Transportation Safety: The Myth, The Mayhem, and The Management, Part 1
Civic Minds Podcast Episode #2
In part 1 of this episode of Civic Minds, Environmental Design Group Associate Director of Transportation, Reneé Wittenberger, PE, joins host Laura Hengle to explore the realities of transportation safety. Drawing from her experience in traffic engineering and conducting safety studies, Reneé unpacks common misconceptions around road design, including bikeways, lane reductions, and signal timing.
Throughout the conversation, she explains how traffic engineers use data-driven road safety studies to guide decisions that improve safety for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike. From rethinking how we approach safety investments to understanding how small design changes can reduce crashes, this episode offers practical insights for communities looking to make safer, more effective infrastructure decisions.
Civic Minds Podcast Episode #2 Transcript
Laura Hengle:
Welcome to Civic Minds, a podcast by Environmental Design Group highlighting civil engineering, planning, and design. I’m your host, Laura Hengle.
I’m happy to welcome Renne Wittenberger as our guest today. Reneé is an associate director of transportation at Environmental Design Group with a particular experience in safety engineering, transportation planning, and infrastructure design. So, welcome Reneé! We’re so glad to have you today.
Reneé Wittenberger:
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Laura:
Today’s podcast is titled Transportation Safety: The Myth, The Mayhem, and The Management. I’ve known you for several years now and, as do many others know, you have a very strong passion for “all safety” as you put it. What would you say was something that led your career path down a trajectory towards safety?
Reneé:
Well, I’d say, so I was a bridge engineer for a long time, and I really liked that, but it wasn’t really feeding my soul. There was just something missing. I liked doing the things, but I wasn’t saving the world, and I didn’t know exactly how I would save the world. But I had the opportunity to come over to Environmental Design Group and work on some pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and I was really pro-bike. I still am pro-bike, and so I was very excited to help create pathways for bikes, but there was still something missing, and I couldn’t understand why. I was finally doing something that I thought was changing the world, and then I got my hands on a safety study, and I didn’t even know what a safety study was, but I took it and ran with it and just kept doing more and more safety studies and found how much I really liked that, and I do feel like I’m really saving lives at these places. At one point, I realized I care about everybody on the roads, not just the bikers and the pedestrians, and that was news to me. I didn’t think I cared that much about people driving cars, but I do, turns out.
Laura:
Well, you know, I’ve sat in on a few seminars that you’ve spoken at that we’ve hosted, and you can make other people very quickly passionate for safety as well. You give great examples. We’re like, “Yes, I do want to think about that little third grader crossing that street to go to school.” So, I still remember that from one of the first times I’ve heard you speak, and I’m sure we’ll get into many different scenarios today. But, in keeping with the theme of today’s podcast, let’s talk about the myths associated with transportation safety, because there’s a lot of opinions and thoughts and ideas out there, but as you told me when we were preparing for this today, there’s a lot of myths that need to be busted.
Reneé:
Yes, and I would say that everyone who has a driver’s license finds themselves to be a traffic engineer at some point, so it is really hard to bust these myths that they have. If it was something like nuclear science, most people don’t have an opinion on that right? Because we have no idea what’s going on there, but one of the biggest myths here is, “We don’t need bike lanes here. I never see anyone riding bikes.” They’re not riding bikes because it’s not safe to ride bikes there. That’s why you need the bike lanes. That one is really hard to get across. Like, why would we need bike lanes? And so, then once you put in the bike lanes, then the next myth you hear is “I never see people riding bikes in these bike lanes. What a waste.” Well, if you consider how much time you’re driving on the road in that area, perhaps 15 seconds on your way to work and 15 seconds on your way back. So, this is half a minute every day for how long? I mean, 60 days is only 30 minutes, so maybe you haven’t seen this, like, chance encounter with the biker, right? In those 30 minutes, so that doesn’t mean that they are not being used. In fact, if you see crashes, if you have bike crashes, then you know there at least there are some cyclists, and with crashes being considered really rare, despite having high crash locations, any bike or pedestrian crash is an indication that you have people walking and biking in the area.
Having said that, we don’t have to wait until there’s a crash. We know how certain situations have been set up over time as we’ve evolved as a society with the car as king. We’ve set up these situations where people want to walk from one side of the street to the other, but we don’t provide good places for them to do that, so they are going to cross mid-block. They’re not going to walk out of their way to the next two or three intersections down to get a safe crossing, and cyclists are similar. If we have parks nearby, if we have job centers and residential locations, people need to get from home to work, and they don’t always have a car, can’t afford a car, don’t want to participate in the car economy. Just having a certain set-up can lead to pedestrian and bike crashes, so just knowing that, we can apply safety improvement countermeasures for just those modes, knowing it will make a difference.
Laura:
Yeah, it’s interesting you bring that up. I had to drop mail at the post office, and I live near a somewhat busy road, but it doesn’t have bike lanes. It doesn’t even have sidewalks, and there was a biker on it and a walker on it. It’s also quite hilly, so when people are coming over the hill and the biker seemed to be doing okay but I kept worrying about the woman that was walking. Then she was deciding that maybe the other side was better, so she was going over the hill and crossing the road again at not a really sort of specified crossing area. So, it kind of hit me in the face this morning, exactly like you’re saying. Yes, so very fitting for what we’re talking about today. So yeah, I think your thought about “I don’t ever see people on bike lanes,” it doesn’t mean just because you didn’t see them, they’re not there. It also could mean are you looking at a time that’s primo bike season? Because there might be times of the year where it’s busier than others. I think, especially being here in Ohio with the climate that we have, there’s probably times that we see more people biking than others. But yeah, I think that’s certainly a thing. Are there any other myths about transportation safety?
Reneé:
Almost all of these myths, I believed at one time, too, so don’t worry. Another myth is for bike lanes. “Why should we make space for them? They don’t even pay for the road.” I thought, like many people, that roads are paid for with gas tax and license fees, right? Things that people who ride bikes wouldn’t have paid for. Except, they probably do have a car, so they did pay for gas tax and license fees at some point, but even if they didn’t, gas tax and license fees aren’t the only thing that pays for roads. All taxes pay for roads: property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, things which they participate in, and that really changed my whole world when I realized that bikes do have a right to have part of the road, because we all are paying for that. And then, when I was riding on the road, I felt like an inconvenience to other drivers. Even though I knew I had a right to be there, I still felt like it was too much for them to have to slow down and then move around me. Then I realized the time that it took was probably 5 to 25 seconds at most, and so when I thought about if they’re losing that much time in their day, then it really isn’t that crazy of a thing. So, those were some big ones.
There are more myths not dealing with bikes of course. Another one is if you have a four-lane road, two lanes in each direction. We really like having our lanes. We like to be able to pick which lane we want to be in and go around people that are slowing down in front of us, so to lose one of two of those lanes and only have one lane in each direction, and then maybe a center turn lane, that feels like we’ve been robbed, right? And that it’s going to take me so much longer to get where I’m going. But actually, they’ve done studies on this, and you get through from point A to point B faster when you reduce from two lanes in each direction to one lane in each direction with a center turn lane.
Laura:
Wow. I would not have thought that.
Reneé:
I would not have either. That’s what changed my mind about road diets. Just learning that.
Laura:
Right. And I was thinking, I keep coming back to my own life, and they’re putting a turn lane in where we are, and it’s again one way in each direction, and there is a lot of congestion there. But the turn lane, I think, will solve the problem, but then it goes into a two one way and two the other way. And like, you say, everyone is fighting for that left lane, like “I want to be the fastest car.” So again, there becomes a safety issue, I would imagine.
Reneé:
Yes, and so, you get your side swipe crashes. When you have two lanes in each direction, you have double the amount of conflict points. You have double the amount of gaps that someone is looking for if they want to make a left turn. Then they get nervous as more cars are coming behind me because they know they’re in that left lane, and that’s where everyone is trying to drive faster. So, they might take gaps that don’t exist or gaps that are too small. So, if we can reduce it from four lanes to one in each direction with a center turn lane in the middle, if you want to turn left, you can go in the turn lane and wait for an appropriate gap. And, you’re only looking for a gap in one lane, not two, and you’re not getting nervous with the people behind you because studies have shown that as the line behind you gets longer, the shorter the gap that you’ll take, and that’s why we get our left turn crashes in front of oncoming traffic.
Laura:
The people that try to crash the light even though there’s no arrow.
Reneé:
Right, right. So, if we can reduce that, then we’re reducing conflict points. It is so much safer, but this was before I was involved in safety, when I learned that road diets actually get you through faster. That’s when I became a believer, and then the crash savings was so much better.
Laura:
Wow. There’s so much, like you say, you got into safety studies, and there’s probably just so many layers to it. There’s things that I learn every day, just by being around you and hearing you speak at different things. Another term, you’ve mentioned a few terms here and there, but one that came up as we were preparing for this conversation today was the term “balancing safety,” and it struck me as interesting when you said, “This is not one of my favorite phrases, because it talks about balancing safety with cost.” So, we know that any safety change is going to incur some cost, so how can people look into maybe planning for a safety study and think, “Well, we’re probably going to have to make changes with the results of that,” but also make it an affordable change that’s good for everyone?
Reneé:
So, to speak to that, I hate the phrase “balance safety”because to me it sounds like we’re saying, “I’m ok with a certain amount of severe injury and fatality as long as it doesn’t cost too much.” And I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say it, but I think that’s what comes across. So, rather than saying, “Let’s balance safety,” what if we said, “Let’s reduce crashes and improve safety as much as we can with the money that we have?” That’s a much better way to look at it. So, what money do we have, and what can we do with that? So, some low-cost countermeasures that improve safety is simply narrowing the lanes. If you have 12- or 13- or 14-foot lanes or even 18-foot lanes, as I’ve seen, that makes us think that we can drive a lot faster because people drive as fast as they think is safe, not what the speed limit is, but as fast as we feel safe. So, if we can narrow the lanes and make them 11 feet wide just by using pavement markings, and we can do whatever we want with the outside shoulders. Whether we want that to be recovery space or bike lanes, or even bring the curbs in and do something else with sidewalks. Just narrowing the lanes is traffic calming.
Laura:
So that gives the drive the perception to slow down?
Reneé:
Yes.
Laura:
Ah ok.
Reneé:
And to drive driver, to self-regulate, and there are a lot of traffic calming measures we can do, and many of them are very low cost. We can put high-visibility crosswalk markings. That’s the ones that look like a ladder instead of just the two parallel lines. Not only does that improve visibility of a pedestrian that’s in the crosswalk, but it can also be seen from far away, and it’s an indication to the driver that there may be people up here. It’s time to slow down. The more things that we can place in the driver’s view, vertical things such as trees, shrubs, gateway treatment, things that narrow the lane, causes us to drive slower. And that improves safety for everyone, not just the pedestrians and cyclists, but also the drivers.
Laura:
So, to your point, some of this is just a matter of paint.
Reneé:
Yes.
Laura:
So again, it’s not going to be this out-of-control cost/expense. It’s going to be, “Where’s the best place to set up this crosswalk? How do we paint it and stripe it so that people can see it?” Makes them want to slow down because they realize it’s a very well-trafficked pedestrian road.
Reneé:
That’s exactly right.
Laura:
Yeah, so that’s where you’re getting your balance safety without balancing safety at the expense of life.
Reneé:
Right. We’re not balancing. Another thing with signals, so a lot of people think that just putting a traffic light somewhere will improve the safety of that intersection and actually, we find that a lot of times, signals increase crashes. You might have a two-way stop where one way never stops and then the other way does. We tend to see a lot of failure-to-yield crashes, and a lot of times the public thinks, “Well, if we just put a signal there, people will stop when we want them to stop, they’ll go when we want them to go. But unfortunately, we trade our failure-to-yield crashes for run-red-light crashes and rear ends, especially if it’s a high-speed roadway. So, there are some tests to do to see if it is an improvement. Often, it’s not. Often, the signals are not warranted. We don’t have enough traffic in one of the directions to warrant a signal. But if we do, if we have a signal, an easy way to improve safety is to look at our dilemma zone timing and our all-red timing. So, dilemma zone is a fun concept where if you’re driving and you’re approaching a traffic signal, and it’s green until it’s yellow, and it turns yellow, and you know that you will not be able to stop by the time it turns red comfortably. So, either, you have to slam on the brakes to stop at the red light, or you don’t stop and you go through it, right? Some people do one, and some people do the other. And that’s why we have rear-end crashes and run-red-light crashes. Right? We don’t all do the same thing.
Laura:
I feel like at least once a week this is a conflict I have. I especially feel bad if I have my children in the car and I’m like, “I don’t think I’m going to stop, so I‘m going to have to go.” And yeah, I don’t know which to do.
Reneé:
Yeah, so what we can do is we can reduce that distance of roadway where that can happen. And that’s a calculation that’s based on the speed, so we want to reduce that dilemma zone and make it as small as possible, so it’s less likely that people will find themselves there. That’s a yellow light timing so we can change the amount of seconds in a yellow light timing, and where we put that and, we can and should have all-red time. So, after your yellow light, and then it turns red. Everyone has a red for two to five seconds, just depending on the approach speeds and then that helps for when there are people that did hit the dilemma zone and chose to run or people that are just in a hurry and want to push through. You know, deep down, a lot of us really hate that. We hate providing a way for people to break the law. Then, when I talk to communities about safety improvements and they say they want more enforcement, and they want more people to get in trouble for running the red light. So, when I say, “Let’s add more red time, so that we don’t have a green opposing someone who’s running the red light,” they get upset, and they say, “Well, we don’t want people to run red lights.”
I say, “I thought you didn’t want crashes,” or, “I thought that was more important,” right? Are we going to be okay with sometimes people hitting that first second of the red to spare the crash that would happen? And generally, most people are like, “Yes. In fact, that’s the most important is not having the crash.”
Laura:
So that all-red time would be adjusted based on the type of roads that is, the amount of traffic?
Reneé:
There should always be all-red time.
Laura:
Oh, there should always be all-red time. I like that idea. I think I’ve seen that now that you mention it, but I hadn’t really thought of it. It does, because then it wouldn’t make the person that was like, “Do I stop? Do I go?” It gives them that extra moment before you don’t want it to automatically turn green the other way. But there’s no rule that says that every traffic light has to have that?
Reneé:
Unfortunately, not. Not here anyway. There are certain cities that which will remain nameless, which don’t provide all-red timing because their signals are coordinated, and that would really jam up some things.
Laura:
Interesting.
Reneé:
We’re working with them to maybe loosen their grip on the coordinated signals a bit. Traffic engineers are a very engineer-type group. Highly analytical, so timing to seconds is down pat. They’ve got it worked out. It’s very clean cut, very analytical, but when things get off key, when there’s extra congestion, when things don’t work out the way they’ve calculated it to be, that’s difficult. But, also they get calls. Also, they’re the ones that the public is calling to complain about the congestion and so, that weighs on them a lot. So, it is difficult for the traffic engineers of our cities and counties to balance –
Laura:
Balance! There’s that word again.
Reneé:
Then, if you asked me, I don’t get the phone calls by the way, but if you asked me, I would say, “Do what you have to do to improve the safety, regardless of the phone calls.”
Laura:
Yeah, I think so. Well, I think we’ve addressed the myths and the mayhem about transportation safety today. So, I want to invite our listeners back for part two of our conversation with Reneé, where we will dive into the management with further discussion about planning and safety studies. Thank you, Reneé, for being here. We look forward to the next chapter.
Reneé:
Thank you.