“Why are we have such discrepancy?”
Yes, that's a real quote
Hello hello! On the docket today are a few shorter dispatches from the city council last night and a refreshingly not-stupid take on Mill Street courtesy of contributor Greg Opperman!
Three main sections: First, documenting Donna Colorio’s exceptionally stupid and nakedly transparent display of crankery on the Mill Street issue last night. That sets up the second section: Greg’s interview with an actual traffic engineer on what our roads are and what they should be. Third: A rare but small positive development regarding the city’s homelessness crisis and response.
I’m juggling more work-in-progress pieces than I can reasonably fit in this post, so expect another dispatch on Sunday! I know I’m a bit behind schedule, and that’s because I’ve been spending a lot of my writing time lately on an ambitious (for me) project: an abolitionist analysis of the economic reality of local news, and how we might act on it. Hopefully I’ll be sharing that sometime soon!
But on to the matter at hand. Just have to ask for money first real quick!
“Why are we have such discrepancy?”
Donna Colorio last night provided one of the most stunning examples of city council incompetence. Fittingly, she used the Mill Street issue to do so.
In a one-page report to the council (I put it on Drive if you want to read it), interim Police Chief Paul Saucier outlined crash data for the redesigned stretch of Mill Street—the one that has been such an issue for the cranks. Per the report: Since Dec. 1, 2023, when the redesign was finished, there have been 13 crashes. From Dec., 2022 to March 2023, there were 16 crashes. More crashes before the bike lane, fewer crashes after. The five-year average is 13 crashes, he wrote.
The Commissioner of Transportation and Mobility has spoken extensively about the reasons for the reconfiguration, national best practices, and their expectations for a safer road going forward. While the early crash rates are consistent with prior years, we anticipate that they will decline as the community becomes acclimated to the changes in the road.
This simple report presents an obvious problem for the cranks: The data and the hysteria do not align. Mill Street did not become more dangerous due to the redesign. It was not a disastrous change requiring an immediate reversal. What’s worse, the top cop thinks it’s a good change. He’s not on their side.
Last night, City Councilor Donna Colorio—a crank and, accordingly, a vocal Mill Street critic—set out to save the narrative by attacking the data. She brought Saucier up to the stand for “a couple questions” that were a transparent attempt at a gotcha. The crash numbers in Saucier’s report, she said, were lower than another set of numbers that WPD officers shared at a recent neighborhood watch meeting. Aha! A grand conspiracy, surely.
After running through the different crash totals month-by-month, she turned to Saucier and said “I don’t doubt those numbers.” Meaning Saucier’s numbers, which she had just doubted. A coy bit of rhetorical misdirection to set up the kill shot. The gotcha moment. The coverup exposed. “Why are we have such discrepancy (sic)?” she asked.
I pulled the clip, for your viewing pleasure. It’s really something:
City Manager Eric Batista stepped in. The numbers shared at the neighborhood meeting were for the entire street, he said, including sections that weren’t redesigned. The numbers in Saucier’s report, however, were specific to the redesigned stretch. If the question is the redesign, the specific data set is more useful.
Knocked off guard, Colorio scrambled for a counter. She said she thought the entire street had been redesigned. “Because the entire Mill Street there’s a bike lane in the middle of the road,” she said. (The bike lane is not in the middle of the road.) She was apparently unaware of the southernmost portion, from Coes Pond to Webster Square, that wasn’t changed at all. It’s a rare and beautiful thing to see a city councilor be so dead wrong about such a simple fact, and in such clear terms.
It was an easy error to avoid. It’s clearly explained right in the first paragraph of Saucier’s report, which is only a single page. “This report will be limited to the area of 195 Mill St. to the intersection of Mill and Chandler Streets, which is the portion of the street that was affected by the reconfiguration,” he wrote. The report was made public on Friday, giving Colorio some five days to read and retain before speaking on it last night. To get clarification ahead of time on anything that confused her. Instead, she went on the attack.
“I’m very confused here,” she said at one point, conspiratorially.
Saucier painfully re-explained the simple point. “If you look at the whole street from Park Avenue and Mill and you go all the way through Chandler, then there are a lot more accidents.”
Colorio shifted course. She asked for “just a little bit more additional information.” That information was the crash data for the entire street. She was either unaware or unwilling to absorb what both Batista and Saucier told her. She just wanted the numbers that looked worse.
Then she asked for a report on any deaths that have happened on Mill Street. “For me, one death is too many,” she said. It was a gross way to end an embarrassing show. The recent death of a 90-year-old man being requested alongside inaccurate data in the service of a bad faith argument.
Councilor Haxhiaj was next to speak and man she took the gloves off on Colorio.
The report, she said, “outlines exactly what was asked by Councilor Colorio, which was the number for crashes on the part of Mill Street that has been reconfigurated.”
The other set of numbers, she said, were inaccurate and nevertheless used to advance a distorted narrative.
“That narrative took a hold on social media by people that shouldn’t have a say in what is public safety,” she said.
Colorio is one of those people, to my mind. And yesterday she was simply playing to her crowd. She doesn’t want to help, she wants to be mad. That was made abundantly clear when she insisted on getting the inaccurate numbers.
Haxhiaj praised Batista and Saucier, on the other hand, for showing “real leadership” on this Mill Street issue. And I have to agree with her. They could have played to the cranks, as is tradition, but opted instead to stand up for common sense. While a low, low bar, it’s heartening that neither Batista nor Saucier gave an inch to the hysteria of the “concerned neighbors” who have made so much hay over a bike lane. They didn’t give them what they wanted.
Though other councilors spoke after Haxhiaj, they didn’t put up the big stink we’ve seen in the past. Perhaps vocal opponents like Moe Bergman and Khrystian King (for some reason) saw how Colorio looked and decided to back off. It doesn’t matter though. Colorio really walked into a big fat rake here, severely compromising any claim to legitimacy in her position. She looked nakedly uninterested in the truth, and only dimly aware of the issue. It was silly, as the Mill Street issue has always been. Hopefully this cartoon moment courtesy of Colorio puts it to bed for good.
It is a crying shame to have a political talent like Haxhiaj waste so much time on a damn bike lane. It is beneath her, and beneath all of us.
There’s nothing to do with these cranks but ignore them. It’s encouraging that Batista and Saucier appear ready to do just that. It’s about time.
City Hall ignoring the cranks is just one piece of the puzzle, however. They’re still going to be loud, they’re still going to define press narratives by nature of being loud, and they’re not going to stop looking for new things to get mad about.
Mill Street is far from the only road in need of a “complete streets” overhaul. There are others in the pipeline right now! They will be just as beneficial, and are just as likely to spark this sort of townie uproar.
It’s incumbent on us to make these people know their concerns are illegitimate. In the next section, contributor Greg Opperman steps in with some tips on how to do so, courtesy of an actual traffic engineer.
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How To Explain Complete Streets To Your Neighbor
By Greg Opperman (@gopperman)
The redesign of Mill Street to reduce the number of traffic lanes from four to two and to include protected bike lanes has been a hot-button issue for months, going back to Etel Haxhiaj and Jose Riveria’s city council election battle. In the wake of a fatal car crash, city council voted 9-2 to pause future construction of streets with protected bike lanes. Mill Street’s been blasted as a failure of the Complete Streets movement, which is “an approach to planning, designing, building, operating, and maintaining streets that enables safe access for all people who need to use them, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities.”
While I’m not surprised by some of the reaction to the new street design, I am perplexed it’s become such a hot-button issue. I’ve spent a few years living, driving, and yes, biking around Mill Street. I’ve personally witnessed speeding drivers careen off the road. As recently as last August, a child was hit by a car. I’ve spoken to neighbors who have complained for years about rampant speeding and reckless driving. Now, many of those same neighbors are blasting the design online and complaining to the city council.
As we continue to improve roads in the city by making them more inclusive, this debate is going to rage on. So far, any kind of scientific expertise has been lacking from the discourse. I wanted to learn more about what goes into designing safer, inclusive streets, how we might do a better job explaining complete streets to our neighbors, and what we can do to ensure Worcester continues to build inclusive infrastructure. I spoke with Wesley Dismore, a civil engineer who designs infrastructure in a major US city, to get some insight from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
My name is Wesley Dismore, I'm a licensed civil engineer and my professional focus is multimodal transportation and complete streets. My job is to build a transportation system that gets everyone where they want to go as safely, as reliably, and as sustainably as possible. I'm also a car driver, a bicyclist, a pedestrian, and a transit rider (not necessarily in that order). One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to the public, to explain why we do things a certain way: there are a lot of misunderstandings and we, as engineers, could definitely do a better job explaining our practice to the people who use it every day. I lived in Worcester for four years while I was a student at WPI.
You design streets for a living. Can you tell us about some of the projects you've worked on?
Most of my projects lately have focused on improving safety: We do a lot of pedestrian improvements, fixing sidewalks or upgrading crosswalks. We might do traffic calming on neighborhood streets to cut down on speeds in residential areas. And yes, I work on bike lanes in some cases, and the idea there is usually to add some protection between the bicyclists and the vehicles. Across the board the idea is to get people to their destination in one piece.
You're familiar with Mill Street, right?
Yup!
As a professional, what do you think about the old design?
Think about the tradeoff between mobility (your ability to travel far and fast) and access (your ability to safely reach and enjoy the place you're trying to get to). We need both! But roads can really only be designed for one or the other, because of one fundamental conflict: Fast cars are great for mobility and terrible for access. You want to go fast on the turnpike, but you really don't want somebody going turnpike speeds outside your home, your doctor's office, your grocery store. So, speaking about the old design of Mill Street in general, my professional opinion is that a four-lane divided road with on-street parking is trying to do both mobility and access at the same time, and it can't. Four-lane divided roads can move a lot of traffic very quickly, but then you want to park in front of your home, pull out of your driveway, just sit and enjoy your front porch—that's access, and the road can't do both. Roads for quickly moving large volumes of automobiles are not places you want to live, or walk, or spend time.
Right, and Mill Street is a neighborhood for living and spending time. On top of the residences and small businesses, there is a public beach, an elementary school, and little league fields. In terms of reducing reckless driving, what do you think about the new design?
This is a really thorny question. There are a lot of ways to drive recklessly. Maybe a driver is looking at their phone or they dropped french fries in their lap. Road designers have very little control over that type of behavior, so we tend to focus on speed. If you're gonna be fiddling with the radio or whatever, it's a lot better to do it while you're driving slowly because you have more reaction time to avoid a crash and even if you do crash the consequences will be lower because there's less energy involved.
Removing a travel lane reduces the capacity of the road, which reduces speeds, which improves safety. But it's a tradeoff: the road is now providing less mobility and more access. If the speeds are lower overall, we expect that there will be fewer, and less damaging, crashes.
A 90-year old man unfortunately hit a parked car and died. City council has pointed to this incident as justification for halting future complete street redesigns. Does this mean the new design is less safe for drivers?
I can say definitively that the occurrence of a crash, even a tragic fatal crash, doesn't mean the design is necessarily unsafe. When we evaluate crashes we look for patterns over time, not single instances, to minimize the effect of randomness. I would predict that there will be fewer crashes on Mill St in the future. It's difficult to ask people to focus on the big picture when someone loses their life, but the available evidence suggests that this design will save lives over time.
What kind of evidence do you use to determine something like that?
Researchers conduct studies comparing similar stretches of roadway in nearby areas, and measure the crash rates over time when one of the two is upgraded. When we look at data from a wide variety of sources. There are a lot of roads out there, a lot of miles driven every day, so we have lots of data. It all paints the same picture: wider roads contribute to higher speeds and worse crash outcomes.
Have you ever experienced pushback on a complete streets project you've worked on, either by politicians or residents?
Definitely. The short answer is that we, as engineers, need to do a better job explaining the benefits and honestly accounting for the tradeoffs. We do our homework: We have tools to model before-and-after scenarios on our roadways and we can predict with decent accuracy how things are going to change after a project is completed.
The longer answer is a bit more nuanced: Everybody on earth uses the transportation system on some level, and so everybody has developed an opinion about how it should operate. Most people believe that they understand how the system works and they know how to fix the problems that we encounter: Widen the roads to eliminate congestion, install stop signs in the neighborhood to slow down speeders, and create more free parking. Unfortunately, all of those solutions are precisely wrong, and we are learning that the hard way. We've tried those solutions and we ended up with a road network that kills tens of thousands per year in the United States alone.
But our solutions are often counterintuitive, and that's where we run into trouble because we're coming into people's neighborhoods and saying, basically, "I am going to do the opposite of what you want and you have to trust me that it will work." So I struggle with this because I'm a practitioner and I have some professional pride and integrity and I honestly believe we're doing the best we can given the state of the practice and what the science tells us, but we could really improve how we communicate about it. And so yes, we get pushback.
Folks in Worcester will be talking to their neighbors and arguing, both online and at city meetings, about inclusive infrastructure for a long time. Let's talk about some of the common complaints I've heard, and how you might respond:
City Councillor Moe Bergman called the protected bike lane and offset street parking "odd." Many others have expressed concern that it's too "confusing.”
Some confusion is understandable. We have conflicting goals sometimes in traffic design: We value uniformity and predictability, but we need to change things when they aren't delivering the results, especially in terms of safety. So my response would be, yeah it might be a good thing that it's a little different than what you're used to because hopefully that means it will have different results than what we're used to.
I've also heard a lot of complaints about the bike lanes. People are complaining that they haven't observed anybody using them (despite it being winter), or that whatever amount of bike traffic there may be isn't worth the inconvenience to drivers.
Bike lanes, just like roads for cars, don't work unless they're part of a network that connects origins and destinations. If you built a bridge over a river but you didn't connect it to any roads on either side, would you be surprised that no cars were using it? Previously, Mill Street would have been a barrier to bicycle travel, and that barrier has now been removed, but there still might be several other barriers between your house and the park, the school, whatever. As those barriers are subsequently removed, you'll see more bicycle traffic. To your other point, it's only inconvenient for drivers who are using Mill Street for mobility. It's a much more convenient and safer design for people who are using Mill Street for access.
You're saying that there's a "build it and they will come" effect, which seems intuitive to me. I saw at least one parent posting in a Facebook group that they finally feels safe biking to Coes Pond with their child and is excited to try it out. What about the idea that even if a small number of people use the bike lanes, they still have a right to be able to use the roads safely?
I don't even think of it as a "right," personally, but it's just good policy. Say you need to get from Point A to Point B: you might ride your bike for a lot of reasons (fresh air, exercise, it's fun, etc.) but if there isn't a safe way to make the trip, you aren't going to put yourself in danger, not on purpose anyway. If there are enough obstacles, enough friction, if you just don't feel safe, you might say "heck with it" and drive instead. Now we've created more traffic on the road, more congestion, more emissions, more demand for parking. This is something people just don't understand: Even if you never want to ride a bike yourself, it's good for you if your neighbors feel safe riding because that's one less car in your way, one less occupied parking spot at your destination.
If you see those people as a nuisance on your roadway I think you're missing the point—those people are making your driving experience better overall. Talking about rights, I think, is a distraction from the reality that having more options is better for everybody.
You've spent some time riding bikes around Worcester. How was that experience?
On the one hand, a bicycle is an enormously liberating thing. They're cheap to acquire and free to fuel, you can fix them yourself, lock them up practically anywhere, and so on. In Worcester I learned to ride a bicycle for transportation instead of just for fun, and that was a hugely positive experience overall. And that includes that my world got much bigger when I was riding my bicycle: I experienced more of the city, I met more people, I broke out of the bubble around my college campus.
On the other hand, there were a lot of challenges, and I think these are very common in American cities: It was pretty clear from the beginning that bicycles didn't fit into the transportation system. The reality on the road is that it was scary, and sometimes it was dangerous. It wasn't an experience that I could recommend to everyone with a straight face.
We're currently facing down a long battle over future street improvements in Worcester. How would you recommend people get involved to show their support for complete streets?
There's no wrong way. I'd say the most important things are to call your representative in local government and show up at public meetings. If that doesn't feel accessible, write a letter to the editor. Host a bike ride with your friends to check out new facilities, then take a selfie and tweet it at somebody. Tap into urbanist news sources like StreetsBlog or Strong Towns and captivate all your friends over a beer sometime. Refuse to shut up about it. Even just being visible at a water-cooler conversation can help shift the narrative that "everyone hates the new bike lanes."
My last comment is that transportation and land use are two ways of talking about the same problem. We didn't talk about land use a lot here, but as you explore urbanism it will come up a lot—all the bike lanes in the world won't help much if you don't have a vibrant community with lots of destinations worth riding to. And of course, cute neighborhoods and thriving economic centers are useless if you can't get there safely.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Greg Opperman is a software engineer and former newsroom developer at the Boston Globe. Follow him on Twitter @gopperman.
“It’s a public health concern”
Bill again!
However frustrating and stupid, the way the Mill Street item played out yesterday was a win. The cranks looked silly and both the manager and police chief refused to capitulate to them.
There was another small win worth noting, this time in the arena of the worsening homelessness crisis. A citizen petition to do a little better by our unhoused residents actually made it past the reflexive “file” and will be discussed further! Tiny win, of course. But considering how it went with the last petition, it’s not nothing!
HALO Worcester organizer and unhoused resident Sam Olney filed the following petition…
With some ardent support from Haxhiaj and King, the petition is going to the city manager for a report, and then to the public health subcommittee for consideration.
It’s a long, long way away from getting actually approved, of course, and it may well never come to fruition. But it wasn’t dismissed outright! It will be considered. That is a win when wins on this issue are all too rare.
Like Mill Street, this was another example of Batista being maybe a little deserving of some credit.
Apparently, according to King, Batista is receptive to this idea in a way that his predecessor, Ed Augustus, was not.
“That administration was not open to public bathrooms,” King said.
Since the city manager acts unilaterally in this city, that’s a good sign! It might actually happen.
Offering public restrooms to the unhoused is a very bare minimum expectation, though. So let’s not get too crazy with the praise. We should have already been doing this and it is ghoulish that we aren’t. It would be a rare and welcome gesture toward actually caring about unhoused people as people, and it wouldn’t be very costly. It would be an easy way to signal you aren’t content to be purely punitive, which is still an open question.
“It’s a public health concern,” said Olney. “We need to be able to use the bathroom. People discriminate against us for going to the bathroom. Like they don’t let us use the bathroom.”
Haxhiaj said the city should look at a model employed in other cities, like Boston, which include technology for overdose detection. An actual piece of public safety technology, to my mind. Unlike Shotspotter! The former is a feature that would actually save lives. The lives of unhoused people deserve to be saved! Not an open question! Haxhiaj made a similar statement.
“I would like to remind folks that the unhoused community is part of our community,” she said. “They are our residents, and they should be treated as such.”
That’s all for today, folks. Thanks for reading. Lots of other recent developments to get to, so see you again on Sunday! And see you on the Worcestery Council Theatre stream on Thursday for School Committee! 5:30 p.m. Read Aislinn Doyle’s preview here if you missed it.
And one more pitch for subscribing! We’re working hard over here folks.
How anyone can watch Colorio speak at length and say to themselves “yes, this is the person I want representing my interests on the City Council” is a mystery to me.
If this redesign had been in another CC district, it would not be such an issue. This is happening because Etel Haxhiaj is the target. (Thank you W Bird)