Dr. Atkins of roads speaks in Davis

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By Claire St. John, Enterprise staff writer

Published in the Davis Enterprise, March 8, 2009

Dan Burden has instigated more diets than The Biggest Loser.

Better yet? The weight stays off.

Burden’s diets apply to roads, and he says that in every community that has reduced a multi-lane thoroughfare to one lane in each direction, the city has seen a boost in home prices, retail and the walkability of the area.

Davis is considering alternatives for Fifth Street, a four-laner that carries about 15,000 vehicles per day. Fifth Street was slated for a diet about two years ago, but the idea was controversial: North Davis neighborhoods were solidly in favor but the downtown business community wasn’t convinced that changing Fifth Street wouldn’t lead to more problems.

[Davis Bicycles! note: the road diet, written in the City of Davis General Plan, was under consideration by the City between 2003 and 2006, when the council followed a recommendation by staff against its implementation.]

Burden is the founder and director of Walkable Communities Inc., which is part of Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, where Burden is a principal and senior urban designer. He has been recognized as one of the “six most important civic innovators in the world” by Time magazine.

On Friday, he came to Davis to show how Fifth Street could take off the weight and become a better method of transportation for vehicles, bikes and pedestrians.

Burden said he coined the term “road diet,” and the method has worked on thousands of roads. Seattle, Burden said, has already put dozens of its roads on diets and plans to do more. It also is the home of 1,000 “mini-circles.” “The crashes in their neighborhoods have come down 93 percent,” Burden said.

It would not be difficult, expensive or detrimental to reduce Fifth Street to one lane of traffic in each direction with a third lane for turns and bike lanes on either side, Burden said. In fact, Davis could put in some temporary measures to try it out for a while. If it doesn’t work, the city could go back to four lanes. But it would be the first to do so.

A standing-room-only crowd packed Community Chambers Friday, and, according to Burden, it set a record for his audiences for how many people biked or walked. That’s the kind of behavior Burden wants to encourage on the streets and roads he helps design.

“The more we dedicate streets to crafting an environment where people are going to bump into each other, the more we’re going to have maximum change,” he said. “You still pay attention to the number of vehicles that get carried, but you maximize the social interaction.” Burden, a former National Geographic photographer, spent Thursday and Friday morning roaming the city, snapping photos of roads and how they carry people to their destinations.

“You probably have five or six or eight or 10 candidates for a road diet,” he said.

Shots snapped in other cities made up the slideshow Burden presented Friday afternoon, which showed dozens of successful road diets, both before and after.

“It’s the intersection that moves traffic, not the number of lanes,” Burden said.

Some in the audience had concerns nonetheless: If there are fewer lanes on Fifth, would vehicles opt to use other streets, creating more traffic there?.

“No one has seen any spilloff on La Jolla Boulevard (in San Diego, a recent road diet success story),” Burden said. “We don’t divert traffic. When we put in any treatment, we look at the whole system.”

On one reduced Seattle road, for instance, traffic volume actually increased by 5 to 8 percent because the road was easier and more pleasant to use, Burden said. Reducing lanes does not impede traffic flow.

“You can either further devalue Fifth Street, or you can add immense value to the neighborhoods on either side,” he said.

Another audience member said all of Burden’s examples showed retail business improving along the narrower road; Davis merchants are deeper downtown and count on Fifth to deliver customers to their quieter streets.

“The more friendly we make all of our streets — certainly into the business district — for walkers, bicycles and automobiles, the better,” he responded. “We’ve got to stop fretting over traffic in Davis and get back to putting people first.”

The Davis City Council is expected to consider alternatives for Fifth Street at one of its April meetings.

— Reach Claire St. John at cstjohn@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8057. Comment at www.davisenterprise.com