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Walk-Friendly-Reapplication-Survey_Northampton-MA_WF7-14-2017 RE-DESIGNATION SURVEY NORTHAMPTON, MA May 23, 2017 INTRODUCTION Thank you for your participation in the Walk Friendly Communities program! As a designated WFC, your community is setting the bar for pedestrian safety and walkability, and serving as a model for other communities around the country. As you may be aware, your WFC designation is good for a five-year period. This survey has been created to re-designate your community for another five years at the current level. If you feel that your community is ready to move up to a higher level, you will need to fill at a new full assessment, please contact WFC staff before beginning that process. The intent of this survey is to gauge the progress that your community is making towards maintaining and improving its safety and walkability. For the questions that request a brief description, please summarize the policy, activity, or process in your own words. If a concise summary already exists, you may link to that summary or use that description. Include in your summary a description of the nature, scope, and results of the policy, program, or project in question. Please add your responses directly within this document and send the final version as an attachment to info@walkfriendly.org. It may be the case that you have supporting documentation or other files that you’d like us to consider along with your responses below. If so, please feel free to send those documents to info@walkfriendly.org to be considered with this reapplication survey. Thank you again for being a leader in creating great and healthy places for people to live! Please do not hesitate to contact WFC staff with any questions or comments that you may have. Sincerely, Dan Gelinne, 919-962-8703, gelinne@hsrc.unc.edu Kristen Brookshire, 919-962-2973, brookshire@hsrc.unc.edu Note: You can also send general inquiries to info@walkfriendly.org RE-DESIGNATION QUESTIONS Response to Feedback The WFC Community Report Card and Feedback, which was provided in response to your original application, included several primary recommendations for improving your overall walkability. For your reference, these recommendations have been copied below. Please provide an update on your progress towards each one of these recommendations. If you have been unable or chosen not to implement these changes, please describe why. Deploy a comprehensive pedestrian counting program in locations across the City. Due to low overall crash numbers, you may not be getting all of the info you need on where to focus your projects from crash data alone. Conducting counts at certain intersections, and especially where your trails intersect with busy roads, you may be able to identify areas where high pedestrian volumes warrant enhanced facilities. Since that recommendation, we have undertaken two actions to create a comprehensive pedestrian counting program: We are activity doing pedestrian counting to provide model development and ground-truthing for the Metropolitian Area Planning Councils Local Access Score, an effort to model pedestrian counts (footfall) all over the state. http://localaccess.mapc.org/The counts are a mix of locations that are important to us and randomly assigned count to support the model. We have acquired and use three pedestrian counters, two permanently mounted to provide a base line in two key areas (downtown Main Street and Mile 0 of our 12 mile rail trail network) and one movable counter to fill in the gaps. These counters provide longer term monitoring to help understand diurnal and season fluctuations that our one time counts do not. Develop a regular training program for City staff who work in the pedestrian area, such as planners, engineers, law enforcement, and transit operators. There are many low-cost options, like webinars, that help bring your team together to examine pedestrian safety issues. We have done this in a couple of way, primarily through the Complete Streets training that is offered to the City through the MassRoads program, as well as some NACTO webinars. There are a somewhat low percentage of sidewalks, which is surely a byproduct of a limited budget for installation. Consider a prioritization system that utilizes your inventory, pedestrian counts, crash data, and other factors like proximity to schools/senior centers to focus your improvements where they are needed. Developing a pedestrian-specific plan would also help with this. In January 2017 we completed Walk/Bike Northampton, Pedestrian and Bicycle Comprehensive Planwith a comprehensive examination of all things pedestrian Areas of Improvement In your original application, you were asked to describe “the three aspects of your community most in need of improvement in order to accommodate pedestrians.” Your original response has been copied below. Please describe whether these identified areas are still relevant and your progress towards improving upon them. The largest hurdle Northampton faces in accommodating pedestrians is resources. The city budget has been essentially flat for the past five years while state and federal aid has decreased. The plans and priority lists for pedestrian projects exist, but the lack of resources hold them back. Funding is still limited, but we have had some breakthroughs. First, the Mayor has allocated some limited funding each year for sidewalks and complete streets improvements. Second, our Public Works Department is including some sidewalks and pedestrian improvements each time they do roadwork. Finally, we have been able to secure a number of grants to help us do this work, most recently (and currently under construction) to transform a major gateway into the city from a state highway department highway to a city-owned local street, with related sidewalks, raised intersection, curb extensions, and raised crosswalks (“Pleasant Futures”). One particular issue that Northampton could make improvements on is curb radii at street corners. The city recognizes that there is some tension between building a pedestrian focused city and the state DOT's need to accommodate tractor trailer trucks. The Office of Planning and Development hopes to continue working toward creative solutions with MassDOT and the Department of Public Works. We recently met with the MassDOT Secretary of Transportation on many issues, including this, and felt heard and that there will be some response. In our current Pleasant Futures project we narrowed the street to 21 feet at three raised crosswalks/intersections and narrowed driveway widths and radii and, in spite of some push back, feel that this is a demonstration project to show that our approach can work. The city also works hard to maintain a balance between creating a pedestrian focused downtown and providing enough affordable parking to satisfy downtown businesses and their customers. There is still a strong market demand for accessible, free parking and surrounding communities that offer more and cheaper parking options sometimes succeed in luring away Northampton businesses. The city is in the process of raising parking rates again, but is always assessing this balance. We have raised on-street parking rates and maintained low off-street rates to move some demand off the street. We completed a parking study that supports our demand (as opposed to supply) based approach. Mode Share Please provide the latest walkingand public transportation percentages of commuting to work from the most recent5-year estimates from the American Community Survey. This information can be found by visiting http://factfinder.census.gov/. Year Walking % Public Transportation % 2015 12.8 2.9 2014 11.4 3.3 2013 11.9 3.5 2012 11.9 3.2 2011 10.8 2.7 Count and Volume Data Please describe any other pedestrian volume or count data that you are collecting. Include a description of your count locations, how this is being collected, and how this data is being used. As discussed above (in responses to 2012 feedback) we have undertaken two actions to create a comprehensive pedestrian counting program: 1. We are activity doing pedestrian counting to provide model development and ground-truthing for the Metropolitian Area Planning Councils Local Access Score, an effort to model pedestrian counts (footfall) all over the state. http://localaccess.mapc.org/. The counts are a mix of locations that are important to us and randomly assigned count to support the model. 2.We have acquired and use three pedestrian counters, two permanently mounted to provide a base line in two key areas (downtown Main Street and Mile 0 of our 12 mile rail trail network) and one movable counter to fill in the gaps. These counters provide longer term monitoring to help understand diurnal and season fluctuations that our one time counts do not. Safety Data Please populate the table below for crashes involving motor vehicles and pedestrians.(Data for 2015 not yet available in Massachusetts from MassDOT.) Year # of Ped Crashes # of Ped Injuries # of Ped Fatalities 2009 9 9 0 2010 10 7 1 2011 10 9 0 2012 13 15 0 2013 12 12 0 2014 9 8 0 Safety and Volume Trends What long-term trends in walking volumes and pedestrian/motor vehicle crashes has your community observed? Slight increase in walking and significant increase in bicycling. Slight decrease in pedestrian crashes, but our numbers are small so it can be hard to distinguish from noise and random fluctuations. Plan Implementation Please describe the progress in implementing your pedestrian (or other relevant) plan.Does your plan include performance measures and benchmarks and have you made progress towards them? We use STAR Communities assessment for sustainable communities for our benchmarking, and we are making moderate progress (dramatic progress on multiuse trails and bicycle lanes, some progress on sidewalks and improved crosswalk safety). We are implementing our complete streets policies and investing significantly in pedestrian (and bicycle) safety and infrastructure improvements. Guiding Policy Statements and Goals Does your community have any of the following? If so, please describe and provide an update on the progress of implementation or meeting the goal. Signed International Charter for Walking or a similar pledge to improve the conditions for walking in your community No Vision Zero, Toward Zero Deaths, or similar goal Yes, as one of the goals in our Walk/Bike Northampton Plan Complete Streets policy or equivalent Yes, both as a city ordinance and as one of the goals in Walk/Bike Northampton Other (please describe) [Response] Sidewalk Construction How many miles of sidewalk have been installed since your application? Approximately two Countermeasure Installation Please provide the number of installations of the following treatments since application: Treatment/Design Number Comments Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacon 3 State Street, Conz Street, Elm Street by High School Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon [0 Leading Pedestrian Interval 0 We primarily use dedicated pedestrian signal phases Road Diets 3 Pleasant Street (Route 10)/Pleasant Futures and bicycle lane carve outs on Prospect Street, North Main Street. No lane drops (most of our roads are only two lanes) but significant road narrowing. Medians or Pedestrian Crossing Islands 0 Curb Extensions 6 Pleasant Street, Village Hill (Jackson Street just completed at last application) Speed Reduction Strategies (e.g. traffic calming, speed limit reductions, etc.) 6 Every road project with curb extensions, bicycle lanes, and road narrowing, and wider shoulders. One new roundabout (Pleasant/Conz) since last application (which included one roundabout (Look Park/N.Main/Bridge Rd), with two more under design (North King, I91 Exit 19) Have you conducted safety evaluations for any countermeasures listed above? [If yes, check box] Education, Encouragement and Enforcement What education, encouragement, and enforcement programs have you implemented since your application? (This may include Safe Routes to Schools programs; increased staff training;enforcement actions for pedestrian safety;Open Streets events;creating a pedestrian safety task force that meets routinely and includes several departments, law enforcement, or transit agencies) Education Continuation of education efforts- safety village and other education. New efforts focus on profiling new traffic calming efforts and why narrower streets and intersections make streets safer. Encouragement High profile effort by Mayor to get the word out. Enforcement Pilot project of police stopping pedestrians for jay walking and other violations to use as opportunity to educate and understand what conditions lead to violations. Biggest Accomplishments What are your community’s greatest accomplishments since the application? Multiuse trail networks continue to grow. Bicycle lanes accepted treatment for all arterials getting new pavement. Acceptance of road diets and pilot projects such as the Pleasant Futures complete streets effort. Some funding from grants (large budgets) and consistent city funding. Priority Areas What are the areas most in need of improvement to increase the walkability of your community? Additional sidewalk improvements, crosswalk improvements, and complete streets. Leveraging WFC Designation Have you been able to use your WFC designation and/or the Report Card feedback to leverage funding or other support for programs to improve your community’s walkability? Please explain. It has helped improve our profile, as well as helping our STAR Communities scoring Assistance Needed Howcan the WFC program better help you and your community? Information on competitive grant programs.