Globe: "The future of crossing the street" (Aug 10, 2008)

The Future of Crossing the Street.

Now some very smart people think they've got the answers to help everyone play nice on our roads.

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A few minutes before, I'd been sitting with Hart inside the Institute for Human Centered Design, a nonprofit advocacy group on Portland Street, just down from Causeway, where Hart is the director of urban and transit projects. We were discussing Shared Space, a street design concept becoming popular in parts of Europe (the German town of Bohmte started turning its entire main street into a Shared Space last fall), and I ask Hart if he thinks such a "wild" idea could ever work in Boston.

"It's not a wild idea," he counters quickly. "It existed for thousands of years. It was only with the advent of sewers and fast-moving vehicles - horses and trolleys and cars - where you start seeing curbs and really defining where uses go."

The curb is a big enemy in the Shared Space philosophy, because the curb is a separator, dictating what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vehicle. There are other enemies as well: signs, lines on the road, even traffic lights. Pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who died earlier this year at age 62, Shared Space gets the street naked, removes all physical and psychological barriers, and forces cars and pedestrians to share. The concept makes the street safe by making it dangerous to proceed without paying attention.

Wendy Landman, the executive director of the nonprofit pedestrian advocacy group WalkBoston, says, "One of the pieces that Monderman talked about is that you have to give responsibility back to the drivers and pedestrians to behave rationally." (An oft-quoted Monderman mantra is "If you treat drivers like idiots, they act as idiots.")

Drivers expect to have their needs served in due time. The pedestrian? Unsure. Do I have to push the button, or will it just give me the walk signal? And when? So what we do, Larson says, is serve ourselves. "Most of the time, it's safe if you're a rational person. That's when people jaywalk. But a car can come out of a driveway, and that's when trouble happens." The catch, according to Ann Hershfang, one of the founders of WalkBoston, is that studies have shown that pedestrians will wait just 30 seconds before they get restless and cross.

So is it really as simple as getting pedestrians and drivers to behave within the system? Thomas Tinlin, the city's transportation commissioner, thinks that's a big part of it. Everything they do, Tinlin says, is a trade-off . "Transportation commissioners of the past have always been about 'move the car, move the car.' The world is so different now. It's cars and bikes and wheelchairs."

Jeff Rosenblum sees the pedestrian walk button as a symbol of inequity. Four years ago, he founded the advocacy organization LivableStreets Alliance because he thought the discussion about streets was missing the human element. An engineer by training, Rosenblum [recently] took [a] job [with the city of Cambridge as a Transportation Planner] because he says he believes Cambridge is on the right track for human-centered street issues. When I ask Rosenblum to point me to other cities and towns in the region with strong pedestrian initiatives, he says the lack of them is what concerns him."Why do we make pedestrians jump through hoops? The assumption is, 'You tell us when you'd like [us to have] a little slice.' " Bicyclists and pedestrians are not fighting for space in the system, he says; they're fighting for scraps. "When the system is laid out such that it works for everybody, people will behave.

There is no silver bullet that will fix everything, Rosenblum says, but the first step is readjusting how we value things. "Part of the problem is that the study of traffic engineering is so numerical, it's easy to quantify. But how do you value something like a bike lane? When you start talking about value, that's when it becomes sticky," he says, his face telling the story of someone who's tired of losing this nuance argument. "It's more of an art than a science, which makes it difficult for people to handle, because they want numbers, they want proof."

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