Smart Junction, Smart City
Michael Schenkman, a 78 old man, is a ‘celebrity’ among a number of cyclists in Queens, New York City. He is an avid cyclist often pedaling nearly 20 miles a day. Besides, he also taught driver’s education for several years. “He knew the rules of the road”, his son said.
On Aug 24th, when he cycled near 223rd Street and began to merge from the center lane on the left to Cross Island Parkway bike trail in Bayside, a black Chevrolet Impala struck him, dragging him about 25 feet and leaving him fatally injured, according to New York Times report. Mr. Schenkman’s death has alerted all city riders that “Biking Perils Persist in New York”.
Though the city administration has spared no effort to implement traffic safety project, known as Vision Zero, the number of death of pedestrians and bikers caused by motors is still increasing yearly and standing in high average level. Besides increasing the number of protected bike lanes, further punishing traffic violations and lowering the default speed limit to 25 miles per hour, Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to need to do more to make the City more friendly to cyclists.
San Francisco’s case might be an inspiration for New Yorkers. As Esteve Almirall, the Director of Center for Innovation in Cities at ESADE, introduced, San Francisco not only has applied data technology to create TransBase , a platform to map and visualize traffic incidents, then to create High Injury Network where the hottest points were highlighted as the alarm for both the riders and car drivers, but also has applied smart design thinking to transform the crossroad as cycle-friendly as possible.
Protected Intersection, the official name of the designed road junction, is applicable and effective. As we know, The policies, even ambitious city administrations have made, are limited by budget and constraints of legislation. Compared with lowering the default speed or enforcing traffic violations further, Protected Intersection is straightforward and not much more likely as a wicked problem.
As the video shows, there are four principal elements for Protected Intersection: Corner Refuge Island brings the protective barrier from the bike lane far into the intersection, which guarantees the safety of cyclists when they turn right or wait at a red signal; Forward Stop Bar makes bikers much more visible to drivers and reduces the distance and time as bicyclists ride across the roads; Setback Crossing mainly shows as one car-length of parking space between the traffic lane and the bicycle crossing, which provide space and time for everyone to react to potential conflicts. Also, effective corners are designed with a small radius to force drivers to lower speed when they turn right. Bicycle Friendly Signal Phasing is either to provide head-start green light for bikes from 2 to 5 seconds or to create a specific time period for bikers to prohibit conflicting movements entirely.
In terms of the effectiveness of smart junctions, Cases in the Netherland set much more positive examples and provide us optimistic results after implementing design thinking in crossroads for several years. What’s more, the Dutch create protected intersections for different types of junctions, like ‘T’ Junction or Roundabout. In addition, They use colors to instruct the public how to ‘use’ the smart junctions as well.
For me, with much curiosity about data science, it’s time to think about how to apply data technology to design smarter junctions. After all, all the New Yorkers don’t want to lose another Michael Schenkman.
