statewide efforts Archives - WalkMassachusetts

WalkMA Network connects towns

By Brendan Kearney/Communications Director, WalkBoston

At our WalkBoston annual meeting in March 2018, we announced that we were building a statewide WalkMassachusetts network. It would consist of advocacy organizations, municipal committees, and community groups working on walking.
The Network aims to connect and support new, emerging, and existing local organizations. Key Network features include community and statewide sharing of advocacy techniques, member recruitment strategies, and approaches for securing improvements to the built environment.

Many organizations and committees have questions about how to build constituencies for improving local walking, and we see great opportunities to learn from each other and to work together. Early interest came from points all over the state, including Western and Central Massachusetts, the North Shore, Greater Boston, Metrowest, the South Coast, and the Cape. To maximize statewide participation, we gathered at Worcester Polytechnic Institute on Saturday, December 1, for our initial in-person meeting.

After introductions to let everyone learn a little bit about each person and group in the room, participants suggested topic areas to create the agenda in an “unconference” format. Each person proposed a topic they wanted
to discuss by writing it on an index card. Cards were then exchanged, and everyone ranked the new card’s topic by writing a number between 1 and 5 at the top — and then trading for another card. Once a card had five ratings, each card was totaled for a score. These were the six highest-ranked topics used for breakout sessions:

Low-cost infrastructure improvements
Outreach. Emails. Social media. How to do it. Resources to use.
Content accessibility, navigation, mobility, features [sensory input]
Tools to incentivize behavior change
Vision Zero – enforcement of lower speed limits
Best practices for reaching out and gaining support from people not involved in bike/ped advocacy

We’re thankful to everyone who took part for their lively conversations, questions, and suggestions. At the end of the day, we launched an email listserv/online discourse forum to continue the connections that were made in Worcester. We also added notes from each of the breakout sessions and the full list of topic suggestions to the forum so that additional resources can be shared.

We’re excited that participation in the Network is growing to include so many groups working on walking throughout the Commonwealth—and we’re gearing up for more throughout 2019. Visit walkMAnetwork.org to see participating groups and learn more about how you can get involved.

This article was featured in WalkBoston’s February 2019 newsletter.
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New state Pedestrian Plan is a positive step

By Adi Nochur/Project Manager, WalkBoston

As the largest single investor in the state’s roadway and pedestrian system, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation [MassDOT] has a critical responsibility to take pedestrian safety, accessibility, and convenience seriously in all of its actions and investments. With its release of a draft Massachusetts Pedestrian Transportation Plan last fall, the agency has expressed a strong commitment to addressing these issues.

The Plan recommends policies, programs, and projects for MassDOT to guide decision-making and capital investments. It also provides a Municipal Resource Guide for Walkability to support cities and towns in their efforts to improve walkability on local streets. The Plan advances a vision that all people in Massachusetts have a safe and comfortable option to walk for short trips.

The Plan further outlines goals of eliminating pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries and increasing the percentage of short trips made by walking. It is rooted in principles of treating people walking the same as people driving, focusing on systematic safety improvements, and supporting municipalities to do the same. We are especially pleased that MassDOT is using the Plan to improve its own practices and lead by example — an approach that WalkBoston encouraged throughout the development of the Plan.

We support the Plan’s vision, goals, and principles and applaud several of its action items, including research on the impacts and benefits of automated speed enforcement, construction of safe crossings to connect bus stops to destinations, piloting a winter snow and ice removal initiative on pedestrian facilities, and collection and analysis of pedestrian-focused data. Please see our comments on the draft Plan: walkboston.org/tag/pedestrian-plan.

WalkBoston also offered several recommendations to strengthen the Plan. These included preparing in-depth analysis of pedestrian injury patterns across the state and by race, creating an annual review process with advocates and peers outside MassDOT to ensure continuous improvement, and providing more in-depth state-level tracking and municipal guidance around pedestrian signals.

We look forward to seeing a final version of the Plan in 2019. As part of the Massachusetts Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board, we will play an important role in guiding the Plan’s implementation. Through continued collaboration with partners from the advocacy community, and state and local government, we will continue to make steady progress toward the goal of a more walkable Massachusetts for all.

For more info on MassDOT’s Pedestrian Plan, head to: https://www.mass.gov/service-details/pedestrian-plan

WalkBoston comments on Metropolitan Planning Organization process

WalkBoston has submitted comments to the Federal Transit Administration and the Federal Highway Administration on the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (MPO) transportation planning process. The MPO plays a critical role in developing a vision for transportation in the region and deciding how to allocate federal and state transportation funds to transportation programs and projects that improve roadway, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure. Read the full comment letter here.

Comments on MassDOT Draft Pedestrian Plan

October 16, 2018

Secretary Stephanie Pollack
Massachusetts Department of Transportation
10 Park Plaza
Boston, MA 02116

Dear Secretary Pollack:

WalkBoston is pleased to provide comments on the Draft MA Pedestrian Transportation Plan, and to see so many of the comments that we and other members of the Massachusetts Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board captured in the Plan.

The vision, goals and principles set a strong context and base for the Plan, and we are especially pleased that MassDOT has adopted the principle of leading by example and supporting municipalities. As the largest single investor in the State’s roadway and pedestrian system, MassDOT has a critical responsibility to take pedestrian safety, accessibility and convenience seriously in all of its actions and investments.

We specifically applaud several of the action items including:

3-3: Research on benefits and impacts of automated speed enforcement (ASE). We will continue to advocate for legislation that will allow ASE to be is implemented in an equitable manner. Automated enforcement has been shown to be an effective means of discouraging dangerous driver behavior.
4-1: Construct safe crossings to connect bus stops to destinations, starting with MassDOT-owned corridors.
5-1: Pilot a winter snow and ice removal initiative on pedestrian facilities in order to provide the basis for development of a comprehensive plan – and an understanding of potential barriers to make such a program permanent.
6-1 – 6-3: Collecting and analyzing pedestrian focused data.

Our comments below reflect several additional issues and refinements that we believe will strengthen the Plan:

The equity discussion should be updated to include MA Department of Public Health (DPH) injury data for Massachusetts which reveals substantial differences in injury rates by race. Under Initiative 2 we recommend adding an action item of preparing in-depth analysis of injury patterns across the state that combines the crash reporting provided by police and EMS and the hospital data that is gathered by DPH. We understand that MassDOT and DPH have begun this analysis, and think that this process should be formalized as one basis for the prioritization analysis.
Initiative 1 sets ambitious and strong actions for MassDOT’s own design and operations practices, including maintaining pedestrian routes through work sites during construction. We are concerned that Action 1-1 will be difficult to accomplish and measure without outside review, and suggest adding a measure for tracking progress such as the following:
- Create an annual review process of MassDOT development, scoping, scoring, design and construction that invites advocates and peers from outside the agency to comment on how pedestrians have been prioritized in agency activities. The review should be designed to guide MassDOT in a continuous improvement process to learn from each project:
  - What is working well?
  - What can be improved?
Initiative 5 of the Plan should include specific reference to traffic signals, including a measure that tracks the number of signals on MassDOT roads that include pedestrian-focused attributes, such as concurrent WALK signals, Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPI), and automatic recall of WALK signals (not requiring people walking to push a button). In addition, MassDOT should consider providing more in-depth guidance to municipalities about good practice for pedestrian signals – the inconsistency in signals among the State’s 351 cities and towns contributes to confusion for pedestrians and drivers which can lead to unsafe conditions. This section may also be an opportunity to share information on the safety benefit for “No Right Turn on Red.”
Principle 3 of the plan describes that MassDOT will lead by example yet municipalities are critical to the success of the plan, since MassDOT owns just 8% of all sidewalk and 8.2% of all roadway miles in Massachusetts. We encourage MassDOT to add information about that other state agencies that maintain pedestrian facilities, like DCR and the MBTA, and should recommend that they also follow MassDOT’s best practices for communities to emulate.
The presentation of the report was visually pleasing, but has some features that could be improved:
- If using this web-based ARCGIS format for any future reports, please create a way to easily jump to sections within the document from the introduction. The table of contents is a static list, which makes it difficult to refer back to specific sections since page numbers are not obvious.
- Using the share link at the top left of the page re-directs a user back to the beginning of the document, not to the page/section of the document that the user is on. There was not a readily apparent way to link to a section.
- While this web-based ARCGIS report format allows a user to zoom in on statewide maps (which likely would be rendered difficult to read in a printed format), please provide an option to access the final version of the plan in a visually clear PDF form.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide comment.

Sincerely,

Wendy Landman
Executive Director