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City's Traffic Circle Results Flawed |
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| SECONDS COUNT!
NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release Contacts: Warren Hultquist (303) 541-0151 CITY'S TRAFFIC CIRCLE RESULTS FLAWED Boulder, CO-June 5, 2000--Recent time trials conducted by Boulder's Transportation Division to evaluate emergency vehicle delays at traffic circles were poorly designed and improperly analyzed. As a result, the delays to fire trucks caused by experimental designs on Balsam Avenue and Pine Street are being understated. Transportation staff recently held neighborhood meetings at which the faulty data was presented, misleading citizens into believing delays are less severe than they actually are. The trials were supposed to compare the time taken by a fire truck to travel a measured distance that included the traffic circles to a theoretical time to cover the same distance on an unobstructed street at the truck's entering speed. For the tests to be valid, the entering speed should have been the fire truck's normal cruising speed on the unobstructed street, and the truck should be back up to the same speed before leaving the test course. Speeds were measured at several points along the course with radar guns. The SECONDS COUNT! committee reviewed the raw data from the time trials and found several flaws. First, the Pine Street course used to measure delays from a single traffic circle was too short, so fire trucks had not yet returned to cruising speed before finishing the timed runs. In actual emergency situations, a longer distance would be required to return to speed, translating to more delay than calculated. At the Balsam Avenue test site, the approach distance was too short, so fire trucks were not yet up to cruising speed before beginning the timed runs. Even though they had to slow to go around the circles, the trucks reached higher exit speeds than entrance speeds. When the data was analyzed, this situation seemed to produce the impossible result that the traffic circles had actually caused the trucks to go faster, contradicting radar measurements confirming they had to slow down. Transportation staff masked this discrepancy by telling the public that on certain runs no delay had been experienced. In reality, the radar speed measurements prove that both traffic circle designs delayed the fire trucks. David Wagner, Issues Director for the SECONDS COUNT! organization, said "City staff is asking the public to choose between traffic circle alternatives on the basis of false information. They are telling people one design delays emergency response less than another, when such a conclusion is not supported by the test results. Worse, they are telling us some designs don't delay emergency vehicles at all, and that's clearly not true." The only things the tests prove are that all traffic circle designs slow emergency response and that the effects of additional circles are cumulative. SECONDS COUNT! is a November 2000 ballot initiative by Boulder, Colorado citizens to prohibit traffic devices that delay emergency response. Information is available online at http://www.secondscount.org . # # # |