense rainfall but that leaves quite a lot of unknowns such as how fast will the sea level rise, how much will it rise, and the impacts be to the land adjacent to the structure as the water table rises.

Perhaps the most important unknown from his point of view was what the 100 year storm will look like as the climate warms.  The amount of run-off from the storm will increase as the sea creeps higher and the groundwater level rises (essentially saturating the soil) while the total amount of rain increases.  This leads to flashier stream flows, more erosion and scour around the bridge piers, and the possibility that too low a bridge will act as a dam. This could cause the road to wash out on either side of the bridge or spread flood waters out into developed areas.  To avoid these problems requires a larger bridge with more environmental impacts because in this case there was to be a 2:1 slope from the center of the structure to the roadway thus lengthening the bridge.  Increasing the height also widens the bridge as larger retaining walls are required and all of this construction would be occurring in an environmentally sensitive wetland area. Getting to brass tacks, this adds substantially to the cost of the project.

One answer to the bridge by bridge issue could be a benefit-cost analysis. The DOT can, with reasonable accuracy, predict the costs of a single bridge replacement.  The benefits side of the equation present a trickier problem as many of these don’t come at the front end as the costs do. In fact, some benefits might require twenty years to appear (say the bridge holds in the face of one or more hurricanes instead of failing) and allows a critical emergency evacuation route to remain open. What are the dollar values for that or of being able more quickly rebuild houses and businesses on the other side of the stream?  I think the argument must be made that unless otherwise directed the DOT’s responsibility is to provide safe roadways and improve access to community resources for all users. In this case that means build the bridge.

The real question, the one causing State DOT heartburn, is how to handle the political firefight needed to propose an eventual abandonment of the road as sea level climbs.  Any substantial infrastructure investment in the roadway (say a new bridge) creates a moral hazard for the agency (and by extension the State), as this offers the public an expectation that this road will continue to exist and be maintained.  As a result, not only do existing businesses and residents plan for a future that includes access to their investment via a State road, other development may come to the vicinity with similar expectations.  In point of fact, stimulating economic growth (supportive of local land use planning efforts) is often seen as a primary function for transportation projects.  This presents a sticky wicket for any State DOT as they have exactly zero ability to substantively influence land use planning when elected officials select alternatives that offer benefits within their term of office but ignore larger costs occurring later .

 

 

Why Cross the Potomac?

With the recent failure of two pieces of proposed legislation in Virginia, the likelihood of a additional structure crossing the Potomac River retreats for another ten years and we are all well rid of the over-priced sprawl generating highway concept.

Going back in history since the original roadway plans in 1954 that showed the Outer Circumferential Freeway in Montgomery County with a Potomac Crossing, various politicians and developers carried the idea forward through iteration after iteration. The proposed locations have generally center around an area north of Dulles Airport where the design and construction would be relatively simple with the shallow rapids and narrow expanse of the river. The environmental impacts, however, would prove formidable and costly barriers as Montgomery County has designated approximately 90,000 acres on the Maryland side of the Potomac as Agricultural Reservation and the Environmental Protection Agency has long opposed a bridge in this area.

The political and economic pressure for the new crossing isn’t difficult to understand given that the Washington D.C. metropolitan region regularly makes top ten lists for ‘most congested regions’ and travel time delays cost the region millions of dollars. Nearly everyone would prefer less congestion but the costs of roadway improvements, distinctly different incentives motivating local land use planning and state level transportation planning, and the “plus one” problem complicate matters to the point where all involved parties agree there are no simple solutions.

Currently, the Maryland State Highway supports options that improve existing crossings and it is slowly working on improvements to I-270 and I-495/I-95 corridors that include a potential $500 million breakout project widening the American Legion Bridge. However, given the status of the federal transportation bills in congress and the warm reception Annapolis has given the proposed gas tax, I’d not be holding my breath.

So, the question I ask my readers, is “why cross the Potomac anyway?” If one considers the value of your time, the cost of $4 gas, the wear on your vehicle (and your nerves), and the cost of housing together, it may become obvious that you’d live more cheaply if you moved closer to your place of employment. Just consider what could you do with the 2 hours a day you spend commuting and the money you’d save.

 

Unprecidented Event??

Recently, an article appeared that questioned the appearance of two 100 year storm events in Birmingham New York in two years. Given the climate change predictions of larger and more intense storms includes a increase of the 100 year event to nearly 1 in 20 years at the high end this sequence of storms is not so unlikely as one might think. Perhaps it is the new normal?

 

11.07.2012 – Hurricane Sandy just passed through NYC and devastated the subway system and a goodly chunk of the Jersey Shore.  Even the Mayor of NYC is talking about climate change now.  I called here first.

 

Rebuilding the Oceans

I’m awfully busy with a house restoration project but found this bit on-line covering how we can Fix Our Broken Ocean

LINK