Stearns Road Corridor – An Out of this World Project

Stearns Road Project South Elgin IL

Today I had the privilege of attending our APWA Chapter meeting and then touring the Stearns Road Corridor Construction Project. Tours are offered a few times a year as a regular feature of APWA meetings and always provide great information. This particular tour offered a unique opportunity to visit the construction site of a $165 million project – definitely a significant size for our local area. Primary work included relocation of 4.6 miles of roadway, a new bridge over the Fox River, the widening and resurfacing of several intersecting routes, multi-use paths and stormwater facilities.

During our drive through the site, an engineer for the project pointed out specific areas of interest and shared with us some of the challenges they faced. The project team also used several forms of media to communicate to the public information about construction. Kane County set up a page on their Website at http://www.co.kane.il.us/dot/foxBridges/stearnsRd.aspx. And they posted two related videos on their YouTube Channel which can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/user/KDOTTransportation. A dedicated Website was also created at http://stearnsroad.com for this specific project. 

There was also one additional unique piece of information our tour guide shared with us that caught my attention. He mentioned the posting online of videos related to extraterrestrial activity associated with the project. Well, if you're like me, that's not something you hear everyday about a construction job. After I got home and Googled "Stearns Road" and "UFO" I found the YouTube videos he was talking about. Now, we all have had projects where people accuse construction activities of damaging their foundation, causing mysterious sinkholes in areas of their yards not anywhere near our sites, cracking their sewer or water pipes, flooding their basements, but until now, I had not yet heard of someone accusing construction of hiding UFO activity. I embedded the first of the four movies posted to date so you can hear for yourself. And feel free to post your own out of this world accusations you may have heard on your own jobs!

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Pod Travel – The Future of Transportation?

About five years ago, I was out on the jobsite watching the contractor and talking with the crew. We had removed the old pavement of a road and were building up a new base of stone so we could replace the asphalt. One of the laborers on the job said, "it's too bad people can't find some other way to get to their homes. Think of all the space we would have if we could remove all the roads." He went on to envision community gardens, trails, parks, and other uses for this newly reclaimed public space. It sounded great, but at the time, I just couldn't see how something like this could be accomplished. Then a couple years ago, I was visiting the virtual site of the United Nations Climate Change Conference and saw a 3D re-creation of the MISTER PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system. At the time, I wrote a blog post about it, and since then, I have not been able to stop thinking about this pod-based mode of travel.

 

Last year when a local consultant had contacted our city about a study for building pedestrian/bike access along and across a very busy roadway, I mentioned, at the risk of having him question my sanity, the possibility of PRTs as an alternative. To his credit, he didn't laugh and spent some time checking into it. But he came back with the conclusion that it would not work.

Even so, I have continued to think about the implementation of pod-based travel. Taking this beyond just a public transit system, could we replace cars with PRTs? Could each of us have pods in our garages instead of cars, and when we want to go somewhere, we just hook to the rail? Could it all be computerized so we just put our children in our family pod, tell it which school to drop them off at, then program it to return home? Could this rail system be elevated so that we can fill in roads and reclaim the space as my friend, the laborer, had envisioned?

With increasing costs for roadway maintenance, gas and fuel issues, traffic fatalities, and all of our other transportation-related problems, the idea that we drive vehicles powered by fossil fuels when we have safer and cleaner technologies available seems archaic.

For those of you who are interested in learning more about PRTs, you can check out the following links:

MISTER Website

Open PRT Specification Project 

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Public Hearings Held City Camp Style

This year, I have been involved with two initiatives in our county. One is Kane County's Transit Plan which is just ending and the other is our Downtown Master Plan which is just beginning. Each planning process is professionally managed and both have or will go through all the traditional steps of gathering public input. This usually consists of forming committees of stakeholders and having committee meetings and public hearings. Then all comments and input from these meetings are assembled and worked into the plan. But we all know that as much time and effort as everyone puts into drawing out ideas, it is difficult to get a large majority of folks really talking at these events.

Citycamp Chicago 2010

In the same time period, I have attended several "barcamps" or unconferences related to government and social media. These events are incredible because they offer the opportunity to learn and share ideas in a comfortable and informal setting. The environment is also conducive to developing networks and connections to others who care about the topics discussed. And the energy at barcamps is usually so intense that everyone, even that normally reserved person, ends up contributing.

One awesome camp I attended in January in Chicago was CityCamp. This event drew over 100 people who spent two days talking about ideas for increasing government performance. And the event format seems to be taking off – over the last few days I have been watching a discussion on the e-democracy site about several efforts to host CityCamps throughout the world. But organizers are also expressing an interest in having something solid come out of each camp. This got me thinking – wouldn't it be awesome to use the CityCamp model as a planning tool. If each planning initiative, like the transit plan or downtown plan, could include a "CityCamp," along with the more traditional methods, we could generate a lot more ideas and discussion. And in the end, everything would get incorporated into the formal plan. 

If I worked in a government position responsible for launching community plans, I would definitely try this out because I see a huge potential for success. Instead I can only encourage others responsible for community planning to take the initiative to try out this technique. And I would definitely be willing to help! (Contacting Kevin Curry, one of the CityCamp organizers, for advice is also a great idea – he's an awesome resource!)

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From the Floor at APWA Congress 2010

Due to budget cuts I was only able to attend the APWA Congress for one day since I was speaking on a panel at the show. Normally, I try to attend the entire event because I always come away with many valuable insights and opportunities to reconnect with fellow professionals. This year, in the short time I was able to spend there, I was able to find a contractor who performed sawcutting of sidewalk trip hazards. My division was already familiar with Precision Concrete Cutting and have used their services to eliminate trip hazards. But in order to expand the project, we needed to have more than one proposal for the work. Fortunately Sidewalks Plus was at the show, and I was able to speak with a representative about their process and get their contact information. This allowed us to investigate two bidders and move our project forward. I also was able to discuss a few other pressing issues with representatives from a few other companies. So in addition to speaking, networking, and researching products, I was able to also conduct some business related to existing projects. 

While checking out the products on the floor show, I was also able to video tape a few interviews with vendors. Willie Urish with Tower Sign and Signal had contacted me prior to the show to discuss his product. So we made some time to meet so I could see his product in person. He also allowed me to video tape his product demonstration. His company, based in Illinois, manufactures and sells portable traffic signals for construction jobs.

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Transportation TV

AASHTO has always been an awesome organization. So it should come as no surprise they have embraced social media and are rolling out information about transportation through several channels. One of the cooler offerings has been a Transportation TV channel hosted on a dedicated website at http://www.transportationtv.org.  Below is an example of one of the many videos available at this site – this one explains the Highway Trust Fund. Because the videos have embed codes, other agencies can use post these videos on their own sites to help educate and inform citizens about transportation.

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A Failure in the Making

Today I read a story about a massive hole in the road in a community in New York that has not been repaired for a month. Even though at first glance this might seem an excessive amount of time to neglect repairing a hole in the road, I can certainly understand the delay after reading the entire story. It seems to be a clear case of too many government agencies/bodies having jurisdiction over a common area without a clear understanding or agreement of responsibilities. Unfortunately for the public and the governments dealing with the problem (because many dealing with it are not the ones responsible for the setup), this sort of thing seems to happen too frequently all over.

In this case, it appears that the roadway with the damage is located within a village, but the actual roadway is under the county jurisdiction or control. This is a very common situation. Then the water line installed under the road appears to be owned by a city. So when the water line broke and damaged the pavement, the city was deemed responsible for the repairs. But it appears this took quite some time for everyone to figure this out.

In the last city where I worked, we had similar issues along some roadways that were located between our city and the neighboring city. In one particular area of a road, there were three jurisdictions involved: our city, the neighboring city, and the county. At one point the state even had jurisdiction in the same location. So when an accident occurred, law enforcement from each of the four agencies would have a conversation over who would respond. Most of the time, they decided based on which direction one of the cars was traveling. Can you imagine this happening with each accident prior to anyone responding or taking a report?

So how can these types of situations be improved or avoided? My first thought was always try to minimize the jurisdictions involved. We had another situation come up where a road was going to end up between two communities with again the county and the state being involved. I desperately tried to convince everyone to arrange to have only one government body responsible for the area (remembering the other location), but no one seemed to understand the benefit of doing so and allowed another poorly organized arrangement to go through.

Why? Because in the end, the county, state, or other city did not want to give up any control. But more importantly because the decision makers involved were not the ones who would be receiving the phone calls for accidents, traffic signal failures, road maintenance. They still would have jurisdiction over decisions in this area, but knew our city would be the one typically called to handle any problems.

My next thought is where these types of arrangements are unavoidable, such as in the case of utility easements, an agreement should be prepared stating everyone’s responsibilities. Better yet, place this online somewhere for everyone to see and make sure if you have turnover in your department, these agreements are obvious to those taking over.

In my own frustrating case above, were any agreements drawn up to cover these issues for this area? No, so this will also be an area where the pavement falls apart and accidents occur, and the public will again wonder why government never responds in a timely manner. Never really knowing that all this could have been avoided with some planning, cooperation, and clear understanding and acceptance of responsibilities.

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