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Tree ordinances differ by city

This hearkens back to my values in running for office.  One of my simplest and least controversial positions was that every child deserved to be safe walking or biking in Rochester.  This fails that test.

The compromise consists of putting in speed tables and making the road wider so that a 10′ pedestrian / cycling path can be added on one side.  If I was dictator for a day I would have had a separated path and no speed tables.  I would have been willing to compromise with speed tables and a separated path.

The compromise that was motioned by Bruce Snyder and passed 5-2 (thanks Mark, once again you saved me from being lonely) ignores the safety of pedestrians including our children.  The plan that the city council adopted would protect a child on a tricycle from a speeding truck with a 4 inch white stripe.  This is further complicated by the narrow winding nature of the roadway.  This is not a safe option.  Our public works director specifically stated that this options was the least safe of the options being considered.  The difference in cost for the safer separated path is very small when bonded over the life of the project.  This did not deter the city council.

I oppose speed tables because the do not work.  I know because I live near them on Fox Valley Dr.  They slow cars for the tables and then some use the space between them to “catch up.”  They are also expensive, loud, hard on plows, and bad for emergency response.  Also if the speed tables are only on the driving surface, some drivers will drive on the path.  If they are on the path the are a nuisance to cyclists and wheelchairs.

In this particular case I think that city made a poor decision, pandering to a poorly designed neighborhood while disregarding public safety.  We should have insisted on a separate path for the safety of our children.

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Regards,

Michael Wojcik
Rochester City Council - Ward 2

Are Downtown Two-Way Streets Better?

The proposed street light fee in its current form is regressive in nature, hitting both the working poor and efficient neighborhoods hard. We should also be concerned that this fee may be abused. Our need to raise revenue should be done with equity in mind.

But before I get into the details of this fee, I would like to concede some points and do some “City Finance 101.”

The city of Rochester has financial issues that are largely the result of items beyond our control. While we are blessed to have 110,000 jobs for 45,000 households, the city provides infrastructure and services for many that are not helping us pay for the costs. The city of Rochester only has two tools to raise funds; property taxes and fees. We do get a tiny slice of sales tax, but that has limited uses due to state regulation. Taxes should be a three-legged stool (property, sales, and income), but local governments are only allowed to levy property taxes.

Local Government Aid (also known as the “Minnesota Miracle”) was a tool whereby local governments traded their ability to raise funds through various forms of taxation in exchange for the fair sharing of funds at the state level. Among other things, LGA addressed the situation where a person making $650,000 annually at a downtown job but living outside of the city pays almost nothing for city services. Given the ratio of jobs to households in Rochester, this situation is common.

Since 2003, Tim Pawlenty and other state leaders have skirted their own budgetary responsibility by borrowing or taking from local governments. Based on growth from 2003 promised LGA numbers, Rochester is losing out on roughly the equivalent of 150 police officers worth of aid in just 2010. While failing to live up to their side of the Minnesota Miracle, Pawlenty and those who back him have actually further reduced cities’ ability to raise funds in a fair manner.

While I have been outspoken about our local spending priorities, the real per capita city operating budget in 2010 is less than it was in 2000. City government is getting smaller, more efficient, and has been for years.

Though it is not well known, we previously reduced the 2010 levy by the same $1.3 million that the lighting fee would raise. The discussion about where the money is going stems from poor communication. Every dollar that comes in for lighting will pay for lighting.

I have a number of concerns about this fee, however.

We know that sprawl increases lighting costs, but we do nothing to ensure that properties on large frontages to pay a fair amount. Let’s consider if the city were to build a new mile of residential road with lights every 160 feet. We could allow homes with an average of 50 ft. of frontage per lot like many older neighborhoods, or we could allow frontages of 250 ft. like some other subdivisions. Let’s also assume it costs $50 annually to operate each light.

Given the regressive charge, the dense neighborhood will be paying nearly three times the cost of lighting their street. Or, put another way, those properties will be paying for their lighting and then a significant additional amount for the rest of the community.

Conversely, the other neighborhood will be covering only about half of their costs. We are overcharging the efficient development to subsidize the sprawl. This is poor fiscal management. We also ignore that some neighborhoods should probably pay a reduced amount because they have private or less lighting. We will never get a perfect solution, but a tiered solution would be better.

There is a claim that the average property owner will be paying less with this fee because entities that are not currently paying taxes will now be paying. This claim is unsubstantiated, and my suspicion is that this may not be true given the heavy weighting of this fee towards dense residential property, particularly if the citizen is able to itemize their property taxes.

My primary concern with enacting a new fee, however, is our history of being irresponsible with fees. Our RPU customer charges are regressive and disproportionately affect those that do the best job of conserving energy. Our water fees are still regressive but have been improved. Storm water fees are arbitrary and do not reward responsible decisions.

The most abusive fee is the wastewater fee. This fee pays for the operating and maintenance of our wastewater treatment system (good), and $68 million in development subsidies over 18 years (shameful). We increased this fee to keep our developer charges artificially low.

When I presented the data in a city council meeting not a single city employee, developer, or council member disputed my calculation. But we approved this anyway and did so without getting anything for the taxpayer in return.

Given the inequities in the proposed fee and our history with fees, I remain concerned about adding a new fee. I would encourage citizens to demand that their council member only support fees that are fair and equitable.

Proposals for planting rows of trees along the roads — a traditional technique for shaping pleasing public spaces — are often opposed by transportation engineers, who contend that a wide travel corridor,
free of obstacles, is needed to protect the lives of errant motorists.

Increasingly, however, the engineers’ beliefs about safety are being subjected to empirical study and are being found incorrect. Eric Dumbaugh, an assistant professor of transportation at Texas A&M, threw
down the gauntlet with a long, carefully argued article, ”Safe Streets, Livable Streets,” in the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. A follow-up article by Dumbaugh, in
the 2006 edition of Transportation Research Record, will present further evidence that safe urban roadsides are not what the traffic-engineering establishment thinks they are.

Though engineers generally assert that wide clear areas safeguard motorists who run off the roads, Dumbaugh looked at accident records and found that, on the contrary, wide-open corridors encourage
motorists to speed, bringing on more crashes. By contrast, tree-lined roadways cause motorists to slow down and drive more carefully, Dumbaugh says.

Dumbaugh examined crash statistics and found that tree-lined streets experience fewer accidents than do “forgiving roadsides” — those that have been kept free of large, inflexible objects. He points to “a growing body of evidence suggesting that the inclusion of trees and other streetscape features in the roadside environment may actually reduce crashes and injuries on urban roadways.”

Among the cases cited in his JAPA article are these:

• A study of five arterial roadways in downtown Toronto found that mid-block car crashes declined between 5 and 20 percent in areas where there were elements such as trees or concrete planters along the road.

• Urban “village” areas in New Hampshire containing “on-street parking and pedestrian-friendly roadside treatments” were “two times less likely to experience a crash” than the purportedly safer roadways
preferred by most transportation engineers.

• A study of two-lane roadways found that although wide shoulders “were associated with reductions in single-vehicle, fixed-object crashes, they were also associated with a statistically significant increase in total crashes.” A rise in multiple-vehicle crashes offset the decline in fixed-object crashes.

• An examination of Colonial Drive (State Route 50), which connects the north end of downtown Orlando to the suburbs, found fewer serious mid-block crashes on the “livable” section than on a comparison
conventional roadway. According to Dumbaugh, the conventional roadway also was associated with more injuries to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Drivers adjust.

In his explanation of why “livable streets” enhance safety, Dumbaugh says “drivers are ‘reading’ the potential hazards of the road environment and adjusting their behavior in response.” Dan Burden, senior urban designer for Glatting Jackson and Walkable Communities Inc. in Orlando, notes that there is research showing that “motorists need and benefit from tall vertical roadside features such as trees or buildings in order to properly gauge their speed.”

What Dumbaugh advocates appears to be consistent with, though not as radical as, the work that traffic engineer Hans Monderman has been doing in small towns in Holland. Monderman has introduced trees,
paving, stones, fountains, and other features, while eliminating conventional safety devices such as traffic lights, speed-limit signs, and pavement markings. Monderman discovered that, at least in small Dutch towns, drivers therefore slow down and become alert to clues about how to behave.

JAPA accompanied Dumbaugh’s article with a counterpoint from J.L. Gattis of the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, who argued that the studies cited are not conclusive. More context-sensitive research is
needed, Gattis said.

Since then, Dumbaugh has written the forthcoming Transportation Research Record article, which reports on what Dumbaugh found when he examined safety on three routes — State Routes 15 and 44 in DeLand,
Florida, and State Route 40 in Ocala, Florida — that have pedestrian-friendly designs along parts of their length and conventional designs along other sections. Dumbaugh discovered that the pedestrian-friendly segments experience 40 percent fewer crashes than comparison roadways.

Burden told New Urban News that “many traffic engineers work out of a pseudo-science when it comes to trees and crash causation, and many others are not well tuned in to urban crash causation.” Research like
Dumbaugh’s may help overcome that failing.

Burden has incorporated some of Dumbaugh’s findings into a new article, “22 Benefits of Urban Street Trees.” Among the benefits Burden attributes to street trees are the abilities of tree canopies to reduce temperatures at pedestrian level, absorb some tailpipe exhaust, make drivers calmer, and extend the life of asphalt paving by 40 to 60 percent. The JAPA articles by Dumbaugh and Gattis can be found at: www.planning.org/japa/pdf/JAPADumbaugh05.pdf.

As a general principle, Burden urges that engineers, planners, architects, and landscape architects work closely with one another to come up with functional, safe, complete, and successful urban spaces.
Meanwhile, he says, city councils and other community leaders need to exercise more control over “important decisions about things like urban street trees” instead of leaving such matters solely to
transportation engineers.

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Rochester Water Reclamation Plant Tours

Friday July 23 at 4:00 pm

Saturday July 24 at 10:30 am

David Lane, the Plant’s Environmental Coordinator will present an overview of the treatment plant: its history, the technology that goes into treating the wastewater and the future challenges we face as a society in protecting the public health and our environment.