Florida's Experience With Context-BasedStreet Classification

Florida's experience with context based street classifications with Billy Hataway, Duane Carver, and, myself, Rob Stewart. You can register for coming webinars. We have one, next week on the climate and equity challenge projects, which were selected by CNU earlier this year. Go to cnu. Org slash resources slash on the park bench. And today we have a panel that is super accomplished on streets and transportation and has been recognized for the contribution to urbanism. Billy Hadaway is principal with Fer and Pierce with 45 years of experience in the transportation industry. Prior to joining Fare and Pierce, Billy was the transportation director for the City of Orlando. He has held many leadership roles in the private and public sector sector, including F. Dot Director, Office of Design. State Roadway Design Engineer in District 5 Design Engineer. And he is a previous recipient of the John Nolan Award from CNU Florida, which is a high honor. And we have Dwayne Carver. He is Florida DOT, criteria publications manager. He manages production of the F. Design manual Florida guide green book. F dot context classification and other criteria documents as needed and he provides expertise on context based design and speed management. He was also the state complete streets program manager for 7 years. And he also won the John Nolan Award from CNU Florida chapter this year. I don't know that, there has been, other current, DOT or current or past UT, officials who have won such high owner from, from, seeing you people, but, we're, honored to have, Billy and Duane today. I'm Rob Studovil, editor of CNUs Public Square. Today we're gonna have a discussion. About Florida's context based street classification system. This is an innovative and revolutionary system that in my view should be emulated nationwide. We're going to find out what Florida has learned from this system. How it connects land use transportation, how it meshes with form base codes. And more. First there's gonna be a presentation followed by brief, discussion among the panelists. And then QA from the audience. So please use the QA function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you. I'm gonna pass this along to Billy and Duane. Okay, I'm sharing my screen. Thank you, Perfect. Alright, Rob, are you seeing our screen? I don't know that I am. Okay, good. I am. And it's in full screen mode. Perfect. Domain. Thank you. All right, great. So go to the next slide. So here's our agenda today. We've got quite a bit of information to cover during this, time that we have allocated for the, for the webinar. So. Hopefully we'll be providing some meaningful information to the audience that will be helpful to them and Dwayne and I have included our emails at the end. On the last slide in case you have further questions. You can always email us. And Rob, how will questions be answered if we end up running out of time and you have additional questions? Is there any mechanism for following up or should they just contact us directly? They could contact, they could put the questions in the chat. They could, email me or email, you all and get more questions answered. Perfect. Thank you. Go ahead, Dwayne. So, as you saw in the first slide, we're gonna talk about how we got here and from a transportation perspective having [email protected] 28 years and having been in the industry for 45 years, most of which. Was in Florida. Our focus in the transportation industry has really been on moving cars. This, exemplifies that I was presenting at, University of South Florida years ago and I saw this young lady walking her twins near the USF campus because we did not have sidewalks on Fowler Avenue which happens to be a transit corridor also. It does have sidewalks today, but there's still way too many quarters throughout the state, including transit corridors that still do not have sidewalks. Next slide. And while we in the transportation industry certainly have a great deal of responsibility for how things have ended up with with wide intersections multi-lane roadways that are high speed. Land development patterns have also played a major role in this. On the top half of this slide, you can see what we would call conventional land development patterns or suburban, sprawl types of land development patterns and you can see as an example you've got a pot of housing, single family housing, you've got a pot of apartment complexes, maybe office building, some retail. And everything is really called a sack on to the arterial or collector system which creates a lot of demand. Push that to the next button. There we go. And then on the bottom half of the slide, all of our cities even in Florida before World War 2. Not only had a network of streets and small block sizes because everyone walked, primarily to get to where they wanted to go. But we also had a mix of uses. We had, neighborhood schools, we had neighborhood retail. And while obviously in the summer like we have right now, people will still choose to drive their cars. They have lots of ways to get around. You're not dependent on one's, unlimited number of streets. Which means that you don't have to make them as wide and you don't have to make the intersections as large. Next slide. And when I talk about the fact that. That's not just the network, but it's also the land development regulations and government zoning by local agencies. The Florida DOT does not control the adjacent land uses that's controlled by local governments. They have a role in creating, these issues because again, cul-de-sacing these developments on to the state and US highway system along with their own roadway systems. And so you can see in this slide you've got a retail center. A lot of, parking out in front, which is usually empty. And you can see multi-use trails on, all the quadrants of this, of these roadways. But even though you have these trails, people are not going to walk in this environment unless they absolutely have to. Next slide. So how did we get here? Back in 2,011, the complete streets coalition an element of smart growth America put out a report called Dangerous by Design. And basically it said these 4 major metropolitan areas in the state of Florida were the most dangerous in the country for pedestrians and bicyclists. And the secretariat had recently brought me back to florida.to be the district secretary in southwest Florida. And at our first secretary staff meeting, he said the secretary had a way as help is here to help lead a statewide initiative to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety and he said while we are always proud of being number one as state transportation agencies. And so many areas being number one in pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries is not where we want to be. Next slide. A big part of the problem is that, almost all of our system, the Florida DT state system, our posted speeds are generally in the range of 45 miles an hour on our collectors. We do have We do have lower speed roadways through communities, but by and large most of our 4 and 6 and 8 lane roadways are 45 miles an hour and higher. And you can see if you get hit by a vehicle at that at that speed. Only about, one, only about 10% of the pedestrians survive. And chances are you're gonna have a lifelong disability that you just cannot overcome likewise with 30 miles an hour. So low speed. Is a key element that we're gonna talk more about throughout this presentation. Next slide. So in fact in 2,014 Dwayne and I went to. The Pro Bike Pro Walk conference and we wrote this policy. I'd convinced the secretary at the time that we couldn't keep designing our streets the way we were and expect different results. That's always been known as the definition of insanity. So we wrote this policy at the at that conference and the secretary signed it. Which, was the start of our journey into complete streets and then the complete streets coalition next bullet. Then the complete streets coalition. Actually, I'd run into the executive director at the time. And he told me that they were had just finished helping another state agency to develop their complete streets implementation plan. And I said, I'll be calling you back shortly. And so we were able to actually get. Smart growth America and the complete streets coalition to help us to develop our complete streets implementation plan in 2015. Next bullet. You can see that was approved. In 2015 and that modified, 11 key documents. And how did that also came the context classification guide, which Dwayne will talk more about in 2017. Next slide. The, result of that is the, because of the implementation of the context classification guide and the incorporation of all of this into our design manual, the complete streets coalition actually provided Florida DT and award for what had been done in the state of Florida which I was gone at that point in time, but I was very proud of the work that that continued on thanks in part to what Dwayne and Michael Shepherd the state roadway design and engineer at the time. Next slide. Dwayne. Alright, thanks Billy. That was a great overview of sort of how we got to this point. Sort of from 0. I even we really weren't even starting away from 0. We've been trying for years to try to make. Context based design work within the conventional realm of state highway design. And it just really was not working. And so what we've realized when we came back to it a few years later when we came back to it a few years later was that what was missing was the land use connection. Talk a little bit now about context classification. Those of you who are new urbanists probably recognize that graphic and you'll you know if you squint a little bit it looks like another graphic that I'm going to show you that's been used many times by new urbanists. And so it's no surprise that Billy and I being urbanists came in and said we think this may help as a way to address this question. So that was where we kind of went with it. Now part of it meant that we had to do all of our state roadways. We had to do with it. Now part of it meant that we had to do all of our state roadways. We had to do all of our state roadways. We had to context classify them as we'll say. So that was a big effort. But I wanna kind of start with helping folks understand what context classification is in relation to the transect and as we consider the transsect to be sort of the gold standard of how we talk about land use and transportation and how we talk about how land use changes over space. That's a good place to start. So most of the folks I bet on this call are familiar with the transsect diagram from DPZ. Organizes space from the least walkable, condition, over, on, the, left, to, the, most, walkable, urban, conditions, over, on, the, right, normally, you, see, it, broken aspects of the built environment based on where you are in space along that. So it doesn't take a lot of imagination to go from that. Up to this, which is our contest classification system. This is in a way that this is great and we love the fact that we have this contact classification system, but in talking to new urbanists, sometimes this will throw you a bit because you may want to try to think that this is a one-to-one kind of thing. And it's not quite that way. I'm gonna talk a little bit later about how this fits into your form base code if you have a form based code. But the key thing to take away from this is that The, the purpose of the context classification system is to give your transportation folks a way to think about the roadway. And in Florida, the DOT controls the road. We do not control the land use. And so we could not have a system that required that the department control the land use in order to classify something. And so the way our system is set up, the context classification is actually kind of reactionary. Now it'll let you do things in the future as well, but it starts by looking at what's on the ground today. But it starts by looking at what's on the ground today. And so if you imagine that what's on the ground today. And so if you imagine that this is your state road going through the middle of the diagram here from the middle of the diagram here for the left to the right, going through the middle of the diagram here for the left to the right, you see it passes through the left to the right. You see it passes through all the areas that we would recognize as transsects through all the areas that we would recognize as transsects. My C one natural conditions, my C one natural conditions, C 2 rural. I have a rural town there. My C one natural conditions, C 2 rural. I have a rural town there, see 2 rural. I have a rural town there, you know, through my suburban areas, getting into general urban on the right and then working my way over to my urban areas, getting into general urban on the right and then working my way over to my urban center and then my urban core. Now in most new urbanist areas where you've used new urbanism and you have the transect applied you'll have all of those done. We made a few changes to this for our context classification system that can that sometimes trip up the new urbanist. New urbanists typically think of the most urban condition in your own town as your T 6 that's your that's your core for wherever you are in Tallahassee will have one and Gainesville will have one and Boston will have one and everybody will have their own T 6. On our system, the T 6 or the C 6 is our urban core is only reserved for the very most urban conditions. That's Miami, Tampa, Orlando. Places of a million or more population. That's that's the only place that we use that urban core designation. Now the C 5 is a lot like your urban center. Most cities will have a C 5 and and the C 4 is not too different. So those 2 things will trip trip folks up a little bit sometimes and they're like, well, why isn't our T 6 translate into that. Maybe during the question answer we can go into why we made that decision. There were some good reasons behind it, but it can trip you up a bit. The other thing to consider is that we do have 2 flavors of suburban. We have the C 3 R, the C 3 C. That's not super unusual. A lot of, towns that I've worked in on the webinar stuff, I have, you know, recognized that particularly they'll break out the C 4 into different categories. In Florida we recognize that the C threec commercial suburban has a tendency to change over time. And that's very important when you're thinking about how the road might look different in the future. The C threeR suburban residential on the other hand has a tendency to stay static over time. And so that also is important when you're thinking about what the road might look like in the future. So we felt like from a planning perspective, we needed to break those out and those are reflected somewhat in the design criteria as well. Other than that, it's not terribly different. The CT rural town is a little different from the from the transsect, but really all that is is taking a T 4 and dropping it into a small town and a lot of us have done that working on projects before. But under this system, it's a C twot rural town. This system matches up very closely with what Ashto has done in the latest version of the Ashto Greenbook, which is allowing us to kind of dovetail and think in unison with what Ashto was doing. Alright, so kind of moving on from this, the next great thing about doing this is that was allowing us to create a common language and recall, I used to work with the HPE, Rick likes to say the planners speak French, but the engineers speak German. And one of the things that we did and that we do as new urbanists is learn how to translate between those 2. And, and so that's what this context classification system was designed to do. In the past, transportation engineers kind of understood arterial and collector. They understood urban and rural, but that was about as deep as it went and and planners had a hard time conveying to them why an urban arterial in a downtown would be different from an urban arterial in a rural condition, particularly in terms of the speed and the design criteria. And this was a way to try to get us on the same page with that. So try to create a common language. So if you go to the, contest classification guide, and I want to put a link to it, in the chat in a few minutes. So you can go there and take a look if you want and open that thing up. You will see the, there's a matrix in there called The Matrix. And this matrix on the left-hand side is the information for the planners and it talks about your context classifications and it tells you what those would look like in terms of their physical characteristics that would matter to a planner. And then across the top is really sort of the information for the engineers. It talks about intersection density, block perimeters, block lamps. And then there's some more information that kind of gets back to the planners about building heights and placement. But these are all things that could be measured. And that, this really is where this is the Rosetta Stone that lets you go from talking about roads to talking about places and yeah so I want to enlarge this top column there just so you can kind of see the top column there just so you can kind of see on the left hand side there is the railway connectivity measures. Most of, and there's a lot of criteria that are affected by that. The most important one really is design speed and you can see here and Bill is going to touch on this as well the context classifications are assigned a range of design speeds based on how fast we want the traffic going and that's directly reflective of what kind of character we want that area to have and do we expect to have a lot of pedestrians and cyclists and transit there or not? What kind of movements are we expecting to have there? What kind of traffic are we expecting to have there? So that's all covered in our FDOT design manual. So here are classifications again. And this is one of the way Billy said we would come back to speed and this is how we are kind of making this play out. So, so you at your context classifications, you have your state road. We need to convey to the engineers how fast we want things to move on these roadways. And so the idea is that if you're in the most urban conditions, you may start in C 3 where you have higher design speeds and work your way down to your lowest speeds are going to be in the highest context classifications. Now if I'm in a rural condition on my state arterial system, it's okay to have high speeds there because I'm just moving lots of traffic, you know, very long distances. Speeds are gonna go up there. But when I get to a small town or someplace, I've got to transition my speed down and then back up again as I leave. So, this is just sort of a visual of how that breaks out. And the context classification system allows the planners to converse with the engineers about this is where we need these speeds to be. And then the engineers get it. Once they see this kind of thing, they're able to understand this is what we need to try to achieve. Now now achieving it's much harder but understanding that you need to achieve it is actually very helpful from this. Okay, Billy. Billy's gonna talk more about connecting land use and transportation. Sort of generally beyond just what we've done at DOT, but kind of starting with that. Back to you, sir. Sure. And thank you. So. Going to the to how we got here to some extent so the plans preparation manual originally recognize only 2 types of speeds. High speed, which you can see was greater than 45 miles an hour and they considered low speed less than or equal to 45 miles an hour. One other thing that is helpful for you for you to understand is at the same time this Plans Prep menu recognize only 2 speeds. Our minimum design speed on any corridor regardless of context. Historically was 40 miles an hour. So if you were going through the heart of a downtown, the design speed would be 45 miles an hour. Likewise, the, the Florida, whereas the Florida design manual recognizes the 8 contacts with the Associated Speeds as the Wayne just mentioned. Next slide. So you can see as he'd mentioned previously and you can see that the range of speeds on this chart. The one thing that we were able to get in place and Dwayne's gonna talk more about this later is the target speed. So the target speed and the design speed and the operating speed we want to be the same. So the days of adding 5 or 10 miles an hour. During the course of design, to what was the intended design speed is something that's historical. We are no longer doing that nor should anyone in the industry be adding additional speed to what's the intended posted speed is going to be once the project is built. Next slide. Likewise, the planespret manual only recognize 2 sidewalk widths. The back of if a sidewalk was at the back of curb it was 6 feet wide if it was separated it was 5 feet you can see in the table on the right now that for the different contexts there are different sidewalk widths, 5, 6 or 10 feet, excuse me, 5, 6, 10 or 12 feet again based on the context of the built environment. And likewise, traveling wits are handled the same way. Basically at DOT if you were putting in the travel lane it was expected to be 12 feet in every case. Now the engineers have much more flexibility using a 1011 or 12 foot traveling again based on context. And then a couple of illustrations to show how, conditions can be changed. Once the, local governments change their land development patterns, this is a Woodville Highway. Runs through a little community called Woodville, which is between Tallahassee and the coast. And you can see the conditions. It would be classified as a C 2 basically. And they, had intended to want this to become more urban to get the speeds down because there's an elementary school less than 50 feet away from this roadway. So Dwayne, go ahead and. Paying through these. So adding sidewalks would obviously help. Trees would help. But if you want to get the speech down, you really need to get the buildings to the back of sidewalk and on street parking, then you can have realistically have a 25 mile an hour speed. Operating through this corridor. This 2 lane rural quarter and then let's go to the next illustration which is Johnny Dodds Boulevard. This is a project that, Dwayne and I worked on at HPE and the, and the community actually funded this project as a master plan, as in opposition to what was gonna be interchanges at every singleized intersections. And you can see the conditions. Businesses were struggling along these frontage roads. And so we were we worked with Dover Call to come up with a plan. So let's go through those Dwayne and show how it could be transformed over time. Obviously bringing the buildings back. The putting on street parking on the side frontage rows, putting in trees for shade. And then there's actually a multi use trail between the side access street and in the continued through corridor. And then the next image shows that there's, we actually left room for transit. Or additional lanes in the media. I think there should be should come up. Maybe not. All right, go ahead, Dwayne. I thought I'd included that up there it was. So back to you, Dane. So, we wanted to talk a little bit about how this context classification can work with form based codes. A number of cities in Florida have adopted form based codes. And, so it's a good question about and actually we like the form base code and the context classification. System was specifically designed to help you, integrate with your form base code. Billy can tell you one of the reasons that drove our complete streets efforts in Florida was that the department frankly was getting tired and it was costing a lot of money to go to a town and try to do a roadway project and then the town rolls out these street standards I've got and maybe they're context based and maybe they have transsects and they want all these things that we couldn't do on our roadways. Given the conditions that he just described under the plan's preparation manual. And so the idea was to come up with a language that we could put our we could design our roads around that the locals would also be speaking. And so that's the idea would be this form base code idea. So. There is in the context classification guide a table, table 5 that talks about the relationship between the FDOT context classifications and the smart code transit system. Now, your form base code may be the straight smart code. It may be a variation of it. We're using this as kind of the gold standard as the smart code. But if you can If you can figure out how to get from the smart code to your, you know, to your particular code, you can figure out how to get from the context classification as well. Because this is kind of linking those 2 things together. And again, I wanted to point out that some things are very similar. Natural means natural rule means rural. You may or may not have a rural town. Where you are, you may or may not have a couple of different flavors of suburban. When it comes to the C 4, that does translate into a T 4 general urban but keep in mind a lot of towns will have subcategories of this. Commonly you'll have a T 4 office or T 4 commercial and you'll have a T 4 residential and in each of those you still have a mix of uses compatible with good urbanism but the uses are gonna skew one way or the other depending on what's going on. And so you may have that. We don't get down to that fine grain level with our contest classification system, but in general, you know, you should be able to make that make that translation. Get our C 6 although you may very well have your own T 6 that would probably map out closer to a T 5 in a lot of conditions. We also have this special district and if you're familiar with form base code, you know that there may be places that just don't really fit into the context, classification system or the transsect system. Maybe you have a port or a university or. Really, something like this that really just doesn't quite fit into one thing. It is it does have basically all one use and so we do have this special district opportunity as well in the context classification system and you can map that into into your own system as well. So that is sort of the kind of a one to one to how they fit together. The other thing to be the really, really important thing to keep in mind is that our context classification for FDOT is focused almost entirely on arterials. Now remember under the functional classification system there's arterial collector and local. And so our system is almost entirely arterials. When so when you look at our design criteria, that's for arterial streets. If you're applying it to your local streets or your collector roads, Our criteria are probably gonna be too big and too fast for those roads. For instance, you can't get to a yield street under FDOTs context classification based criteria because you wouldn't have a yield street on an arterial road. You need those on your local roads. And so as you're doing your local street standards, you're gonna have to develop those for your own streets. And you can use our contest classification nomenclature if you would like, but keep in mind that the criteria are gonna have to be fit, you know, to your own town. And for those other context, for those other functional classifications as well. And I'm glad to answer your questions about that when we finish up the presentation. And so we answer questions. I want to talk about this first 5 years of implementation and how it's working. So I'll try to go through that pretty quickly. Basically, we started with the FDM, we put contest classification there first because we realized that a lot of different manuals at FDOT looked at our design manual. And so when we put it in there, it kind of requires them to begin adopting this as well. And that is exactly what's happening. So it's fine in its way into our planning, traffic operations, safety manuals. Even maintenance has come to us and ask about, if we could use context classification for that. That actually was a place where it was not that helpful. They wanted to know if they could see, if context classification would help them figure out where payment was gonna wear out faster. It's worth a shot. It turned out to not really work that way. But in other places, it was very helpful. For instance, we're doing safety analysis. But what we found in our.at least was that this was not. That hard an idea for people to get their heads around. It actually seemed like something they were prepared to think about and that they wanted to think about and I was honestly a little surprised how quickly they adapted it and they've just kind of taken off with it. So. Just these are just some of the manuals that have begun adopting context classification. And, So that we're just starting it so we still have some work to do but at least they're talking about it and they have now this language there that we can work around. One example of a way we've used it to help us understand things a little better. We looked at our safety and bicycle and pedestrian injuries from a context classification perspective. And it helped us narrow in pretty quickly actually that most of our safety problem if you're in a C threec or a C 4 area context classification roadway the odds are that you're more likely to have the safety issue. So that kind of got us to looking at what are our design criteria there, what are the types of uses and types of people that we have going there, what kind of transportation are they using and and really find another way to try to grapple with this problem. So rather than spreading all of our effort across our entire system, we can kind of focus our efforts. We're hopefully they'll be at the most use. This is what Billy was talking about also with, got target speed by knowing the contact classification. It helps us on our project understand where we need to start with our target speed. So basically in C one and C 2 we start by saying well let's assume we want to start on the high end of the speed range and then we justify why we would go any lower. Whereas in the other parts of it, we may start on the lowest end of it and then justify why it would be higher. So let's say we wanna start at 25. Well, why would I not use 25? A lot of good reasons why you might not use 25, but you need to justify that. You don't start by saying, 45 and then talk our way down for instance. And lastly, we wanted to cover. If you're not in Florida and a lot of you I think are not in Florida, why would you even care about this? So Billy, you wanna explain that to us? Okay. Please, so especially for the sun belt states because the vast majority of our growth has happened after World War 2. The The problems with fatalities is serious injuries are extremely. Located within the Sendel states because of the land development patterns and the resulting high speed multi-laying roadways. And you can see the map here. We have 7 regions in the state of Florida. Thankfully, the Florida DUT is still working on this to improve things in the state and the complete streets implementation will certainly help as as will the increase focus on speed management in the bike path safety initiative continues to work with these regions where the biggest problems are in next slide. So. You can see these countries. Back in the mid-nineties, move to what's called vision 0, a safe systems approach to, improving pedestrian and bicycle safety and all these all these countries were actually very autodominate but the cut but the leadership in those countries decided that the loss of human life on their roadways was not acceptable. And so they all moved to improve safety from a transportation standpoint and a big part of that especially in the state of Florida is moving towards the state of Florida is moving towards a big part of that especially in the state of Florida is moving towards a complete streets approach. If you're if you're working on, especially in the state of Florida is moving towards a complete streets approach. If you're if you're working on improving safety either from a vision 0 or a systems approach, you've got to bring complete streets into the equation. Next slide. So one of the things that's important to understand, are these types of safety. So Normanative, safety is what you is what's considered by most of our engineers that if they meet a design standard, then then they will actually achieve safety. The important thing to understand is the ETO design standards are not based on safety research. They're based on operating on maintaining the operating speed and capacity of the roadway. If you look at that in comparison with substantive safety that's what occurs when real-world safety history is favorable whether or not standards are met and we've been meeting [email protected] my whole career and yet we obviously have significant issues in that world. And then and then perceived their subjective safety is based on an individual's level or comfort or risk, for example. Next slide. So visions are in say systems, just a quick overview. Our traditional approach has been has been we're trying to reduce crashes and that fatalities are just gonna happen. With vision 0, the, it's a totally different approach. It's focusing on fatal and severe injuries. And I'll tell you just for example at this city of Orlando when we implemented our vision. We found out that 3 short segments in each of our commissioner districts accounted for between 2928 and 79% of all the fatalities and serious injuries within that district's geographic areas. So if we could reduce the fatalities and serious injuries on those corridors, then we would be able to accrue double digit reductions in fatalities and serious injuries. And I think this is the benefit to other states is using complete streets as approach to improve safety for vulnerable users. Next slide. And basically this is this is out of federal highways, systems approach and the things that are underlined here are the things that those of us who are planning and engineers can have the most direct impact on. By having safe speeds. Safe roads which can which will contribute to safe driver behavior if a road if a roadway is designed in such a way that drivers feel as though they cannot drive fast. Comfortably, then they will be safer road users. Next slide. And with that, I think we've covered everything, Rob, that you were looking for us to cover and now we're available for questions. Or comments I guess. Yeah, first of all, I wanted to, you know, want to thank you and until people, let people know that if you want to ask questions, be sure to put that into the Q&A function of Zoom and we'll get to those questions. As soon as possible. And I wanted to assure everybody that this is going to be posted on the scene new website likely tomorrow so that you can go back and you can go back and you can revert review all these, so that you can go back and you can go back and you can review all these slides again in more detail and you know learn some of this the great information. I wanted to, you know, ask, just a little bit more. I think this, is an issue that, a lot of planners are confronted with a lot of municipalities, not just in the state of Florida, but but elsewhere. Often DO Ts will recognize when they are going through a historic town they will recognize that they really need to maintain a certain design. In those places, these are historic places and they can't just RAM through, you know, a superhighway through a town or through a city and they accept that there is different design that's going to that's going to take precedence in these historic places. But when there are new places that are walkable that are designed. And you may have touched upon this a bit in your presentation, but I think in little more detail. How does the Florida classification system enable the state to respond to planned walkable places that may not be walkable today. I can start with that answer, Rob. So first of all, there are, there's a lot of redevelopment that happens along the state in US highways. Which is not new, but it's it's becoming new and so having this, classification system in place gives engineers better guidance. They didn't have guidance before and what they could and couldn't do in terms of street design either from speed or traveling with standpoint. So it's giving them more flexibility and comfort with doing that. Outside of the state system the state of florida has what's called the florida green book and it's adopted into statute and I think it was in 2,008 we published the traditional neighborhood development chapter, which actually provide guidance to locals on how they could do streets again. That was actually based on the transect and so it provided guidance and is still used. By local agencies and by engineers who are doing new development projects. I'm working actually on 3 right now where we're using the Florida, green book traditional neighborhood development chapter is the basis for the street design in those communities. I don't know that other states have that option. We do here in Florida. So, and as far as if you were developing something like that at a green field T and D on the state system. We have what's the existing context classification we call the current classification. That's what's on the ground today. So if I went out and looked at your area, it would be C 2. It's rural right now. And you're telling me that it's going to be something different in the future. It's going to be a C 2 T. So we also have the ability to use what's called a future classification. And the future classification is used when either DOT believes or when you can convince the DOT that what's gonna be there in the future is different from what's there today. So some good examples of this might be that you have an area full of, suburban, oriented shopping centers that have all sort of, burnout and reached their obsolescence and you're expecting to read develop all those into new towns. So you're gonna cut the big lots up into small blocks and build them up as townscape. And so you may say, well, in this area, we're gonna be future is gonna be C 4 or C 5. And so we'd like to develop and work on this road as if it was going to be that way and have the speed set at that level. And so we would look at your plans and look at what all you've been permitting lately and what was in your plans and see if we believe that that was going to happen in the department then could make a decision to go ahead and treat it as a C 4. Same kind of thing then in your new and your green field area we would have to look at your plans, we'd look at, the likelihood that what you're gonna say was gonna happen was really gonna happen. And then, if that could, you could make a good case for it. Then, you know, we would be able to let you develop that as a CT and it would be reclassified as a CT. That's a conversation that you have to have, you know, case by case with with the district who controls that particular part of the state highway system. So, you know, that's something that just has to be handled on a case-by-case basis, to be handled on a case-by-case basis. But there there is that option there under the case by case basis, but there is that option there under the context classification system. Thank you. I also note that, that the transect was, created in Florida by DPZ and this system was created in you know in Florida there were some differences between this and the transect but there were some differences between this and the transect. There were some differences between this and the transect, but, is it a coincidence that, that both of these systems were, you know, originally created in Florida, although the transect is now being used across the world. That's, one part of the question. Another part is that, you know there's differences between the transsect and you talked about this but why why include suburban in there at all. II can respond to both of those questions. So, is a former and current member of the Florida Green Book. I was at a meeting years ago and the, city and county engineers that are members of the green book said we've got these developers wanting to. Do 10 foot travel lanes and developments. And they're calling them traditional neighborhood developments and we have no basis for whether or not they are in fact traditional neighborhood development. So I worked with a group with that group and and that's how we brought the transect. Into the traditional neighborhood development chapter Liz, Lis, Zyberk actually worked with me. To establish quantifiable criteria that would allow them to say, yes, this is a T and D development and then they could use the T and D handbook and chapter to develop those communities. On the second question. We have a lot. In fact, I would say our dominant form. Of development is suburban suburban sprawl, suburban commercial and suburban residential and because we still had to address that in some fashion, that was the reason for these 2 classifications. I'm gonna get to. some of the questions from, from the audience because they're really good. Ross had talked about, there's a project under design in West Palm Beach, and, this is timely for that project. He said Australian Avenue and from 40 Fifth Street to downtown is under redesign. He said even in this context the publicly proposed design is for vehicle speed and throughput at the public meeting most comments were focused around safety of the road with speeding traffic pedestrian and children along the roadway. How can I as a resident without expertise in this field work with the county to get a better design that fits the context. That's a tough one. You have to get community support. One person can't do it by themselves. So my suggestion is that they work with other like minded folks that have those concerns. And approach the county that way because one person by themselves is not likely to have much of an impact, unfortunately. There was, somebody had asked, our shoulders required on C 4 roadways in this, you said this county is requiring them inciting the Florida Green Book. My reaction would be no, but I don't have the, FDM memorized. True. Well, whether you have a shoulder or not depends on other things besides just the context classification. So we have urban roadways in the southern part of the state that do have shoulders. And, and whereas in the northern part of the state, you only ever see those in rural roadways. Was because of how the drainage has to work. And so we don't necessarily assign the shoulder base just on the context classification. We're also looking at the speed of that roadway, what other functions that roadway is trying to accomplish and now the context class will begin to you know lead you in a certain direction on that but there may be conditions where where you would have shoulders there but as far as what the stuff in the green book now, a lot of communities don't even know what their local context classification would be because they haven't gone through that exercise yet. So to try to, you know, assign greenbook criteria to that will be. Interesting at this point because we're still in the process of going through the green book and assigning context classification based criteria within it. That's that'll be what we'll be working on for the next couple of years actually with our green book committee which is composed of you know city and county engineers and and consultants who work in this industry as well. One other point, Rob, is that when we went through this exercise, the T 3 became part of C 4. So that's an area that's transitioning from more suburban to more urban. So there could be places as Dwayne mentioned where it's still a higher speed environment. You don't have curbing gutter sections. You're gonna have open swell. So in those cases you will likely see shoulders, but it wouldn't be on new quarters. You would be less likely to see that, I would think. But there's a lot of existing infrastructure out there that's already that way. I kind of laughed when I heard that question because I had the exact same response myself. When we started talking about that, I was like, we're not doing C 3. Why would we ever do C 3, but I had to be, they had to make me understand that we're talking about building something for the entire system. Exactly. That includes stuff that's already there. And so even if you don't like it, it is there and you have to find some way to deal with it and that's a lot easier if you have something you can call it and and begin to have a language to address it. So that's why we do have the C 3 and there's not that we necessarily want to see more of it. But if we want to deal with what's there, we have to be able to talk about it. See that. So have technical questions coming up and some of may not. Easy to answer but. Somebody asked often the right of way with does not provide enough space to accommodate a complete streets approach, especially at intersections. What tools does new manual have to rebalance the right of way allocation and make the hard decisions that might impact level of service. So the new manual does not mention level of service. It's really not something that we consider for the design of the roadway. We're more worried about, you know, especially when the designer gets it, a lot of those decisions actually already been made. So they're told design a 4 lane road, design a 5, a 6 lane road, whatever you're supposed to design, that gets handled in the planning part of it. So that's partly a conversation that you have to have with the planners. How much respect are you giving level of service? Remember that level of service is no longer a standard now. It's a target on the state highway system. So if you can't meet it. You haven't blown a standard. You just haven't met a target. And that's a lot that's a lot easier for people to understand. And we, have flexibility now also to understand there's different modes that have to be there, you may have to give up a little level of service for one mode in order to make it better for a different mode. And we'd like to see that go toward the pedestrians and the cyclists, for instance. But the issue with the ride away That's true on most things where you're not just buying, going out and buying it. So, certainly on 3 R projects where you're dealing with existing conditions, we never have the right way to do all the things that we would like to do and you have to make trade-offs and decisions about what you can actually fit in that in that particular corridor, what the priorities are, what the budget will let you do. These are very complex decisions and and sometimes very tense. Conversations that get had, in district offices about how these things are going to be done. And Rob, I would just add to that is that safety should be a higher priority now. So for example, if someone's thinking that you need to add or write the dedicated right turn lane in a more urban context. In my view, that's something that shouldn't be done. Regardless. Because you're basically putting those in for peak periods, increasing the crossing distance and exposure for pedestrians. So safety should always have a an important role in that process. And doing the best you can. I mean, many times you're in the position of having to do the best you can. No, I, you know, many people are aware that, the, the districts, the department transportation districts have a certain amount of autonomy and often do things differently. And this question relates to that. Are all of the F dot districts complying with the target equals the design equals posted speeds. I doubt it, still working on projects being mandated to add plus 10 miles per hour above the posted target. I will answer that question because I've been associated with this agency for 28 years inside and in a bunch outside it varies from district to district and I'm not naming names but they're certainly districts that are more progressive around this and seem to have a higher focus on safety than some of the others. And I'll leave it at that. Well, and I can tell you that there is nothing in the design manual that tells you to add to the miles an hour above the target or posted. No. So if they're doing that, they're on their own. Which always kind of makes me laugh because there's so many things engineers won't do because it's not in the manual, but then there's other things they're happy to do even though it's not in the manual sometimes. So, you know, this may be one of those things where somebody is doing the way that they've just done it for 20 or 30 years and or that they were taught to do by somebody who've been doing it that for that long and don't they don't realize that it's changed. Yeah. So let's assume that they just don't know that that's changed yet. Maybe you could send them in their own copy of the FDM and highlight that partner, but it says, you know, about the target speeds. Yeah, the guidance is clear now. There should be no question. Okay, are there any other state DOTs pursuing similar concepts and standards? What is the interest in this and and also how would other state DOTs emulate would you have done? I'm aware of. Yeah, go ahead. I would say I've yeah I would say that Florida DUT has and always has been willing to work with other states that are trying to follow our lead as an agency. When I was the state roadway design engineer it was not unusual for other states to reach out to us especially Georgia at the time. As far as as far as where other states are with this process I can't really speak to that from my from my experience not, there have not been many if any that have gone this far with. With using context as the basis for street design. Is there interest? I mean, at all, are you really seeing interest at least in exploring this from other states? Well, I'm on a couple of national committees and research panels that are looking and actually, creating national criteria for these things. So, I think there is interest in it. Ashto is moving in this direction. So whether your state wants to do it or not, Ashto is doing it in most states, pretty much all states look to Ashto for guidance and direction on these things. So you can do it now or you can wait 10 years and do it when you adopt the new Ashto manuals but it's kind of coming so one way or the other I think we're all gonna end up here. The question, more technical questions and in Florida the transportation element is a required comp plan element. Have you created an example, goal policy objective for cities to add and require f.to use these classifications. What language would you suggest? do we have to pass a complete streets policy first? So the FDOT is specifically not the state land planning agency and we've taken great care to not drift into that area. So that's one of the reasons the context classification system is set up the way that it is. It responds to land use. It doesn't necessarily require you to do any particular thing with land use. And so that is a local decision to make about how you wanted to develop your area. If you want to develop your area and adopt contest classifications, there is guidance coming out now to do this. We're going to actually add that to a context classification guide over the next couple years to support the changes that are being made in the Florida Green Book as well. And so, but I would say yes, you you do want to add this to your goals and policies and objectives for your count plan. That'll be very helpful. Really the most helpful thing to me is to actually do a form based code. If you don't have a form based code in your community. I think that's going to be the most effective way to move in this direction. And that will give you a lot of tools to make these other things come to pass. I agree with Dwayne and Rob, the other thing I would say is that part of what drove me to, use this approach first with the green book and then with the design manual. Is that, when I was in district 5, the Orlando area. And I know other districts had the same experience. We were kind of always at war with local with downtown city downtowns wanting to do things differently that were in more in line with these with this approach to designing a land development in streets. And this is a way I saw of encouraging local governments to get on board with fixing their land development patterns. So that we could design streets and keep with what they want because what they would do is they come to us and say, we want you to reduce the speed limit on this roadway from 45 to 30 miles an hour. And of course I would have to say, well, your land development patterns don't support that. And so this will let this provide a mechanism to encourage local governments to do things differently and then allow.to work collaboratively with them to achieve their community vision. Christine asks a couple of questions. Having to do with, getting F to change classification from one is the existing or observed classification. And She asks whether this has ever happened. Are there any, cases where this has happened and what is the, best way of persuading F to change classification. It has happened from time to time. I don't. No, exactly. All the details are where it happened. The districts are the ones who make those decisions and they make it on the information that's brought to them. I had a few that they brought to central office that were just weird that they didn't know what to do with. That's the stuff we always get and to help them make a decision about what that contest classification would be. But I'm pretty confident there have been some that have changed. 10 miles of our highway frontage and we're like, that's not gonna happen. Yeah. You know, that's more growth than you've had in the last 100 years. You're not gonna, that's not gonna happen before the next resurfacing cycle in 12 years. So, you know, it's got to be realistic. If you're saying that you want on street parking but all of your current land development codes require off street parking and say nothing at all about on street parking, then it's unlikely that, yeah, we're gonna be willing to go along with that either. So you're, it's good to have your own ducks in a row when you come to the department and then you just have to have that discussion with the district and and make the best case that you can for it. I had communities in my district in Southwest Florida that approached me wanting to change quarters and actually, eliminate, 6 landing projects that were in the work program, which I worked with them to do that and over time at DOT you get a at least I did have a good sense of which agencies were. Really serious about transforming their downtowns and which worked. And because the ones that were were doing meaningful changes along from a land use standpoint along the state and US highways. City of Sarasota is a good example of the city of Lakeland and there were others as well. Great. You know, we talked about how this is creating common language between, engineers and, and the transportation officials. And, so, could you tell me how well do you think this is working or the, is the DOT learning the, you know, getting good at it learning the common language or the, or is this an ongoing process? I would say it's ongoing. Keep in mind that, contrasting with when I started it DT where we did 95% of all the production work. 95% of it now is done by the consulting industry, such a much larger audience to reach, but if they're if they're following the design manual. And the districts are working with local governments. There's no reason. For things not to move forward, but it takes a collaborative effort. The local agency. From my perspective is just as responsible for creating the problems that we have and so they have the same responsibility to help correct the the challenges that have been created over the last 40 or 50 years, 60 years actually. And, There's a question. You know, many of this, of the roads in Florida are state roads, but most of them are probably not. They're not owned by the state. Do you know if this is influencing? the streets that are not owned by the state or the or the designs on that. Can you talk about how that's how this is working with a non state owned streets. I can tell you that what from what I've seen working in the private sector now that there are cities in counties that have moved in the direction. I mentioned earlier that local agencies are intended to use the Florida Green Book. To design their local streets and unless they have adopted their own standards or if they use the Florida design manual and there are agencies that do use the Florida design manual so I would expect that there are agencies moving in this direction and I've seen evidence of that. As well. Another, question has to do with many roundabouts and, this is obviously, this, this is a way that a lot of places around the country are dealing with arterials and trying to slow down the traffic. How does, the classification system deal with roundabouts? Is that a good way to calm traffic in, the places where you're trying to lower the design. That. Speed. I don't think that it speaks directly to modern roundabouts. That's, that's addressed in the in the traffic engineering guidance. And engineers that are either putting looking at putting in signals are supposed to be evaluating modern roundabouts as part of that process likewise my understanding is that if they have if you have intersections that have high rates of fatalities and serious injuries, modern roundabout should be looked at as. As a solution. But you have to also look at the corners of those intersections if they're existing because you may not always have right of way for to fit them on a roundabout and that can make the process much more involved. Dwayne may be able to add to that. Yeah, a little different take on it. So, the context classifications as you saw are gonna push you toward lower speeds. As you get to a higher context classification. So FDM, 200, and 2 is the speed management chapter and roundabouts are specifically mentioned in there as speed management measures to achieve certain speeds. And we've begun seeing projects coming through this office for review because we review all the roundabout projects where they're wanting to use roundabout as transitional devices to move you from a low speed or from a high speed condition to a low speed more urban condition. They're also adding more horizontal deflection as well and some vertical deflection to that. So we are beginning to see that where they're trying to get an engineering grasp of how to manage these speeds and get these speeds to where we want them to be. Great. I think we're about running out of time or at least the hour is over and, you know, I wanted to let people know that we will in fact be posting this on, the seeing you website, tomorrow. I don't know if we still have any time to take any more questions or should we? I do. Yeah, I can screen a little longer if you'd like. Okay. So, we have a question dealing with, C 3, the arterial roads. Obviously, you talked about that as being one of the more dangerous the places where accidents are occurring and what can be done to make C 3 a nice place to walk. Is there any anything in this system which would allow you know that to occur and a separation between the sidewalk and the street. C 3 is a problem child. Always has been and, because it's not their fish or file. It has a lot of stuff, which means you're going to have all kinds of people coming there. Some of those people will be walking and biking whether you want them to or not. On the other hand, because it's designed around cars, it's very hard to walk in back there and it's very unpleasant and maybe even unsafe sometimes situation to be in. So, you have large blocks. Those are difficult to break into smaller blocks, but where you can, you begin to transition C 3 into C 4. Those that to me is the best way to kind of tame C 3. The department's latest research is indicating that in C 3 and in context where you have those higher roadways, we do want to move more toward more separation between the motor motor vehicle traffic and the cyclists and the pedestrians. And so I think over the next 5 to 10 years you'll see us begin to roll out more things in that direction on new on new projects but we're still you know in in the process of developing those criteria now and of course it'll all be based on how much we can afford to build over time. And there is a move to put more mid-block crossings in Rob as well. Especially on, and this is where having a visitor action plan or a safe systems action plan is very important. If you've got a corridor on the high entry network like we had in the city of Orlando, the justification for putting in mid block crossings becomes easier because it's part of the high injury network and we do wanna reduce fatalities and serious injuries for pedestrians and bicyclists. So that's that's another value of having a vision 0 safe system action plan and fortunately Federal Highway is funding those through the Safe Streets for All Grant program and a lot of communities in Florida have successfully. Receive funding for developing those action plans and then they will be funding implementation as well so it's very exciting. Opportunities to improve safety for all. You there's a lot of questions about C 4 2 you had mentioned that a C 4 is an area in the state where there's a lot of accidents and injuries fatalities. Could you tell me why do you think that there is a safety problem in C 4? Is it, because the design of the thoroughfares do not match the actual context very well. I, we have not doing done the valuation on that. I don't believe the state has either, but because these are transitioning areas, you tend to still have a lot of suburban characteristics that are becoming more urban but the streets have not been modified so they're still high speed multi-lane roadways which Yeah. is where most of our fatalities and serious injuries occur. Even in, in some of the traditional neighborhood development projects in Florida. That are bifurcated by high speed, high volume roadways. They have issues with fatalities and serious injuries. So it's the streets that are a big part of the problem. Alright, so what, you know, there's a question about a city engineer not favoring a mid-block crossings as a safe option to create walkability. You know is there an issue with this city engineers not necessarily being on board with these standards and what the state is doing and how do you resolve that. Sure. Could I answer that a little bit, her state system anyway? So, There are there are studies out there that show that if you just drop a mid block crossing into a high speed roadway or a highly traveled roadway. It actually can create more problems than it solved. You can create a safety problem if you're not careful doing that. And so there are criteria that you're supposed to follow to help you understand when the mid block crossing is really a good idea. There are also additional counter measures you can take along with the mid block crossing to try to make it as safe as possible. So, you know, it's not necessarily easy to second, guess why an engineer would say yes or no to a particular project. I can tell you that at the department in general, our traffic engineers are the ones responsible for setting the speed limits and they want to be confident that whatever we're designing is really going to achieve the speeds that we say they're going to achieve. So if I have a road that's running at 45 today and the planners come in and say oh this needs to be 30 and how are we going to get at 30? Well, that's a 15 mile an hour drop in speed. That's very difficult to achieve from a design perspective without completely ripping out the road and restarting it or doing 10 or 15 years of redevelopment along the roadway. So to do that in one project is a pretty big leap. So there may be reasons why they're reluctant to do that. On the other hand, I've seen situations where, you know, everything else was in place. It was just that the particular engineer didn't have the confidence that it really was going to achieve the speeds that were intended. And so you've just got to develop that trust. We are trying at the department to do more research on exactly how you do achieve particular speeds on roadways and as we get that information developed and rolled out I'm hoping that it will make people out. I'm hoping that it will make people more comfortable doing other things. Kenneth asks if a new walkable area is being developed in an otherwise suburban context. How large would that walkable area need to be in order to justify a change in context classification adjacent to the new development. Big enough to satisfy the district secretary. It would have to be that's a I'm kind of joking but kind of not it's a case by case decision and the districts get to make that and so you're gonna have to joking but kinda not it's a case by case decision and the districts get to make that and so you're gonna have to show that you're gonna, you know, be enough. There's gonna be enough of it there to really make a difference in that. We talk about having a town town, a rural town, and then just a wide spot in the road. And, you know, town towns and rural towns get special treatments. Widespread in the road, you may get a caution sign, but we're probably not gonna change the design speed necessarily for that right away. I'm wondering this is a obviously a system that's only been done in Florida and it's innovative. And you know it seems to be working quite well in many places but how does it, you know, how well does it make sense to engineers who have been doing it a different way their entire career. They they never studied anything like this. Does it make sense to them? You know, when, they take a look at this, do they understand it or is it really something that has to be explained over and over to them before they can really get it? I can respond to this to Wayne when when Dwayne and I were working on this. I met with every area of expertise within DOT, which means I met with all the district design engineers. I met with all the district traffic operations engineers. And interestingly to me is they understood what this was going to do for them in terms of decision making and working with local agencies. They were they were much more receptive than I expected. And at that time, we had a lot of DTOs and district design engineers that have been in the agency for 25 and 30 years. So that they seem to receive it really well. Similarly with the Florida Green Book and the T and D chapter, once they understood what context meant. And what it meant to the street design. They were very, like I said, they voted unanimously to approve that chapter. So I think that that I think by and large, once people understand what the intent is and they understand that it's supported by Florida DOT. There should be less resistance to change, there should be less resistance to change, there should be less resistance to change, but that, you know, every person is different and, not everyone has taken the initiative to and do things differently. Well, with that, I think we've had an excellent discussion. I really appreciate, your time, Billing. I really appreciate your time, Billing Dwayne. And, I, you know, I know I've learned a lot and, once again, I will say that this is gonna be posted on, the senior website and then we will send around the link so people can check it out afterwards. Look at it again. I'm sure there's a lot that, you need to review, to fully understand this, but once again, thank you. Thank you for everybody who, participated. Thank you for letting us come and talk with you. Yeah, thank you for hosting, Rob. Appreciate it. Take care. Have a great day.