Thank you so much for the invitation, some of you I know very well and
several of you I don't know at all.
So a quick introduction- the organization that I have
the privilege to be the director of right now is responsible for
long range transportation planning for the city of Tampa and
two other cities in our county as well as our huge unincorporated area population.
Welcome.
Who here already knows that there is a long range transportation plan for
the greater Tampa area?
Do you know, raise your hand, yes so,
if you didn't raise your hand, if you didn't already know that,
would you have wished that somebody had a long range plan for transportation?
So medical and planning organizations (please come sit at the table).
So Metropolitan Planning Organizations are set up all around the country in
metropolitan areas for local communities, cities and counties to come together and
agree on what are the major transportation investments that they intend to
make over the next decade or two decades to meet their current and future needs,
and there are a lot of pieces of that puzzle, and I'm not going to go through
all of the pieces of that puzzle because I want to talk with you about how some
of the issues around transportation play into our community outcomes.
And if you want to find out more information about my organization,
this is sort of our annual report, we do it in a calendar format and
there's lots of ways to get involved with us if you're interested,
we can talk about that later, so let me advance this slide.
Maybe I'll use this mouse.
Works.
How many people here are actually in transportation in one way or another?
Many people, OK so
handful of responses why, why are you interested in transportation,
anybody?
OK so that's good.
It's true, it affects everybody and I think a lot of
people that I've talked to and these are a lot of women locally who are involved in
transportation who got together last year with WTS (Women's Transportation Seminar).
And the answers tend to be about not the transportation itself but
what does it do for our community, so in the same way that doctors who
look at our blood circulation, maybe they love veins, maybe they do, but
I think a lot of them are in it because they want the person to be healthy,
right, and isn't that what we what for our communities, and so we want
the transportation systems to work in a way that supports the community.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about our community in the greater Tampa area
and I'm going to start by going through some little factoids that the Tampa Bay
partnership put together last year as part of their regional Competitiveness Report,
so they're looking at how are we doing as a region kind of big picture, as a whole?
And a couple of points are very positive.
We got a lot of growth in this area, we're one of the most rapidly
growing areas in the country and we have a lot of job growth.
We are number two among the 20 peer regions that they looked at
in the country, but some of the challenges that we have,
our average wage is a lot lower than Seattle,
you'd expect Seattle's to be higher right, a lot of high tech folks there but,
this is a lot, this isn't just a little lower, this is a lot lower.
What could that be related to?
We don't have high educational attainment in this area,
we're number 19 out of the 20 metro areas that the partnership looked at.
And our labor force participation is not great, particularly among younger people.
So like age 16 to 24 not in school or not at work,
we're number 19 out of 20 in that area.
So what could underlie those kinds of statistics?
Well one of the things is that we don't have a very good transit system,
so how are people getting to educational opportunities and
how are people getting to jobs if they want to start out their careers,
if they don't have access to a car, their options are a lot more
limited in Tampa Bay than they are in places like Seattle.
So when the Tampa Bay partnership was looking at our problems,
they did look at traffic congestion.
And they found we were kind of middle of the pack as far as traffic congestion
goes, it's not our big challenge, this is one of our big challenges.
And they actually looked at, if we increased transit availability
by one mile per person in this county,
we could seriously increase our gross regional product,
has very clear economic outcomes, this was part of a study that was done through USF.
But they're not the only people saying this.
This is an article that the Tampa Bay Times came out with a couple of years
ago looking at what our spending
on our public transit looks like compared to other major cities.
So yeah, we're on par with Sheboygan, something to aspire to, but
Tampa Bay spends far less on transit each year than any other major metro area,
it's the only top 20 metro region to spend less than $213 million annually.
Our $141 million operating budget is on par with Bridgeport,
Connecticut and Buffalo, New York, each of which have 1.5 million fewer people.
So we basically have a seriously undersized public transit system and that
has implications, so I'm a planner so now I'm going to talk about planning stuff.
To start off with, the transit agency's, HART's Transit Development Plan,
so when we were updating our long range plan for
this urban area in 2014, we're looking at all the different pieces
of transportation as we went to HART to ask them "What are your plans for
the future?" and they said "Well, at our current investment level,
which we are calling investment 'level one', we can continue our
existing service, we might be able to add some night and weekend trips.
"But, if we had more funding, we think we could really provide good service
to our job centers, to our residents, if we had six new MetroRapid routes,
if we had 30 new or improved local routes, 20 new or improved express routes,
and 18 new or improved flex and circulator routes." We said "okay, well that's great,
what does that look like if we plug that into our long range plan?", so
we are comparing it with where are people and jobs going to be in the year 2040?
This is a forecast, a little bit like forecasting the weather in the year 2040,
but we look at where job growth is happening, where residential growth is
happening, and we compare that with our transit system at the existing
level of investment versus the proposed, expanded level of investment.
And so here the dark green means frequent service and
we've drawn a quarter mile walking radius around those routes, so
you can see with the plan that HART had, if we up the investment level,
we can serve almost half of people in jobs with frequent service,
and almost two thirds of people in jobs with somewhat frequent service.
But I want to
talk about a related challenge that we have in this area, and
this photograph was taken not quite a mile south of here.
Theories on why would anyone do this?
I get this question a lot- "why would anybody do that?"- because they have to
get to something on the other side.
To get to something on the other side (why did the chicken cross the road?).
So let's think a little bit deeper into what's going on here.
Tying it back to the transit system, where are those bus routes running,
they're running on those major high-speed six-lane arterial road lanes.
Would you run across that six lane road to catch a bus?
What if the next bus doesn't come for 30 or
60 minutes and you'll be fired if you get to work late?
Dig a little bit deeper.
So here we're going to look at Busch Boulevard and 40th Street,
like I said just a little bit south of here, what kind of a place is this?
There are stores all along this road.
There are walkable neighborhoods with connecting,
rigid streets all along this road on both sides.
From this point the distance to the next signal-protected
crosswalk is more than half a mile, so am I going to walk that distance?
If I cross Busch at this intersection, I have to cross not only the through lanes,
but also the turn lanes which means I'm crossing nine lanes instead
of crossing six, if I try to run across in between the signals.
Plus, if get half way across and I run out of time, there is no protected place for
me to wait in the median, if I get to this crosswalk.
And some survey research that Julie did pointed out people don't
believe that drivers are going to yield to walkers at a crosswalk anyway,
so if I am in a neighborhood and I'm trying to get to a grocery store,
or to a bus stop, what incentive do I have to walk a quarter mile
out of my way (potentially) and cross at this nine lane intersection?
We also find that we have a lot of neighborhoods where people
are not only transit dependent to get to work or to education,
but also to get to grocery stores, to health care,
to child care, and they don't have a lot of opportunities for
those things in these neighborhoods, so we're talking about
food desert areas that line up with these same very challenging walking conditions.
So in this particular area along Busch Boulevard, we have a survey from
the Health Department "During the past year, were there times when your
household did not have enough food?" and a lot of folks saying yes.
Residential units with no vehicles available, this area,
area of interest, a lot higher in the county as a whole.
So all I'm saying is, when we dig a little bit deeper it
starts to make sense why people behave in the way that they do and
use our urban spaces the way that they do, and by urban spaces I mean roads,
those are our urban spaces.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about something that happened here locally
a few years ago.
Which is, we had a grass roots group, Walk Bike Tampa, get organized and come
forward and demand a change, particularly in the number of pedestrian deaths.
And it happened after, there was a high school student who was trying to get
to Chamberlain High School across Busch Boulevard, and was hit and killed.
They asked us to look at a movement called 'Vision Zero', which is a vision of
zero traffic deaths, so we started looking at "Does Vision Zero make sense here?",
"How do we stack up compared to the rest of the country?".
So we looked at traffic deaths per a hundred thousand residents.
At the time that we're looking at it, that was the highest rate of any
large county in the United States, and this is on a per capita basis,
we do look at these statistics in a bunch of different ways but, we continue to be,
unfortunately, like in the top tier for severe crashes as a whole,
and for pedestrian and bicycle crashes in the country, year after year.
So we start asking questions "Why, why us?" and
people say " that's the tourists".
Actually our economy and Hillsborough County is not that tourism focused,
we're not a beach community, we're not a theme park or resort area,
our average age is similar to the national average, so it's not the retirees.
We have a lot of folks who are born here and
grew up here so we're really similar to the rest of the country on that metric.
So, it's not strangers, it's not people retiring here who can't see,
it's not tourists, it's us, we're doing this.
So let's dig a little deeper into that.
What do we know about us from a crash data point of view?
Well, for one thing, we not only have a problem with fatal crashes,
we have a problem with severe injury crashes, so for every one fatal crash,
we have eight incapacitating injury crashes, more or less.
So, you think about 1,500 people being significantly affected -every
year- in our county, and it's not just those individuals, they have families.
You think about the long term care that may be associated with taking care of
somebody who's been in a serious injury crash, it's affecting a lot of us.
Where are they happening?
75 percent of fatal crashes in our county are on roads with posted
speeds of 40 miles per hour or greater, so we're looking at our relatively higher
speed roadways, and there's an exponential relationship between speed and
crash severity.
We have some concentration of those crashes, so
75 percent of them occur on only one third of our roads.
Aggressive driving is a big factor for us, and so
is lack of lighting.
When we look at intoxication, which is something that you hear about a lot,
affecting severe crashes, yes it's a factor here, but
as a share of the crashes it's a smaller factor here than it is in the country as
a whole, which is kind of interesting, it kind of points to "yeah that's a problem,
but we also have some other problems that we need to pay attention to".
So speed, aggressive driving, lack of lighting.
And we average more than one pedestrian injury crash every day.
So I'm going to give you a little snapshot of what one of those roads looks like,
so this is West Hillsborough Avenue in the Town and Country area.
Six through lanes, the posted speed along
the length of West Hillsborough is 45 to 55 mph,
176 severe crashes over five years.
So what kind of a place is this?
This is a suburban community that grew up in the early
Eighties along West Hillsborough, you see shopping plazas,
behind it there are sub-divisions, a lot of this housing has
become more affordable housing as sprawl continues to push further out.
So this is actually a high percent Hispanic area,
through part of West Hillsborough Avenue.
This is a high ridership bus route along Hillsborough, so
you're going to have folks running across the road to catch the bus.
This is a school age student, high-crash area.
What kinds of crashes do you see on roadways like this?
So of severe crashes, we've got angle and left turn crashes are the largest share,
that red slice of the pie here, of the fatal crashes we have walk and
bike crashes being the largest part of the share.
So these are the things that we're focusing on, so angle and left turn
crashes, think the T-bone crashes, so think about people pulling into and
out of driveways at the same time the traffic is coming through at 45 or
55 miles an hour, and that's a very serious crash.
And then, let's say that you also have somebody walking along the sidewalk,
interacting with the people pulling in and out of the driveways,
trying to cut across six lanes of traffic to make a left turn, and
then the through traffic going through at high speed,
so it's not a recipe for success, it turns out this isn't rocket science,
it turns out we have built this, we have created this problem.
A couple of things about some of our other crash statistics: aggressive
driving I mentioned was a factor in one third of fatal crashes here.
So what kinds of places, here's three of them- Boyette Road (east of the I-75
interchange), Columbus Drive at 50th (just north of the I-4 interchange),
Brandon Boulevard near Lakewood (just east of the I-75 interchange).
So these are areas where we have made our roads quite wide,
where people are speeding up, coming on or off of our interstate highways.
And we've sized these roads for peak hour traffic, and off peak
you don't actually need all those lanes, and people are going really, really fast.
One other thing to think about with aggressive driving is your street network.
So for example in West Tampa (maybe you can't see this very well)
that's a pretty solid grid system.
We don't have as many aggressive driving related crashes in this area
as we do along Dale Mabry highway quite a bit north,
which is a suburban area, was developed in the Eighties and
Nineties, not nearly as much street connectivity, and so
what that means is everybody coming in and out of these neighborhoods,
they're all coming to a few major intersections on Dale Mabry Highway,
and those intersections are trying to get so much traffic through that one spot,
that the signal cycle length has to be really long to let everybody take a turn.
So if you miss that green light, you're going to be waiting
another two or three minutes, and people don't want to wait that long.
So now they're doing crazy things, they're veering around each other,
they're using turn lanes for things that they shouldn't be using them for,
which was actually how that young lady on Busch Boulevard was killed near
Chamberlain High School, and they're running red lights.
So this is another way of looking at how our transportation system affects
our traffic safety, lack of lighting, one other thing that I wanted to mention,
if you can't see the person in the crosswalk you're not going to stop,
you're not going to slam on the brakes before you're coming up to them.
So let's talk a little bit about how this lines up with
our different populations in Hillsborough County.
So there is an Executive Order on Environmental Justice,
it's a federal order that was signed by President Clinton a number of years ago,
which says that our federal Investments shall
not have a disproportionate negative burden, or negative impact,
on protected populations, and that meant low income and minority populations.
So as we're looking at what our investments are for the future,
we're looking at "Are those investments going to make things worse?".
We already are coming into this with some disproportionality,
in terms of the hurdles that folks are facing.
So for example, one of the things that Christine Williams' group did,
was they looked for us at the intersection
of communities of concern with some of our transportation facilities and
gaps, they looked at sidewalk gaps, where do areas with
a lot of sidewalk gaps line up with communities of concern that are going to
be needing to use those sidewalks to get to bus stops or grocery stores.
We also looked at our severe crash rates and
we found that your chance of being in a severe crash of any kinds while
bike driving is 20 percent higher in a community of concern, so
that's today.
We also look at things like what's affecting community health
in the greater Tampa area, so one of those ways that transportation affects community
health is vehicle emissions, so where do you have vehicle emissions?
We looked at some national research, the Department of Environmental Health
suggests looking at population within 300 meters of roadways that have
30,000 cars a day or greater, but what does it look like in Tampa?
We have about 21 percent of our population as a county,
as a whole, in those areas.
If you're in a community of concern, it's 23 percent of your population is exposed.
So just doing the math, that means if you live in a community of
concern you have a 13 percent higher chance of being exposed to
these higher vehicle emissions, and you potentially have fewer resources to try
to recover from the health effects, and emissions exposure is linked to asthma,
chronic lower respiratory disease, and several types of cancer.
And then digging a little bit deeper into the geography of chronic disease (can you
tell we've been spending a lot of time with the Health Department?), so they put
us onto some data that we have uploaded into a mapping tool on our website.
The Hillsborough County Health Atlas, and
you can look here at data from the Center for Disease Control, 500 Cities project,
so we don't have this county wide at this point, we just have it for
the city of Tampa, but it does show you how different types of chronic diseases,
how those rates vary across the state, and so right here we're looking at
diabetes and you can see it's more concentrated in East Tampa.
Well it turns out that it also lines up with food desert areas, so if you get
the data on food desert locations from the United States Department of Agriculture,
and we put this up on our Health Atlas site as well,
you can see that lines up as well.
Is this really a problem for us?
The Health Department of Hillsborough County says that we have significantly
higher deaths from blood pressure (hypertension deaths) than our peers,
and by peers I mean Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and Orlando, so
they're looking at peer cities in Florida and we're higher than those other cities.
Our adult obesity rate is higher than those of other cities, our cancer
incidence rates are higher than peers for all the six reported types of cancer,
and we also have higher rates of asthma and chronic lower respiratory disease.
So what can we do about all of this?
I know this is so cheerful, I'm just seeing lots of smiles
around the table here [sarcastically], it's not all bad there's a lot of
good things that are being worked on to turn some of these numbers around.
So how can planning projects improve health?
Of course we can look at injury and mortality rates of drivers,
pedestrians and bicyclists, how do we bring those high crash rates down?
We can look at promoting physical activity through biking, transit, walking
to public transit, helps with obesity and chronic disease prevention and diabetes.
We can look at our air quality, at our greenhouse gas emissions,
reducing our asthma rates, and finally we can look at access to goods and
services, and education, remember that educational attainment thing that I
mentioned back at the beginning, so trying to look holistically
at how do our transportation systems improve these outcomes.
So we changed our performance metrics.
We started by reshaping our performance measures around what
was required by the federal government, and the federal government a few years ago
said "Thou shall look at the good repair of your transportation system and
have some performance metrics about potholes and bridge repair"
which is a good thing, right, "whether your buses are well maintained",
they said that "we will look at severe and
fatal crashes, that we will look at travel time reliability".
But we added in some more measures,
because we want to know more things about our transportation system.
So we want to know what are our crash rates in communities of concern.
We want to know about our vehicle emissions exposure, and how does our
our traffic management affect that, both countywide and in communities of concern.
We want to look at access with the bus system and our walk and
bike network, access to those systems from households, jobs, and health care.
And then one other thing that I haven't talked a lot about, but
certainly we are vulnerable to major storms here on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
And so we've been looking at economic impact of a major storm and
we've started including in that how are communities of concern
affected by things like the need for hurricane evacuation and resilience.
So here are some things that are going on locally,
if you are interested I can tell you lots and lots about some of these different
projects and there are some highlights in the calendars.
But one of these projects the Vision of Zero traffic deaths
has a strong coalition of members who are working on this issue,
raising awareness (thank you Dean).
And raising awareness and also working with folks in enforcement,
and in health, and in traffic engineering, to turn around these numbers.
We've been working on access to fresh foods with a grant from
the Aetna Foundation, that is helping to create more
community gardens and improve walk bike access to those gardens.
This new sign near the Tampa Heights Community Garden in the top right here,
that is an outcome of this project, City of Tampa is one of our partners and
they created a new sign design for us and so we're hoping that we'll
be putting up some more of these, because we did just get the larger grant for
$50,000, so 'yay', we get to do more of this!
We've also been working in the school areas.
Not only on traffic circulation, but walk bike access, and
really zooming in, in collaboration between the school district and
traffic engineers on the areas around schools and, how do we make those safer,
so created a new working group for that.
And we were fortunate to win a grant from Federal Highway
to look at the resilience of our transportation system, so
the Resilient Tampa Bay working group is actually not just Tampa but also St.
Pete, Clearwater, and Pasco County, they are all collaborating on this project.
All of this feeds into that long range transportation plan that I mentioned at
the beginning and we've put a lot of time and
energy into seeking feedback for the long range transportation plan.
This is a snapshot of the interactive website survey tool
that we used back in 2014 with our last major update of the long range
transportation plan, it's supposed to kind of gamify some of these questions and
make it easy for people to get feedback, and we've tried really hard
to get that kind of engagement strategy out to
as many different folks from as many different walks of life as we can.
So that particular survey, we had more than 3,500 survey responses and
presentations to 94 different civic groups, and
what's interesting when you go and
ask just a wide range of different people what they want,
is you get really sensible responses, go figure.
You ask people, what is the right level of investment,
on preserving the system, on minimizing traffic, on reducing crashes,
on real choices, so those areas where I showed you our new performance measures,
and very few people said they want the low level of investment.
Lots of folks said we need better outcomes, and
they said it even though we showed them a budget that meant increasing taxes.
And so, out of that long range transportation plan, and related to it,
there was a ballot initiative last November that was approved by 57%
of our voters, saying we should raise our sales tax by a penny on the dollar,
and it should fund those same things that you saw in the long range plan,
maintenance, congestion reduction, safety improvements,
walk and bike facilities, and then there is another pie that I'm
not showing you that has the transit improvements.
So we can now, assuming our sales tax is upheld by a judge next month,
six weeks from now, we can actually achieve those better performance outcomes,
that I showed you at the beginning with the investment levels.
So I just want to leave you with this thought, you have more impact than you
think, you never know when write you a long range plan who might read it and
think it's a good idea and try to do something with it.
So I just encourage everybody to stay involved with the things that you
are passionate about,
because it all feeds back into making a difference in our communities.
I'm here for questions if you have questions, or
if you have something that you'd like to share from your own experience [clapping].
[clapping].