aashto Archives - Transportation For America

Three critical considerations for evaluating AASHTO’s new Bikeway Guide

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On July 25^th, The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) met to consider changes to their Bikeway Guide, including the long-awaited addition of designs for protected bike lanes.

AASHTO deserves credit for creating and updating this guide for building bike infrastructure, but AASHTO is largely responding to the massive, growing interest from cities across the country. Many cities have been the leaders in this area. San Jose, CA, and Champaign, IL, have had protected bike lanes since the 1970s, and Boulder, CO, and Denton, TX, since the 1980s. People for Bikes started the GreenLane project in 2011 to help more cities build protected bike lanes. The result is that — without any formal guidance from AASHTO — almost 300 protected bike lanes exist across the country today.

Flickr CC photo by Zane Selvans

It is important to recognize the limitations of AASHTO’s action and why it’s ultimately unlikely to lead to the significant expansion of new bike and pedestrian infrastructure onto more roadways across the country. Why? Here are three reasons.

First: AASHTO’s Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities is wholly separate from their standard manual for road design, the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, also known as “The Green Book”. Unlike this new bike guide, The Green Book is the industry standard that sits on every transportation engineer’s desk.

Second: The Federal Highways Administration adopts The Green Book by federal regulation. Not so for the Bikeway Guide. This reinforces the message to engineers and local policymakers that one document has primacy over the other.

Third: These two documents are not written in conjunction. This often sends designers in different directions.

Flickr CC photo by Spencer Thomas

A local transportation agency interested in building bike facilities might seek out the AASHTO’s Bikeway Guide for assistance. If they do, they will be steered to some very interesting designs, but not the most cutting edge designs being deployed in many cities. For a more up-to-date approach, communities turn to the National Association of City Transportation Official’s (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide. NACTO’s authors have analyzed designs across the world, and worked with local governments more likely to build bike infrastructure.

While the AASHTO Bikeway Guide might help design bike infrastructure, the overall guidance in their flagship guide, The Green Book, pushes engineers toward roadway designs that make bike infrastructure difficult at best. The Green Book encourages wide lanes and wide roads with fast-moving traffic, which makes additional right-of-way for bicycles unlikely and creates a hostile environment for those outside of a car.

When these shortcomings in The Green Book are pointed out, many say it allows for flexibility (like this page from the Federal Highways Administration about context sensitive solutions). I work with state DOTs to analyze the barriers in their project development processes that stand in the way of building complete streets (roadways that safely accommodate all users from trucks and cars to transit users and people on foot or bike). In my experience, it’s a persistent challenge for transportation agencies to exercise flexibility that’s theoretical.

To use that flexibility, a project designer must first make up their own design without guidance from The Green Book, then undergo a challenging and strict review process for approval. For engineers judged on delivering a project quickly, this flexibility is really a Hobson’s choice.

I am excited to see AASHTO recognize the need for guidance in bike infrastructure design and support separated bike lanes, which are essential for making biking safe, convenient and attractive for far more people. Protected bike lanes appeal to seven times more people than unprotected bike lanes, according to People for Bikes. But, for AASHTO to demonstrate true enthusiasm for bike infrastructure and become a partner in building safer roads for non-motorized travelers, the organization needs to bring these designs and concerns into its flagship document, The Green Book.

So what do you want from transportation?

We noticed that the folks at AASHTO are asking all their visitors to weigh in and “tell Congress” what they want to see in a transportation bill, and more broadly, what they think we need to be building and doing with our transportation dollars.

During the six-week campaign, people can use AASHTO’s Facebook page to post YouTube videos and written comments about their transportation priorities, ideas, and personal stories. Already a number of people have weighed-in on their concerns, from traffic congestion and safety, to high-speed rail and job creation through greater investment in transportation projects.

To view or post your comment, go to http://www.transportation.org/IToldCongress.

We like their idea and encourage you to weigh in with them.

As some of our polls and other groups’ polling have shown, Americans have a pretty good idea what we want to spend our money on. We want to have more options for getting around. Nobody wants to be stuck with only one way to get where they need to go. We need to do a better job of fixing what we’ve already got before we spend money on a lot of expensive new things. Travel should be safe, no matter whether we’re in a car, on a train or on foot or bike. Our communities need to have the power to build what we need to get us where we need to go.

So go and tell AASTHO: What do you want?

Reports from AASHTO and U.S. PIRG highlight an unsustainable transportation status quo

Two reports out this week speak, in quite different ways, to the urgent need for a fresh approach to federal transportation policy.

In “Road Work Ahead”, U.S. PIRG sounds the alarm on the escalating deterioration of America’s infrastructure and the need to get serious about repair and restoration. The “Unlocking Gridlock” report from AASHTO, the trade association of state Departments of Transportation, emphasizes the problem of congestion in our increasingly urbanized nation, offering highway expansion as the solution.

The subtext of the PIRG report is that expanding highway capacity – whether by widening or building new roads — is generally a bad idea, because it comes at too high a cost: Deferred maintenance on existing roads and bridges, perpetuation of over-reliance on cars with an associated dependency on oil and other problems.

For AASHTO, congestion comes at too high a cost, and the report marshals a compelling case that people should have a way to avoid those costs. However, the report comes up short in two respects: It does not adequately explain how we built a system that functions so poorly for many commuters, and it offers only one solution — more of the same.

We believe strongly, and our polling shows most Americans agree, that maintaining existing roads and bridges in top condition is our first priority. This doesn’t mean we think highway expansion is over for good. But it cannot continue to be the default solution, simply because it is the only tool that current federal policy supplies to the entities that get most of the money – the state DOTs.

The real crux of the two reports is that we have a national policy that is decades behind the reality of this century: Whether in states with low or high population, Americans are concentrating more and more in urban areas, both large and small. Yet our national policy seems almost to be designed to thwart urban mobility. Roads and bridges in our towns and metro areas take the worst pounding, and are most in need of repair and maintenance, but don’t get the resources they need. Metros plagued by congestion need a full array of tools: fixes to bottleneck-creating highway designs, rail and busways, congestion-management technology and planning and land-use approaches that minimize impact on highways and maximize transit investments.

But as we said before, the DOTs have one tool: bigger highways. You know the old saw: When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

The figures are startling and compelling. By AASHTO’s estimates, poor road conditions cost U.S. motorists $67 billion a year in repairs and operating costs, which comes out to an average of $335 per motorist. According to the USDOT, 12 percent of America’s bridges are “structurally deficient,” and in some states that figure is higher than 20 percent. Among federal highways, 45 percent are in poor, mediocre of fair condition.

The traffic gridlock resulting from inadequate transportation options has hindered quality of life and slowed the economy, as AASHTO has pointed out. Drivers with a 30-minute commute lose 22 hours (roughly three full work days) sitting in traffic, and travel on U.S. highways has increased five-fold over the past several decades. Expanding capacity in a smart and targeted way has been and will continue to be a part of the solution.

Our continued challenge will be to draw from every tool we have to make our transportation system smarter, safer and more sustainable. Although PIRG and AASHTO come at transportation issues from a different perspective, both agree that the status quo is unsustainable, and our team at Transportation for America couldn’t agree more. We look forward to working with AASHTO, PIRG and all interested groups toward a reauthorization bill that increases affordable and efficient transportation options, creates benchmarks to ensure accountability for taxpayer dollars and makes our roads safer and less congested. Only with an “all of the above” approach that says yes to safer highways, yes to transportation choices and yes to accountability can we truly say our system has met 21st Century needs.