The asphalt rebellion

For decades, traffic engineers have been designing wider, straighter, faster roads. Now, some communities are challenging that approach.

By Alan Ehrenhalt

Published by Governing Magazine - October 1997

online at http://governing.com/archive/1997/oct/roads.txt

The Asphalt Rebellion seems to begin, in just about every state, at a bridge. It is a country bridge: lightly traveled, decades old and starting to fall apart. The local government wants a few modest repairs. The state transportation department comes in, takes a look and declares that the only way to save the bridge is to tear it down and build something much bigger and costlier in its place. A fight ensues. By the time it is over, a mild-mannered mayor or council member or selectman has turned into a rebel.

It happened two years ago at Poverty Hollow, just outside Redding, Connecticut, where there is a stone arch bridge on a rural road with woods, ponds and lily pads on one side and 18th-century barns and fields on the other. The bridge is 17 feet wide. The state offered to fix it, but said that in order to be made safe, it had to be replaced by a brand new 28-foot-wide structure made of steel and concrete. Fortunately, the department said, there was good news: $350,000 in state and federal money was available to finance the project.

But it turned out that the Redding board of selectmen had some news for the highway engineers. They didn't want the money. They didn't want the project. If they had to destroy the bridge in order to save it, they would take their chances with it as it was--or spend their own money shoring it up. "It's a sad commentary on our system," Redding First Selectman Henry Bielawa wrote in an open letter mailed statewide, "when historic preservation, neighborhood esthetics and common sense are displaced by cookie-cutter design requirements."

Around the time of the incident at Poverty Hollow, a similar debate was going on in Guilford, Connecticut, and beyond the state border, in Chester, Vermont. Both of those towns ultimately decided that a big wad of federal money--almost $1 million in Guilford's case--wasn't worth the price of accepting an overbuilt concrete monstrosity on a country road. Both said no and did the job with local money.

Meanwhile, unknown to most of the activists in New England, a different crop of road rebels was playing out an almost identical scenario in Virginia, where they organized as the "Snickersville Turnpike Association" to block their state from bulldozing a 19th-century stone arch bridge. The only real difference was the result: The Snickersville rebels didn't have to reject any money. The state gave in and just widened the old bridge by three feet at its narrowest point.

The Asphalt Rebellion ignited in many different places at virtually the same time. There is no Rosa Parks of highway design. But during the past year or so, it has become a full-fledged protest movement, and it is spreading beyond New England, beyond the narrow question of bridge safety, beyond country roads and into the much broader subject of how streets and highways are designed and built in America and the way those decisions affect communities and individual lives.

It has grown into a rebellion against an entire half-century of American engineering ideology, and against an obscure but immensely important book: "A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets," more commonly referred to as the "AASHTO Green Book." When traffic engineers propose the replacement of an old stone bridge with a pile of concrete; when they declare that a city street must be doubled in width to be made safe; when they argue that a two-lane country road be converted to a four-lane highway, they are doing it because, at least in their view, the AASHTO Green Book dictates that it be done.

AASHTO is the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. For the past 43 years, it has been compiling, publishing and revising its 1,044-page lime-colored masterwork, packed with numbers, equations and diagrams explaining to engineers how to make American roads and bridges efficient and safe.

Until 1991, federal law required that any road built with the help of federal funds be built in accordance with Green Book standards. Now, there is no such requirement. But the book's status as virtually sacred text in the engineering profession has kept it just about as influential as ever at the state level. "It's basically the foundation for all the engineering design that goes into highways," says Thomas R. Warne, Utah's transportation director and chairman of the AASHTO Design Committee.

Among those who hate it, the Green Book has a reputation it doesn't entirely deserve. The truth is, it mostly offers advice about what sorts of construction are safest in particular situations. It never has described its language as anything more than guidelines. During the decades when it was being applied to construction of the Interstate Highway System, conservative Green Book policies undoubtedly saved thousands of American lives. It is largely in the post-Interstate era of the 1990s that the engineering profession's Green Book devotion has led state transportation officials into some all-but-indefensible decisions--and set the Asphalt Rebellion in motion. "People want to be safe," says one of the activists, First Selectman Alan Chapin of Washington, Connecticut, "but they don't want to take a country bridge and blow it up."

The formulas and equations of the Green Book make it virtually impenetrable to the lay reader, but the principles that emerge from it are remarkably simple. The first one is that safety trumps all other considerations--history, aesthetics, community habits, community values. "The design values given within this text," the Green Book states flatly, "have safety as their primary objective."

The second principle is that in order to be safe, a road or bridge must accommodate drivers traveling at high speeds, even speeds considerably in excess of the legal limit. AASHTO and most state highway departments traditionally have used what is known as the "85th percentile" standard. They calculate how fast the 15th fastest driver out of every 100 on a highway is traveling, and they commit to make that driver's trip free of danger. "The AASHTO standards," says James Lighthizer, a former Maryland transportation director and a Green Book critic, "assume that everyone on the road is a drunk speeding along without a seatbelt."

The third principle is that safety at high speeds requires width. And so streets, roads and bridges all become wider to accommodate the very fastest drivers. In the early 20th century, most urban streets and roadways in America were built between 18 and 24 feet wide. By the 1960s, when most of the new pavement was being laid in suburban subdivisions, the width was nearly double that--32 to 34 feet.

Even AASHTO's fiercest critics don't dispute the Green Book's technical accuracy. When it proclaims that a given road needs to be 30 feet wide to accommodate cars traveling at 60 miles an hour, it knows what it is talking about. The question raised by the Asphalt Rebels is why those speeds have to be accommodated in the first place.

In the end, many of the rebels come to realize that width is an all-important idea, not only in designing roads but also in creating communities. Within a certain range of highway width, many things are possible: walkable pedestrian boulevards, Main Street-style commercial corridors, residential streets where neighbors stop and talk to each other on the sidewalk. Beyond that range, none of those things are possible. "Once you have a six-lane facility," says Walter Kulash, a maverick traffic engineer who supports the rebellion, "it is difficult to make it into anything but an ugly monster."

And so the Asphalt Rebellion has become, in the simplest terms, a revolt against speed and width, and against the doctrine that safety outweighs all other considerations.

It is a revolt that is going on largely in the shadows of ISTEA, the massive federal transportation law, which is currently being rewritten in Congress. Most media coverage of transportation issues is focused on ISTEA, and on its heavily lobbied arguments about the future distribution of federal highway money.

ISTEA is, in fact, crucial. But while it is being debated, equally crucial debates are quietly taking place over highway design. However Congress ultimately chooses to apportion its transportation money, it is the states and localities that ultimately will decide how the roads built and rebuilt with that money are going to look. And that is a matter about which they are beginning to change their minds.

In the past year, Vermont has enacted a law that all but invites its transportation department to depart from AASHTO standards in road-building. Connecticut has passed a law relaxing the rules on bridges. Philadelphia is seeking to rewrite the AASHTO guidelines in urban development neighborhoods.

Phoenix passed a city ordinance this spring that explicitly offers developers the option of building narrower streets in future residential developments. "Sometimes we're building things wrong," the deputy city manager explained. "We're creating neighborhoods we have to go back and fix." Up until now, all residential streets in Phoenix have had to be at least 32 feet wide. The new rules reduce the minimum to 28. Eugene, Oregon, which used to require 28 feet, is now allowing some to be as narrow as 20.

Other cities are doing something even more difficult: taking streets and highways that were made into massive slabs of pavement in the Green Book era and retrofitting them. Wellesley, Massachusetts, confronted with a plan to widen heavily traveled Route 16 through the center of town, decided to narrow it, and widened the sidewalks instead. In West Palm Beach, Florida, six lanes of U.S. 1 are being converted into two separate two-lane roads. The sister cities of Riverside and San Bernardino, California, among the last places where one might expect to find anti-AASHTO sentiment, have both reduced their principal downtown streets from four lanes to two and are switching from parallel to diagonal parking to make them even narrower.

It is too fragmentary to be a revolution, and yet many of the people involved in it can't resist the temptation to talk in revolutionary terms. "I just see a percolation," says Alan Chapin, the Washington, Connecticut, selectman who lobbied for passage of his state's new law. "It's spreading broader and broader and broader as more local governments hear about these things. This is still a guerrilla movement. The institutional resistance is tremendous. It will take years before this becomes standard procedure. But at the neighborhood level, this has tremendous appeal. And it will spread and grow." A few months ago, Chapin traveled across the border to Providence, Rhode Island, to testify on the situation in Connecticut. "I thought I would be the only person with this gripe," Chapin recalls. Instead, he found road rebels from all over New England and the East Coast who wanted to talk strategy.

"The problem is everywhere," says Barton D. Russell, executive director of the Connecticut Council of Small Towns. "The discontent is everywhere. There's just too much pavement. It's not what anybody wants."

One can, of course, dismiss those comments as the hyperbolae of a few grassroots activists who blocked a project or two and now have developed grandiose dreams. There is, undoubtedly, a fair amount of wishful thinking in the Asphalt Rebellion. On the other hand, events seem to be moving in its direction, even far beyond the grassroots.

Early this summer, the Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Transportation Engineers issued its own manifesto of street design guidelines. At 43 pages, it is hardly a rival to the Green Book. But ITE is sort of a rival to AASHTO. ITE is a broader-based organization whose 14,000 members include not only state and local traffic engineers but also a variety of private consultants and planners, many of them more receptive to changing entrenched practices than most of the highway-building establishment.

The new ITE manual doesn't set out to pick a fight with AASHTO, and, indeed, it is aimed specifically at what it calls "traditional neighborhood development." But it is difficult not to read it, at the very least, as a challenge. "A street," it proclaims, "should be no wider than the minimum width needed to accommodate the usual vehicular mix that street will serve." It defines "traditional" in such a loose way that the guidelines could be applied to virtually any facility short of a major arterial highway. And it was written, says design consultant Frank Spielberg, chairman of the committee that produced it, for the express purpose of giving engineers a tangible and credible alternative to the AASHTO way. "If our members have only the old standards," says Spielberg, "that's what they have to go by."

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, something even more unusual has been happening. The Federal Highway Administration, more or less with the help of AASHTO itself, has prepared a companion volume to the Green Book, aimed at sprucing it up for the urban policy complexities of the new era. At one point, in fact, the volume was actually called a "Companion Guide to the Green Book." AASHTO ultimately decided that was a little more companionship than it wanted. "The Federal Highway Administration does not own the rights to the Green Book," says AASHTO's Warne. "They can't write an addendum to a book they didn't publish." So now, it is being called "Flexibility in Highway Design," and AASHTO has not endorsed it in any official way.

Still, AASHTO has been involved with the project all the way through, and that in itself is pretty remarkable, considering some of the things the book says. "If highway designers are not aware of opportunities to use their creative abilities," it proclaims right in the forward, "the standard of conservative use of the Green Book criteria and related state standards, along with a lack of full consideration of community values, can cause a road to be out of context with its surroundings."

None of that was written accidentally. "It's giving sanction to new ways of doing things," explains John Horsley, a deputy assistant U.S. transportation secretary, who has been helping to oversee the project. "The most important message," he says, "is that it's OK not to do the tried and true wider, straighter, faster, flatter."

Can AASHTO really swallow that? Maybe, says James Byrnes, Connecticut's chief highway engineer and chairman of the AASHTO task force created to evaluate the new book. In Byrnes' view, neither the book nor the Asphalt Rebellion itself is anything for highway designers to be afraid of. "It's not useful for designers to act like automatons," Byrnes says, sounding a bit like a reformer himself. "The public doesn't want every road to be wide, straight and mow everything down. Those days are long over."

Whether they really are over remains to be seen. Next May, at a meeting in Maryland, AASHTO is scheduled to debate the whole issue of the new guide and possibly take a vote on endorsing it. If AASHTO does agree to endorse the effort, with its implicit criticisms of traditional practice, it will be the strongest possible evidence that the rebellion has come further than its promoters ever could have imagined just a couple of years ago.

Even if next year's meeting does produce a kinder, gentler AASHTO, however, the road to significant change in the American streetscape is still paved with huge obstacles.

Foremost among those obstacles is the highway lobby. It may not be the behemoth it was in the heyday of Interstate construction, but it remains an influential voice in favor of maintaining bigger-faster-wider principles of construction. From its founding in 1914, AASHTO has been linked in an almost seamless way to construction labor, to the American Automobile Association, and to asphalt and concrete suppliers and trucking companies. Many of those linkages survive, both at the organization's Washington, D.C., headquarters and at the state level. State transportation officials routinely rotate out of their government jobs and into positions with trucking and contracting companies, and sometimes back again. The organizations that lobby on behalf of Green Book highway standards continue to fund design awards and research at major state universities.

If the ties that bind lobby groups and state transportation agencies are to weaken, the most likely reason will be cost. Bigger, wider highways are in the economic interest of the people who are paid to design, build and ship goods on them, but they are not as clearly in a transportation department's interest as they were when the federal Interstate program provided a virtually endless spigot of funds. A study conducted for the state of Florida in 1991 found that the cost of resurfacing a typical two-lane road was about $500,000 per mile; the cost of adding two new lanes to the same road was $1.9 million per mile. Cost can reasonably be expected to serve as a source of increasing future tension between the highway lobby and state budget offices.

Even governments determined to break with the forces of tradition, however, often fear a single issue that those forces repeatedly raise: liability. One thing any local board or council knows for sure is that if it builds a road according to AASHTO standards, it will not be sued for design negligence in the event of an accident.

Many states specifically exempt their employees from such liability, but that still leaves local officials on the hook, and in the past, it has kept many of them--and their engineers--from breaking with the wide-road tradition. "It's the lawyers driving the engineers," says John Horsley of the U.S. Transportation Department. "It's the liability suits they've been pounded with over the last 20 years. The attorneys have intimidated the engineers."

The actual extent of the liability problem for local government remains very much open to dispute. There is little convincing evidence of a rash of design liability cases in recent years. Most jury awards appear to have less to do with design than with maintenance, and that is an entirely different proposition. In many places, a town's liability is limited to the extent of insurance. "Most of the work that's been done says there's no liability problem," insists Hank Dittmar, director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a group that promotes design change. "It's more of a scare tactic at a public meeting than it is a verifiable fact."

Some elements within the road-building community appear to agree. "The only way government employees can be held negligent," in the words of James Thiel, general counsel to Wisconsin's transportation department and chairman of AASHTO's legal committee, "is if they fail to perform a mandatory non-discretionary function. If the action is discretionary, which design matters usually are, the employee cannot be held liable for exercising judgment."

Whatever the truth about liability, however, it is only part of the inertia within the traffic engineering profession. In a field with an quasi-military preference for order, discipline and hard numbers, the AASHTO Green Book has served for decades to ground crucial design decisions in data rather than subjective preference. The adequacy of an existing road or bridge can be determined by rating it on a 100-point scale for width, drainage, grade and a whole list of other fixed criteria. In many cases, a machine can do the measuring. To most engineers, that is the beauty of the system. "There's comfort and safety in following standards," acknowledges Warne, the AASHTO design chairman. "By our nature, we tend to be on the conservative side. When you go outside the traditional rules, you go outside your comfort zone."

To the Asphalt Rebels, the very rigidity of the standards constitutes the main problem. "If you are designing beams for a bridge, it's appropriate to look it up in a book," says Jim Wick, an architect and highway design activist in Vermont who has challenged the engineering establishment there, "but books and tables aren't very good at explaining complex phenomena. They ignore all the human elements."

It is just this clash of cultures, between the number-crunching engineers and the ultimately unquantifiable community values of the opposition, that is the central point of the Asphalt Rebellion, in New England and in the other states to which it is now spreading.

Nowhere is the clash more dramatic than in Connecticut, where every corner of the state seems to have generated its own anti-bureaucratic lore. The bridge at Poverty Hollow attracted the most attention, but there are numerous others that have been equally controversial. A couple of years ago, the village of Sharon, in the affluent Litchfield Hills, wanted to fix a crumbling 18-foot-wide country bridge and obtained an estimate from a local engineer for a $370,000 repair job. The state transportation department told Sharon the bridge had to be 32 feet wide. Eventually, the two sides compromised on a 26-foot bridge, but at a likely cost of more than $1.5 million.

The whole episode converted Robert Moeller, Sharon's first selectman, into an Asphalt Rebel. "The cost of this thing is outrageous," he says. "They could do three or four bridges for a million and a half. Why in the world does a local back road need to have the same standards as a state highway?"

The stories are virtually interchangeable. Only the names of the towns are different. It is puzzling, because the state DOT insists that it wants to work with the communities, and that they can obtain a waiver from AASHTO standards if they can explain their position. "Nine times out of 10, those requests are approved," says Byrnes, the chief state highway engineer. It's the 10th case, he insists, that attracts the coverage and the controversy. Byrnes professes sympathy with much of what the communities are arguing for.

It's pretty clear, however, that at the working engineer level, Connecticut's DOT, like many of its counterparts around the country, remains dominated by traditional Green Book literalism. Getting a waiver of AASHTO rules can take a community years, and sometimes involves an all-day grilling by department officials at state DOT headquarters. Until recently, most local officials have simply capitulated in the end, accepted the money and rebuilt the road or bridge the way the state wanted to.

That is changing. This year, local selectmen persuaded the Connecticut legislature to pass a new law loosening the grip of AASHTO standards on bridge design. It makes waivers easier to obtain, and it establishes once and for all that state and local employees "shall not be liable for injury caused by the selection of the design standards." As originally written, the new law would have applied not only to
bridges but to roads as well. The transportation department opposed that, and the bill was amended to eliminate any mention of highways. As enacted, it is strictly a bridge bill. Next year, the activists plan to return to the legislature and lobby for a stronger law.

To find a place where the Asphalt Rebellion is in the process of fully transforming state policy, however, one needs to travel north into Vermont.

As recently as five years ago, Vermont's highway department, the Agency of Transportation, was bound as closely to design orthodoxy as any such agency in the country. All roads and bridges in the state were given safety ratings in accordance with Green Book standards. Speed and width were the crucial factors. Land use and community preferences, scenic and environmental considerations were largely irrelevant. "The same mind-set was brought to repairing and replacing as had been brought to new construction after World War II," admits Jeffrey Squires, currently the deputy AOT secretary, "and so you got these incongruous outcomes."

But what ultimately did in Vermont's hard-line engineers was their decision to take on Cheryl Rivers in the town of Bethel. Rivers was a member of the local select board when the state announced plans to rebuild Bethel's lightly traveled one-lane "no-town bridge" into a 40-foot-wide extravaganza. "It was going to be the megabridge," she says, "but there's nothing out here. And it's not safe to go fast anyway. The idea that we needed a 40-foot bridge defied common sense."

Rivers not only fought the bridge to an ultimate compromise, she won election to the state Senate in 1990 on a highway reform platform. Every session thereafter, she introduced legislation loosening state transportation policy. The first few times, it went nowhere. But by last year, with the Asphalt Rebellion gathering steam throughout New England, her bill had the support of the governor and most of the legislative leadership. When some of the senior AOT engineers went to the Capitol to testify against the bill on their own time, the Appropriations chairman inquired out loud whether AOT needed such a large engineering staff.

The end result was the strongest highway design reform law that has been enacted anywhere in the country so far. In Vermont, as of this year, state and local officials have explicit legal permission to depart from conventional AASHTO standards in designing or repairing the vast majority of roads and bridges. Right now, at the insistence of the legislature, the AOT is actually drafting its own set of standards, which will make Vermont the only state to have a full-fledged alternative to the Green Book written into statute.

The new rules will make it expressly permissible to design projects that lower the speed limit on a given road, not just ones that increase it. They will give communities the legal option of designing a road for safety at the posted limit--not 20 miles above the limit. "It's going to have a profound effect on the Vermont landscape," Rivers says.

Not everybody is sure of that. But what nobody disputes is that Rivers' law already has had a profound effect on the Vermont Agency of Transportation. "We're really not in the business of straightening, widening and relocating roads anymore," insists Squires, who was brought in from a Burlington planning firm to help manage the transition. He appears to mean it. In the past year, three senior engineers at AOT were transferred out of their jobs for resisting the change. All three chose to retire.

"There's tremendous resistance at the engineer level," says Steve Jeffrey, executive director of the Vermont League of Cities, which lobbied in favor of Rivers' bill. "The state is trying very hard to change a prehistoric monolith."

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