In Conversation With an Expert: Ellen Zavisca of Knoxville-Knox County Planning
Ellen Zavisca, transportation planner and Crash Analysis Studio panelist.
Ellen Zavisca’s nearly two-decade career as a transportation planner is defined by her commitment to centering the experience of pedestrians and cyclists. As a planner for Knoxville-Knox County Planning and the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization, Zavisca has pioneered Safe Routes to School, fortified systems for collecting and analyzing crash data, and rejuvenated the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Greenway Council.
A self-professed data nerd, Zavisca has spent the last decade compiling and maintaining a database of crashes to better serve Knoxville’s mission to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries. In doing so, however, she asked herself, “We’ve got the data. Now what?”
Knowing numbers are only one piece of the puzzle, she has made it a routine in her work to humanize data and to tell stories. With this background in mind, Strong Towns invited Zavisca to serve as a panelist in the latest Crash Analysis Studio, which examined a fatal crash in Bradenton, Florida.
Strong Towns was able to catch up with Zavisca and ask her what stood out in the crash she analyzed, what challenges exist in ameliorating our built environment today, and what excites her about her work. (The following conversation was edited for clarity.)
As an expert in planning and multi-modal street design, you were invited to provide your insights at our latest Crash Analysis Studio which centered on a fatal crash in Florida. Did anything stand out to you in that crash?
When I read through the crash report and examined the location, what was striking about it was its very ordinariness. You’ve got this four-to-five lane arterial going through a neighborhood and it’s a type of roadway that is probably in every single community. Here was a person trying to get from point A to point B, who has likely done it a hundred times, but this time they didn’t make it.
When we have these unsafe intersections, often our solution is to discourage people from crossing it, which is, in itself, ridiculous. Not only is it unlikely someone will go two or three blocks out of their way to access a safe crossing, but we shouldn’t design for that.
We’ve had a lot of conversations, especially orbiting Safe Routes to School, where people say, “well, yes of course you should walk to the ‘safer’ signalized intersection.” Imagine, however, it’s raining and you just want to go home. You’re currently at an existing intersection but it’s not the “safe” one. You’re likely not going to walk 10 or more minutes out of your way just to cross the street. We don’t expect drivers to routinely go 10 or 15 minutes out of their way, yet we expect this from pedestrians, who are also more vulnerable on our streets, as it is.
Part of this work is accepting human nature and what people are likely to do and likely not to do.
How does your work relate to the Crash Analysis Studio?
I started my career in traditional multi-modal—meaning bike and pedestrian—planning but somewhere in the last decade or so, I began looking into crash data more seriously. I started with analyzing and mapping pedestrian crashes and, more recently, examining all types of roadway crashes.
Putting together the data was fascinating but when I would present it, in return I got a collective shrug. That’s when I realized that not everybody responds to data. You have to tell stories, shape it into ways that are engaging to people. Having it and putting it to use are two totally different things.
To give an example of where story-telling has become a central part of my work: we have a group that comes together every six months to review roadway fatalities. We bring together law enforcement and people from every profession and corner in order to have a dialogue.
When I prepare for that, I look for news articles, obituaries, images of everyone we lost to traffic violence in the last six months. We end up starting every meeting with these slides in order to underscore that these aren’t just numbers but these are parents, kids, grandparents, and community members that we lost on our streets.
Part of why I did this is because it’s too easy to talk about individual crashes and focus the conversation on individual behavior: “Oh, they should’ve done this or crossed there.” It’s not that those things aren’t somewhat true, too, but we need to step back and see this as a flawed transportation system that we’ve all contributed to.
It’s a system that allows for human flaws, errors, and distractions to lead to horrific injury and death. And it doesn’t have to.
In general, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges in our built environment today?
Dealing with the trade-offs. As the city of Knoxville has been doing its outreach, we’ve learned that people are generally excited about pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, but the minute they realize that it may slow down their ride by 30 seconds, hesitation creeps in. There’s a change in mindset that we still need to adopt. People especially fear losing things more than they embrace gaining things.
To the extent that we can get people out of their cars and experience these places, they’ll see the world differently. You see a corridor so differently when you’re walking along it or trying to cross it versus cruising down that same strip in your air-conditioned, climate-controlled personal vehicle.
I think putting people in the physical space by offering, “let’s take a walk there,” or, “let’s try to cross there,” is so much more informative. It involves some more coordination than hopping on a Zoom call, but having that conversation in the physical space is really important to understanding what we’re working with and what people have been dealing with.
Often, you’ll hear people say, “well, nobody walks there,” or, “nobody rides their bike there,” but the reality is that they do. You don’t see it until you look for it and then it can’t be unseen.
There’s also data that points to it. We know people are walking along these corridors because we know where people catch the bus, we know which bus routes get used and where people get on and off. We know people walk there, cross the street there, and so on.
Is there a project you’ve worked on recently that gave you hope for the future of our cities?
There are the larger multi-modal initiatives pursued by Knoxville which are making a positive difference, reducing close calls, crashes, and overall making a safer environment for pedestrians. It’s definitely great to see, especially since these changes have been underway for a long time and millions and millions of dollars have been spent on these initiatives.
Yet, the things I get excited about the most are the smaller interventions—like a pedestrian refuge or a curb extension with flex posts—implemented as part of the Safe Routes to Schools initiative.
It’s those little changes that you rarely have a ribbon-cutting for, a ceremony for, or a federal grant to fund, but it’s those little changes that make the difference when you’re thinking about crossing the street safely. We should be doing a lot more of that.
These investments cost a bit of effort, some conversations, and some maintenance, but they can be done tomorrow. We have a tendency to look toward the bigger projects and the federal dollars, and sometimes those are necessary, but we should simultaneously make smaller moves while we wait for those bigger opportunities.
It’s so frustrating when a parent asks, “why can’t my kid cross the street safely?” and all you can tell them is that in a couple of years they will. In a couple of years that kid won’t be at that school anymore, anyway!
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.