The Hesitancy of Western Massachusetts to Address Traffic Deaths Is a Warning to All

*Advocates call for action on State Street, the site of numerous deaths, in Springfield, MA. (Source: Streetsblog.)*

Last month, I did public speaking events in Southern California, engagements hosted by Local Conversations in both Costa Mesa and Pasadena. The turnout was great. The crowds were enthusiastic. Everyone was ready to talk about what it would take to build safer streets, and beyond talk, people were demanding change. Justified impatience and frustration connected a room of otherwise pleasant Californians.

The challenge in California, and throughout the entire western half of the country, is that the DNA of their places is mostly auto oriented. Costa Mesa and Pasadena have some lovely neighborhoods, but both grew up during the post-war boom. Every facet of their mobility is built around movement by automobile. In the most proactive and productive places, people walking or biking are accommodated, but rarely in a way that would inconvenience—let alone hinder—automobile movement. These are auto-first communities.

Of course, this has wrought tremendous financial damage on families, small businesses, and local governments. These places are also notoriously dangerous, for drivers but especially for anyone outside of an automobile. Fixing this mess requires us to get beyond a change in leadership and enacting a couple of simple solutions to something more like broad cultural change.

This is hard, yet both events were full of people ready to climb the Mount Everest of local policy challenges in the hope that things will become modestly better. The task can seem overwhelming, quite frankly, but I stand with them nonetheless. I’ve met some of our nation’s greatest local leaders in Costa Mesa and Pasadena. They deserve all of our support, and they are making things better. Just watch.

Where cities in Southern California have an endless number of structural challenges, the cities of Western Massachusetts have a seemingly endless number of advantages. Where California’s DNA is auto oriented, cities in Massachusetts are among the most walkable in North America. To the extent that their neighborhoods are dangerous and financially unproductive—and they are both—it is damage they did to themselves. They didn’t grow up this way; after World War II, they attempted a DNA transformation. They wanted to be more like California. It didn’t take.

There are a lot of courageous people working in Massachusetts and throughout the Northeast of the country to address these problems, particularly the challenge of street safety. There is plenty to show from these efforts (for example, cities like Hoboken and Jersey City are models for what Vision Zero is supposed to be), but progress is maddeningly slow, especially given the comparative ease with which transformation can occur there.

Where California’s cities need a full genetic mutation to thrive, Massachusetts’ cities merely need to stop consuming the urban policy equivalent of expensive junk food. Costa Mesa and Pasadena need a cultural transformation equivalent to a collective lobotomy. Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee need only follow their own people and lean into their community strengths.

Yet, while I’m continuously pleasantly surprised by the progress being made in places in Southern California, I repeatedly find a low bar of pathetic expectations too high for many cities in Massachusetts to clear. Costa Mesa and Pasadena would give almost anything for the downtowns of Springfield and Holyoke, but these Western Massachusetts communities seem beyond ignorant of their own riches. It is almost as if they hold themselves in contempt, bent on their own demise. I don’t get it.

I wrote an entire book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, using State Street in Springfield as a device to discuss street safety. Last month, the local paper, Masslive, ran another in a series of articles asking the same question: What’s being done to make roads safer?

The answer: not much. Certainly nothing with any sense of urgency.

In the wake of yet another death on State Street, the city finally took some action. In the way we have been calling for for years, they went out with cones and barrels and rapidly iterated a design that slowed traffic and dramatically improved safety. “It went a lot better than I thought it would,” DPW Director Christopher Cignoli was quoted as saying. “I thought we’d be picking up barrels all over western Massachusetts.”

It should not have taken numerous deaths, but at least it seemed like Springfield was finally making progress. That was in late 2021, after we recorded a podcast interpreting engineering speak for the public officials in Springfield. Then the cones and barrels that worked so well went away. Then nothing.

In August 2022, it was announced that the project was delayed so the DPW could study the impact on traffic, something they could have done when the barrels and cones were in place. Since then, the city has done more studying and discerning, applied for grants, been awarded a federal grant, and now hired more consultants, all in pursuit of an approach guaranteed to not scale. There is no urgency here.

There is plenty of misplaced blame, however. Cignoli readily blames the users of the system he designed, not his own approach. “If people are going to break rules, there’s only so much we can do,” he was quoted as saying. “We still have a big, big problem with speeding.” For Cignoli, there is apparently no “I” in “we,” even though the overwhelming reason people speed is because of the design (something the cone and barrel demonstration showed).

I don’t understand why elected officials tolerate this kind of ignorance in their leadership positions, especially in departments spending millions of dollars and having such an oversized impact on public safety. If someone can’t be fired or reassigned, then reassign the tasks of doing a collaborative design to a different team, one that more clearly understands the problem. But, again, this isn’t just Springfield. I experience this approach all over the Northeast; a lack of urgency combined with a deference to systems shown to be out of alignment with public safety.

Up the stroad from Springfield, Chicopee is asking similar questions. Again, from Masslive last month: “Chicopee topped state list of most pedestrian fatal crashes last year. What is it doing to fix that?” The answer: a lot of finger pointing, but not much else.

Impaired driving, distracted driving, and speeding are the primary culprits getting the blame in Chicopee. The convenient thing about these diagnoses, from a local government perspective, is that they are endemic. There is nothing to be done, no real way to fix them, but we can all wring our hands, apply for grants, and issue another call for people to be more responsible.

Where Costa Mesa is rolling up their sleeves and doing what they can with the little that they have, Chicopee—a city that abounds with great, walkable neighborhoods, the kind that naturally calm traffic when given a chance—can only manage a shrug.

In one of the more feeble attempts at action I’ve ever seen, Chicopee did send out a city employee to drive the speed limit up and down a couple of streets for a bit each week. The concept was that this “pace car” would slow down traffic and that would improve safety. I’m assuming they went out during business hours and not in the off hours and evenings when the bulk of deaths are occurring, the times when the expensive, aggressive, over-engineering of Chicopee’s streets create the most danger.

Springfield and Chicopee are very poor cities. They have spent, and continue to spend, extraordinary amounts of money they don’t have making their streets unsafe and their neighborhoods drive-through and undesirable. Unlike Costa Mesa and Pasadena, they need only stop these terrible practices to see things immediately get better.

Costa Mesa and Pasadena seemingly have the will but the challenge is so great. In Springfield and Chicopee, the task is so much simpler but there is no sense of urgency or even ownership of a problem. Your community likely fits somewhere between these extremes. Lean toward the California cities in terms of attitude and approach and Strong Towns will be there to help you, regardless of how difficult the road ahead is—and your people will be with you, too.

Strategies for Safe and Productive Streets:

Start a Local Conversation.
Establish a Crash Analysis Studio.
Establish a Street Design Team.
Follow the Four-Step Approach to Public Investments.

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Charles Marohn

Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.