Complete streets are streets that are designed for safe travel by all users, not just automobiles. This includes pedestrians, bicyclists, people with disabilities, mass transit vehicles (buses), emergency vehicles and anything else that moves along or across the street. A complete streets policy simply says that the local (or state) government endorses the idea of including a review of all proposed new or reconstructed roads to ensure that they include appropriate features to make them usable by all likely users.

Imagine how much easier it would be to cross County Road 39 on foot if it had raised crosswalks and medians like this.

Complete Streets are streets for everyone.¹ They are designed and operated to enable safe access for all users. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities are able to safely move along and across a complete street. Complete Streets make it easy to cross the street, walk to shops, and bicycle to work. They allow buses to run on time and make it safe for people to walk to and from bus stops. When people are given more convenient, attractive, and safe travel choices they are more likely to not rely solely on automobiles. They can replace congestion-clogged trips in their cars with bus rides or heart-healthy walks or bicycle trips.

On the other hand, incomplete streets – those designed with only cars in mind – limit transportation choices by making walking, bicycling, and taking public transportation inconvenient, unattractive, and, too often, dangerous. Unfortunately, right now most of the streets in Southampton Town are, in one way or another, incomplete. So the opportunity for improvement is great.

There is no singular design prescription for complete streets; each one is unique and responds to its community context. A complete street may include: sidewalks, bike lanes (or wide paved shoulders), special bus lanes, comfortable and accessible public transportation stops, frequent and safe crossing opportunities, median islands, accessible pedestrian signals, curb extensions, narrower travel lanes, roundabouts, and more. A complete street in a rural area will look quite different from a complete street in an urban area, but both are designed to balance safety and convenience for everyone using the road.

Implementing a complete streets policy in Southampton can be a win for the community in many ways:

It makes economic sense. A balanced transportation system that includes complete streets can bolster economic growth by providing accessible and efficient connections between residences, schools, parks, public transportation, offices, and retail destinations. Integrating sidewalks, bike lanes, transit amenities, and safe crossings into the initial design of a project spares the expense of retrofits later. Safer roads also lower police and emergency services costs.

It improves safety by reducing crashes through infrastructure improvements. One study found that designing for pedestrian travel by installing raised medians and redesigning intersections and sidewalks reduced pedestrian risk by 28%.

It encourages more walking and bicycling. Public health experts are encouraging walking and bicycling as a response to the obesity epidemic, and complete streets can help. One study found that 43% of people with safe places to walk within 10 minutes of home met recommended activity levels, while just 27% of those without safe places to walk were active enough. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently named adoption of complete streets policies as a recommended strategy to prevent obesity.

It can help ease transportation woes. Streets that provide travel choices can give people the option to avoid traffic jams by offering them other transportation options, and increase the overall capacity of the transportation network. Several smaller cities have adopted complete streets policies as one strategy to increase the overall capacity of their transportation network and reduce congestion.

It helps children. Streets that provide room for bicycling and walking help children get physical activity and gain independence. More children walk to school where there are sidewalks, and children who have and use safe walking and bicycling routes have a more positive view of their neighborhood. Safe Routes to School programs benefit from complete streets policies that help turn all routes into safe routes.

It’s good for air quality. Fewer car trips translate directly into lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Finally, complete streets foster strong communities. Complete Streets play an important role in livable communities, where all people – regardless of age, ability or mode of transportation – feel safe and welcome on the roadways. A safe walking and bicycling environment is an essential part of creating friendly, walkable communities.

Road congestion and safety are two of the biggest quality-of-life issues confronting Southampton Town. By adopting a complete streets policy, Southampton will have indeed found a way to make a great place even greater.

¹ Thanks to the National Coalition for Complete Streets for most of the information, and some of the text in this post.

All this is a rather lengthy way of saying, I’m just like you. I’m totally hooked on owning a car and using it to get wherever I need to go. Based on the number of cars on our roads, I have to assume that most of you feel this way too.

Yes, we love our cars, but we sacrifice a lot in the name of love.

Almost 34,000 people were killed in automobile accidents in the United States in 2009, and over 2,000,000 people were injured during the same period.¹

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) “The current U.S. transportation infrastructure focuses on motor vehicle travel and provides limited support for other transportation options for most Americans. [As a result] Physical activity and active transportation have declined compared to previous generations. The lack of physical activity is a major contributor to the steady rise in rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other chronic health conditions in the United States.”

Again, according to the CDC: “Transportation accounts for approximately one-third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.”²

The United States has the largest network of roadways of any country at 3,995,644 miles (2005). On average over 20% of developed land in a typical U.S. community is devoted to the automobile in the form of roads, parking lots, gas stations and garages. In some cities, such as New York, it exceeds 30%.

Streets in our communities have been redefined by the automobile from places with various uses to channels for moving the most vehicular traffic as quickly as possible, bringing new dangers, and degrading the qualities that make our communities attractive: spontaneity, locality, and human interaction.³

And cars can be just plain annoying — when you’re stuck in traffic, when you’re trying to cross a busy street, or when car horns or alarms destroy the peace of a residential neighborhood.

Are the sacrifices worth it? Maybe some are for the short term, but I suspect that the short term — from the dawn of the automobile age to the present — is rapidly coming to an end. The combined impacts of the automobile on our planet, our communities and our health have now become unsustainable.

Fortunately, strategies for making alternative forms of transit more available and more desirable already exist. Implementation of these strategies however, requires both public and private will. Government on all levels has to be willing to abandon old habits in the areas of  planning and funding. At the same time, individuals — that’s you and me — will have to be willing to sacrifice some convenience.

And, we all must be prepared to challenge some very fundamental assumptions underlying our responses to questions about the future of transportation. Must congested roads always be “improved” to promote better traffic flow? How do we determine an appropriate level of service for a new road? Is it determined by traffic flow alone, or also by the needs of the pedestrians, bicyclists and shop owners along the road? In other words, is the car still king of the road, or are we ready to acknowledge that roads must be shared, and that streets are places for walkers, joggers, bicyclists, and mass transit vehicles as well?

Strategies such as complete streets, smart growth, shared spaces, healthy communities, placemaking, and more offer a variety of ways in which communities can adapt in order to make it easier for individuals to regularly use more varied modes of transportation, including active choices such as walking and biking. This is part two of a multi-part series on our “car-centric” culture. In future posts I’ll talk more about these strategies and how some of them might work here in Sag Hampton.

What are your thoughts and feelings about your cars? Is the era of “Car as King” over? Are you ready to embrace mass transit, walking, biking? If not, what will it take to get you out of your car? Share you thoughts on these questions, or other concerns you may have in the comments below.

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References

(1) Motor Vehicle Accidents–Number and Deaths
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html
(2) CDC Transportation Recommendations
http://www.cdc.gov/transportation/recommendation.htm
(3) The Traffic Guru by Tom Vanderbilt. The Wilson Quarterly http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1234

On the other hand there’s this guy in Sag Harbor who keeps jumping up at public meetings and proclaiming loudly that the Sag Harbor library’s plan to expand is fatally flawed  because it does not include a parking lot.

Whenever he repeats this mantra, I want to ask him, “which of the million-dollar-plus historic homes that surround the library should be purchased with taxpayer dollars and torn down to make room for a parking lot?”

If you’ve been to the library in Sag Harbor, you know that it is never a problem finding a parking space within a few blocks of the building. So, why is this guy obsessed with parking? And, is he the only one, or only the most extreme?

Actually, I think it’s fair to say that just about everyone who drives a car (and that’s just about everyone) is concerned, if not obsessed, about parking — not just at the library, but about parking in general. Most of us who drive tend to think that there’s never enough parking, and that what parking there is is rarely close enough to the place to which we want to go. In that regard, I’ve heard a local restaurateur quoted as saying that his customers would “park in my kitchen, if they could.”

So, is it true that we need more places to park in Sag Harbor? For me, the answer to that question depends on when you ask it. If I happen to be behind the wheel, looking for a place to park outside Conca D’oro so I can pick up a pizza on a rainy Saturday night in summer, then my answer would probably be “damn straight we do.”

But, in less stressful moments, my response would be a bit more thoughtful. Most of the time, I tend to think that more parking might be nice, but at what cost? As with the library, we’re not likely to come up with a “free” parking solution anywhere else either. The simple truth is that whether or not you pay a fee to park, parking is never free. Every parking space requires a bit of land on which to live, and as we know, land is a very expensive commodity.

Who pays for that land? You do…it’s always you. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a private parking lot, like the one outside K-Mart in Bridgehampton, or if it’s the space on the street in front of your house. You pay.  In the case of K-Mart, and every other business that must buy or rent extra land to provide parking, the prices you pay for the goods and services you purchase include the cost of of that land. It’s one of the merchant’s overhead costs, and any business that wants to stay in business has to cover their overhead.

As for “on street” parking, you pay many times and in many ways for this luxury. First and foremost, every parking space represents land that is not on the tax roles. Therefore, your taxes are higher because no one is paying taxes on the land used for all that parking. Second, each of those spaces has to be paved, striped, maintained and policed. All of these services are provided by various government departments, and all are paid for by your taxes.

Finally, we often pay a very high aesthetic price. Sag Harbor is a lovely scenic village, yet if you try to take a photo of our historic Main Street, what you end up with is a picture of parked cars. We know it’s a picturesque street, but we never get to appreciate its beauty in full because so much of it is obscured by parked cars. The net result is a reduction in our community’s quality-of-life.

Unfortunately the aesthetic effects of our parking problem are not confined to Main Street, but severely impact many adjacent parts of the community, including what is arguably the most scenic spot in the village: Long Wharf. Think about it — the most scenic spot in Sag Harbor Village is…a parking lot.

This is part one of a multi-part series on our “car-centric” culture. I’ll have more to say about cars, parking, streets, and other forms of transportation in future posts. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you have to say about the parking situation in your community, whether it be Sag Harbor or any place else. Please let me know what you’re thinking by leaving a comment below.

Present at this event were quite a few of the East End’s local and regional elected officials including the supervisors of the Towns of Southampton, East Hampton, Southold and Riverhead, County Legislators Schneiderman and Romaine, Assemblyman Thiele, every member of the Southampton Town Council, members of various other town councils, and representatives from the offices of Congressman Bishop and State Senator Lavalle. The only significant player not present was the Shelter Island supervisor. Among those commenting on the transportation plans presented at the forum, only the representatives for Congresman Bishop and Senator Lavalle did not take a position, saying they would have to defer to their bosses; County Legislator Romaine left early, before his opinion could be recorded. Riverhead’s Supervisor Cardinale arrived late, and having missed the presentation said that while he could not take a strong position either way, he would, at this time, defer to the opinions of the other supervisors. Only Legislator Schneiderman voiced a dissenting opinion. Everyone else present expressed support for the development of the rail/bus network plan.

Quite frankly, I was dumbfounded. After listening to the presentation, I was sure that the local officials would use the cover provided by the Volpe Center’s more reasonably priced alternative to avoid supporting what looks to be a very difficult to implement and costly project, the outcome of which is far from certain.  But, calling the more elaborate plan “visionary,” and “of greater long-term benefit,” the politicians quickly came to consensus. How often does that happen? I’m still shocked. It certainly tore a hole in my post of a couple of weeks ago in which I asserted that the provincialism that crops up in inter-town disputes was one of the biggest problems facing the East End. Needless to say, I was thrilled at this level of cooperation. I also support the plan.

At this point some of you are probably wishing for a little background. OK, here it is. Planners have been predicting total gridlock on East End roads since at least the 1970s, and starting around then have also proposed many ways to avoid it, most of which have proven unacceptable to residents and or government officials for one reason or another. In the mid 1990s, the East End Supervisors and Mayors Association (EESMA), created a new group, the East End Transportation Council (EETC) to again study the issue, which they did…interminably. Their work eventually culminated in the 2006 release of a study known as SEEDS (Sustainable East End Development Strategies). I won’t go into that here, except to say that development of a mass transit system of some kind was one of the recommendations of the study. During the SEEDS process, a splinter group formed among the SEEDS stakeholders. The members of this splinter felt that EETC was moving too slowly, and that it was time to jump from studying the problem to developing solutions. This group became Five Towns Rural Transit (FTRT), a non-profit devoted to the development of what was to become known as the East End Shuttle.

Through the dedication and hard work of FTRT, a plan was developed that included replacement of the Long Island Rail Road service on the East End with a more frequent light rail service that would shuttle between the stations and be met by a network of feeder buses to which passengers could transfer for short rides into nearby hamlets, villages and business centers. In 2007, Assemblyman Thiele and Senator Lavalle took up the cause of FTRT and were able to obtain a matching grant  for the study and further development of the East End Shuttle concept. The East End Towns came up with the matching funds, and the EETC was given the task of finding a group capable of undertaking the study. This turned out to be the Volpe Center, which was charged with fleshing out and analyzing the feasibility of the Shuttle plan, and also with coming up with at least one alternative, so that if the plan proved unacceptable, the Towns would have a fallback strategy.

The result of this work was presented on Friday, April 17th at Suffolk Community College in Riverhead. I won’t try to recap the presentation here, as I’ve probably already worn out your patience with this long-winded post. However, in summary, I think it would be fair to say that while Volpe was favorably impressed with FTRT’s shuttle plan, they concluded that it could be prohibitively expensive, and that the results — whether or not people would use it, and whether or not it would relieve congestion on our roadways — were uncertain. The alternative they proposed, was, in their words, more flexible, less expensive, and implementable in phases — all advantages over the shuttle plan. The big disadvantage of the alternative was that the buses would run on the same clogged roadways that we all use now, resulting in long travel times, while contributing to congestion on the roads.

After the presentation, many panelists and audience members spoke eloquently in favor of the shuttle plan, in spite of its possible drawbacks. Legislator Schneiderman spoke thoughtfully and presented some additional drawbacks to the shuttle plan that had not been mentioned by Volpe. Supervisor Russell of Southold, suggested that a hybrid solution, with different approaches for the north and south forks might be the best alternative — more rail on the south fork, more buses on the north. Ultimately, the idea of a hybrid solution — details unspecified — took hold of the group, and when it came time to arrive at a consensus, a hybrid solution embodying most of the details of FTRT’s East End Shuttle, at least on the south fork, was agreed upon.

I’ve skipped over a lot of important details in this post — financing for one — which I hope to get back to another time. For now, though, I think it is enough to say that occassionally, the people we elect do their jobs with thoughtfulness and diligence, putting the greater need ahead of short term political considerations, and we should all be grateful for that, and that the *!~@$*** congestion on our roads may eventually be remedied.