Another example of better engineering of road materials making real change

Workers installed zigzag paint to slow drivers before this trail crossing. (Mike Salmon, VDOT).

The Post's Dr. Gridlock wrote, in "Get There: VDOT Tries Paint to Promote Road Safety" about Virginia's test of pavement marking at an entrance of the Washington and Old Dominion Trail, in order to better regulate "driver-trail user interaction." His column starts:

Traffic engineers are always trying to get drivers to pay attention to the road. Virginia is experimenting with one of those methods on two roads in Loudoun County where the Washington & Old Dominion Trail crosses.

This week, Virginia Department of Transportation workers painted zigzag white lines along Belmont Ridge Road where it approaches the trail crossing. They will do the same on Sterling Boulevard next week, then study the results to see if the paint should be applied elsewhere as well.

I think we can rest assured that for the most part, drivers won't pay much attention to lines on the road, even if painted differently. This was discussed in Sunday's Dr. Gridlock column, where Jack Delaney of Vienna, Virginia writes:

I first saw that on Saturday [April 18] when I was riding the trail from Sterling to Purcellville and can report that the zigzag lines appear to have no effect on drivers.

Cars and trucks continue to travel this road like it's a NASCAR track. This is a tough situation to solve, as both the northbound and southbound lanes of Belmont Ridge Road slope down to the intersection with the W&OD. The road design encourages cars to speed up as they approach the intersection, and painted lines will not change that.

As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2001 in the New Yorker, in "Wrong Turn: How the fight to make America's highways safer went off course," for the most part highway systems are designed so that people don't have to pay that much attention to what they are doing, cars are better designed and include safety devices to reduce the impact and damage from inevitable accidents, but as a result, people develop a kind of "inattentional blindness." From the article:

There is a part of driving that is automatic and routine. There is a second part of driving that is completely unpredictable, and that is the part that requires attention." This is what Simons found with his gorilla, and it is the scariest part of inattentional blindness. People allow themselves to be distracted while driving because they think that they will still be able to pay attention to anomalies. But it is precisely those anomalous things, those deviations from the expected script, which they won't see.

Marc Green, a psychologist with an accident-consulting firm in Toronto, once worked on a case where a woman hit a bicyclist with her car. "She was pulling into a gas station," Green says. "It was five o'clock in the morning. She'd done that almost every day for a year. She looks to the left, and then she hears a thud. There's a bicyclist on the ground. She'd looked down that sidewalk nearly every day for a year and never seen anybody. She adaptively learned to ignore what was on that sidewalk because it was useless information. She may actually have turned her eyes toward him and failed to see him." Green says that, once you understand why the woman failed to see the bicyclist, the crash comes to seem almost inevitable.

In my opinion (hey, I am not a traffic researcher), painted lines aren't enough to change people's behavior, you have to change the pavement type. Belgian Block for example, provides physical (the road is a bit bumpy compared to traditional concrete or asphalt), visual (the road looks different), and aural (the sound of driving on Belgian Block is different from driving on smooth concrete or asphalt).

On the stone paver street between the East and West buildings of the National Gallery of Art you never see cars drive fast. Everything about the environment communicates that you should drive slowly.

I suppose this is the philosophy in part behind "the naked street" concept advocated by Hans Monderman (now deceased). I have problems with this concept not because I don't think it's a good idea, but because of the problems discussed in the Gladwell article. I think we can get to the point (maybe) that Monderman suggested, but that we have to move there in steps. The first step is to begin "changing up" pavement types according to the place conditions of the area bounded by the road.

This means that streets by parks, commercial districts (suggested by Andrew Aurbach), schools, streets say around college unions and college libraries (i.e., around the Marvin Center and Gelman Library at George Washington University), public markets (Eastern Market) should be paved with stone pavers and blocks, just like how the street is paved between the east and west wings of the National Gallery of Art.

Cars never seem to drive that fast on the 900 and 1000 blocks of South Carolina Avenue SE, just a couple blocks east of Eastern Market in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

We understand the attractiveness of brick and/or conglomerate sidewalks in historic districts and commercial districts. We need to make an intellectual jump and begin changing the pavement types of the streets. Right now, for cost reasons, most local transportation departments (including DC's) don't favor this. But these are investments that last 100 years--for the most part--while every 10-15 years, asphalt roads have to be resurfaced.

So from a lifecycle standpoint, not to mention from having "complete places" as a foundational policy goal and priority in a local transportation plan, these kinds of investments are justified and worth spending money on.