Hearing One Engineer's Call to "Sit in the Ambiguity" of Transportation Planning

There has been a significant debate occurring in transportation planning and advocacy circles over the past couple of months, as hundreds of cities pursue some version of “open streets” or “slow streets” policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to create more room for biking, walking, and rolling (for recreation and essential travel) than is available on often-inadequate sidewalks and park paths.

These efforts (which we at Strong Towns have generally celebrated) have not been received with equal enthusiasm everywhere. The pushback generally follows a consistent theme: open-streets policies are being hastily implemented in neighborhoods, particularly those dominated by people of color and/or lower-income residents (who are disproportionately “essential workers”) that did not ask for them, were not consulted on the implementation, and may have vastly different priorities. If the implementation involves a heavier police presence, impedes public transit, or simply takes scarce public-sector resources and attention away from competing priorities, it may be far from an unalloyed good for everyone affected.

Ariel Ward, a transportation planner and engineer in San Francisco, wrote a piece on Medium in mid-May titled “A Tale of Two Truths: Transportation and Nuance in the Time of COVID-19.” It should be essential reading for anyone grappling with these issues. If anything, it is more resonant now in light of the waves of protest that have swept the nation over the past week. Ward writes:

You can want open streets and want to hold cities accountable to ensuring new policies do not further harm communities of color. You can want open streets and want to prioritize the acute needs of Black and Brown communities that have been forced to show up for themselves in the midst of a crisis that has impacted them severely. Realizing these ideals in tandem may demand greater imagination and the decentralization of personal desires, but they do not necessitate competition. And yet, I’ve repeatedly observed them held in contempt of one another, particularly in the name of closing streets to vehicle traffic.

….

This reflection is not a critique of open or slow streets programs. This reflection is a call for more critical nuanced thinking within our profession — especially in the time of the COVID-19 crisis.

Ward is calling for an overdue acknowledgment of the contradictory needs and priorities that come to light in trying to plan transportation that actually serves communities. Some of these priorities are invisible to planners who make the common, all too human, error of relying too much on their own personal experiences to inform policy preferences, and not enough on a deep process of listening and considering the needs of everyone else who will be affected by a policy. She asks all those implementing transportation policy

to take pause, and evaluate, before enacting solutions that could perpetuate and inflict harm. In any case, I am inviting you to sit in the ambiguity with me.

I’d like to believe that if we all better embraced the practice of “sitting in the ambiguity,” one result would be a move away from the destructive legacy of transportation engineering based almost entirely on rulebooks and “standards” that are one-size-fits-all and disregard local nuance. At Strong Towns, we’ve written about this legacy before, in the essay, “Engineers Should Not Design Streets” (written, just like Ward’s piece, by a transportation engineer).

The reality is that our public spaces are incredibly complex social environments and that, just as surely as we do real people a disservice when we design to optimize traffic flow or speed or “Level of Service” for cars, we also do real people a disservice when we assume that our pedestrian-oriented designs can be applied by taking a template that works in one place and copy-pasting it to another.

Here’s Ward again:

Those who stand to be the most impacted by a policy or program should hold the most power in the decision-making space, but they rarely do. Thus, inquiries into how new transportation policies might compound inequity and erasure are always critical questions. They invite necessary nuance into an already delicate conversation. They are questions that someone must call attention to. For inattention is what allows inequity to flourish.

The most striking assertion is the falsity that, because we do not passively accept transportation policies and projects as they are presented to us, we don’t want Black and Brown communities to have access to active transportation infrastructure. How dare we ask for an evaluation on the impacts of decisions that were made for us, without us at the table — right?

I don’t believe that Ward’s advice is at odds with acting quickly or with a sense of moral urgency. Rather, I take it as a challenge to embrace hyper-local nuance even as we act quickly to make real changes to our streets—where, we can’t forget, the status quo actively kills people every day. This means moving away from top-down planning processes in favor of letting our efforts start small, with real people’s on-the-ground struggles and needs, and then scale from there based on a constant stream of actual feedback.

This is an approach altogether messier and more nuanced and, I hope Ward would agree, ambiguous. But ultimately necessary if we are design places that work for all people.

Editor’s Note: Ariel Ward recently launched At the Intersections, a Medium publication “centered on the narratives, experiences, and expertise of Black, Brown and Indigenous people in transportation and mobility.” We’ll be following At the Intersections with great interest. We hope you will too.

Cover image via Flickr.

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Free Webcast

Open for Whom?
Streets as a Platform for Recovery
Tuesday, June 16
12 p.m. CDT

Crisis precipitates change. The novel Coronavirus has transformed our lived experience in the blink of an eye, generating mass uncertainty and economic upheaval while laying bare the inequities of America’s culture of white supremacy. As we witness the struggle to maintain a sense of self, purpose, and hope, it is paramount to understand that the collective utility of the street has never before played such a crucial role in determining our American destiny.

In this free webinar, Tamika Butler, Esq and Jason DeGray P.E., PTOE of Toole Design will discuss equitable, ethical, and empathetic approaches to “open streets” recovery initiatives.

This presentation will:

• Table pre-pandemic agendas

• Reflect on the nuance of how people rely on streets

• Address the need to dismantle racial, economic, and environmental inequities for streets to be truly open

• Identify the need for those who are most impacted by changes to the street to have the most power to shape those changes

• Provide practical considerations for deploying open streets

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