To the city of Northampton: I begin by sincerely congratulating the Department of Public Works on the newly redesigned intersection around Northampton High School. This did not happen overnight. Years of planning, community meetings, engineering reviews and public dollars went into this intersection — and the result is that cyclists will now face more conflicts, with higher speed traffic than before. I don’t say that to be uncharitable. I simply cannot fathom how anyone looked at this design and signed their name to it.
In our city, where half the student population lives within a 10-minute bike ride of their school, cycling should be an obvious answer. It would be, if we’d built for it. Biking would make a lot of sense for many students. Yet, this redesign doesn’t make biking any safer with cars zipping next to children at 35mph or faster. I’ll let the City Council particularly sit with that sequence for a moment.
Consulting several transportation safety frameworks — the kind that are freely available, online, for free — shows that most of them share a quaint, old-fashioned belief that “safety improvements” should result in, measurably, more safety: Separated infrastructure, reduced exposure, slower speeds near vulnerable road users. The sort of thing Amsterdam figured out roughly 40 years ago.
But perhaps we’re doing something new here. A bold experiment — what if the cyclists were just more aware of the danger? That’s a safety philosophy of a kind, I suppose.
I do have one genuine question, and I ask it with all due respect: when the next serious injury occurs at this intersection — and given what’s been built, I want to be clear that I am saying when, not if — will this body revisit the project? Or will we commission another study, break ground on another improvement, and gather again in three years to admire whatever that produces.
Barbara Bricker
Florence