Blog Post 2

Pre-Meeting Notes and Thoughts

I decided to attend the Bicycle and Pedestrian safety meeting as it seemed pretty relevant to my group project that we are working on for class. As it sounds the main goal of this meeting is to cover issues surrounding cyclist and pedestrian safety around town. Myself as a frequent user of alternative transportation and walking find this pretty relevant to myself as well as pedestrian and cyclist safety is pretty important to me. I want to do kind of a preliminary outline, with kind of what my conceived thoughts are on some potential topics and then have that to compare to what actually happens and is discussed at the meeting.

I'm hoping there is a diverse crowd of people in attendance at the meeting especially with a division of people are are non-pedestrian/non-cyclist and do the majority of their commuting via vehicle. I think it is very important that both sides of this issue are in attendance

The meeting will take place at City Hall in the Hooker Conference Room on 3/9 @ 5:30PM.


Current issues that I think face pedestrians:

• Use of non-motorized/motorized vehicles on pedestrian only areas.
• Lots of streets have long stretches of no-crosswalks leaving a lot of pedestrians with the choice to walk way out of their way or jaywalk.

Current issues that I think face cyclist:

• Cars and non-protected bike lanes. ie: bike lanes without a physical barrier between them and traffic.
• Road conditions, especially during the darker times of the day a large inconsistency in the road (grates, potholes, etc.) can really ruin someones day.
• A lack of street lighting during the darker times of the day for cyclist visibility, with many darker stretches of road around town.

I'm not quite sure what information or statistics will be presented during this meeting, but I'm pretty curious to see how/what information does get presented to the attendees. Will it be cyclist/pedestrian accident statistics, or will it be less informal anecdotal evidence? I'm pretty curious to see how they end up doing it. I'm also curious as to if any conflict will actually arise out of this, is it not universally accepted that we need better pedestrian and cyclist safety?

Meeting Notes and Thoughts

The crowd of people that ended up showing up was mostly our class. There were a few older people from the Bloomington area as well. Pretty involved group with local cycling clubs and other cycling related activities.

Current issues and topics that were brought up related to cyclist and pedestrians:

• Driver hit and killed cyclist in the past few months, no charges were pressed at the scene of the crime. You can be arrested, but you cannot be charged. Indiana does not have vehicular homicide laws. There is a reckless homicide charge which could be applicable to cyclist, but usually is overlooked.
• NYC is currently proposing a vehicular accident bill of rights, and it could potentially help with people effected by these types of accidents.
• Bloomington has about 4,000 crashes a year, not necessarily bike crashes, but this is a very high number to have police responded to each day.

Questions that were raised during the meeting:

• How are vehicle pedestrian, and vehicle cyclist cases handled compared to vehicle on vehicle collisions?

Some other topics that came up were:

• Signal timing and efficiency for pedestrians. Improving consistency between all lights in the city so that people always know how much time there is. Dangerous from the standpoint of now knowing when the vehicle lights will actually change. A lot of this seems to be coming down to UI and how information is being represented at traffic points.
• There have been a lot is issues recently with the accuracy and correct traffic patterns being shown at several patterns around Bloomington recently.
• Pedestrian signaling is not always automatic.
• Proposed no right on reds for many intersections around Bloomington, and we currently have no outlined no right on red policy here in the city.
• There are a lot of pending projects currently underway here in Bloomington.
• They went through and highlighted a lot of high danger traffic areas. Most of them are un-regulated intersections, but some are. A lot of the issue is on roads that have low visibility from the yielding streets, but others are roads with large amounts of traffic and unregulated pedestrian cross walks.
• New traffic patterns and improvement to rode geometry to reduce blind corners, and tight merges. This also includes bike lanes with physical barriers between cars and cyclist.

The information was presented as very anecdotal evidence person to person position mainly focused around deaths, injuries, and accidents related to certain intersections. With these very specific case examples of several different intersections around campus and several other places around town were identified. There seemed to be specific concern especially with a few common bike/pedestrian crossings that currently do not have any marked cross walks since they are technically residential areas, but see relatively high traffic.

The main issue seems to be how to fix traffic patterns, with limited data about the actual intersect. There seems to be a lack of data that is being collected overall. The current issue that they seem to be battling is an overall outdated system that is a lot of our traffic lights. The committee seems to firmly agree that the city is in general need of traffic light updates so that we can maintain consistency of pattern signally between all intersections around town. Additionally, it also seems that a lot of the money is going towards repairs and renovation. They are currently working on purchasing a cameras that will allow them to monitor intersections and it will be able to detect cars/people to collect more informative data that could help make specific traffic pattern changes that will have a better and more targeted effect to which they are trying to accomplish.

Towards the end of the meeting we got into talking about the community TDM updates, and the information that has come out relating to how the collection of transit data has been shown as well as some potential updates on transit options including but not limited to:

• Carpool
• Bike share
• Increased/improved bus routes

These are pretty interesting, because this information and services are done in part with the 4th Street parking garage, with the goal to not only solve the parking problem, but solve the transportation problem. Hopefully, with these other options they would be able to considerable reduce the number of spots needed overall.

Potential Smart City Solutions

• Data sensors to take information on # of cars that pass through a intersection, as well as # of pedestrians. They actually were talking about traffic camera investment so that they can get more detailed information about what is actually happening at intersections.
• Potentially mining information from people who use the bus app to get a better idea of where we should potentially set up bus stops or use it to determine some of the most common routes.
• More predictive traffic patterns to adapt to pedestrian and vehicle flow during different times of the day, however this is dependent on proper data collection so that this can be created.