Transportation Planning ridealongs allow swapping of insights

This fall, the Transportation Planning team had the opportunity to accompany both Eugene Springfield Fire and the City's street sweeping crew on ridealongs. The Transportation Planning team was seeking to understand how recent infrastructure projects have affected other essential services, what crews' concerns are, and how future projects can best serve the community.

Insights From Eugene Springfield Fire

Riding along with the fire crew in a 48-foot ladder truck clarified which infrastructure elements truly affect response times and which are not a concern. The major takeaway from riding with ESF was that the little things really make a difference. For example, roundabouts and protected bikeways are not a major concern overall. What does matter is keeping corners clear from the placement of signage and stormwater planters, providing sufficient lane widths, and avoiding obstructions along the street center line, which fire trucks often straddle.

Public Works Engineering recently has installed some newer elements that ESF wasn't familiar with, such as flexible bollards (traffic barriers) and mountable curbs. The ridealong provided PWE staff a chance to talk about bollards and mountable curbs and emphasized the importance of training City teams who use the streets on new elements in the roadway. ESF had been avoiding the bollards along the protected bikeways, assuming they were concrete. Now they know that bollards are flexible and can be driven over during emergency response.

PWE staff plan to coordinate further with ESF to test various traffic devices before installing them. Lastly, about 80% of ESF's calls are related to medical assistance. Designing safer streets may also decrease the number of medical calls related to traffic crashes that require ESF response.

Insights from the street sweeping team

To support the work of the City's maintenance teams, Transportation Planning staff wanted to better understand the barriers to street sweeping. The team learned that certain designs pose challenges for effective cleaning when not designed to specifically meet sweeper geometry. Long, smooth curbs are easier to maintain than intermittent ones, and the angle of parking bays and bump-outs can dramatically affect a sweeper's efficiency.

Similar to ESF, the street sweepers were hesitant to drive over the larger flexible bollards along the High Street bikeway. Together, PWE staff and the sweeper operators tested the bollard flexibility; the sweepers could navigate over them without significant damage to the bollards and no damage to the sweeper. Despite the ability to drive over the bollards, sweeping isn't effective when the bollards prevent suction, and damage to the bollards over time is a risk. PWE staff are exploring opportunities to more strategically place bollards in a way that protects people using the bikeways, prevents cars from driving in them, but also allows sweeper access.

Moving forward together

Planners and engineers in Public Works are committed to designing streets that are safe for residents and functional for emergency services and maintenance crews. The ridealongs helped open doors further between all the teams. Frequent collaboration on street design will help the City design a transportation system that serves everyone well.