San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
USING ART AS A TOOL FOR PEDESTRIAN SAFETY, STREETS AS A CANVAS
On a patch of street where drivers used to pull up in front of a Hyattsville, Md., coffee shop to dash inside and grab their orders, bright blue coffee beans are now stenciled over rainbow blocks of color.
The message, reinforced by planters and plastic flexposts, is clear: This isn’t a space for cars anymore. The artwork spreads up the street and around the corner, where clouds and bands of red, orange and yellow mark out space at crosswalks and stripes beckon buses up to a stop.
The collaboration between officials in Hyattsville and Baltimore-based artist Graham Coreil-allen is part of a growing movement to use art as a tool to promote pedestrian safety, an appealing option for cities looking for quick and affordable responses to a perplexing nationwide increase in fatalities.
“It helps establish this as a place,” said Coreil-allen, 41, who seeks to turn streets into somewhere people on
foot can enjoy rather than being only for cars to pass quickly through.
The number of people on foot killed by drivers in the United States has surged in recent years, with an estimated 7,500 deaths in 2022 — the highest figure in over 40 years. Plastic posts and swatches of color offer less protection than concrete barriers, and without hard data and clear federal guidance, some transportation engineers have been skeptical about turning to art as a
safety measure. But the idea got a boost this month in an overhaul of a widely used design manual for streets, with federal transportation officials stating clearly that their guidelines don’t prohibit what they call “aesthetic surface treatments.”
“This is a win for sure,” Coreil-allen said.
Federal transportation officials are taking a growing role in trying to protect pedestrians and cyclists. Federal highway officials said in a document explaining the design manual changes that they plan to study how street art could help, pointing to a report sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2022 that studied the effect of art installations at 17 locations in cities around the country. The study’s authors concluded that the projects were linked to a 50 percent decline in crashes involving pedestrians.
The update to the design guidelines, known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, is part of that effort and includes updated standards for crosswalks and bike infrastructure. When it was released, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the aim was to help cities, counties and states “make it safer to walk, bike, and drive.”
The federal government also has new money to spend on the problem. The infrastructure law provided a $5 billion fund to help local governments design and build safer streets. The most recent round of awards went to 385 projects around the country, including $9.8 million for Mount
Rainier, another Prince George’s County city. The project will tackle filling gaps in sidewalks, lowering speed limits and improving intersections.
A full-scale redesign and rebuild of a street with pedestrians and cyclists in mind might take years of planning and a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a project like the one in Hyattsville can be finished at a fraction of the cost.
Coreil-allen integrates his work into more established ideas like extending curbs part way into a crosswalk to narrow the space people have to traverse, a technique called a “bump out.” Adding bright areas of color catches drivers’ attention and sends a signal that the street isn’t only somewhere for them to zip through.
“It provides a cue to the motorists to slow down,” Coreil-allen said. The idea, he said, is to offer an interim solution until a permanent change can be put in place.