Respecting All Methods of Transportation

Viable alternatives to driving starts with treating other methods of transportation with dignity and respect

Around the Seacoast Region we have lots of options on how to get around from one place to another. In one of my earliest articles I wrote about this luxury which many areas of our country do not have, but I also highlighted that we do prioritize automobile movement above all others. In today's article I want to expand on that idea by highlighting ways that we bias our transportation system towards automobiles, often to the detriment of other methods. I also want to offer suggestions on how we can create an improved approach that respects all forms of transportation.

2025 April Meeting Details

Monday, April 14th, 6:30PM - 8:00PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St
Dover, NH 03820

We will start our meeting with a presentation from a group member on OpenStreetMap, what it is and how it could be a potentially useful tool for our group. I'm interested in this because maps are incredibly useful tools, not just for navigation, but also for communicating and representing data.

After that we will be following up on the City of Dover's Bicycle Friendly Streetscape Guidelines that we reviewed at our March meeting by looking at a list of streets that have upcoming restriping or maintenance and get group input on how these street's designs could be improved during that effort. Our hope is to collect feedback and ideas for these streets that can be brought to the City of Dover and impact the designs that get approved.

The Bias in Our Transportation Network

These four travel lanes located in Downtown Dover are dedicated to automobiles, but there are zero bike lanes available

Automobiles seem like the default method for transportation here, and across the country. The idea that you need an automobile to be able to accomplish everyday tasks is so prevalent, that it often goes unquestioned and in fact if someone doesn't own one, that it seems strange or crazy. Without an automobile, how do you buy groceries or go to the gym? How do you go shopping on the weekends or visit your friends? Isn't that inconvenient?

To be frank, yes it is inconvenient, but only when you live in an area that has biased its transportation system towards automobiles. If you happen to live in an area where the transportation is focused on the movement of people, and not solely on the movement of automobiles, then not owning one doesn't feel inconvenient, it feels normal. There are many places across the world, highly developed and wealthy places, where people go to work, pick up groceries, attend church, go to the gym, eat out, and live productive lives all without the need for an automobile.

Zoomed in view of off street parking in Downtown Dover

This bias for automobiles shows up in both big and small ways and it sends a message to people who do not drive, "This place does not prioritize you and your safety and comfort are secondary." It signifies a lack of respect towards non-drivers. I wanted to highlight a few of these and point out solutions for the smaller ones that are easy, cheap fixes for any city or town to do. These will be improvements that make walking and biking safer, more comfortable, more convenient, and dignified options to engage in.

Longer Crosswalks for Faster Turning

When walking along a sidewalk, it is common to come across an intersection of two streets and to use a crosswalk to navigate it. This is comparatively much more dangerous than the sidewalk because people are crossing in areas where automobile also cross, and it exposes them to potential fatal or injurious collisions.

Notice how the street widens just before it gets to the intersection. The red highlights show the extra crosswalk distance that it creates.

Unfortunately it is also common to see streets widen at the exact location of a crosswalk. This is done to affect the corner radii so that automobiles can take turns at higher speeds. This decreases the safety for pedestrians because it increases the distance for people to cross while also increasing the speeds of any potential collisions. It is important to note that automobile speeds can have a dramatic effect on the survivability of a collision with a pedestrian, so even a 5mph difference can cause a spike in fatality rates.

Central and Chestnut - Traffic heading south along Central barely has to slow down to take this turn and notice the extra length of the crosswalk.

Central and Oak - The turning lanes at this intersection make the crosswalk much longer while also adding potential points of contact for pedestrians in the crosswalk

Central and Washington - A combination of turning lanes, slip lanes, and significantly widened streets make these crosswalks unpleasant and dangerous for pedestrians

This added danger and risk in crosswalks can be mitigated by simply shortening the crosswalk (thereby shortening the amount of distance to cross) and by slowing down automobiles when they are driving over the crosswalk. We need to treat crosswalk safety with a higher priority than we do automobile speeds, and cities and towns can easily make this change.

Sidewalk Cutouts for Smoother Driving

Another walking experience that you may be familiar with is the sidewalk roller coaster of ups and downs that create a bumpy inconsistency. Every driveway and intersection where there is a sidewalk a section of it is cut out and dropped to street grade. This creates uneven surfaces to walk on, and can be inconvenient for people with strollers or wheelchairs. Also, if you're curious where large puddles form that will soak your shoes and socks, it is at these locations.

Every driveway cuts out a section of the sidewalk creating an uneven experience that is amplified on rainy days due to the puddles of water that collect in these cutouts

A sidewalk is supposed to be infrastructure that is dedicated to walking, but even here we can find that bias. Imagine if it were flipped around and every crosswalk was raised to sidewalk level, and every driveway had a ramp leading up to the sidewalk level. Would motorists be upset that suddenly they have to watch out for differences in street grades or would they be as ok with it as we expect pedestrians to be?

Bad Crosswalk Timers for More Traffic Flow

When you are at a signalized crosswalk, you will typically find a beg button to request access to the street so that you can safely cross it. While the idea of a beg button itself is something I would consider a bias towards automobiles (who don’t have to beg), I want to discuss ways that we could at least balance the bias here. We can most certainly improve the experience for pedestrians.

Imagine that you've pushed the button and are now given the signal to cross, but it seems as if it is only a few seconds before the 15 second countdown begins, a yellow light equivalent for pedestrians. This becomes even more of an issue when you need to cross two streets at the same time, now you have to wait for two entire signal cycles just to finish crossing. Automobiles will be given upwards of a minute or more for their green lights, and but for some reason we can barely find the time for people walking.

There is also seemingly an assumption here that the only person crossing is the one who pushed the button. As if there could not possibly more people that might be 20 or so steps behind them when the signal is given, but by the time they get to it the countdown has begun. Again, imagine if this were flipped. Consider a traffic light that is always red until someone drives up to it and hits a button, then as soon as they drive through it the yellow light turns on.

Comic by Dhiru Thadani

A better way to do this is to give pedestrians the same amount of time (or maybe more) that we are willing to give to automobiles. Drivers regularly experience coming up on a light that is already green, pedestrians should be able to have this experience as well. We can also give an "all way crossing" to pedestrians and stop both lanes of automobile traffic to let people get to whichever end of the street they want to be at. "All way" crossings should be accompanied by diagonal crosswalks or at least some indication that it is safe to walk through the center of the street.

Missing or Narrow Bike Lanes for Wide or Multiple Travel Lanes

Streets can sometimes be really wide with highway-sized travel lanes for automobiles, parking lanes, left or right turn lanes, the works. There seems to be plenty of room for accommodating the various needs and wants for drivers, but often you can't even find a bike lane or if there is one it can be uncomfortably narrow.

For an example I could pick many streets that are missing bike lanes altogether, but let's choose a street that was redesigned relatively recently to include bike lanes, Silver Street. The travel lanes are 11' wide and you can find turning lanes in multiple places along it, but the bike lanes are only 3-4' wide which is below the recommendation. At one point the bike lanes end and are replaced by sharrows, but you can still find turning lanes here.

Silver Street - We have room for a turning lane in the center of the street, but the bike lanes are too narrow and without buffers

Silver Street - A turning lane here that invites drivers to pass through the bike lane to get to it

Silver Street - The right side of the intersection has two turning lanes and zero bike lanes, only a sharrow

Improvements here can be done in so many places. There are lots of opportunities around us to reduce the width of travel lanes, to remove these accessory turning lanes, and to provide capable, viable bicycle infrastructure. Putting up a sharrow or a "Share the Road" sign should be a last resort decision that is only made when there actually isn't enough room for an additional lane to dedicate to bikes. If there's room for parking or a turning lane, then there is room for a bike lane.

Disproportionate Public Investments in Automobiles

Finally I would like to highlight the disparity of public investment into facilitating different methods of travel. There are so many places that I could start with here, just consider the number of miles of dedicated automobile infrastructure and compare it to the number of miles of dedicated walking or cycling infrastructure. That number alone will dramatically demonstrate a bias, and be sure to remember that out of the three of those automobile infrastructure is significantly more expensive than the other two. For simplicity, let’s make the comparison a bit more targeted and limit it to just one specific investment, the Dover Parking Garage.

According to a Foster’s Daily Democrat article, the garage cost $11.5 million to build and while it did not give an expected useful life, there is a second garage planned with an expected useful life of 40 years so we can use that as our base. There is an additional $3.3 million for maintenance on the garage that was approved in the capital improvement plan (p. 111) with an expected 20 years of use. Let’s do some math to find out the yearly costs the city is putting into this.

$11.5M / 40 years = $287,000 yearly average
$3.3M / 20 = $165,000 yearly average
Total = $452,000 yearly average

That yearly $452k is money spent on providing 321 parking spaces in the Dover garage. Let’s compare that number to how much Dover invests into the main transit provider in the area, COAST, per year. According to the most recently adopted city budget (p. 238) for Dover, they are making a contribution of $564,510 in 2026 and pouring over previous budgets for the last 10 years there has been a total contribution of $3,210,083. That makes it an average yearly contribution of $321,008 over the last 10 years.

2026 Contribution = $564,510 + $290,000*
2025 Contribution = $491,231 + $170,000
2024 Contribution = $399,304 + $139,000
2023 Contribution = $351,639 + $139,000
2022 Contribution = $286,093 + $129,493
2021 Contribution = $286,093 + $180,540
2020 Contribution = $225,993 + $180,540
2019 Contribution = $239,026 + $180,540
2018 Contribution = $198,540 + $180,540
2017 Contribution = $167,654 + $167,654
Total Contribution = $3,210,083 + $1,757,307
Average Contribution = $321,008 + $175,730

* The second number is for a line item in each yearly budget called "COAST - Transportation Improvements Project Transfer", but I could not find out what this for or if it is actually additional money for COAST. I decided to include it in the calculations in case

I’m not an expert on the city’s budget, but these are the numbers that I found and could confidently show. Just by comparing these two investments you can see how much of a disparity there is here. For just a single parking garage the expected yearly cost to taxpayers is slightly less than what goes towards the primary transit service. Also, what about bike parking? Does Dover spend anywhere close to $452k a year? The installations that you see in Downtown Dover were all generously donated by the Rotary Club.

Conclusion

Walking and biking are tremendously valuable methods of transportation for a city to invest in and enable many more people to access the transportation network in productive ways. If cities should be biased in any direction, it should be towards walking first, and then biking (especially surrounding denser areas). In my personal opinion, owning an automobile should be considered about as mandatory as owning a boat; you might need one for work, but for everyone else it is a expensive toy. Strong Towns Seacoast is going to be focusing on promoting viable alternatives to driving in this region. There are new developments popping up all around the area, and we want to help set up our communities for success by advocating for transportation that is accessible, productive, safe, and scales well with new growth. If this sounds like something you want to participate in, we would love to see you at one of our upcoming member meetings!