The Case for Access Management
By John L. Heilman, P.E.
Technical Services Coordinator
Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments
Back in the early 1980's, Doug Porter, of the Urban Land Institute, was quoted as saying: "I have seen the future, and it doesn't work!" Well, we are now more than 10 years into that future, and I would submit that, as regards our attempts to preserve a functioning arterial street system, the future hasn't gotten a lot brighter!
I HAVE ONE CENTRAL THEME: In dealing with the problem of eliminating, or more importantly, preventing traffic congestion, access management must be a major part of the solution. In terms of the provision of access between private property and the public roadway system, we have several decades of convincing first-hand evidence that, with very few exceptions, "business as usual" hasn't worked in the past, it isn't working now, and it won't work in the future.
NOW FOR A DEFINITION: Access management is a formal, structured program to coordinate and maintain the safe and efficient use of the arterial street system, while providing necessary vehicular access to adjacent lands. I am talking about access to major public streets, from intersecting streets, and, equally importantly, from private driveways. This includes:
* frequency, spacing, and design of private driveways serving all types of land uses
* left and right turn lanes and acceleration lanes
* frequency and location of cross streets
* frequency and location of traffic signals
* possible use of median barriers to control left turns
* safety issues - stopping sight distances and corner clearances
Access management differs from past practices primarily in that it looks at land access and development from a planned, long range, system-wide approach, rather than in a case-by-case, piecemeal fashion. It recognizes that narrowly focused, parcel-by-parcel access decisions made in the early stages of corridor development can and will make it difficult or impossible to preserve roadway capacity and functional integrity as the corridor becomes fully developed.
Every urban area has examples of failed or non-existent access management. In the Cincinnati area, I only have to mention Beechmont Avenue, or Colerain Avenue, and people immediately know what I'm talking about. [Or US 23 North in Columbus, or the Airport Highway in Toledo, or North Dixie in Dayton.] If it's an arterial street, and you're spending a lot more time on it than you should at 5:00 every afternoon, that is a result of a lack of access management.
Now, I believe that two failures over the years have lead us to the mess we're in:
First, land use and transportation planning linkages are missing. Local governments make decisions regarding land use, zoning, and density issues without adequate regard for the ability of the roadway to accommodate these uses. Simultaneously, highway agencies (because they don't want to appear obstructionist or anti-growth) frequently grant driveway permits without adequate concern for the impact on the capacity or safety of the roadway, or for the total volume of traffic that the road will eventually be expected to carry.
The second failure is that a hierarchy of roadway functions involving mobility and access has not been preserved. Below freeways and expressways, in far too many cases, every road is called upon to serve every purpose -- THIS WILL NOT WORK! Arterial streets must primarily move traffic, with land access provided primarily from collectors and local streets. We already recognize the importance of access management, by prohibiting private access to freeways -- absolutely none! But then we fail to follow through to other levels in the roadway hierarchy (that is, arterials and collectors).
Intuitively, the failure of our present system should be evident to anyone who has driven on a busy street lined with commercial strip development and uncontrolled driveway access. We have all found ourselves stopped behind a left turning vehicle which is waiting for a gap in opposing traffic, or slowing down to avoid a car turning in front of us from a driveway, or getting the green light at one intersection, only to see the next signal go to yellow just as we get up to speed. All of these are reflections of poor access management, and while each one only delays us a few seconds or a minute, the collective delay for all motorists and all intersections can be incredible. Time spent idling at red lights, or in stop-and-go traffic, also causes unnecessary air pollution and fuel consumption. One national study concluded that, in street networks with poorly timed and poorly spaced signals, 40% of all fuel consumption was attributable to vehicles stopped and idling at traffic signals!).
Frequent and poorly spaced traffic signals can reduce roadway capacity by over 50 percent! On a major surface street with good access management and infrequent signalized intersections, a 12-foot lane of pavement can carry something on the order of 1000 vehicles per hour. But that same 12 feet of pavement, on a busy arterial street with too many signals and access points, and no signal progression, may only accommodate 500 vehicles per hour, or even less!
Access management is also a safety issue -- 50-60% of accidents are access related. These include all left turn and right angle accidents, and most rear end accidents. In Colorado, this translates to some 45,000 accidents per year, involving 22,000 injuries and nearly 200 fatalities. Albuquerque, New Mexico had 22,000 traffic accidents per year during the late 1980's. Over 60% of these occurred at intersections, or were intersection-related. A 1992 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that 58% of urban area accidents occurred at or near intersections.
Governments at all levels have a right and, more importantly, an obligation to preserve and protect the functional integrity of the roadway system. All too often in the past, and still today, governments have attempted to be accommodating to private development by granting access almost without question. This is short-sighted and, in the long run, harmful not only to the general public, but also to the very private development interests we thought we were supporting. Governments at all levels must be convinced that there is a legitimate way to preserve capacity of streets and highways, without harming private development, and that those units of government are responsible for implementing and enforcing it.
It is right for governments to try to be responsive to their constituents. But in the case of managing our roadway system, we must remember that, along our major arterial streets, motorists, not adjacent landowners, are the principal "constituents" of that public roadway system. It is not a goal of access management to place unreasonable demands on developers and property owners. It is, rather, to ensure that the provision of vehicular access to private property does not unduly interfere with the safety and welfare of those using the public roadways.
Now, admittedly, the impact of a small number of individual access points, especially residential driveways in semi-rural areas, with low present traffic volumes, is minimal. But, at some point, a permit request will be for a commercial use, not a residential use. And the very fact that access permits are being requested is a potential warning sign that the corridor may not remain semi-rural forever, and traffic volumes may not remain low forever. Just about every major urban arterial in the Greater Cincinnati area was once a two-lane rural highway passing through agricultural areas and small crossroads towns. Think about this for a minute. Long before we had suburbs and urbanized townships as we know them today, we had two-lane state and federal highways passing through open countryside. And now that those highways are busy urban streets, the access points permitted long ago remain to haunt us as we try to solve today's congestion problems.
Every access point contributes to the deterioration of the system, and these impacts increase geometrically over time, as both traffic volumes and number of access points increase. And after the problem is evident, it is too late to try to fix it!
Access management must, therefore, be anticipatory of new growth, not reactive to it. It is far better to overzealously apply its principles to two or three "growth" corridors, which, as it turns out, do not grow, than to refrain from applying them to one supposedly "forever rural" corridor, which turns out to be the next "development hot spot" in the region.
Access management is not anti-growth. On the contrary, by maintaining higher travel speeds on arterial streets, access management supports more vital commercial development, rather than impedes it, because market areas will be larger. Consider this example: If average travel speed in a street network is 21 miles per hour, anyone within a 7-mile radius will be within 20 minutes of any given destination (say, for example, a restaurant). If, because of aggressive access management, average speeds are 30 miles per hour, the same 20 minute travel time captures an area of 10 miles radius, fully twice as large! At worst, motorists must endure a bit more circuity of travel in the vicinity of an origin or destination (that is, by using a frontage road or a side street), but this will be more than offset by reduced travel time throughout the remainder of the trip.
Also, the notion of the job-creating value of new growth, at least retail growth, is, in my view, considerably exaggerated. Building a new grocery store will not increase the total area-wide demand for bread by a single loaf -- it will simply change the place where the bread is bought. Jobs created at the new store are offset by jobs lost at other stores, which lose business to the new one. [Home Quarters moves in - Central Hardware moves out; Auto Zone opens up - Auto Source closes down - think of your own examples]
Now, regarding implementation of access management by units of government, current language in the Ohio Revised Code allows too much room for lax enforcement at the State level, and many local officials feel they are inadequately empowered at the county, township, and municipal levels. None-the-less, there are ways to implement access management principles and regulations in Ohio, even under current state laws.
Implementation options include the following:
First, specific and detailed access management requirements can be integrated into local subdivision regulations. This will address all developments covered by the sub regs, but not other developments, including minor lot splits and development of large individual parcels.
Second, general authority to administer access management regulations can be vested in an official within the jurisdiction (for example, the county engineer, or city public works director). This would be done under the general authority of police powers, which enable jurisdictions to enact and enforce regulations for the health, safety, and welfare of the general public. Traffic control regulations and devices are clearly accepted as a valid exercise of the police power, and access management is nothing more or less than another tool to manage traffic for the safety and well being of the general public.
Third, corridor-specific access management plans, specifically identifying individual land parcels and locating, either generally or specifically, acceptable locations for future access points, can be a very effective way to implement access management.
And finally, even if these formal mechanisms are not available, direct negotiation with owners and developers on a case by case basis can be quite effective, if the merits and long term benefits of the program (to the developer and his clients/customers, as well as to the general public) are presented convincingly, and if the program is applied uniformly and consistently to other similar developments.
Now, a couple of notes before I close:
First, any access management program must include a provision that any substantial change of land use (either type or intensity) will render existing access permits null and void. New access will need to be established in accordance with the access management program requirements.
And second, it is important to be aggressive in trying to limit minor lot splits (and associated requests for access) along major roadway corridors as much as possible. One way to do this is to develop and adopt corridor plans, which specify how access will be provided to all parcels of record as of the date of adoption of the plan. Access to any parcels created after plan adoption would need to be provided by the owner through linkages to the plan-specified access points.
Wrap-up:
So, I guess it’s evident by now that I have strong feelings about this subject. The reason for this is that, as I have studied our urban and suburban traffic congestion problems over many years, I have come to a disturbing and frustrating conclusion. That is, that by and large, and in spite of literally several decades of failure, far too many units of government are still dealing with issues of private access to the public roadway network in a short-sighted, piecemeal, and case-by-case manner. As I said at the outset, this has not worked in the past, and it will not work in the future. And the frustrating thing about this is that we don't need to continue doing business this way -- there is a better option available. That option is access management. I certainly can't claim to have invented the concept, but I have discovered it, so to speak, and I feel strongly that it must be taken more seriously by all levels of government. This is essential if we are to have any chance of avoiding more crippling traffic gridlock in the years to come.
It has often been said in the planning profession that "failure to plan is planning to fail", and that is precisely what I am talking about here. If the principles of access management are used as a guide to planning and design of access points along a developing corridor, adequate access to property can be provided, and the capacity of the roadway can be maintained, at a relatively low cost. If, however, the construction of access points occurs at random, with little thought given to proper spacing, design, or long-term impacts, it will be very costly, and perhaps impossible, to correct the situation once development along the corridor is complete.
Thank you for your attention. I would be happy to address any comments or questions.
REVISED 2-23-99
