Changes are for everyone, not just bikes and pedestrians

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many discussions around Fourth and Fifth street have degraded into warring factions. But as I mentioned in my column back in September, in a well-executed transportation system all modes work together.

Someone choosing to ride their bike, walk or take transit instead of driving is one less car ahead of you and one more parking space that’s available when you arrive. We know from both local and national data that a lack of safe infrastructure is a major hurdle for people who are interested in utilizing other modes. These data also show that once you build safe, accessible infrastructure, such as protected bike lanes, people use them and we have seen that here.

On the note of “usage” — I’ve found it to be a bit of a red herring. I think looking at “usage” or “volumes” is appropriate when considering the size of a facility (like how many lanes to put on a road), not whether a facility should exist at all. For example, there isn’t some broad argument against sidewalks for lack of usage because we recognize that walking/rolling is a fundamental mode of transportation that a city should plan for. Same can be said for biking.

In Jim Spehar’s recent column he presents an alternative — why not Third and Sixth for improved bike lanes? It’s a valid question. It is a possible alternative but one that makes some safety tradeoffs worth mentioning. The first is finding a gap to cross five lanes can be difficult at an unsignalized intersection with the traffic volumes on Grand Avenue. Even if we implemented his suggestion of flashing crossing beacons, a recent car/ pedestrian crash on Seventh Street near Grand Junction High School involving a student in a crosswalk highlights the limitations of this strategy; 12th Street near CMU also lights up in the crash data, so it’s perhaps not the pinnacle of safe design. At the end of the day, the changes to Fourth and Fifth were done for a reason — to improve safety — and changes were only implemented after extensive input spanning years. There are three separate but related problems that showed up in the historic data — Fourth/Fifth had more crashes overall, more crashes where someone was killed or seriously injured, and more crashes where a pedestrian and cyclist was involved when compared to other downtown streets. By moving the improved bike and pedestrian infrastructure to Third/Sixth and reverting Fourth/Fifth to their original design, it means we’ve decided to give up trying to reduce crashes of all varieties on Fourth/Fifth. Yes, someone cycling or walking might choose to use Third/ Sixth with better facilities on those streets but they were already more comfortable streets, and we still saw a higher number of bike/pedestrian crashes occurring on Fourth/Fifth anyway.

Furthermore, if we saw a hot spot for car crashes in a particular area, I doubt the proposed solution would be to tell drivers — “Well, why don’t you just drive on this other street instead?” We’d fix it. I should add here that the slower speeds the Fourth/Fifth streets redesign encourage means that the likelihood and severity of car/car crashes is reduced, too. The design being piloted seems to address all three problems we saw on Fourth/Fifth simultaneously. Other designs might work too, but I think addressing all the known problems should be our “North Star.”

But what seems to have gotten lost is that this is a pilot and things can still be changed. There has been a push to pass a verdict on the project, which feels premature and against the spirit of doing a pilot in the first place. The aesthetics are temporary. If there are areas that are creating issues, say a certain intersection with sightline problems for example, please communicate suggestions to city staff so we can work towards a better solution!

During this phase, seeking to find the best possible version that addresses the diverse needs of an entire community is the goal. The benefit of doing a pilot is to be able to iterate and improve in a low-cost way. We’re expecting to make changes and we need constructive feedback to do so. Generic “for” or “against” input is the least helpful. But overall, I’m neither ready to pull the project out, nor to make it permanent.

In my mind, in order to make a fair assessment there is still some important missing information. Namely, we need to understand how this pilot is changing safety; to understand that we need to know post-change traffic volumes, speeds, crashes, etc. The city is collecting this data now, but the analysis is still being done. There is a very real possibility that Fourth/Fifth are moving roughly the same number of cars as before the changes, just at a lower speed, while reducing both accident frequency and, most importantly, accident severity for everyone. If that’s the case it’s hardly a “fiasco.”

Ultimately, I liken the changes to Fourth/Fifth to roundabouts. There is a slight learning curve the first couple times you use them. But if that adjustment means one of your friends or neighbors is more likely to get to where they are going safely, isn’t that worth it?

Jason Nguyen is a member of the Grand Junction City Council.

N GUYEN

A car drives along Fifth Street past Main Street in downtown Grand Junction.

LARRY ROBINSON/ The Daily Sentinel