Opinion

- I had a good call on Friday from one of our community leaders. His concern was to sound me out regarding; my position on how I personally felt about the conditions on Palisades Drive, and whether my statement at the community meeting that “I was just trying to facilitate communication” was accurate. After a short Q&A his assessment of me was that I was an advocate. Advocate of what became the next line of discovery.

It is safe to say that my assumption is that Palisades Drive, in its current form and culture, are not safe for me or my family. I differentiate form from culture but the two are inextricably connected.

As the moderator of discussion on this site, I read every posted comment before approving it. To date, I have approved every comment. In another case, an email was sent to a group of people who monitor these goings-on, and I referred to the sender as a “troll“, an Internet vernacular term for a person that uses invective in digital forums.

There was concern that I was taking ‘sides’ with my Troll remark, and so I am writing this missive to state clearly my bias and intent. (It’s a fine line when criticizing the parenting of someone that has lost a child, and in order to make a point well, nuance and subtlety are certainly advantageous.)

I am a Design Thinker, a Creative Director, which means that my job is to define problems (unmet needs) for creative disciplines to solve. I also live on Palisades Drive. My experience with the road is up-close and personal as I am on it, one way or another, many times a day.

As stated earlier, the problem is, as I experience it, that Palisades Drive is unsafe for automobiles, pedestrians and cyclists. Any argument to the contrary is necessarily accompanied by a caveat “if only [insert your anomaly here]“. E.g. “It is safe if only people obeyed the speed limit”.

In order to look for a solution to the problem, the cause must also be agreed upon. My straw-man suggestion is, that the cause is, an environment that creates a culture of speeding.

Because the long, wide, winding slopes of the road caters to the speed-daemon in all of us, no single group seems to be immune. While teenage drivers have higher fatality rates, that data could be normalized by looking at the safety and handling characteristics of their cars, versus other drivers in other accidents. E.g. a middle-age driver flying off the road, and hitting a tree 7′ off the ground in a BMW M5 was saved by virtue of the quality of the vehicle. The point being that most drivers, in most vehicles, would not have survived the same crash.

So if, for arguments sake, one assumes that the environment creates a culture of speeding, what might solutions look like? The two areas for improvement are the environment and or culture.

For this case, the word culture is defined as the assimilation of values and processes. Culture can be changed by adjusting the values of a group (processes usually follow values). In the case of Palisades Drive, the values are the speeds at which people drive. Enforcement and education can be used to influence those values, but require vigilant human resources to maintain an effective status. E.g. people will slow down until the police go away, people ‘forget’ what they have learned, or a new uninitiated population enters the area.

Another way to change the values and, in turn, the culture is to change the environment. The benefit of an environmental change is that it is sustainable, in that it does not require the long-term commitment of human capital. It is a short-term capital expense, but over time, will continue to be effective, yielding a lower total-cost-to-maintain than the enforcement and education options.

For example: John Fisher’s second option had a price tag of $5MM. If we assume that the cost-to-taxpayers for each man hour of that project is $200 (person, benefits, apparatus) then the projects cost is one-time 25,000 man-hours. If we assume that Police, at the same rate were available for enforcement and education at 160 man hours a week, the cost would be 8,320 man-hours per year.

Even without cost-of-living and inflation increases, a sustained education and enforcement solution equals the cash outlay of the engineering solution after 3 years. However, to maintain it into year four, the cost increases, and continues ad-infinitum in order to maintain control of the speeding culture. (This calculation does not factor in the Fire Department and other public service savings).

Homeowners associations run into this type of issue, regularly. The pressure between raising association fees and deferred maintenance creates a similar dynamic, whereby short-term band-aid fixes attempt to shore-up, postpone or offset required capital expenditure. Invariably, this strategy fails with time, as it is equally unsustainable.

The Highlands President’s Council might well consider the property taxes that this community pays as our ongoing contribution to to the “reserve”, and that the deferred maintenance has now reached a point where further inaction will cost more lives.

I’m not married to any particular reconfiguration. It just seems, from the back-of-the-envelope calculations, getting rid of some lanes, adding some lights and making room for the safe conveyance of pedestrians and bicycles is the safest, most cost-effective solution and sustainable solution to changing a culture of speeding.

I welcome comments, anything but anonymous invective.

Peter Duke

peter@dukemedia.com