Traffic-calming: A Whirligig at Work In New York NeighborhoodsBy Jane Holtz Kay A cross between a traffic cop and a whirligig, Michael J. Wallwork stood dead center on the treacherous space where three roads converged in Queens. Swinging his arms to mimic the route of the onrushing automobiles, the self-described "radical engineer" conducted an exercise in the new art of traffic calming in a manner that was anything but calm.
That perch and Mr. Wallwork's passion, is traffic calming. An oxymoron to those who first hear the phrase, traffic calming is a design approach that transforms unruly city streets from raceways to peaceful community roads, taming a thoroughfare to make a pedestrian crossing. Despite New York and Mayor Giuliani's Great Barrier Wars against pedestrians in Midtown Manhattan, the fine art of traffic calming is not about curbing walkers to allow full speed ahead for automobiles. Quite the contrary: It is about saving lives by giving safe routes to walkers. By whatever name, traffic calmers--pedestrian advocates, traffic engineers, planners, bicyclists, landscape architects --have begun to use this form of design to de-brutalize the road. By de-paving and seeding; by narrowing and treeplanting; by shrinking or re-ordering roads and widening sidewalks, the speed of the moving vehicle is diminished, dominance returned to the walker. And Michael Wallwork has become a Johnny Appleseed of the form. The calming kit of design "parts," some 25 of them by his count, include this personal trademark: the roundabout that brought their designer to New York to persuade and train city engineers to install this new art form. City engineers deemed This latest design device on the block, a kind of vest pocket rotary, suitable for three trial neighborhoods. After an educating session on the mini-traffic circle the New York City Department of Transportation installed lower speed limits and can begin this taming process. As a living roundabout displaying its uses just below PS117 on the balmy morning of his visit, Mr. Wallwork's life-threatening stance paralleled the way these devices could end the threat to school children crossing to the brick school building at the Briarwood site. Whether out of curiosity or wariness, the cars from the three diagonal roads funnelling around the consultant did indeed slow down at the sight of the gyrating engineer this day. On most days, though, the streets are scarcely serene and the issue of subduing cars, especially in school districts in New York and throughout the nation, has grown precipitously. "The schools have come on board," Michael King, head of the city's pedestrian division and involved in promoting traffic calming, agreed. The city's pedestrian deaths comprise 230 a year. Almost one of the nation's 120 victims to automobiles every day is a New Yorker. And, for all the city's so-called "pedestrian bill of rights" of 1996 and the latest City Hall injunctions, neither the manifesto nor the flurry of barricade droppings and taxicab commandments have curbed "vehicular violence," as Charles Komanoff pedestrian and bicycle advocate and former head of Transportation Alternatives put it. Going beyond today's "blinkered approach to pedestrian endangerment" to make the tragedy vivid, Komanoff and a dozen other activists have, in fact, taken to the streets, stencilling in the image of 130 slain pedestrians streetside at the scene of their death by the end of the year. Spurring complaints from neighborhood groups to community boards, citizen concerns with car-based policies that marginalize pedestrians and bicycles have accelerated. The issue has also engaged city councilors, and as the roar of traffic and increasing congestion provide an impetus for traffic calming, Mr. Wallwork's tutoring reflects that ground swell. Ebullient and persuasive, the Australian-born traffic-calmer with the precise down under accent is one of the field's more articulate proselytizers. He is a de-paver and designer who lists his calling as "r.e." -- "radical engineer" -- a phrase shunning the asphalt-minded mentality of the older "p.e.," "professional engineer," on his degree. From his home base in Jacksonville, Florida, this shirtsleeved advocate of the roundabout lives on the road and works out of his pocket cell phone installing calming devices around others parts of the country as well. His home state alone holds some dozen of his mini-traffic circles and his travels and messianic speaking expand from Eugene, Oregon, to West Hollywood, to Montana. Delivering eight-hour lectures and unscrolling detailed maps of prototypes and specific solutions across the country, the 5l-year old crusader has demonstrated their logic from Seattle to Boca Raton. With 6000 miles of streets in the city of New York, three trial roundabouts may seem slight. But they reflect a recognition that the standard approaches to the problem have failed. The traditional stop signs just cause cars to slow briefly before speeding up, Mr. Wallwork explained Speed humps, a quick and dirty solution, haven't cut it with neighbors or planners who dismissed the insertion of a rising bump in the middle of some busy street as a cure-all. "It's quite fine," the transportation planner King observed, "unless, of course, you answer the calls from irate citizens." A year after such humps are installation, neighbors balk and remove them, Mr. Wallwork observed. The roundabout, on the other hand, performs a three-pronged service to the neighborhood. It permits pedestrians to cross, keeps traffic moving (albeit at a slower pace) and beautifies the street. With a roundabout, cars don't just slow or stop at a sign or light and then shoot off like a Batmobile, said their designer. The warning of visual clues makes drivers anticipate danger and slow down early on. Our next stop, an intersection at Cambria Heights across Queens, was the quintessential example of that danger. The intersection in a residential neighborhood proved too fearsome for even the "radical engineer's" demonstration skills. A quick look at cars careening by and our intrepid guide declined to take to the fearsome crossing 223 and 118th streets there. Cambria Heights is a lookalike for many neighborhoods. Its basic grid defines the New York pattern with the long -- very long -- road stretching 20 blocks. Lacking traffic lights or even stop signs to slow the motorist, Cambia Heights' thoroughfare streams into a distance as tempting to speeders as Jack Kerouac's open road. To either side of the raceway, the orderly houses sit, their peaked roofs and manicured lawns standing in peaceful contrast to the 50-mile an hour cars plunging by their front doors. "It's just really bad. You stand there and you see," longtime resident, Tom Hargrove described the street that plagues has his house. "I heard three cars totalled right by that tree. Three. It used to be so quiet and peaceful." In Cambria Heights, as in everywhere U.S.A., more driving and more clogged streets have sent cars careening off busy shop-filled arterial roads to such quiet enclaves of residential homes. Attempting to avoid busy stop lights and traffic, drivers seek out, and despoil the next neighborhood over. Enter the roundabout. "You put a roundabout there and you don't have the big crashes," the consulting engineer went on as we stood at the intersection chatting. "People drive around. It doesn't stop traffic, so you have flow. It stops accidents and lets people cross." In fact, the "go slow" roundabout device has achieved a notable record, reducing crashes with cars as well as pedestrian accidents, progressive traffic engineers agree. "We had never even thought of them four or five years ago," said Walter Kulash, another well-regarded, Florida-based traffic engineer. "The roundabout is like all these traffic-calming things: it has burst in this country." "There's a lack of understanding about how people drive," Mr. Wallwork went on to describe the theory behind the form. In his traffic engineer's canon, drivers are best characterized as semi-comatose behind the wheel -- "half asleep, talking to the kids." The object is to shake them awake. Place a visible obstacle in plain view and you alert their recumbent senses. In this case the object is the forty-foot diameter circle. "People drive fast, real fast here," Mr. Wallwork described the New York City driver's pace. By appearing in the distant range of vision, the mini-roundabout is a signal. "You never force people to do anything they don't want to do," Wallwork insisted. "The best you can do is give them an environment. The idea is you've always got to keep your eyes in the back of your head seeing what's happening." Beyond enabling people and cars to coexist, that environment and Mr. Wallwork have an aesthetic imperative in their traffic-calming and a concern with the amenities of street life. The so-calmed neighborhoods become more pleasing to look at and hence inhabit. And it is that beautification impulse that roused the detail-minded technician to his most enthusiastic statements. "Instead of all the asphalt, it's going to be more attractive," Mr. Wallwork exclaimed. At this artistic height, roundabouts form "Welcome" circles. By adding attractive signage and landscaping, Wallmark's designs have served as entrance markers at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere. "A gateway," he described it. You add "a waterfall and you're now controlling your speed and pedestrian crossings. In between, you put in sidewalks and trees." The advocate's voice became more animated, telling how the barren road become a showcase. "One of a kind," Kulash described his colleague's "energetic approach plus his willingness to get into the nitty gritty, to poke around manholes." To be sure, the traffic-calmer's signature solution is still a minority one in auto-dependent America. "There's only a small number of engineers that think that slower is better," Mr. Wallwork conceded. Yet, some signs are hopeful. In addition to assignments here and at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, local communities have begun to hone in on the New York transportation department to move away from an auto-first orientation to making the city mobile. If anyone can boost them in their task, this "radical engineer" can. "I'm having a lot of fun talking to the engineers," Mr. Wallwork described the process. With his sheaf of papers and his down-under accent and skills, Wallwork relishes being embroiled with America's archaic traffic industry standards and the nation's half-century old car-dependent dogma of wide streets in the name of traffic flow. Though the jury on creating pleasant surroundings for congregating and socializing is out, Wallwork's confidence in the process stems from parallel work undertaken in Melbourne, Australia. That city like many in Australia stopped the building of urban freeways 20 years ago and has been innovating ever since. It was there he learned what he called "pro-active engineering. My job was to solve problems before people got killed. We're not as rich as Americans," Mr. Wallwork went on, "so we have to be more careful how we spend our money." Leaving our last Queens site for a cup of coffee at the nearby main street, he surveyed the small markets, the angle parking, the signage of the typical arterial nearby. The outlook was grimy and cluttered but the small clutch of stores created a brisk shopping street. For him, it was clearly one worth enhancing. "When I look at this I say: 'Where are the trees? Where are the bricks? Here's your little shops. Your neighborhood. What's missing is the pedestrian-oriented feeling that gets you out of your car." With that feeling, a thoroughfare becomes a place for people. The traffic rolled through unheeding the visitor's mission as he scanned the district. Mr. Wallwork continued undaunted. "Washington, D.C., fixes one street a year." It is his role model. "Every city could do so. If they just rebuilt one street a year and made that pretty that would change the quality of life," the radical engineer insisted. And the notion is becoming less radical each day. A condensed version of the above appeared in Planning magazine, 1999
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His aim: to demonstrate how the swirling traffic would, in fact, slow down and move in a safe and orderly fashion once this space was tranquillized, altered and re-built with the construction device of a roundabout to reproduce his stance.