Legislature(2007 - 2008)Anch LIO Conf Rm
06/28/2007 01:30 PM House TRANSPORTATION
| Audio | Topic |
|---|---|
| Start | |
| State Transportation Issues | |
| Adjourn |
* first hearing in first committee of referral
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
+ teleconferenced
= bill was previously heard/scheduled
ALASKA STATE LEGISLATURE
HOUSE TRANSPORTATION STANDING COMMITTEE
June 28, 2007
1:32 p.m.
MEMBERS PRESENT
Representative Kyle Johansen, Chair
Representative Mark Neuman, Vice Chair
Representative Mike Doogan
MEMBERS ABSENT
Representative Anna Fairclough
Representative Craig Johnson
Representative Vic Kohring
Representative Woodie Salmon
OTHER LEGISLATORS PRESENT
Representative Bob Buch
COMMITTEE CALENDAR
STATE TRANSPORTATION ISSUES
- HEARD
PREVIOUS COMMITTEE ACTION
No previous action to record
WITNESS REGISTER
FRANK MCQUEARY, President
Anchorage Road Coalition
Anchorage, Alaska
JACK LETTIERE, President
American Association of State Highway and Transportation
Officials;
Secretary, New Jersey Department of Transportation
New Jersey
JENNIFER WITT, Regional Planning Manager
Central Region
Department of Transportation & Public Facilities
Anchorage, Alaska
TOM DOUGHERTY, Engineer/Architecture
Construction/Operations
Central Region
Department of Transportation & Public Facilities
Anchorage, Alaska
JIM LAMSON, Design, Engineering & Construction
Project Management & Engineering Department
Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions (AMATS)
Municipality of Anchorage (MOA)
Anchorage, Alaska
ACTION NARRATIVE
CHAIR KYLE JOHANSEN called the House Transportation Standing
Committee meeting to order at 1:32:49 PM. Representatives
Neuman and Johansen were present at the call to order.
Representative Doogan arrived as the meeting was in progress.
^State Transportation Issues
CHAIR JOHANSEN announced that the only order of business would
be a discussion on state transportation issues. He asked
Representative Buch to inform members about today's agenda.
1:33:28 PM
REPRESENTATIVE BOB BUCH, Alaska State Legislature, told members
the first speaker would be Frank McQueary, who would outline
context sensitive systems (CSS). The discussion would focus on
community road development, particularly on collector and feeder
streets and on codes and infrastructure development. He noted
that the Anchorage road systems have been under serious scrutiny
lately. The committee is looking at some community development
designs that have been promoted nationally.
1:35:07 PM
FRANK McQUEARY, President, Anchorage Road Coalition, gave the
following presentation:
Thank you, Bob. For those of you who don't know me
I'll give you a little bit of background. I am not an
engineer and I am not a highway designer. I am the
President of the Anchorage Road Coalition. My
background is actually [indisc.] at multiple levels.
I was in banking here in Anchorage for a number of
years. I've also run a trucking company and worked my
way through school as a grade checker and road
construction projects and my father was a highway
construction engineer. So there's a certain genetic
affiliation with the process and certainly as a user
both in the commercial sense in trucking and an
individual with a high degree of interest.
The Anchorage Road Coalition was formed primarily out
of dissatisfaction with a number of projects that had
been designed and built here in Anchorage on the level
of the collector streets, which are both access and
mobility streets but should have a high degree of
emphasis on access and safe access, whether it is for
school children or people going to and from work and
getting to their home neighborhoods. A group of us
became involved first with the Strawberry Road issues
and then with projects we discovered all around town
and, as we started researching, we discovered that
there was a "c change" going on in the profession in
terms of philosophy of design, particularly with urban
streets. Now statewide we're talking a lot more than
urban streets, but as we got into looking at what the
profession was trying to do with a process called CSS,
we realized that it would ... help solve some of the
problems we saw with what was happening in Anchorage,
but it also would have a great deal of applicability
with some of our rural projects as well.
I am going to show about 12 minutes of a slide show
that was done by the President of AASHTO. His term, I
think, was in 2005. His name was Jack Lettiere. He
speaks obviously from the pinnacle of the profession
as the President of the American Association of State
Highway Transportation Officials [AASHTO] that's been
sort of the lead agency and professional organization
and wrote the Green book with [indisc.] between
designing, managing and constructing the interstate
highway systems. Jack probably speaks with more
credibility than I do so I think the first few minutes
of this slide show will be very informative and
hopefully useful for this committee.
1:38:03 PM
[THE FOLLOWING IS AN AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION OF JACK LETTIERE ON
VIDEO]
Hello, my name is Jack Lettiere, President of the
American Association of State Highway and
Transportation Officials and Secretary of the New
Jersey Department of Transportation. Welcome to this
video, "Contact Sensitive Solutions for the
Transportation Professional." The transportation
strategies for the next 50 years are going to be very
different than the conventional strategies from the
last 50 years. This video is intended to help
transportation professionals adjust to the new
transportation paradigm of contact sensitive solutions
and to introduce this subject to others as well.
Since the 1950s, transportation professionals have
predominantly focused on raising levels of service for
motor vehicle users by widening roads. The Texas
Transportation Institute studied 70 metropolitan areas
over 15 years and found that the conventional strategy
of expanding roads had had virtually no impact on
congestion. The Institute confirmed that metropolitan
areas that spent heavily on increasing motor vehicle
carrying capacity were no less congested than those
that spent nothing on widenings.
Although counter intuitive to many, our profession's
longstanding popular assumption that widening roads
eases congestion is false. However, over the decades,
the unsuccessful battle with congestion has directly
and indirectly resulted in harm to others in a number
of ways. Arguably, pedestrians, the litmus test for
good cities, have suffered the most due to our past
motor vehicle focus, sprawling cities, poor pedestrian
facilities, and hostile street environments. Through
20/20 hindsight, our profession now realizes that a
century ago, American cities were as pedestrian-
friendly and as transit-friendly as European cities
but through a series of deliberate choices, we
retrofitted and expanded our cities in a highly motor
vehicle oriented way. Many cities are so poorly
designed now that motor vehicles have effectively
become prosthetics, without which people could simply
not function effectively.
Expansive highways built to rural and natural lands
opened up vast areas for developers. Beautiful
meadows and forests were covered with tract housing
and strip development. Farms, along with some of our
most fertile lands and ecosystems, were lost. Sprawl,
the unintended but real consequence of our
transportation system, happened. The system was
unfortunately equated with failure by our profession
and, despite colossal public funding and effort over
the last 50 years to beat congestion; the conventional
transportation strategies are less than ineffective.
The more motor vehicle capacity that was built, the
bigger the problem became.
With half a century of experience, the profession's
epiphany was that it was not the roads were really
failing, but the conventional transportation paradigm.
In a nutshell, the input into the conventional model
was levels of service for motorists and forecasts of
even more congestion unless the roads were widened.
The models were simplistic facsimiles of reality,
presuming all else being equal. However, all else
was not equal and people began driving further than
they had ever driven before, more than doubling their
vehicle miles traveled per capita in a mere 35 years
between the years of 1960 and 1995.
As areas became more motor vehicle oriented,
pedestrian and bicycle travel became less safe and
less popular. As a result, people increasingly
replaced pedestrian and bicycle trips with motor
vehicle trips, exacerbating the problems. New motor
vehicle dependent development patterns responded: low
density tract housing, big box retail, and warehouse
schools became common land uses that responded to the
large scale of the road building efforts. Public
transit was simply not feasible in these types of
areas due to the low concentrations of people and the
long travel distances. The conventional antidote of
road widening could not keep up to sprawl due to
limited space, money and public support.
Furthermore, the deteriorating road infrastructure
from early road building boom times needed
professional attention and increasingly scarce
government funding for repairs. Climate and cities
were affected by our development patterns and asphalt
expanses raising the city temperatures in the summer
months due to what are known as heat island effects.
Heat, tailpipe emissions and other pollutants
contributed to smog, which became a serious health
issue, reducing the quality of life for people and
occasionally killing them, as happened to this freezer
truck full of people and about 700 others in Chicago's
1995 heat wave.
Our motor vehicle dependency and resulting development
patterns have contributed greatly to a countrywide
inactivity and obesity epidemic according to the
Center for Disease Control in adults and children. It
is a startling statistic that an average 11 year old
boy today is 11 pounds heavier than an average 11 year
old boy in 1973. Consequently, diabetes has grown to
become a huge problem in adults and children, along
with a host of other lifestyle and environmental
diseases, including various cancers, asthma, heart
disease, and depression. Children born after the year
2000 have a shorter life expectancy than their
parents, due to lifestyle and environmental diseases
overtaking the ability of our medical industry to
counter them. To add fuel to the fire, most credible
sources predict that the world demand for oil will out
pace the ability to extract and refine oil within
about 10 years.
In the meantime, we have built cities with the most
highly inefficient transportation and land use
patterns in the history of the world in terms of
energy and land consumption per capita. Left
unaddressed, it will not take long for economic
problems associated with this wastefulness to weaken
us internationally. The cumulative effects of
deforestation, CO emissions, and generally messing
2
with natural systems is contributing to global
problems. Melting ice caps, rising ocean levels,
expanding deserts, droughts, and extreme weather
events may be Mother Nature's way of giving us a hint
that it's time to change our ways.
So let's talk about context sensitive solutions.
Context sensitive solutions are an integral part of
smart growth.
1:45:16 PM
Context sensitive solutions include context sensitive
design in which projects are designed to suit the
context but they also include solutions that do not
require anything to be designed at all. For example,
changing policies to require street trees or mixed use
zoning requires no design. Context sensitive
solutions involve working with the community, working
within the various levels of context, ranging from the
general need to reduce motor vehicle dependency to the
specific context of a location and applying the
principles of smart growth.
We will review some of the most important aspects of
context sensitive solutions, starting with approaching
context sensitive solutions with objectivity. We need
to recognize some of our own profession's historic
biases and fix them. For example, a highway capacity
manual, though sold as a technical document, contains
language and value sets that are inherently biased to
be pro-motor vehicle. This should come as no surprise
due to its inception during the golden age of the
motor vehicle. For example, the common use of the
word "improvement" when discussing a street project is
biased in favor of the beneficiaries of the project
against those and that which is harmed. In this case,
the widening project benefits motorists while harming
the urban forest, the residents, and residential
property values. The use of such value based words
indicates a bias intentionally or not by the user and
results in a lowering of credibility with an objective
audience. Perfectly accurate and objective
substitutes exist and need to be used.
Similarly, the idea that changing the type of street
from a collector street to an arterial street is an
upgrade indicates a bias. Audiences that share the
bias might not notice, however, and an audience that
is looking for a different outcome would perceive the
bias. Critics may scoff at this as being just
politically correct, however if a speaker or writer
wants to be and appear to be an objective
professional, then he or she simply needs to avoid
biased language. "Efficient" is a highly misused word
when involved with widening strategies. Motor vehicle
carrying capacities may have increased but as we have
already discussed, energy and land inefficiencies have
also increased and congestion has remained unchanged.
The concept to speed is key to context sensitive
solutions. The first idea is to recognize the plain
physics involved with speed - that the effects of
different speeds are not proportional to the speed.
For example, a driver going 20 miles per hour would
have a stopping sight distance of about 150 feet but
the stopping sight distance at 40 miles per hour is
not simply double, it's actually about 600 feet.
Similar non-linear relationships are involved with
other phenomena. For example, the likelihood of a
pedestrian dying in a collision with a car increases
dramatically with speed. Some drivers drive faster
than the street's designed speed, consequently the
effects of different design speeds on non-motorists,
such as shop owners and pedestrians, is more than a
nominal change in design speed. A change of 30 miles
per hour to 40 miles per hour design speed would be
perceived as more like the difference between 35 miles
per hour and 45 miles per hour design speed, which is
much more impactful due to the non-linear effects of
rising speeds. Oppositely, changes in design speeds
from 40 miles per hour to 30 miles per hour or 30
miles per hour to 20 miles per hour results in much
better environments for non-motorists.
The second idea about speed has to be in context.
Conventionally, design speeds were the lowest on local
streets, higher on collector streets, higher on
arterial streets and highest on highways. In a
context sensitive solutions environment, the
functional classification does not dictate design
speed. Instead, design speed is a function of the
context. For example, it is okay to have design
speeds of 50 miles per hour on a highway outside of
town, but in town design speeds of 25 miles per hour
are appropriate. Just outside each end of town
there's a transition area for changing from the high
rural design speeds to the town's low design speeds.
100 years ago and earlier, local collector and
arterial streets operated at the same speeds - the
speed of a walking horse. As a result, even the
busiest streets had retail fronting them, residential
uses alongside, pedestrian traffic and transit. It
was a very modern and incorrect idea that big streets
and cities also had to be fast streets. It is mainly
the negative effects of high motor vehicle speeds in
cities that caused retail uses, residential uses, and
pedestrians to gravitate away from the big streets.
Consequently, for our urban areas to be successful, it
is important to employ lower design speeds.
There are two types of safety from a design
perspective.
1:51:05 PM
The first type is conventional design safety where we
provide care zones for giving bridge abutments,
etcetera, so that when drivers leave the road and
collide with other objects or otherwise lose control
of their motor vehicles, the least harm comes to them
and their passengers. The second and newer type is
behavioral design safety where we design the street to
result in safe driver behavior, lower speeds and fewer
collisions. Behavioral design safety is typically
included as part of context sensitive design projects
in urban areas. Some people know it as traffic
calming. Our ideas about design safety have changed
over the years outside and inside of cars. Consider
seatbelts, for example.
1:52:02 PM
MR. McQUEARY stopped the video and offered to provide copies of
it to members. He noted the discussion of behavioral design
indicates a vast change in the way the profession is beginning
to design streets. It is occasioned by the fact that a lot of
information is now available with the interstate highway
system's 40-year history. The results of applying design
standards based on moving the largest number of cars as rapidly
and efficiently as possible to urban streets can now be seen.
That design standard has not worked. Typically the wide, fast
approach to urban collector streets and arterials has not
improved mobility and has negatively impacted neighborhoods.
MR. McQUEARY told members he spoke with Steve Soenksen, the
state's Safe Routes to Schools coordinator. Mr. Soenksen's
statistics show that nationally, 22 percent of the trips on
national highways are school related. He said that school
transportation planning has taken place in isolation from land
use planning and with inadequate coordination with other
professions and disciplines. School districts often build
schools on the least expensive land available, which means
students will be bussed over longer distances. Twenty-something
years ago, 80 percent of students walked to school; now fewer
than 20 percent do. A major reason for that decrease is the
type of transportation networks that were designed.
MR. McQUEARY told members the largest study done on highway
safety was done by Robert Noland, a professor at London Imperial
College. Mr. Noland compiled data from all 50 states over 14
years. The number of accidents and deaths has decreased during
the last 40 years; therefore the profession assumed that was the
result of safer roads. Mr. Noland's model included factors such
as seat belt use, safer cars, emergency medical services,
demographics, drunken driving laws, etcetera, and concluded that
lane widening was actually less safe because the permissive,
forgiving design results in inattentive drivers. He concluded
that lane widths of 12 feet and more have resulted in more
severe accidents.
MR. MCQUEARY said some of the ideas developed for highway
design, such as sight design, are not working as well as
expected and often do not work on an urban street environment.
He explained that removing a hill to improve sight distance
results in drivers increasing their speed because they feel
safer. He noted that many lessons are being learned about urban
street design. The CSS says that street design requires
multidisciplinary input, not just financial considerations.
1:58:35 PM
MR. MCQUEARY said it is important to establish a project's goal.
He recently spoke toHHe Jeff Ottesen who is in charge of capital
projects for the Department of Transportation & Public
Facilities (DOT&PF). Mr. Ottesen said this year all federal
funds will not be sufficient to complete the deferred
maintenance on the national highway road system. He said the
state needs to begin to require that all state agencies
cooperate to extract the most value out of each dollar for
roads. He said he has had an ongoing debate with Mark Neidhold,
head of design. Mr. Neidhold believes in "CSD" but believes
DOT&PF should implement it. He told members:
Well, they can implement, they can control their
employees but that doesn't mean that they're going to
get the time they need from Public Safety or from the
Department of Environmental Conservation or other
agencies. Here in Anchorage ... we're lucky we have
in the police department Nancy Reeder (ph) who is the
head of traffic control. She spends an inordinate
amount of time participating in discussions like this
and is an avid fan of CSS, and avid fan of
roundabouts, understands what the impacts of poor
design are because she has to deal with both picking
up the pieces and parts of people after the accidents
and trying to enforce speed limits that don't make any
sense in terms of the design. If you design a road
that looks like it's built to drive 60 miles per hour,
quite a few people are going to go that fast. If it
looks like it's designed to go 80 miles an hour and
they feel comfortable, they are going to go that fast.
So part of CSS is designing the scale of the street to
get the desired behavior. That's the behavioral
design that Jack Lettiere was talking about.
We're still in transition. The legislative approach
or the executive order approach will get us where we
need to go faster. We're going to get there
eventually but we can speed up the process and
probably save some money and save some lives or at
least get better value from the money we're spending
if we do it now. I've been talking to Bob for a
couple of years about it. Last year we did some
presentations to the Senate Transportation Committee.
We're hoping that this next year that either
legislation or an executive order will be implemented.
I think there are some people here from - Jim Lamson
from the Municipality, who I believe has started a CSS
program ....
2:01:37 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN asked whether the CSS planning process is
in use elsewhere.
MR. McQUEARY said it is. The Federal Highway Administration's
(FHWA) second strategic goal is to have CSS implemented in all
50 states by the end of the year. The program began in 1998 at a
national symposium. Currently, 25 states have statutory or
executive order implementation. Some form of CSS is implemented
at the policy level or program level in almost every state.
Anchorage's AMATS has nominally adopted CSS but has not done
much in terms of implementation. Alaska DOT&PF uses some of the
CSS techniques on freeway connection design. He said the
implementation is broad outside but slow in Alaska. At AASHTO's
convention last fall, it set up state training programs for
state engineers to accelerate the process of adoption.
2:03:16 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN asked if a sufficient track record exists
to determine the effect of the CSS program on planning and
project costs.
MR. McQUEARY said he believes sufficient information is
available to determine that context sensitive systems cost no
more and probably save money. He told members U.S. Highway 93,
which runs through the northern states, had been embroiled in
controversy for 23 years. A CSS team brought the various
interest groups to the table and got it built. He noted he has
heard similar stories anecdotally. The states that have seen
the most success have said it costs no more, minimizes
controversy, and provides a higher degree of satisfaction when
projects are completed. He also felt it restores government
credibility with the public.
2:07:08 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN said he would like to see statistics
because it seems counter intuitive that involving more people in
a planning process will take less time and cost less. He noted
this system might work better on bigger, more controversial
projects.
2:07:58 PM
REPRESENTATIVE BUCH said he would work with Mr. McQueary to get
some hard statistics for the legislature to consider next year.
2:08:53 PM
MR. McQUEARY offered to provide data to the committee.
2:09:19 PM
JENNIFER WITT, Regional Planning Manager, Central Region,
Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities,
introduced herself and Tom Dougherty, Construction Group Chief,
and said Mr. Dougherty has worked closely with communities and
stakeholders on design-build projects including the Parks-Glenn
Interchange and the Glenn-Bragaw Interchange.
2:11:01 PM
MS. WITT told members she would like to frame the CSS discussion
in terms of recent efforts in Anchorage and the challenges that
process has created. She continued:
What is CSS? ... It is a collaborative - I'd like to
read it for the record - a collaborative
interdisciplinary approach that involves all
stakeholders to develop a transportation facility that
fits its physical setting and preserves scenic,
aesthetic, historic and environmental resources while
maintaining safety and mobility - and I want to
emphasize maintaining and not at the expense of safety
and mobility. CSS is an approach that considers the
total context within which a transportation
improvement project will exist. ... From my
perspective within the department, is that it is not
synonymous with traffic calming nor is it synonymous
with design by popular votes and we have some examples
here where it shows that indeed often it is not the
cheapest option but that doesn't mean it doesn't get
implemented.
The next handout I'd like to bring your attention to
is the description of the Anchorage Bowl 2025 Long
Range Transportation Plan that was featured by the
Federal Highway Administration as a case study and a
successful application of context sensitive solutions
on the transportation planning front. It focuses
primarily on the process and the involvement of
specific stakeholders in getting community, basically,
consensus on developing a highway to highway
connection. This is documenting too, for the record,
as the project moves into development, the
expectations and the needs and the values of the
communities that it impacts. Those who have been here
for a long time may be able to remember when the Glenn
Highway was widened to four lanes and brought right
through Mountainview into the heart of downtown, as
well as I and L Street, as well as Ingra Gambell.
Those are two major connections through town and
actually were built directly through neighborhoods.
This last long range transportation plan recognized
that as well as looking at all of the data, the safety
data, it's no surprise that our most congested
locations are also the locations of the highest number
of accidents and severity of accidents, as well as the
locations where the neighborhoods are really pursuing
traffic calming, such as in Fairview and in
Mountainview so that's no accident. So all of these
things are really focused on the need to get to a way
to preserve the neighborhoods, reconnect them, as well
as provide for the transportation and the movement
needs within the community and get them out of the
neighborhoods.
And so this is just a summary of that and actually we
are moving forward with this expectation for
development for a cut and cover, basically, [indisc.]
to connect Fairview over the top. Tom will address a
little bit of the process that he's gone through with
the very first phase of this highway-to-highway
connection being the Glenn-Bragaw Interchange.
You had asked about - Representative Doogan - the
challenges that we have and it seems counterintuitive
that people would get very involved at the planning
stage and that is absolutely correct. Anybody here
that has worked in transportation planning knows how
hard it is to generate that level of interest and this
chart, the first one in the stapled handout, shows the
amount. The amount - the bisecting lines of
increasing public interest as you get out of the
planning, through the programming, and actually into
construction, some people really don't take notice or
want to participate until they see the bulldozers out
there during construction and yet their ability to
influence those decisions commensurately decrease over
time as we get closer so that is the challenge: how to
motivate the public to get involved early on in
project development.
Another challenge that we are faced with in this
profession is the fact that projects take a long time
to reach construction and this problem is exacerbated
in Alaska when we have a 20 year, 25 year history of
relying pretty much exclusively on the federal highway
process for project delivery. We're starting to see a
little bit of a difference now, and Tom can talk about
it too, the dynamics you have in involving and keeping
the interests of stakeholders from project inception
to project delivering and that is something we can
talk about with this design-build project on the
interchange.
This chart demonstrates the linear format of a federal
highway project. Once oil had taken a dip in the
'80s, we turned exclusively to the federal highway
program and we are the only state that does that. It
does have a very linear process in that I can tell you
right now that if we had used federal highway funds on
the Glenn-Bragaw Interchange, we would still be doing
environmental impact statements, same with the Abbott
Loop road extension. So, using other funding sources
allows a lot more compressed timeframe, but this is
one of the challenges we have. How do you generate
and maintain that interest over time when you have a
turnover in neighborhoods and populations and things
like that?
The other challenge we have, and I'd just like to
bring your attention to the bar chart on this page
here ...
2:17:15 PM
MS. WITT continued:
... is the lack of a good and well defined road
hierarchy. A lot of the examples that Mr. McQueary
had referred to were [indisc.] within neighborhoods
and on collector streets. The challenge we have is
that our major arterials and our local roads over time
have been forced to serve both functions. Ideally,
Tudor Road and Muldoon Road would have been developed
with very, very limited access and, consequently, not
be having to serve the through movements around town
as well as providing direct access to the commercial
businesses as well as the several homes that are
located immediately adjacent to the road.
With that comes problems and we've been able to get
away with that for a very long time but as we've grown
as a community, the Mat-Su Borough is experiencing
this as well, where you start experiencing a high
level of accidents and as the congestion increases,
the conflicts increase. So that is one of the
challenges here and we may refer back to this card.
Another challenge, and this is one that has become
very relevant to roads here, within Anchorage is
improving existing roads that do indeed function as
collectors. Unfortunately, these roads are oftentimes
originally developed in an older neighborhood where
homes immediately access the road. I used some
examples from Eagle River. That's where I got the
pictures of this, a couple of them. Baranof Street
was developed as a dirt road to provide access to a
school and the municipality came in and paved it and
provided the sidewalk and lighting for the school.
Meadow Creek Drive is one that was developed initially
as a dead end road but it was extended farther. It
connects to another arterial and it needed to be
retrofitted because it was not only a school bus
route, but also a people mover route and so this is
one where the municipality came in and shoehorned in,
basically, a sidewalk that is heavily used now.
Business Boulevard in Eagle River was one that was
developed in a commercial district and, at the time of
development, the landowners were not required to put
in sidewalks so it was a very, very expensive retrofit
that accommodates an attached sidewalk on one side and
a separated trail on the other.
So the challenge in the biggest application of some of
the context sensitive solutions that are gaining
ground right now are on these types of facilities.
The collector road is where there is a lot of
attention and, again, in Anchorage we're doing much
better on developing our collector street system. The
problems that we have in the Mat-Su Borough are that
we lack collector streets and that our arterials are
starting to be congested with high levels of
accidents. I have missed one of the pages here. The
black and white one is talking a little bit about what
are some of the techniques that have been bantered
about. What are some of the things that work?
2:20:29 PM
There has been a lot of work done in the Fairview
neighborhood. These are actually traffic calming
techniques that are appropriate for neighborhoods but
are not appropriate for the facilities. We do need to
have roads and protect facilities whose main purpose
is to get people from Point A to Point B without
providing access to the lands immediately adjacent.
Fairview has it all. They have the diverters where
basically it used to be a wide road. They have
problems with pedestrian traffic, speeding, crime and
so now to get through Fairview is a little bit of a
trick. Diverters are where you totally cut off access
but provide pedestrian movement through there. The
curved bold-outs certainly help decrease the distance
for the pedestrians crossing the road and it also
gives some visual - the horizontal visual and vertical
effect that Mr. McQueary had referred to. Entryway
signs into a neighborhood [are] done there.
The next one was actually taken in the Turnagain area
where the city has done raised intersections and speed
bumps as a way of traffic calming, getting people to
slow down within the neighborhoods. Another thing is
the chicane, or basically a curve, developed into a
road specifically to help slow traffic and notify the
drivers that they are in a different place. That
again is in Fairview.
With that, I'd like to turn it over the Tom Dougherty
to talk about the projects we've done and who have
been some of the stakeholders that we've had to work
with that were critical to project implementation and
success.
2:22:12 PM
TOM DOUGHERTY, Engineer/Architecture, Construction/Operations,
Central Region, Department of Transportation & Public
Facilities, told members he spends most of his time dealing with
the complaint side of projects, but has also been involved in
three high profile projects that followed CSS guidelines. He
agreed with Mr. McQueary that each project has to be looked at
on a case-by-case basis because CCS guidelines can save time,
which can also lower costs. He noted the stakeholders in a
major highway design are very different than stakeholders in an
urban road design. He said, regarding the Glenn-Parks
Interchange, the freeway was built through the wetland area in
the mid 1960s. He remarked:
A lot of the resource agencies were waiting to get
another bite at us when we came back through again and
it's a bit of a challenge. For about a year and a
half we met every two weeks with all of the
stakeholders. There's Fish and Game, there's the DNR,
there's Fish and Wildlife, and there was the Native
group in Eklutna. There were a whole bunch of
different stakeholders that wanted to see this done
differently the next time. Basically we got them all
together and we had them on board from the beginning.
This job went fairly well, even to the end where the
contractor - it was a design build type situation and
the contractor came up with an innovative solution
himself, which saved us about another 7 acres of
wetland involvement on that project so I think that
one, taking everything into account and starting from
beginning to end, my understanding of, had nothing but
good reviews on how that project turned out.
Another one of the big stakeholders on that job was
the traveling public and we did a lot to try to
accommodate the traveling public during the
construction, as well as when it was all done, there
was - I would say 99 percent of the people I've talked
to are happy with it. There's one group out there
that aren't quite happy. That's the people that
travel from Wasilla to Palmer. There's a stop sign
.... We incorporated things like the local artistry.
I get nothing but rave reviews about that and again,
that was something we planned into it from the
beginning at a very low cost to the project ....
2:25:20 PM
MR. DOUGHERTY turned to the next slide of the Glenn-Bragaw
Interchange. He told members he first met Mr. McQueary at a
community meeting about the interchange. The affected
stakeholders in that project were identified early. Pedestrian
access throughout that area was very important. The public was
presented with different ideas about connecting the two
neighborhoods. The process went well and a good solution
resulted. DOT&PF also worked with the owner of the Red Apple
Market to help keep his business going during the construction.
He said the impact to the traveling public should be minimal.
2:28:29 PM
MR. DOUGHERTY told members that DOT&PF received awards from FHWA
for the way CSS was incorporated into its process. He said he
agrees with Mr. Neidhold that DOT&PF is embracing CSS on many of
its projects and that it is the way to go to prevent last minute
surprises.
2:29:07 PM
AN UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER asked if using the CSS techniques works
for DOT&PF.
2:29:20 PM
MR. DOUGHERTY said he believes CSS is a successful way to
develop a project.
2:29:49 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN noted two elements to the cost. The first
is how the CSS process affects the project planning cost and
second, how it affects the actual project cost. He asked if the
CSS planning method has resulted in design changes that
increased the project cost.
MR. DOUGHERTY said it has not resulted in design changes in his
experience because the design decisions are made after taking
input from the stakeholders. It prevents finishing 90 percent
of a project's design and having to start over.
2:30:56 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN asked if DOT&PF had to redesign a lot of
projects before it began using the CSS process.
MR. DOUGHERTY said there have not been a lot but it only takes
one such project.
MS. WITT referred to the chart that shows projects taking a long
time and said the successes Mr. Dougherty cited are under the
red bars. The department did not follow the linear process of a
federal aid project on those projects but, within two to three
years of working with the same group, it progressed from
inception to construction, which is very rare. She continued:
The problems we have when we get to 90, 95 percent
design is when we have a protracted and very long
development process because of the type of
environmental document required or because of the lack
of funding and the inability to move forward with a
federal aid project very smoothly. ... As an example,
the C Street extension that has just been completed is
one that when I came on with DOT almost 20 years ago
was being planned and been planned for many years but
had been proposed and designed with hits and starts.
So it's taken 20 years, my entire career, to see the
project built. That is the type of project that is
very difficult to do and keeping the momentum up with
effective stakeholder involvement when it takes so
long and when you have a changeover in who lives out
there, what the development patterns have been, what
the impacts will consequently be. It's also one - now
that it's complete it's functioning actually very well
as intended. It's more of an expressway type
facility, meaning few driveways, limited breaks every
quarter of a mile. That is a big thing in the success
with the CSS examples that Tom has cited has been with
a non-federal aid project.
2:33:16 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN noted that Mr. Dougherty's list of
stakeholders included state and federal agencies. He asked if
this process is necessary to keep bureaucrats from impeding
forward progress on projects.
MR. DOUGHERTY said in his experience, it has been very important
to bring the resource agencies into the process early.
MS. WITT added that it also depends on the type of project. The
primary stakeholders in the Parks Glenn Interchange were the
resource agencies; it was important to have them involved from
the beginning. That project was funded with a congressional
earmark so it could move forward very quickly.
2:34:27 PM
JIM LAMSON, Design, Engineering & Construction, Project
Management & Engineering Department, Anchorage Metropolitan Area
Transportation Solutions (AMATS), Municipality of Anchorage
(MOA), told members CSS means different things to different
people. The MOA has been trying to identify and include
stakeholders early in the planning process for two or three
years. The planning process takes longer, but if all of the
issues can be evaluated from the beginning, the designers can
move more quickly so less money is spent on that part of the
process. He noted the solution to a CSS project determines
whether it will cost more or less. He said that he has worked
on 8 or more collector street upgrades; most have worked well
but some have been challenging. He said bringing more people to
the table early and taking a broad disciplinary approach to
determining the needs is helpful and provides a better project.
2:36:42 PM
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN asked if the CSS method was used to design
the changes to Arctic Boulevard and the changes contemplated to
Fireweed Lane. He commented that every business owner in his
district is "up-in-arms" about that project.
2:37:39 PM
MR. DOUGHERTY thought the MOA was developing those projects.
2:37:55 PM
MR. LAMSON said the majority of the Fireweed project is a state
facility. Several years the state worked on a design that was
tabled. It was then reintroduced and taken over by the MOA.
The MOA took a CSS approach and involved many members of the
public. He believes the problem with that project has been
finding consensus on a design. He said the goals and values of
the stakeholders are very different. Arctic Boulevard is a
municipal project; the state is involved because it manages
construction on all federally funded projects. He was not sure
how community involvement worked in the design of that project.
Regarding the Spenard Road project, he said that a challenge
with this process is that one group may leave happy but another
group will enter the process and raise concerns. He said it is
likely that a project design could be completed more quickly
without public input but at the final stage, the project will
"hit the fan."
REPRESENTATIVE DOOGAN said he is trying to determine whether
project problems are lessened by using this approach or caused
by using it, or whether the changes are driven by the traffic
planners rather than the users. He remarked that the solution
lies with how the project is defined so he is skeptical to use
CSS as a template for every transportation project. He thought
simply using CSS could cause problems with certain projects. He
asserted:
But if the problem is that involving the stakeholders
in the design has stopped the design, then if there is
some practical reason for changing the design, that's
a problem.
If it's simply a difference of opinion between the
people who make primary use of the roads and the
traffic planners, that's a different kind of a
problem. So I'm not sure how or if this particular
system of planning projects was used here, should have
been used here, or would have improved things had it
been used here. The reason I'm asking these questions
is I'm trying to use something I'm familiar with as a
model here to figure out - I mean this all sounds good
in the abstract, but what happens when you actually
use it on a project in which there are widely varying
differences of opinion about what should happen here
based on what your use of that particular stretch of
road is.
2:42:32 PM
CHAIR JOHANSEN told members the committee would get more
information from Mr. McQueary before the next hearing, which
will be in Juneau and discuss the issue further. There being no
one else wishing to testify, he invited Representative Buch to
close the meeting.
2:43:22 PM
REPRESENTATIVE BUCH said Randy Scott of Chair Johansen's office
would act as the liaison for information sharing. He stated one
of the reasons he has been interested in this topic is because
the Strawberry Road project has been [in the design phase] for
15 years and construction may begin within the next year. His
thought about CSS was not to use it as a boiler plate, but as a
tool in the toolbox to be used when applicable. He does not
believe any one format will work in every situation. However,
changes need to occur and he organized the meeting to create an
interchange of ideas.
ADJOURNMENT
There being no further business before the committee, the House
Transportation Standing Committee meeting was adjourned at
2:46:24 PM.
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