SeeClickFix Tackles Tomlinson Bridge "Disaster"; ConnDOT Vetoes Safety Improvements

Original Post, 3/19/09: Rather than simply profiling another SeeClickFix "Issue of the Month" this month, DNH has decided to highlight some of the significant coverage received by the Downtown New Haven, Google Maps mashup-based company over the past few days. Using a particularly strong example from the Tomlinson Bridge on Route 1 over New Haven Harbor (pictured at left), we also describe why we think the site will be spreading around the country even more quickly than predicted.

A Tool for Livable Communities: The Coverage

The City Fix, a well-known sustainable transportation blog, has a lengthy post summarizing the company's progress:

Lately, the SeeClickFix guys have garnered national media attention. They were profiled by Voice of America (en Espanol). They scored a $25,000 grant from the We Media Pitch It Awards. And last month, they started incorporating its RSS feeds into an experimental "hyperlocal" news site, sponsored by The New York Times, that covers three small towns in New Jersey. Just last week, SeeClickFix scored a deal with Philly.com, embedding their Philadelphia map into a new “pothole tracker” tool.... According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s technology blog, “They’ve wired up New Haven so well that everyone from city managers to AT&T execs monitor their site and see to it that complaints get addressed.”

Melissa Bailey of the New Haven Independent wrote a profile in yesterday's newspaper, giving detailed examples of how the site is being used in New Haven:

SeeClickFix.com now has over 2,000 users nationwide, said Berkowitz. The project’s success comes thanks to the way it was embraced by the New Haven community, he said. To be effective, the tool relies on commitment from a community of “watchers,” public officials, activists and institutions who take responsibility for maintaining the public space. When someone opens a ticket to document a problem, a report is sent out to relevant watchers based on location and keywords. There are now 454 watchers in New Haven, according to Berkowitz.... After complaints about its shuttles speeding down residential streets, Yale University recently set up a watch area to track those complaints. Given the precise time and location of a speeding shuttle, the university can identify the driver and address the problem.

The site was also highlighted on the Planning Pool, a website devoted to cutting-edge urban planning ideas, including crowdsourcing, and listed on the CEOs for Cities blog; in addition to several cities where it is already being used, a quick search reveals that all around the country, people are posting about the site on their blogs and wondering when it will come to their neighborhood. Downtown New Haveners are very proud of the site, and use throughout New Haven and its suburbs is rapidly growing.

Can SeeClickFix Spread to Large Cities?

Of course, adoption of SeeClickFix depends on involved citizens using the tool, plus government and private entities adopting it as a means of communication with their constituents and customers (typically, having many involved citizens is the first prerequisite). This has worked exceptionally well in New Haven, which has an intimate and legendarily robust civic sector -- after all, the Nine Squares of Downtown New Haven was the first city plan in the United States, Betty Brown wove a detailed story of virtually every building in New Haven in her famous book, the New Haven Independent is currently one of the nation's finest examples of "hyperlocal" online journalism, etc. New Haven's government has also been incredibly responsive: there have been many reported potholes quickly filled, and graffiti complaints have often been addressed within hours of appearing on the website. But will it ever catch on in a larger, more chaotic city like Philadelphia or Chicago?

DNH believes that SeeClickFix will be rapidly adopted by individuals concerned with transportation safety and downtown retail districts, particularly as walking, bicycling and transit use all continue to skyrocket to record levels and beyond. Creating a transportation system that serves these millions of new users requires a much greater attention to detail -- for the simple reason that a small transportation system "gap" such as a crack, missing crosswalk, pothole or gravel in the road is far less likely to damage a truck axle than it is to critically injure a pedestrian, cyclist or bus rider crossing the street.

Design New Haven was the first third-party site to host SeeClickFix, and we believe that transportation and city advocates, such as those hosting some of the roughly 250 other blogs in the transportation and livable communities-focused "Streetsblog Network", may be next. Transportation advocates and downtown boosters generally have amicable existing relationships with local municipalities; once these two user groups begin using the site together -- perhaps in collaboration with public/private entities such as Downtown New Haven's Town Green BID, one of SCF's first public "fixers" -- use can spread more widely throughout a city and even help cement those relationships. In New Haven, for example, See Click Fix was used as a planning tool to help the city identify locations where in-street yield to pedestrian crosswalk signs were needed (and the city has reportedly ordered dozens of such signs since, to be installed this spring).

The Tomlinson Bridge "Engineering Disaster": Fixed?

To give a more detailed example of how this works, and keeping with our SCF "issue of the month" series, New Haven's number one issue at the moment, based on the number of "votes" to have it fixed, is the railroad grade crossing on the U.S. Route 1 Tomlinson Bridge. Opened in 2002, this massive, $120 million bridge represents the only viable pedestrian and bicycle connection from Downtown New Haven to the eastern suburbs of the city, and ConnDOT is currently constructing another, $757 million highway bridge right next to it. Unfortunately, besides the fact that the bridge is not a "complete street" by any remote stretch of the imagination, the railroad grade crossing is at a 30 degree angle to the roadway, and is unsigned for cyclists and improperly paved -- and therefore is extremely dangerous for even the most experienced bicyclists. To view a Google street view of the problem area and the bridge -- which is widely referred to as an "engineering disaster" in terms of overall safety and contribution to community connectivity -- you may click here.

Following posting on SeeClickFix, over 500 people viewed the issue and many comments were posted on the site, all of which can be read on the issue itself, whose link is http://www.seeclickfix.com/issues/1300.html. In addition to the posted comments (which are automatically sent to anyone who signs up for the issue with their email address), dozens of local commuters and cyclists emailed one another regarding the number of people they knew who had been seriously injured at the crossing. Frankly, the catalogue resulting from this exercise was frightening and deeply disturbing.

Based on the discussion on SeeClickFix, numerous individuals ranging from state and city officials to neighborhood activists have now been able to connect and advocate for a quick solution. According to sources, ConnDOT's crack traffic engineering squad is currently conducting an urgent review of the railroad grade crossing issue and plans to have a detailed report ready by April 1st. Hopefully a fix, or at least a temporary one, will happen very soon after that, given the serious injuries taking place on a regular basis. Following this, neighborhood leaders can move on to addressing the more complicated issue of the bridge's overall inadequacy when it comes to multimodal transportation. There's no doubt that many of these users will be back to SCF to report another issue in the very near future.

All in all, due to its potential to empower the community to find solutions for serious safety problems like this one, SeeClickFix gets our award for the best transportation safety innovation of 2008. We predict that within a few months, others watching livable streets issues nationwide will feel the same way.

Update 3/24/09: SeeClickFix has been incorporated into Miami's Urban City Architecture and profiled on Streetsblog San Francisco and Streetsblog New York.

Update 3/31/09: SeeClickFix leads to a successful narcotics sting near Downtown and is compared to Jane Jacobs, while the Tomlinson Bridge story is covered in the New Haven Register Sunday edition (original link here).

Update 7/6/09: The Register has another piece on the Tomlinson Bridge, indicating that more serious "fixes" to the problem are not currently being considered by the DOT, despite the large number of ongoing cyclist crashes at the site. A couple of small metal warning signs will be installed by August, however, which is a good start -- but still grossly inadequate at addressing the situation by any federal or state design standard.

For example, an excerpt from ConnDOT's own manual, posted on SeeClickFix, recommends installation of "flange way fillers." The design manual section refers to "high speed rail lines"; the rail track in question on the Tomlinson bridge was built for future port access and rarely (if ever) used for train traffic -- which, if it did occur, would certainly take place at an extremely low speed.

On low-speed, lightly traveled railroad tracks, commercially available flange way fillers can eliminate the gap next to the rail. The filler normally fills the gap between the inside railbed and the rail. When a train wheel rolls over it, the flange way filler compresses. This solution, however, is not acceptable for high-speed rail lines, as the filler will not compress fast enough and the train may derail. -ConnDOT Bicycle Design Guidelines, Page 42

Research into these "flange way fillers" (shown above) has found that although they are useful in some situations, when it comes to track crossings with extremely acute angles like the one at the Tomlinson Bridge, the fillers could increase the likelihood of cyclists' wheels slipping in a direction parallel to the rail, especially when wet. Although the fillers may be better than nothing if cyclists are appropriately warned of a slipping risk, the only acceptable solution here most likely involves re-engineering the street itself. The street pictured above has a wide shoulder, for example.

An excerpt from Mary O'Leary's piece in the Register:

James Newman, acting engineering administrator at the state Department of Transportation, in an e-mail to an Elm City Cycling member, said “it was not possible to improve the rail crossing geometry given the constraints of the location.”

Michael Piscitelli, New Haven’s transportation czar, said the city is looking at potential engineering changes to see if they come up with a fix for Forbes. “We have to figure out how to do it first, but I think the city would be interested in helping — finding a way to make that safer,” Piscitelli said.

Meanwhile, SeeClickFix continues to rapidly expand around the country, particularly through new collaborations with city government and media sites -- promising news for those concerned with creating more walkable streets and livable communities.

Update 07/13/10: Coverage and protests continue about the issue, which has caused yet more injuries in recent weeks. New Haven Safe Streets has a roundup of recent events.