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TRAFFIC; To Smooth Your Drive, Slow It Down, He Says

Mr. Burden, a photographer and planning consultant, has other traffic-calming remedies, including making intersections smaller, constructing roundabouts, building boulevards divided by medians and designing places where people walk, bike and use public transit.

In 1996, he founded a nonprofit group called Walkable Communities in High Springs, Fla., where he still lives. Since then, Mr. Burden, who is 60, has been exceptionally energetic about teaching his counterintuitive approach to fixing traffic problems, holding workshops in 1,700 communities in the United States and Canada.

Q. What do you call your job?

A. I'm a specialist in converting towns that were overdesigned for cars back into towns for people. It's kind of like being a bumblebee but having a vast field. I do a lot of photography. I analyze the towns I've been in. I read about how things come to work and why they work. I collect the pollen from one town, and I disperse it as quickly as I can to people who want the information.

Q. In terms of traffic, the engineering approach is to make things bigger, wider and faster.

A. That's correct.

Q. You are showing that the conventional approach is often counterproductive. Can you give me an example?

A. By not moving vehicles as fast, by paying attention to intersections, by controlling access and turns, roads actually move more traffic, are safer and are more attractive.

Here's an example. The typical road we've been building for a long time is five lanes. The fifth lane, where people make left turns, is called a scramble lane. By putting the fifth lane in and getting the driver making a left turn completely out of the picture, the thought was that you can greatly increase the capacity of the road and reduce the crashes. We started doing that all over our country.

It was a mistake. By making it possible to turn left into every single driveway, we created all this incredible friction in the street. It reduced the carrying capacity of the road 30 percent and increased the number of crashes. A better idea is to build boulevards with divided medians. A typical boulevard has an opening every 660 feet and a lane to allow people to make left turns. By doing that you increase the carrying capacity of the road 30 percent.

Q. Are some cities downsizing their roads?

A. They are, all over the country. We call them "road diets," where we actually take away lanes. In some cities, like Hartford, we made a list two years ago of 12 roads that will go on a road diet and lose some of the lanes. They've actually done six of them so far, and everywhere Hartford has done it, traffic has improved.

Typically before a road diet, speeds are 10 miles per hour too fast, which means it's not as safe, it's harder to get out of driveways, it's harder to maneuver. The road diet gets it down to the right number of lanes, and the speeds come down. In Hartford, the average speed has come down 6 m.p.h. on neighborhood streets. Safety goes up. It's so much easier to get across a two-lane road instead of a four-lane road.

Q. What are other ways to solve traffic congestion?

A. You have to pay attention to the intersections. That's the first place that traffic breaks down. We build big roads that build up huge volumes of traffic at the intersections. The typical response of the engineers is to widen the entire road. Then intersections become so wide that the traffic signal cycle is longer, and we lose efficiency. There is a need to be more surgical in our solution and design more compact intersections. The signal cycles are shorter, and pedestrians feel comfortable crossing the street.

Another solution is a roundabout. With a roundabout, we have more volume per lane, and therefore it can keep the intersection much more compact. We can keep crossing distances down to 14 feet, and because there are no signals, the pedestrian isn't holding back the motorist. And there is no signal to build up a long line of cars.

Q. You say speeding traffic up increases congestion.

A. This surprises most people because it is counterintuitive. We actually lose capacity on a road if we design it for high speed. If you are in an urban area with a lot of driveways and intersections, you get your best capacity at somewhere around 30 m.p.h. But we have designed a lot of places where the running speed, the speed that most motorists travel, is 40, 45, even 50 m.p.h. When you drive at a slower and more uniform rate, you need less space between cars. Drivers feel more comfortable being closer to the car in front of them. Therefore you can move more cars through than if the cars are traveling faster, and you need more headway, more space, between cars.

Q. Presumably not everyone agrees with your counterintuitive approach.

A. There is resistance. Many people don't understand how traffic works. They think if you have a street where people aren't going to be driving as fast and it won't be as wide, that traffic will come into their local neighborhood street. That is an unfortunate perception because that is not what traffic does. Traffic wants to stay on the significant road and does not want to go into a neighborhood unless it gets strangled at an intersection and gets forced there.

Business owners also get nervous. A perfect example is in Missoula, Mont., on a street called Broadway. It is a four-lane road, and there were a couple of pedestrian fatalities. The volume of traffic on Broadway does not warrant four lanes. The road needs to be only two lanes. The City Council in 1998 approved putting Broadway on a road diet, reducing it from four lanes to two lanes, with raised islands so that people could cross the street.

Some business people were worried it would reduce traffic volumes and hurt their sales. It wasn't going to reduce traffic. The traffic would just be handled in fewer lanes. And it would move slower. When traffic moves slower people will see stores better and otherwise stop when they might not have before.

I also had lifelong friends tell me they didn't like the idea because it would take them a minute longer to get home from work because I'm slowing down the traffic. So the resistance to these projects can come from many places. By the way, construction on this project is about to start.

Q. How did you get into this field?

A. I kind of followed my heart. I had no background in engineering or planning or landscape architecture. I have a very good background in bicycling.

Around 1981, I made my first trip to Australia. When I walked around their towns, I realized that Australia was the country that I remembered when I was a kid growing up in Columbus, Ohio. Somehow my country had lost that scale, that sense of being a place where people knew one another, where you could walk anywhere, where anything you needed you could get by walking or biking or public transit. At the time, I was the state bicycle coordinator at the Florida Department of Transportation. I just basically went back to my job and changed my job title, didn't even ask, to state bicycle and pedestrian coordinator.

Q. What places are doing it right?

A. One I like is Fairview Village, near Portland, Ore. It's perfect. It's actually got a Target store, a department store, a school, lots of single-family residential housing, apartment housing and vast amounts of open space. It's all mixed together beautifully. It has six points of access into the village so that all the traffic gets distributed. None of the roads are big. It has links and trails.

Q. What surprises you about your work?

A. I go to work in a community, and even if I'm there two or three days, I don't have a clue whether the leaders are Democrats or Republicans. That means this is an issue for everybody.