Council Members Discover Pedestrian Crosswalk Ordinance Passed Without A Professional Engineering (PE) Report

Editor’s Note: Katherine Griswold is the Chair of The Ann Arbor Independent’s Editorial Board.

WARD 1 COUNCIL member Sumi Kailasapathy conducted an email exchange this Fall with city staff, including the city’s transportation project manager Eli Cooper. She asked to see a copy of the traffic engineering report prepared in support of the city’s 2010 pedestrian crosswalk ordinance.

Kailasapathy asked to see the engineering report because since 2010 auto accidents, including those involving pedestrians and cars, have risen sharply at the crosswalks. A University of Michigan student was killed in August 2013 while using a crosswalk on Plymouth Road.

The Ward 1 Council member had every reason to believe an engineering report existed. Video footage shows that when asked at a December 2011 City Council meeting by former Ward 2 Council member Tony Derezinski if traffic engineers supported the local pedestrian crosswalk ordinance, Eli Cooper had assured Derezinski the engineers did.

Traffic engineering is a subset of civil engineering and Michigan issues Professional Engineering (PE) certificates. PEs uphold standards similar to the way CPAs uphold their own industry standards. Traffic engineers would have produced a report about the crosswalk ordinance—a signed statement.

City staff sent Kailasapathy marketing materials and information related to alternative transportation, but no PE report. They told her it would take time to put together all of the materials she wanted.

Kailasapathy, a CPA, says, “I finally emailed them, ‘Guys don’t trouble yourselves with all of these other documents. Just send me the engineering report.’ It was 24 hours before I heard again from anyone. My email went silent.”

Then, Kailasapathy, Ward 2 Council members Jane Lumm  and Sally Hart Petersen arranged a meeting with city staff. It was at that meeting the three Council members discovered there was no PE report in support of the 2010 pedestrian crosswalk ordinance.

Kailasapathy said the three left the meeting determined to repeal the ordinance.

Kathy Griswold is a school and pedestrian activist. She said: “We would not be discussing whether engineers are needed to build a bridge, so why do some people think an urban planner and a citizen’s advocacy group can replace a traffic engineer in crafting a local traffic ordinance?”

Griswold is alluding to the Washtenaw Biking and Walking Coalition (WBWC) and the small nonprofit group’s Board member Erica Briggs, a former member of the Ann Arbor Planning Commission. Briggs is also a pedestrian activist and an alternative transportation supporter.

By all accounts, including media coverage, the Washtenaw Biking and Walking Coalition was instrumental in getting the 2010 pedestrian crosswalk ordinance passed.  Erica Briggs was outspoken in her support of the ordinance, pressing City Council members on the need for pedestrians to be safe.

Critics suggest that the 2010 ordinance was a perfect storm of good intentions, ill-planned alternative transportation advocacy and political opportunism. It has  also been suggested by those in favor of repealing the ordinance that a lack of police enforcement coupled with an ineffectual citizen education campaign may have led to the August death of a U of M student while crossing Plymouth Road. Pedestrians were “educated” to believe they “ruled”—that drivers would stop.

Now, several City Council members want to repeal the city’s pedestrian crosswalk ordinance and rely on the Michigan Uniform Traffic Code (MUTC). Critics call those Council members “anti-alternative transit” and “obstructionist.”

Ward 2 Council member Sally Hart Petersen refutes such criticisms: “I don’t think there is anything obstructionist or anti-alternative transit about wanting pedestrians to be as safe as possible.”

Ward 5 City Council member Mike Anglin sees the issue as one of “health, safety and public welfare.” City Council members, says Anglin, “must have that as our highest priority.”

Three years ago, after intense lobbying by the WBWC, Ann Arbor City Council members passed a crosswalk ordinance that required cars to stop if pedestrians were “approaching or within a crosswalk.”

The new ordinance went unenforced by the AAPD for the first 12 months. The city’s police department, with just 6-8 officers on patrol during the day, doesn’t have the staff to do proactive policing and thus couldn’t stake out the new crosswalks and issue citations to the motorists who blew through them, unaware of the change in local traffic law.

This gap in police enforcement resulted in numerous rear-end collisions at the new crosswalks and even a write-up about the whole mess in The Atlantic. Local writer Micheline Maynard writes in a December 2011 piece, “Ann Arbor, Mich. is the smartest city in the country – at least according to a new study by The Business Journals. But all it takes is an ordinance governing cars and pedestrians to get all those brainy people in a tizzy.”

In December 2011, Council tweaked the ordinance to read “… the driver of a vehicle shall stop before entering a crosswalk and yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian stopped at the curb, curb line or ramp leading to a crosswalk and to every pedestrian within a crosswalk, when the pedestrian is on the half of the roadway on which the vehicle is traveling or when the pedestrian is approaching so closely from the opposite half of the roadway as to be in danger.”

The 2011 tweak was done without the benefit of a PE report, as well.

Nonetheless, supporters of the ordinance say that more cars than ever before stop at the crosswalks installed on busy roads, such as along Plymouth Road.

The city’s transportation program manager Eli Cooper defends the resolution he championed. He says the problem lies with pedestrians and motorists who are ignorant of the law.

Ward 5 Council member Mike Anglin agrees to a point. He says, “Interest in repeal comes from the desire to educate public as what is expected of each group.  Drivers,  walkers and bicyclists all have to understand what the other group is expecting.”

Ward 1 Council member Sabra Briere agrees with Cooper. “Cars stop 75 percent of the time at those crosswalks. Before the ordinance, cars didn’t stop at all.”

“Sabra says, ‘Cars stop seventy-five percent of the time?’ That’s not good enough,” said Ward 1 resident Eva Forman. “People are at risk.”

Ward 1 Council member Sumi Kailasapathy agrees, and worries, in particular, about the city’s children.

“Telling kids, ‘You guys rule on the road,’ is really treachery,” Kailasapathy told The Michigan Daily in a recent interview.

In response to a suggestion that the crosswalk ordinance should be repealed, Briere said, “We can’t just throw our arms up and say, ‘It doesn’t work!’ ”

Council member Petersen wants to repeal the ordinance but says: “I do not think the RRFBs (flashing yellow light boxes) should be removed, just that pedestrians should not assume cars will stop.”

Assuming that cars will stop, of course, is at the heart of this issue.

A WBWC petition posted to Change.org is intended to persuade Council members to preserve the pedestrian crosswalk ordinance; it makes exactly this point: “Without our current ordinance, individuals with disabilities, seniors, kids and those of us who don’t wish/are unable to dash across busy streets, will not have the legal protections we need.”

From the start Kathy Griswold questioned why the city needed a local pedestrian safety ordinance.

“Why are local politicians, with no apparent training or knowledge of transportation engineering best-practices, making and editing traffic engineering laws?” she said in a public comment made at a 2011 City Council meeting.

More recently, in an interview with The Michigan Daily, Griswold said, “The current law is not based on engineering analysis but simply prioritizing pedestrians’ rights. Unfortunately, I think that in Ann Arbor we’re an intellectual community and that this is just a symptom of how Ann Arbor frequently operates. We try to intellectualize a problem that really is a concrete physical problem.”

If not engineering analyses, what did persuade Council members to pass the pedestrian crosswalk ordinance? In 2009, the WBWC produced a video of a “test” pedestrian with a white cane attempting to cross at a Plymouth Road crosswalk. According to the video, in 30 minutes two cars stopped.

Another 2009 video by the group focuses on a child pedestrians’s “visceral sense of fear” while attempting to cross a busy section of Liberty Street.

The video attributes the term to the U.S. Department of Transportation. U.S. DOT officials said that while their department promotes pedestrian safety, the research U.S. DOT does can’t determine a pedestrian’s psychological state while crossing streets.

Now that there is a movement afoot to repeal the ordinance, the WBWC is on the offensive. The group’s petition at Change.org is titled, “Ann Arbor City Council: Protect the right for all pedestrians to cross the road! Don’t repeal the crossing ordinance.”

The petition argues: Has the city’s pedestrian crosswalk ordinance “resulted in increased risks to pedestrians in Ann Arbor? No! According to crash reports from 2012 to 2002,  there had been absolutely no changes in crash rates.”

That claim, however, is contradicted by data collected by the Michigan Department of Transportation. In fact collisions between cars and pedestrians in Ann Arbor rose between 2010 and 2013. In 2010 there were 45 pedestrian-automobile crashes. A year later, after the adoption of the new crosswalk ordinance, there were 63 crashes.

Walk. Bike. Drive. That slick slogan tops the City of Ann Arbor’s Transportation webpage.  The problem is that since the 2010 passage of the pedestrian crosswalk ordinance, data suggest crossing the street has become more dangerous. The hodgepodge of signs placed at various crosswalks hasn’t helped.

John Hieftje and former Ward 5 Democratic Council member Carsten Hohnke co-sponsored the pedestrian safety ordinance. The two pushed through the ordinance despite the fact that in a 2009 report by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership as well as Transportation for America, the groups ranked Ann Arbor first in pedestrian safety among 15 metro areas in the state. However, the ordinance made great political fodder. Hieftje and Hohnke rode the wave of pedestrian “safety” in their respective re-election campaigns.

It has been suggested that Ann Arbor instituted the pedestrian ordinance on the cheap, installing a single High-intensity Activated crossWalK signal (HAWK) in November 2010 at just one crosswalk near the Ann Arbor YMCA, at the intersection of Third and Huron Streets.

City Transportation Manager Eli Cooper made it clear that installing the HAWK signals was a matter of money. He told the local press:

“We can already see that it works.” Cooper also said, “It’s possible the city will get more HAWK signals in the future. The question of how many and where becomes an issue of resources.”

A HAWK signal costs approximately $60,000, half the cost of Eli Cooper’s annual salary.

Had the city installed HAWK signals at all of the pedestrian crosswalks, including those placed on Plymouth Road, would a life have been saved? That simple question has led to some very unsettling answers about how the pedestrian crosswalk ordinance was shaped and ultimately sold to he public.

Ward 1 Council member Sumi Kailasapathy is polite but dogged. “I asked to see the engineering report on the crosswalk ordinance, and staff sent me all this other stuff, this fluff. Information about awards the city has won, articles.”

Someone other than Council member Kailasapathy might have backed off, but Kailasapathy pressed on, concerned for the safety of the city’s children to whom city officials distributed bookmark rulers that trumpeted, “Pedestrian’s Rule!”

Ward 4 Council member Jack Eaton agrees that the development and implementation of the 2010 crosswalk ordinance resembles social policy more than traffic engineering.

Kathy Griswold is also concerned about the safety of the city’s children.

“We are empowering pedestrians without the engineering infrastructure and driver education to achieve safe crosswalks….Why is the City continuing to distribute the “Pedestrians Rule!” bookmark ruler with the outdated ‘approaching’ language? And did the City recall the posters with the same outdated language from our schools? Why does Ann Arbor need a local ordinance given the Michigan code? Does the local ordinance just create a false sense of safety for the pedestrian at a crosswalk, especially when only the pedestrian is aware of the local ordinance?”

All excellent questions that may never be answered. In 2010, the pedestrian crosswalk ordinance was passed unanimously. Council members Marcia Higgins, Sandi Smith, Tony Derezinski, Stephen Rapundalo all voted in favor of the ordinance. All four are gone from Council, three voted out of office. They been replaced with Council members who support alternative transportation, but find it extremely disturbing that no PE report exists.

“We’re planning to bring the repeal of the ordinance up sometime in November,” said one Council member. “We have the votes to repeal it.”

Kathy Griswold is working with Representative Adam Zemke to get a pedestrian crosswalk ordinance passed on the state level. If they succeed, it will supersede the city’s own ordinance. What remains to be seen is whether Council members will hold the City Administrator accountable for the missing PE report.