Bike Walk Knoxville, founded in 2012 by Caroline Cooney, focuses on improving biking and walking in the Knoxville area, “. . . to make sure all ages and abilities in the community have safe and accessible streets for walking and biking.” As a part of that effort, they lead walks through a wide range of areas and neighborhoods and invite public officials and the general public to join in. The walks focus on hazards in traffic, pedestrian, and cycling design in the location and how those might be made better.
The walk this week, led by BWK Advocacy Director, Zoe Scott, focused on Henley Street, including the Henley Bridge. Mayor Kincannon and several city staff members joined the walk, along with a number of interested citizens. Henley has a long history of decisions that made it what it is today. The 2009 SmartFix40, which resulted in routing traffic on and off the Interstate and Henley made Henley more of a thoroughfare.
The city’s decision not to make changes to the (already) clearly dysfunctional road when presented the opportunity presented itself in 2011 perpetuated the issues. The bridge was closed for over two years, making Henley Street accessible to change. I first wrote about it in 2011 and here’s another (with earlier ones linked) from 2014. Later that year, the city received a report from the Urban Land Institute (paid for locally and endorsed by the city) that made suggestions for making Henley safer for everyone and re-integrating it into downtown. To my knowledge none of the recommendations were ever followed.
So what makes it unsafe? How do we count the ways? Zoe did a great job of counting them. Our group started at Clinch and Henley beside the UT Conference Center. A pedestrian walkway was overhead and, to some, that might seem to solve the problem in this spot. Unfortunately, a pedestrian walkway is generally just an alert that poor design abounds. As for this one, do tourists and others know how to find it? Do they know where it lands? Is there signage?
Walking on the ground, Henley can’t be crossed from that side of the intersection. To cross the street, a pedestrian must wait and cross Clinch, wait and cross seven lanes of Henley (four of which are bearing rapid traffic exiting or entering the Interstates), then recross Clinch to arrive across from where they started. We paused at the pedestrian island (a good thing, but also indicative of a problematic intersection for pedestrians) to have a moment of silence for Quinton Fields, age 23, who died trying to cross Henley two years ago. His mother was present for the walking tour of Henley.
At every corner of this and most of the other intersections along this stretch of Henley are curved curbs. These curbs are designed for the most rapid turning for cars. Of all the steps to crossing Henley in this spot that I just described, re-crossing Clinch feels to me the most dangerous because as you cross going south, cars that have just exited the Interstate and have a green light to go straight, turn right at high speeds – from behind the pedestrians.
There are solutions for some of these problems, Zoe pointed out. For example, more squared corners or bulb-outs make cars slow down more. Drivers of turning vehicles are more often watching for other cars, as opposed to pedestrians. Slower corners gives them more time to notice pedestrians and more time for pedestrians to avoid being hit by a careless driver. While our group of about twenty stood on the corner of Henley and Cumberland I watched a vehicle round that corner from Henley (rounded corner, of course) and accelerate through our walking signal. Even with a group of twenty people who could have legally crossed, he didn’t slow down.
One possibility discussed by the group was ending right turns on red. Most often the driver’s attention is directed to their left at oncoming traffic to watch for an opening. If traffic is heavy, turning drivers typically accelerate rapidly, often without noticing pedestrians who may be crossing. Due to pedestrian deaths, right turns on red are or soon will be restricted or eliminated in a number of major cities including New York City, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Chicago.
For cyclists, Henley Street is a nightmare. To get to the bridge from the north requires riding either in traffic or on the sidewalk (which is allowed in Tennessee). Traffic is too fast to be an option and riding on the sidewalk often conflicts with slower pedestrians. The bike lane across the bridge is unprotected and the speed of traffic makes it unlikely for any but the most daring cyclists, sometimes with very unfortunate outcomes. Vertical barriers protecting the bike lane might make them more safe and might slow traffic.
Bike infrastructure continued our conversation as we reached the other side of the bridge. The bike lane crosses the turn lane at that point, forcing cyclists to cross with cars. Elimination of a dedicated turn lane would prevent that issue. Across the street at Blount (beside the new Davy) is a large green swath of painted pavement, clearly marked for cyclists to get in front of traffic. It was blocked by a car as we stood there. Finally, a cyclist heading north who survives the bridge crossing finds their land abruptly ending at Hill, leaving their best choice to turn right, right a block, turn left, ride a block, and turn left again to ride a block (against traffic) or to hop the sidewalk. The corner is blind, the curb cut, and cars regularly make that turn. Could Hill be one way going out? Cars could go one more block to turn right.
As part of the event, Mayor Kincannon took questions from the press, saying that pedestrian and cycling safety is a priority. “We try to be a bike-friendly city. We’ve come a long way, but we’ve got a long way to go. Safety is a number-one priority, whether you’ve parked your car or you walk all the time, people need to be able to walk around safely.” She pointed out that neighborhoods that are walkable have been shown to be happier places.
She biked to the event and pointed out that she chose her route on Gay over Hall of Fame because it feels more safe. She said she’s proud of the Vision Zero initiative which has as a goal to eliminate all fatalities on city streets by 2040. “We don’t have to live this way. People in other parts of the country and world walk around and don’t have to worry about being hit by a car. We are committed to continuing our safety infrastructure improvements.” She said some of the improvements take years while others can be accomplished more quickly and she hopes to do more of the latter in the near term.
I asked about her view of Henley Street historically and what she felt we might do to make it better:
Looking back, it’s sort of crazy that the decision makers at the time tore up a beautiful grid and what would have been a nice walkable street and turned it into a highway entrance ramp. We can’t change the past, we can only try to do better moving forward. So, we have this pedestrian bridge over Henley and we’re trying to build out better connectivity.
There are no immediate plans: Henley is a state route, it’s not a city street, so we have to work in partnership with TDOT to do anything . . . but we have a good working relationship with TDOT . . . We are in active conversation with them about improvements, particularly on the bridge. We have proposed adding a more protected bike lane and they seem very open to that . . . I think it would make sense to encourage people to enter Interstate 40 from Alcoa Highway or James White Parkway and restore this to a more conventional city street that’s easy to walk and bike on and to drive on, but drive on as if you are stopping in Knoxville, not just trying to get out.
We want to make sure people enter our city safely, but they could do that on the outskirts and then slow down to twenty, twenty-five miles per hour, park, get out, stroll downtown and enjoy things that way. I think that will happen. It won’t happen overnight.
The view of cities as a place to quickly move through and as a place that must accommodate cars first is a relic of our early embrace of the automobile. As we move toward understanding all the ways that people move about and toward a greater appreciation of a walkable city, we have decades of damage to undo. Until the city streets are safer, be careful out there. That driver isn’t likely watching out for you as you walk and we all need to focus on watching for pedestrians as we drive.