Colin Fiske, Executive Director
In order to understand the need for rapid changes to our streets, we have to first review some grim statistics.
More than 40,000 people are killed in car crashes every year in the United States, including more than 7,000 pedestrians. Nationwide, pedestrian deaths have increased 75% since 2010. In Humboldt County alone, 27 people were killed and 127 severely injured in car crashes last year.
Cars and trucks are also accelerating the climate crisis. The transportation sector is the leading source of climate pollution nationwide, and the only major sector where emissions continue to increase. The draft Humboldt County Regional Climate Action Plan estimates that on-road transportation is responsible for 73% of the climate pollution that local governments can control or influence in our region.
These facts make it clear that, if we value our lives and the livability of our planet, we need things to change quickly. But today, if you were to propose even a modest improvement like a new bike lane or a safer pedestrian crossing in your community, it would likely take years or even decades to see that change happen—if it happened at all.
There are a lot of reasons street safety projects take a long time, but two of the big ones are cost and community opposition. Working with asphalt and concrete is expensive, and only getting more so. And a proposed change to the layout of a street often provokes fierce resistance from people who believe that it will impact their lives in an undesirable way.
A strategy called quick-build offers a promising way to address both of these problems and get meaningful safety improvements built in a much shorter period of time. Quick-build projects use low-cost materials like paint and bollards to rapidly implement proven safety improvements including bike lanes, crosswalks, bulb-outs, and more. Quick-build projects are meant to last several years. And while they can’t produce perfect conditions on every street, they can make things noticeably safer and do it rapidly and at very low cost.
Quick-build projects can buy time for a city or county to identify funding for more permanent improvements. They can also make the planning process for these permanent improvements much more meaningful and engaging. Instead of imagining—and perhaps fearing—what a project might be like, street users can experience what really happens when safety measures are implemented. And because the materials and techniques don’t cost much, it’s easy to make changes if any practical problems actually arise. That, along with the limited lifespan of the materials, is why quick-build improvements are often considered part of the planning process itself.
At the time of this writing, there have not yet been any quick-build projects in our region. But there will be soon! The City of Arcata is currently pursuing a quick-build project on K Street, Humboldt County Public Works is collaborating with the McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee to design a quick-build project on Hiller Road, and the Eureka City Council recently expressed interest in using quick-build techniques on several of the projects in the newly adopted citywide bike plan. At CRTP, we hope that the quick-build approach will become common, and that it will allow local governments to rapidly build what we really need: not just individual projects, but complete networks of safe bike and pedestrian facilities in our communities.