There was time for conversation after the council meeting. From right: Chuck Warpehoski (Ward 5), mayor John Hieftje, and Sabra Briere (Ward 1) (Photos by the writer.)

The council didn’t engage in substantive deliberations on any of its regular business items, but did pull three items off the consent agenda for more scrutiny: (1) an Oktoberfest street closure in downtown; (2) a dam safety inspection contract for the city’s two hydroelectric dams; and (3) a renewal of the maintenance and support agreement for CityWorks software.

The CityWorks software drew public commentary from resident Kathy Griswold – because the web-based citizen request system that a third-party developed a few years ago using the CityWorks API (application programmer interface) does not have a good mobile interface. To the extent that a better mobile interface would allow residents more easily to report problems with traffic-related lines of sight (such as excessive vegetation), that could result in safety improvements.

Pedestrian safety was the second point raised by Griswold, as she weighed in against the city’s crosswalk ordinance, which requires motorists to stop for pedestrians who are in the crosswalk or standing at the crosswalk. It’s a position that Griswold has taken on several occasions in her remarks to the council over the last two years. Her contention is that the city’s ordinance should be identical to the language in the Michigan Uniform Traffic Code, which does not require stopping and does not extend to cover pedestrians who are standing at a crosswalk but not within it.

Sabra Briere (Ward 1) picked up on the topic of pedestrian safety during communications time, and delivered remarks she’d prepared at the request of former city councilmember Leslie Morris. Morris had attended the previous day’s Sunday night caucus and had asked Briere to address the issue of a recent pedestrian fatality on Plymouth Road. Briere ticked through a number of statistics on traffic crashes involving a pedestrian.

The meeting featured two topics related to constitutionally protected speech – one raised during public commentary and the other raised less visibly, during a closed session on the settlement of a lawsuit.

During his turn at public commentary, James Rhodenhiser asked the council to consider expressing its view on a regular weekly anti-Israel protest that’s been held for nearly 10 years outside the Beth Israel Congregation. Rhodenhiser is rector at St. Clare of Assisi Episcopal Church, and conveyed a written document to the council indicating support from 31 other local clergy. The council has in the past approved two resolutions referring to the protests. The city has not been able to take any substantive action to compel the protesters to cease their activity, because the demonstration is constitutionally-protected free speech.

Another issue related to constitutionally-protected speech was the topic of a closed session held near the end of the meeting, which lasted about 15 minutes. When the council emerged from the closed session, a unanimous vote was taken to settle a lawsuit: Dobrowolski v. City of Ann Arbor. The lawsuit alleged that the city infringed on constitutionally-protected speech when it used its vehicle sign ordinance to prohibit anti-abortion signs. The city agreed to pay $7,000 in legal fees and $50 to the plaintiff, Paul Dobrowolski – to cover the tickets he was issued for his signs.

In some significant voting business, the council confirmed appointments to the boards of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority and the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority. Sally Petersen (Ward 2) offered positive remarks about both appointees – Rishi Narayan to the board of the Ann Arbor DDA and Jack Bernard to the board of the AAATA.

Petersen highlighted one other appointment – Alison Stroud to the city’s commission on disability issues, noting that Stroud is hearing impaired and used the CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) to follow along at meetings.

Consent Agenda

This is a group of items that are deemed to be routine and are voted on “all in one go.” Contracts for less than $100,000 can be placed on the consent agenda. The following items were on the council’s Aug. 19 consent agenda:

• Street closing: The block of West Washington between Main and Ashley, leaving intersections open for north-south traffic – for Oktoberfest on Sept. 20-21 (Grizzly Peak Brewing Company and the Blue Tractor).
• Street closing: The block of East Washington between Main and Fourth Avenue, leaving intersections open for north-south traffic – also for Oktoberfest on Sept. 20-21 (Arbor Brewing Company).
• Street closing: A half block of East Washington between Main eastward to the alley – for Lite Bike on Sept. 15 (Arbor Brewing Company and A2 Bike).
• Purchase order to Azteca Systems for CityWorks software license and annual maintenance and support agreement ($60,000). This software is based on a geographical information system (GIS) platform and allows the city to track the maintenance of its equipment and assets. It’s also the software on which the city’s citizen request system is based. However, according to city CFO Tom Crawford, responding to a query from The Chronicle, the city is currently evaluating whether to continue using the existing citizen request application or convert to something else.
• Professional services agreement with Mead and Hunt Inc. to complete a dam safety inspection and report for Barton and Superior dams ($53,600). This is an inspection required every five years by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by an independent consultant. The last one was done in 2008. Mead and Hunt’s bid was the lowest of four bids. It was about half the highest bid for the work, which was submitted by Black & Veatch at $107,000.
• Purchase order to Michigan Supreme Court State Court Administrative Office for judicial information software (not to exceed $54,000). JIS is case management software provided to the 15th District Court, which the local court uses for day-to-day operations.

Councilmembers can pull any item off the consent agenda, and vote on them separately. Three items were pulled out for separate consideration.

Consent Agenda: Oktoberfest

Jane Lumm (Ward 2) pulled the item on Oktoberfest street closures off the consent agenda.

From left: Jane Lumm (Ward 2) and Sumi Kailasapathy (Ward 1) discuss the pink sheets on which nominations and appointments to city boards and commissions are printed.

She noted that the closure for the western portion of Washington Street started at 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 20, while the eastern street closure started at 8 a.m. on Friday. She asked if that’s what had been done in the past.

Sumedh Bahl, the city’s community services area administrator, indicated that the timing is a function of what the applicant requests. Mayor John Hieftje ventured that the difference in time might be related to the fact that people need to be able to get out of the Fourth and Washington parking structure. [However, the portion of the street that includes the entrance to the parking structure was requested to be closed at the earlier start time, which would not support the idea that the entrance to the parking structure was a determining factor in the timing.]

Outcome: The council voted unanimously to approve the Oktoberfest street closure.

Consent Agenda: CityWorks

The CityWorks item was addressed during public commentary reserved time at the start of the meeting by Kathy Griswold. She greeted the mayor and councilmembers, as well as people who might be Tweeting about the proceedings under the hashtag #a2council. She described CityWorks as a geographical information system, used to track service requests. It’s a very effective system, she said, but she characterized it as a mainframe system with a web interface, calling it “old technology.”

Griswold described herself as an IT professional who was qualified to talk about the subject. CityWorks does not have a mobile interface, she continued, and while it is supposed to interface with the See-Click-Fix mobile application, service requests that were put in over two months ago have not yet been addressed. As an example, she gave a request about vegetation obscuring a bike lane. She wanted to draw the council’s attention to the item, saying that she was not suggesting that the council not vote for the item – but she wanted to point out that CityWorks is only half of the solution. What’s needed, she said, is a mobile interface that will identify the GPS coordinates where, for example, there is vegetation obscuring a bike lane. The system is being used in several cities across the country including Boston, Chicago, and Grand Rapids.

Jane Lumm (Ward 2) pulled the CityWorks software agenda item off the consent agenda for separate discussion. She noted that the dollar amount was $60,000, and pointed to other software items on the consent agenda for $54,000 and $107,000. She wondered how the costs compared to the previous fiscal year. Tom Crawford, the city’s chief financial officer, told Lumm that he would have to look that up. But he indicated that generally such contracts are negotiated as multi-year agreements. And the idea is to try to keep them flat over the term of the contract. He described the maintenance costs as around 20% of the software cost.

Sumi Kailasapathy (Ward 1) picked up on Griswold’s public commentary on the lack of a mobile interface for CityWorks. She asked if there was some other software that might serve the needs of the city better than CityWorks. Crawford described CityWorks as a key piece of software for the city. And the city had not been looking at an alternative to CityWorks. He described how CityWorks offers an API – which is code that a third party can use to make a mobile application. What the city had done about five years ago, Crawford explained, was to create a customer service request web page. A third party had created that application for the city. The benefit at that time was that the city was at the forefront of having that kind of technology integrated into its website. The bad news, he continued, is that technology has moved along. What the city has in place now is not what you would consider to be ideal, Crawford allowed.

The city is currently discussing whether to ask a third party to develop a better mobile application, Crawford said. The contract the city council was voting on that night would stay in place regardless of what the city did in terms of having a third party develop a better mobile application, Crawford said.

Chuck Warpehoski (Ward 5) indicated that during the discussion he had looked up the dollar amounts for the CityWorks contract from the previous fiscal year, and reported it was the same last year as this year.

Outcome: The council voted unanimously to approve the CityWorks maintenance agreement.

Consent Agenda: Dam Safety Inspection

Margie Teall (Ward 4) pulled the dam safety inspection contract off the consent agenda for separate discussion. She asked Craig Hupy, public services area administrator, to come to the podium to answer questions.

Margie Teall (Ward 4) talked with city administrator Steve Powers before the Aug. 19 meeting started.

Teall got confirmation from Hupy that the money was being paid for out of general fund dollars. She noted that the dams in question – Barton and Superior – were hydroelectric dams. She asked for a status report on the possibility of adding hydroelectric power generation to the city’s other two dams – Geddes and Argo.

Hupy said that about two years ago, a study was conducted to look at adding hydroelectric power to Argo and Geddes dams. In the open market of electric utilities, he described that possibility as not feasible. It’s only feasible if the interested party had credits for alternative energy generation. The single party in question was the Veterans Administration Hospital, which had made the decision that it did not make sense for them to move forward, Hupy said.

Teall asked about Geddes and Argo dam safety inspections: How would their safety inspections be funded? Hupy explained that those two dams are inspected under a different set of rules and regulations. The power dams are under federal jurisdiction, he explained. Geddes and Argo dams, in contrast, are under state regulation. And when those dams come up for inspection, they will be funded from the general fund. Teal indicated some surprise, saying “They will?” Hupy responded to her query by saying that they are recreation dams.

Teall indicated she understood that they’re recreation dams. She ventured that as recreation dams, their maintenance costs would be funded out of the park’s budget. Hupy indicated that he should have perhaps clarified that they might be funded out of the park’s portion of the general fund.

Sabra Briere (Ward 1) offered that while her recollection might be wrong, she thought that the council had made a budget decision in 2010 that moved the funding for dam maintenance out of the parks budget. Hupy told Briere that’s why he had been cautious in his wording. Briere said she’d remembered a lot of strong discussion about that.

Jane Lumm (Ward 2) then engaged Hupy in conversation about the hydroelectric dams in decades past – when they were accounted for in their own enterprise fund. Her recollection was that those funds had typically run a deficit. She wondered how dam safety inspections were funded at that time.

Hupy told her that they were funded out of the hydroelectric fund. But he also told Lumm that the hydroelectric fund actually broke even or made a small profit on the average year. On average, Barton Dam makes money, he said. On a good year, Superior Dam also makes money – but on an average year it doesn’t. The dams taken together were, Hupy explained, paying their own way. In the 1980s when the city had looked at converting the dams to hydroelectric, a study showed that Barton Dam would turn a profit and Superior Dam would be marginally profitable – and that has been borne out over the years, he concluded.

Lumm recalled that in the 1990s when the city had reached out to DTE to see if DTE was interested in acquiring ownership of the power facility, DTE was not interested because the funds were running a deficit at the time, Lumm contended. So DTE had no interest in taking ownership. But Lumm called it good news that the dams were breaking even or turning a slight profit. Mayor John Hieftje ventured that the increased cost of electricity might have impacted the profitability of the dams, and speculated that the trend would continue.

Outcome: The council voted unanimously to approve the dam safety inspection contract.

Crosswalks, Pedestrian Safety

Crosswalks and pedestrian safety was a topic that came up during public commentary, as well as in council communications. It was also a topic at the Sunday night caucus the evening before the council meeting.

Crosswalks, Pedestrian Safety: Background

The Michigan Uniform Traffic Code reads as follows:

R 28.1702 Rule 702. Pedestrians; right-of-way in crosswalk; violation as civil infraction.
(1) When traffic-control signals are not in place or are not in operation, the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way, slowing down or stopping if need be to so yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within a crosswalk when the pedestrian is on the half of the roadway on which the vehicle is traveling or when the pedestrian is approaching so closely from the opposite half of the roadway as to be in danger, but a pedestrian shall not suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into a path of a vehicle that is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.

That contrasts in detail with the Ann Arbor city code, last revised on Dec. 19, 2011 after a revision a year earlier on July 19, 2010:

10:148. – Pedestrians crossing streets.
(a) When traffic-control signals are not in place or are not in operation, the driver of a vehicle shall stop before entering a crosswalk and yield the right-of-way to any pedestrian stopped at the curb, curb line or ramp leading to a crosswalk and to every pedestrian within a crosswalk when the pedestrian is on the half of the roadway on which the vehicle is traveling or when the pedestrian is approaching so closely from the opposite half of the roadway as to be in danger.
(b) A pedestrian shall not suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into a path of a vehicle that is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.

Crosswalks, Pedestrian Safety: Public Commentary

Kathy Griswold addressed the council during public commentary time at the start of the meeting on the topic of the city’s crosswalk ordinance. She told the council that they should immediately rescind the ordinance. Questions need to be asked like: Is it enforceable? Is it consistent with surrounding committees? Can we effectively educate drivers who visit the city? Was the ordinance motivated by safety, or by a desire to win awards?

She described herself as “so angry,” because she found a brochure in the lobby of city hall with the basic message of “Pedestrians Rule.” The message to pedestrians is that “they rule” and on the back of the brochure is a description of all the awards that the city has won. She called it “shameful.” She called on the council to hire an independent professional engineer who has transportation engineering expertise. She told the council that she herself did not have that expertise and was not making recommendations. No one without that expertise should be making those recommendations, she concluded.

Sabra Briere (Ward 1) used her council communications time to comment on the topic of pedestrian safety in crosswalks. Her comments came in the context of a request from former city councilmember Leslie Morris, who had attended the Sunday night caucus the evening before the Aug. 19 meeting and asked Briere to speak about the issue.

Briere gave several descriptive generalizations based on data pulled from the Michigan Traffic Crash Facts website for 2004-2012. Among those generalizations was the fact that the majority of traffic crashes involving pedestrians take place in the downtown area. That’s illustrated in Map 1. [Or see also this animated map]

Map 1. Traffic accidents involving a pedestrian, colored by year. (Data from the MichiganCrashFacts.org, mapped by The Chronicle using geocommons.com)

While Briere characterized some downtown intersections as dangerous for pedestrians, the higher frequency of pedestrian-related traffic crashes could simply be a function of higher pedestrian volumes in the downtown area. Based on data provided by the city of Ann Arbor to The Chronicle from its non-motorized counts conducted from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at various locations, higher pedestrian counts are confirmed in the downtown area. That’s illustrated in Map 2.

Map 2. Pedestrian counts, colored by frequency. Darker red indicates higher counts. (Data from the city of Ann Arbor’s Non-Motorized Counts, mapped by The Chronicle using geocommons.com)

Briere included in her remarks the fact that traffic accidents related to pedestrians also show consistent seasonal variation. That’s illustrated in Chart 3 and Chart 4.

Chart 3: Ann Arbor pedestrian traffic crashes: Months by year. (Chart by The Chronicle with data from MichiganTrafficCrashFacts.org)

Chart 4: Ann Arbor pedestrian traffic crashes: Months totaled – 2004-2012. (Chart by The Chronicle with data from MichiganTrafficCrashFacts.org)

It’s possible to speculate that Ann Arbor’s seasonal pattern is a function of the influx of University of Michigan students, and Briere alluded indirectly to that idea. She also noted that as fall approaches, daylight is more limited.

As an preliminary exploration of student influx or limited daylight as a factor influencing traffic accidents involving pedestrians, it would be useful to compare Ann Arbor’s stats with another medium-sized Michigan city, like Flint, that does not have a correspondingly large population of university students. Chart 5 illustrates that while Flint’s month-to-month pattern shares a limited set of characteristics with Ann Arbor’s seasonal pattern, it’s not nearly as pronounced.

Chart 5: Flint pedestrian traffic crashes totaled by month – 2004-2012.

In her remarks, Briere mentioned the fact that in Ann Arbor, the number of traffic crashes involving pedestrians has been somewhat higher the last two years than any of the previous seven years. That’s illustrated in Chart 6.

Chart 6: Ann Arbor pedestrian traffic crashes by year. (Chart by The Chronicle with data from MichiganTrafficCrashFacts.org)

Briere did not touch on the nature of injuries resulting from traffic accidents involving pedestrians. However, mapping out such injuries, there appears to be a less downtown-centric distribution of locations than accidents overall. That’s shown in Map 7.

Map 7: Ann Arbor pedestrian traffic crashes incapacitating and fatal injuries – 2004-2012. (Data from the MichiganCrashFacts.org, mapped by The Chronicle using geocommons.com)

Protected Speech

Two issues related to protected speech were touched on at the council’s Aug. 19 meeting. One involved anti-Israel protests outside a local synagogue. The other involved the settlement of a lawsuit over ticketing of anti-abortion signs.

Protected Speech: Protests Outside Beth Israel

James Rhodenhiser picked up on the mention of the 50th year anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which Thomas Partridge had highlighted during public commentary preceding Rhodenhiser’s remarks. Rhodenhiser said that the city of Ann Arbor has a similar but “unhappy anniversary” that is coming up, the 10th anniversary – just after Rhodenhiser arrived in town – of a small group of protesters outside of the Beth Israel Congregation on Washtenaw Avenue.

From left: Chuck Warpehoski (Ward 5) and Rev. James Rhodenhiser.

He described protesters as exhibiting “hateful behavior.” He noted that the city council had in the past gone on record, condemning the protests. When his children attend bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs at the Beth Israel Congregation, they ask, “Who are these people and why are they picking on this congregation?” Rhodenhiser told the council that he’d reached out to the group of protesters, and contended that there was no reason he could discern why the Beth Israel Congregation has been singled out – other than the fact that it has the word Israel in its name. He contended that the congregation had been targeted and scapegoated for the actions of a foreign government. They are no more guilty than any other U.S. citizen, he contended.

Rhodenhiser told the council that he had given the clerk a letter signed by 31 religious leaders in Ann Arbor, encouraging the council to express, “What kind of city we are.” Respect for free speech, he continued, does not “countenance scapegoating a religious minority for positions they do not hold.” He called on the council to follow the example of Dearborn, Mich. He’d attended a large gathering at a mosque when the Muslim community there was being targeted, and he called it impressive how the political and religious leaders had come together to say: “This is not what Dearborn is about.” He believed that Ann Arbor should do likewise. He called it a question of what kind of community Ann Arbor wants to be.

Rhodenhiser asked the city council to mark the 10th anniversary of the protest outside Beth Israel Congregation by encouraging civility and encouraging engagement with the rest of the community – which is equally as guilty – and not picking on this one congregation. The Beth Israel Congregation has many members who’ve gone on record in support of peace and justice in the Middle East. He asked the council again to go on record as supportive of the congregants of Beth Israel, who feel that its community’s burden might go unremarked on the anniversary.

Mayor John Hieftje responded during communications time to the public commentary by Rhodenhiser. Hieftje reported that he’d sat in on a meeting when the leader of the protesters had met with religious leaders. He said it was not a negotiation, but he called it a very good conversation. “The rationality and the logic that was presented seemed to fall on deaf ears,” Hieftje said. They did reach out, Hieftje said, and he thought it had been done a couple of times to try to bring some reason to the protests.

“I was there and saw the steps they took and there is no positive outcome from it, obviously,” Hieftje said. Last year he had spoken at the synagogue, Hieftje continued, and talked for about an hour and a half with members of the synagogue about these issues. “There’s a great deal of frustration there,” he said. Anything new that the council could do, Hieftje said, he thought would be good. He noted that the council passed resolution a long time ago and had also taken some more recent actions. He called it a very tough problem, that attorneys had worked on.

By way of additional background, the past action of the council included a resolution approved on Sept. 20, 2010 on religious freedom, which referred to a previous resolution passed on Oct. 18, 2004 condemning the protests outside the Beth Israel Congregation. During deliberations on the 2010 resolution, specific reference to Muslims was amended out of the resolution. Chuck Warpehoski (Ward 5), who was at the time not yet elected to the city council, addressed the council on the occasion of the 2010 vote, urging the council to pass the resolution.

Protected Speech: Anti-Abortion Signs

Toward the end of the Aug. 19 meeting, the council voted to enter into a closed session under Michigan’s Open Meetings Act to discuss two items – land acquisition and pending litigation.

When the council emerged from closed session about 15 minutes later, the council voted to resolve the Dobrowolski v. City of Ann Arbor case in the manner recommended in the closed session.

The suit was filed on April 23, 2013 in the Michigan Eastern District of the U.S. District Court. The plaintiff, Paul Dobrowolski, had been ticketed for displaying anti-abortion signs in his vehicle. The city of Ann Arbor issued the tickets under the following city code:

Section 10:60 Prohibitions for certain purposes.
No person shall park a vehicle upon any street or highway for the principal purpose of:
(1) Displaying such vehicle for sale;
(2) Washing, polishing, greasing, or repairing such vehicle, except repairs necessitated by an emergency;
(3) Displaying advertising;
(4) Selling merchandise from such vehicle except in a duly established market place, or when so authorized or licensed under Title 7 of this Code.

The suit argued that the city ordinance is on its face, and as applied to Dobrowolski’s signs, a content-based restriction on speech in a traditional public forum. The ordinance was enacted in 1970.

The stipulated order that has now been filed by the Michigan Eastern District of the U.S. District Court requires the city of Ann Arbor to pay $7,000 in attorney fees and $50 to Dobrowolski. The amount paid to Dobrowolski covers the tickets he was issued by the city for displaying anti-abortion signs in his vehicle while parked on a city street.

According to the complaint, Dobrowolski was ticketed twice, at $25 each, and on other occasions informed with windshield notices that under the city’s abandoned vehicle ordinance, he had to move his vehicle.

The stipulated order permanently enjoins the city of Ann Arbor against enforcing its city ordinance against Dobrowolski’s vehicle signs. The settlement is an implicit acknowledgment by the city that the ordinance would not survive strict scrutiny.

Nominations, Appointments to Boards and Commissions

If a pending council rule change is adopted at the council’s Sept. 3, 2013 meeting, the announcement of nominations and votes on confirmation for board and commission appointments would be moved on the agenda toward the start of the meeting. On Aug. 19, however, these items were handled toward the end of the meeting as part of mayoral communications, which comes after all the other voting business.

The Ann Arbor city council was asked to confirm appointments to the boards of two key organizations – the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority and the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority.

Nominations, Appointments: DDA

Rishi Narayan had been nominated for appointment to the board of the Ann Arbor DDA at the council’s previous meeting on Aug. 8.

From left: Sumi Kailasapathy (Ward 1) and Sally Petersen (Ward 2) appear a little puzzled about the contents of the pink packet, which contains a list of nominations and appointments to boards and commissions.

On the DDA board, Narayan is replacing Leah Gunn, who did not seek reappointment to the board this July after serving nearly 22 years, starting in 1991. Narayan is founder and managing member of Underground Printing, which offers screenprinting of apparel in more than a dozen cities nationwide. Narayan made the Crain’s Detroit Business “Twenty in their 20s” list in 2010 as a 28-year-old.

Council deliberations on Narayan’s appointment consisted of some remarks from Sally Petersen (Ward 2). She said she was pleased to see Narayan nominated to serve on the board of the DDA. She described him as a successful entrepreneur, a former resident of downtown and now a resident of Ward 2 [which Petersen represents]. He represents younger urban professionals, she said, “the genre of person we are always trying to attract.” In her mind, the future of Ann Arbor does depend young urban professionals for moving to, and hopefully staying in Ann Arbor.

Outcome: The council voted to confirm Narayan’s appointment to the DDA board on the same vote approving all nominations that night.

Narayan’s appointment still leaves two positions unfilled on the DDA board. One of those resulted from the departure of Newcombe Clark, who made an employment-related move to Chicago and thus was not reappointed after serving a four-year term. The other slot that needs to be filled is that of Nader Nassif, who resigned from the board after being arrested on a sexual assault charge.

Al McWilliams was nominated to replace Clark at the council’s Aug. 19 meeting. McWilliams’ name had appeared on an early version of the list of nominees for the council’s Aug. 8 meeting. The final version for that meeting, however, did not include his name. McWilliams is founder of Quack!Media, an ad agency located in downtown Ann Arbor. Quack!Media lists the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority on its website as one of its clients. McWilliams has written advocacy pieces for bicycling on his blog.

Nominations, Appointments: AAATA

Also nominated at the council’s previous meeting on Aug. 8 was Jack Bernard to serve to the board of the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority. Bernard is a lecturer in the University of Michigan law school and an attorney with UM’s office of the vice president and general counsel. He is also currently chair of the university’s council for disability concerns.

Bernard’s addition brings the total of UM employees on the AAATA board to three, or one-third of the nine members. The other two UM employees on the AAATA board are Sue Gott (the university’s head planner) and Anya Dale (a representative in the office of sustainability).

Bernard’s appointment fills the seat resulting from the newly expanded AAATA board, from seven to nine members. The other new member, appointed by the city of Ypsilanti, was Gillian Ream.

Before the vote on confirmations was taken, Sally Petersen (Ward 2) noted that Bernard is currently chair of the University of Michigan’s council for disability concerns. She noted that she is also a member of that group as a liaison between the city’s commission on disability issues. She paraphrased from some material written by others, which described Bernard as a clear-thinking, multi-talented positive individual who has a wonderful intelligent attitude about collaborative efforts. He was called an effective advocate and mentor for people with disabilities – based on his personal experience and his innate sense of justice. She noted that he is legally blind, and will offer that unique perspective on the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority board.

Outcome: The council voted to confirm Bernard’s appointment to the AAATA board on the same vote approving all nominations that night.

Nominations, Appointments: Commission on Disability Issues

The council also considered the appointment of Alison Stroud to the Ann Arbor commission on disability issues. She’d been nominated at the council’s previous meeting on Aug. 8. Stroud is finishing the term of Ian Scott. Stroud is a public policy intern for the summer at the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living. She addressed the board of the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority during a public hearing at its June 20, 2013 meeting.

During the Aug. 19 city council meeting, before the vote on all confirmations was taken, Petersen pointed out that Stroud has a Pittsfield Township address. Typically appointees are supposed to live in Ann Arbor, Petersen allowed, but in this case there was an opening on the commission. And Stroud is hearing impaired, relying on the CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) program to follow along at meetings. There is not anyone currently on the commission who is hearing-impaired, so Stroud offers a unique perspective that is not currently represented, Petersen said. So she hoped that the Ann Arbor residency requirement would be waived.

The waiver of the residency requirement simply requires a seven-vote majority on the 11-member council. From the city charter [emphasis added]:

Eligibility for City Office – General Qualifications.
SECTION 12.2. Except as otherwise provided in this charter, a person is eligible to hold a city office if the person has been a registered elector of the city, or of territory annexed to the city or both, and, in the case of a council member, a resident of the ward from which elected, for at least one year immediately preceding election or appointment. This requirement may be waived as to appointive officers by resolution concurred in by not less than seven members of the council.

Outcome: The council voted to confirm Stroud’s appointment to the commission on disability issues on the same vote approving all nominations that night.

Nominations, Appointments: Miscellaneous

Other appointments confirmed by the council at its Aug. 19 meeting were:

• Paul Darling (reappointment) to the Building Board of Appeals.
• Reka Farrakand to the Housing Board of Appeals. Farrakand is city of Ann Arbor fire marshal.
• Alex Milshteyn (reappointment) to the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Nominations made on Aug. 19 that will be voted on at the council’s next meeting on Sept. 3 included: Leigh Greden’s reappointment to the Ann Arbor housing commission; Devon Akmon’s appointment to fill a vacancy on the public art commission; and Logan Casey to fill a vacancy on the human rights commission.

Communications and Comment

Every city council agenda contains multiple slots for councilmembers and the city administrator to give updates or make announcements about important issues that are coming before the council. And every meeting typically includes public commentary on subjects not necessarily on the agenda.

Comm/Comm: Human Rights Commission – Video, Non-Discrimination

During the council communications time at the start of the meeting, Sumi Kailasapathy (Ward 1) reported out on some activities of the human rights commission. The commission is working on a revision to the city’s non-discrimination ordinance, and it’s being reviewed by the city attorney’s office. The revision would be brought to a city council work session in the near future, she said.

Kailasapathy also reported that the human rights commission is requesting that progress be made on developing administrative guidelines for installing public surveillance video cameras – in the context of the council’s recent rejection of an ordinance that would regulate the installation of such cameras. The council also heard public commentary on the topic – from the point of view of technology – at its previous meeting on Aug. 8, 2013.

Comm/Comm: Policing (University of Michigan Student Move-In)

During communications time, city administrator Steve Powers announced that the swearing-in ceremony of the four newest Ann Arbor city police officers would take place on Friday, Aug. 23, at 1 p.m. in city council chambers.

He alerted the public to the fact that the University of Michigan student move-in would be taking place primarily August 28-30. Classes are scheduled to begin Tuesday, Sept. 3, he said. With the “positive return of the students,” Powers also noted that “some issues” accompanied that. The Ann Arbor police department’s “party patrol” would be deployed each night from the beginning of student move-in until the Sunday before classes began, he said. The staffing for each weekend in September, as well as on all home football games for the remainder of the season, would be increased. Emphasis by the AAPD would be on alcohol and noise enforcement, Powers said.

Residents are encouraged to call the city’s non-emergency police number: 994-2911. But Powers indicated that residents are also welcome to call 911 as the non-emergency number. A high presence of uniformed officers would be maintained during the party patrol, Powers concluded.

Comm/Comm: Liquor Committee

During council communications time at the conclusion of the meeting, Jane Lumm (Ward 2) gave an update from the council’s liquor committee. A recommendation would be coming to the council about the fee schedule, she reported. Adjustments would be made to make sure that fees charged by the city reflect the costs. A recommendation on liquor license transfer procedures will also be forthcoming, Lumm said, in light of a change in state law. She thanks the various staff who are involved in the annual renewal of licenses, and indicated that their time investment would be tracked.

Mike Anglin (Ward 5) followed up on Lumm’s remarks by saying that 133 establishments in Ann Arbor hold liquor licenses. Each one pays $50 a year, Anglin said.

Comm/Comm: North Main Huron River Corridor Task Force

Sabra Briere (Ward 1) gave an update from the North Main Huron River corridor task force, indicating that the report is almost finished. Demolition of the two buildings on 721 N. Main was taking place that day, she noted.

Comm/Comm: Flooding

During council communications time, Mike Anglin (Ward 5) addressed the topic of water issues and recent flooding. His remarks dealt with the general topic of providing detention facilities for stormwater. He observed that the city has money in the open space and parkland preservation fund that can also be used to acquire land within the city’s borders. He ventured that sites could be identified now within the city to establish stormwater detention facilities. It’s important to find locations farther upstream in order to mitigate flooding, he said. He ventured that the city might in 50 years have less flooding – even if more development takes place – if the city takes advantage of the locations that are available now. Rather than undertaking large infrastructure projects, he called for undertaking “natural projects.”

Comm/Comm: Living Wage Ordinance

During public commentary at the conclusion of the meeting, Jim Mogensen commented on the hardship exemption in the city’s living wage ordinance. He recalled the history for its rationale – a recognition that some nonprofits were not able to comply with the requirements of the ordinance. He recounted how the exemption for the Ann Arbor Summer Festival was handled, and how an exemption was also inserted into the ordinance for work-study students. Last fall, the issue had arisen again, he observed. Mogensen was bringing it up to provide the history, he said, because a waiver had been granted last fall to Community Action Network over work-study students, he said, who were already exempt under the ordinance.

Comm/Comm: Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thomas Partridge addressed the council during public commentary reserved time, introducing himself as a resident of Washtenaw County and the city of Ann Arbor. He called himself an advocate of all those residents of the city and county who need more vital government services. He called for such services to be provided in a way that would end historic discrimination. He told the council that he was there on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, and the speech that King delivered on Aug. 28, 1963 – the “I Have a Dream” speech. Partridge called on the residents of the city and the county to make King’s dream a reality. He called for an investigation of what he called misappropriation of funds, which were now needed to expand public affordable housing and public transportation.

During public commentary at the conclusion of the meeting, Partridge repeated the points from his initial public commentary – Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his candidacy for Ward 5 city council as a write-in candidate. [Partridge has filed the paperwork to qualify as a declared candidate, so votes written in for Partridge would count.] He lamented the lack of sufficient affordable housing and effective public transportation in Ann Arbor.

Present: Jane Lumm, Mike Anglin, Margie Teall, Sabra Briere, Sumi Kailasapathy, Sally Petersen, Marcia Higgins, John Hieftje, Chuck Warpehoski.

Absent: Stephen Kunselman, Christopher Taylor.

Next council meeting: Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2013 at 7 p.m. in the council chambers at 301 E. Huron. [Check Chronicle event listings to confirm date]

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David Erik Nelson

Thanks for returning for this second installment of Dave Not Really Taking a Meaningful Position on Gun Control. As you’ll recall, last month we talked about What Guns Are and Aren’t [1].

This month, we’re just going to talk numbers, because if you get your vision of the world from the daily news, then your impression is probably something like: (a) Guns kill maybe three dozen people per day, mostly in murders (many of which are committed by cops in the line of duty); (b) Lots of little kids find guns, play with them, and get killed; (c) Gun injuries aren’t that common; these things basically kill you or don’t, and most injuries are accidents [2]; and (d) NRA is a deservedly powerful voice in the national conversation about guns and gun control.

All of that is wrong.

I fully acknowledge that the fourth point has some aspects of opinion to it; the first three do not. These first three are demonstrably incorrect.

Just to get the punchline out of the way, in America: (a) Guns actually kill 86 people per day, and only about a third of those are murders; (b) A very small percentage of gun accident victims are kids; (c) Gun injuries are more than twice as frequent as deaths; and (d) NRA doesn’t have enough members to warrant the influence they wield.

Gun Numbers

Starting in December 2012 I got super cozy with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website [3].

U.S. Gun Deaths: 2010

Here is the numerical breakdown of gun-related casualties in the U.S. for 2010 (the most recent year for which complete figures are available).

In 2010 104,914 people in the United States of America were injured or killed by flying lead exiting the barrels of guns. Of these, 31,409 people died; 73,505 did not.

Of the 31,409 deaths in 2010, 19,392 were suicides. That number should sicken and sadden any reader with even just half a heart. Firearm suicide was the number one cause of violent deaths for men in 2010, putting 16,960 of them in caskets [4].

Suicide by gun is a method overwhelmingly favored by men, and at which they absolutely excel [5]. All told, we’re losing 20,000 of our brothers and sisters per year to suicides by gun. Self-destruction by firearm constitutes roughly two-thirds of total gun deaths in a given year.

Next up are homicides, which numbered 11,067 men, women, and children. This doesn’t include lawful actions taken by law enforcement during the course of enforcing the law; those are coded as “legal intervention” [6] deaths, and there were just 344 of them in the U.S. in 2010. So, regardless of how common it is on the nightly news and YouTube videos, the police account for just 1% of all firearm-related deaths and injuries in a given year.

U.S. Gun Injuries: 2010

Finally, there are gun accidents. Watch the news and you already know what these are: Junior finds an ill-secured gun in the lettuce drawer and drills a hole in Buddy. But that’s actually very rare.

There were only 606 firearm-related accidental deaths in 2010 (so called “Unintentional Firearm” injuries, in CDC lingo). Just 36 of these deaths involved children under 12. The bulk of these accidents befell folks 15 to 44 [7].

A total of 73,505 people were non-fatally injured by gun-actuated lead in 2010.

Of those 73,505 injuries, 4,643 were attempted suicides. To reiterate, firearm suicides are abnormally successful.

Of the 73,505 injuries, 14,161 were non-fatal accidents that, as was the case with the fatal accidents, disproportionately befell the adult-ish [8].

And 963 were injuries during the course of “legal intervention.” (Another lesson: the cops are pretty good at not killing people).

Finally, the lion’s share of injuries, 53,738, were part of an assault.

Interpretations

I’m nominally a “journalist,” and so I have an almost overwhelming urge to begin this section with “Now, there are two ways to see these numbers …”

But, the thing is, there aren’t. There is one way to see these numbers – as numbers.

• 73,505 people injured
• 31,409 dead
• 73% of the injuries were acts of malice
• 97% of the deaths were acts of malice

Someone with ill-intent took hold of an instrument and started singing the special little dark song that was echoing in the chambers of his or her heart; that’s how this lead got into these bodies. They did this in cold blood and sweating with the heat of the moment, they did it while mentally ill and while of sound mind, they sang their special little song to strangers and friends and family and lovers and, mostly, to themselves. These injuries weren’t mostly accidents, or mostly kids, or mostly cops. It was people setting out to hurt people, and succeeding.

There is an urge to compare these numbers, so let’s compare.

U.S. Automobile Injuries: 2010

Here’s a favorite Glib Gun Lover comparison: There are roughly as many cars in America as guns [9], and there were 2,771,497 motor vehicle occupant injuries in 2010, and 33,687 deaths for a total of 2,805,184 American motor vehicle casualties. Cars are 27 times more dangerous than guns!

But, the thing is, of those 2,771,497 automotive injuries, only 8,954 were acts of malice or sorrow, and only 1,789 were attempts at suicide [10].

Check the pie charts: Orange represents blameless accidents; red and blue (and green) represent active human efforts to inflict pain or suffering. We’d have included a pie chart of Automobile Deaths, but it would have just been an orange circle.

In other words, those 2.8 million car accidents were basically just that: accidents. Those 33,000 corpses on the highway were largely the result of bad decision-making and bad weather, bad maintenance and bad luck. Meanwhile, our 30,000 gun deaths weren’t accidents – sorry, 4% were accidents. The rest were acts. They were deliberate expressions of hate and sorrow and frustration and desperation. That should mean something to us as human beings.

And, pardon me for saying so, it should mean something to the people who profit from selling the products without which these injuries could not have occurred. I note that the auto industry is constantly working to make sure there is less blood on the road. Car companies build safer cars, more numerous air bags, better seat belts; they support MADD and SADD and ever tougher laws against drunk driving; they support harsher punishments for bad actors at every level – those who behave recklessly and cause death and chaos on our highways and byways.

Now, then, when it comes to the gun industry …

NRA Numbers

Personally, I believe the NRA is terribly distorting the “gun control debate” in this country. I believe the NRA has made a concerted effort to drive gun and ammo sales over the last five years by conjuring the specter of a sinister Negro President hell-bent on confiscating legally owned guns – even as that same president, in his first month in office, overturned a decades-old ban on carrying firearms in National Parks. (That was just the first move amid so much notable inaction that his policies amounted to a loosening of gun control.)

Personally, I find statements and publications from the NRA to be twisted and loathsome in the extreme, often amounting to little more than borderline-racist dog-whistling. Personally, I think the NRA is nothing more than an extremely wily PR firm that doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about human blood and suffering as long as there is still more money to be made encouraging ever fewer Americans to stockpile ever more guns and ammo.

But I don’t object to their participation in the national gun “debate” because I believe them to be detestable hate-mongers and heartless death profiteers. I object because they don’t represent the actual interests of a meaningful portion of our citizenry.

The NRA has fewer than 4 million members [11]. That’s not a lot of citizens. They are dwarfed by such notable voting blocks as: illegal drug users (of which we have almost 23 million in the U.S.); Michiganders (9.9 million voters no-one in DC seems to care about); and dogs (there are 78 million belovéd mutts in this great nation).

Fact: No politician in American history has ever said: “I’m sorry; I would love to support stricter drug laws, but the illegal drug user lobby is a powerful group, and I can’t afford to lose their votes” – even though there are at least five times as many pill-popping daddies and paisley-clad Mary Janes in this country than there are NRA Freedom Fighters.

Since the Newtown Mass Murder Using Guns, I’ve spoken to several traditionally staunch NRA supporters who’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with lending their support. On the one hand, they feel that the NRA is the only group out there defending “gun rights” (whatever that’s supposed to mean, in a nation where there are clearly plenty of guns to go around and no way to even track them down, let alone take them away). On the other hand, these same NRA supporters find their once-beloved NRA to increasingly sound like “a sack of dicks” – an assessment already shared by the vast number of Americans (maybe around 130 million?) who own guns, yet would never consider sending a penny to the NRA.

A lobby should be powerful because it represents a lot of votes, not because it represents a lot of dollars.

And there’s the point: Not only is the NRA a minuscule sub-portion of the population, the organization doesn’t even represent more than 3% of the nation’s gun owners. NRA members are nothing more than a splinter of a minority of the nation, and they presume to speak for all of us – and we, for unknowable reasons, just let them.

As an aside to my gun-owning co-citizens: The NRA may constitute the loudest assholes in the room, but we quiet assholes – who keep our guns under lock and key and teach our children well – are kinda-sorta the biggest assholes. We’re the biggest assholes because we’re not speaking up on our own behalf on the side of honesty and rationality and fair-play in political discourse. Just sayin’ …

In the end, this isn’t about guns or “gun control,” this is about numbers: The NRA has worked for almost two decades to make it as hard as possible for you and your elected representatives to see these numbers in an organized, meaningful way. They’ve poured countless millions of dollars into making it as hard as possible for you to make your own decisions about what gun policy might make sense.

Twenty mostly pink-colored children were murdered-via-firearm in December in Connecticut, and the NRA said “Let’s put more guns in schools.” Last year in Chicago, 440 mostly dark-skinned children were gunned down, and the NRA decried closing the gun show loophole [12]. That loophole has been instrumental in illegally moving handguns into a city with some of the toughest legal gun restrictions in the nation. Something on the order of 30,000 of our friends, neighbors, and family members will kill themselves or one another with guns this year, but the NRA wants you to worry that my dad and I had to fill out a one page application and a couple little cards so he could give me his Browning pistol as a gift.

I’m sorry, NRA, but maybe we’ve got slightly bigger problems. We’ve got some numbers to discuss, and it’s kinda hard to do that with your hysterical bullshit drowning out the conversation.

Notes
 
[1] tl;dr: They aren’t tools for solving problems; they are instruments of self-expression, for better or worse.
 
[2] I put this in there because I feel that a lack of reporting on the large number of gun injuries in the U.S. buttresses the erroneous belief that guns are problem-solving tools requiring little training or practice to be effective. Lots of folks try to kill each other with bullets and succeed only in maiming each other, because Guns Aren’t Tools.

[3] Specifically Leading Causes of Death Reports and Nonfatal Injury Reports. These sections of the CDC website are ugly as hell and a total pain in the ass to use – especially in contrast to the slick and informative main page. If you do a little searching on that page, you’ll find something really interesting: the words “gun” and “firearm” appear zero times, even as we are in the midst of a news-gobbling national debate on just how dangerous guns are in America. Meanwhile, this report about a multi-state outbreak of hedgehog-linked salmonella infections is linked from the front page – OMG MICHIGAN! Three of those infections have happened here! Wash your hands, people!

Kidding aside, it’s actually a really good report: Lots of info, links to practical advice to parents and pet-owners. It’s basically exactly what you went from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their site is packed with such handy info on everything from seasonal flu to water-related injuries.

Are you wondering why the hell the CDC has a section dedicated to fires, but nothing on firearms? Are you wondering why “guns” and “firearms” aren’t even listed in the alphabetical breakdown of site content? Have you noticed that the section on indoor firing ranges focuses on the dangers of high noise levels and lead exposure? Do you wonder why, if you search “guns” on the CDC site almost all of the returns are for nail gun injuries? It’s as though the CDC exists in an alternate America where Samuel Colt was a championship knitter. I recommend you and Google spend some quality time together. SPOILER ALERT: The NRA bullied the CDC away from researching gun violence.
 
[4] Wanna get super-depressed? The next runner-up for violent deaths for men was firearm homicide: 9,328 lives lost. The top three violent deaths for women in 2010 were suicide (by poisoning, firearm, and suffocation in that order), with homicide by firearm coming in as a distant third at 1,734 deaths.
 
[5] I’m told that conventional wisdom is that most suicides fail; only about 8% resulted in death in 2010. This is not the case with armed young men: Of the 24,035 Americans who tried to kill themselves with guns on 2010 (86% of whom were men), 19,392 – or roughly 80% – succeeded.
 
[6] From the CDC: “Legal Intervention – injuries inflicted by the police or other law-enforcing agents, including military on duty, in the course of arresting or attempting to arrest lawbreakers, suppressing disturbances, maintaining order, and other legal actions. Excludes injuries caused by civil insurrections.”
 
[7] With a telling breakdown: 15–24-years-olds accounted for 145 deaths, 25–34-years-olds for 107 deaths, 35–44-years-olds for 91 deaths (the next ten-year chunk gives you another 89 accidental deaths, then after that it drops off to something like 60 for folks between 55 and retirement, and another 50 or 60 for the elderly). All told, in 2010 62 people under the age of 14 were fatally wounded in gun accidents, while 544 were nominal “adults” – which is a very different picture than what we assume. The numbers tend to indicate that we do a decent job of keeping our guns out of the hands of our little ones; it’s ourselves we have to worry about.
 
[8] Only 595 of the injuries were children under 14, and most of those (523) were kids age 10-14. The distribution of accidental injuries is otherwise very similar to that of accidental deaths – which stands to reason; these were, after all, accidents.
 
[9] Yes, that’s an estimate – and a crummy one at that. Remember, gun sales and ownership are not meaningfully tracked in the U.S. Experts tend to base their estimate of the number of firearms floating around in the U.S. on the number of guns annually manufactured and imported. The latest reliable estimate is 310 million guns in the U.S.: 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles of all sorts, and 86 million shotguns. I got those numbers from page 8 of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service’s 2012 report on Gun Control Legislation, although that’s just an analysis from the ATF’s Firearms Commerce in the United States 2011 report.

As for the current number of cars in the U.S., dammit, that’s an estimate, too, even though we do register cars in this country! Anyway, the most recent figure from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics is for 2009, when there were 254,212,610 registered passenger vehicles in the U.S.
 
[10] The CDC doesn’t offer us information on the intent (i.e., “act of violence” vs. “accident”) for motor-vehicle related deaths, so there’s a slight macintosh-to-gala comparison here; all apologies. We do know that there were 114 suicides and 39 homicides associated with “All Transport” in 2010, but those end up broken out under “Other Transport” rather than “Motor Vehicle Traffic,” so who knows; maybe it was all jumping in front of trains? (see Table 18 at that last link, if you wanna ponder this).
 
[11] Unsurprisingly, this is another gun number that’s shockingly hard to pin down. The current best-guess is four-million-ish, of which only two million may actually be living, breathing human beings who are aware that they support the NRA. According to folks active in the NRA only about 7% of the membership actual bother to vote in NRA board elections – which makes it sound like a pretty disconnected group, regardless of how many millions of living humans may actually be paying dues.
 
[12] Check the date on that article: 2010! It isn’t like this is a new problem.

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Under the planned 4-3 lane conversion, four lanes (two each way) would stay in place from the Maple and Jackson intersection eastward through the intersection of Collingwood and Jackson. From Burwood eastward to Dexter-Ann Arbor, one lane would be dedicated in each direction, with the third, middle lane assigned to turning vehicles. (Photos by the writer.)

However, the point of the open house was strictly informational. The Michigan Dept. of Transportation had already made a decision to convert the Jackson Avenue segment – between Burwood and the Dexter-Ann Arbor “Y” in the road – from four to three lanes. That decision came after the Ann Arbor city council passed a resolution at its April 2, 2012 meeting that made a formal request of MDOT to make the conversion.

But the initial request for MDOT to consider a 4-3 lane conversion had come much earlier – from the city of Ann Arbor project management staff. That request resulted in a February 2012 public meeting to solicit public input, when MDOT staff presented the proposal and their traffic analysis. MDOT expects the lane conversion to reduce accidents along the corridor.

The lane conversion, which amounts to re-striping the lanes, not changing the roadway footprint, is scheduled to coordinate with an MDOT road resurfacing project. That project is now expected to be implemented in the spring of 2014. It also includes the portion of Jackson westward to the I-94 interchange.

MDOT staff were on hand Tuesday evening to answer questions. Arranged around the cafeteria were several easels with schematics of the road design, and posters displaying crash statistics and peak traffic flows. Peak attendance at the open house for the first hour was probably around 40 people, which included city of Ann Arbor staff and three city councilmembers – Jane Lumm (Ward 2), Mike Anglin (Ward 5) and Sabra Briere (Ward 1). Lumm and Anglin had voted against the city council’s resolution on lane conversion.

Attendance was hard to judge – because of the open house format, as people filtered in and out. One measure of the strong opinions held by people in the room was two separate attempts by Ann Arbor resident Libby Hunter to call the room to order. The first time was to take a straw poll on the sentiments in the room for and against the lane conversion. On the second occasion, Hunter tried to impose a bit more structure on the open house format, by suggesting that people gather around a table for a question-and-answer session.

This article begins with some basic background on the historical impetus behind the city of Ann Arbor’s current focus on Jackson Avenue. It draws in a limited way on the experience of other communities in Michigan with 4-3 lane conversions.

The article includes a section on the arguments for 4-3 lane conversions, and current criteria used as guidelines to determine appropriateness of such conversation. Included is an MDOT-commissioned study (not yet adopted by MDOT or the Federal Highway Administration) that came out earlier this year, suggesting a substantial revision to those guidelines.

And because many of the arguments for 4-3 lane conversions are based on the possibility that traffic accidents can be reduced, the article includes a final section on crash data. That final section also includes crash data maps for Ann Arbor traffic accidents from 2004-2011 in a variety of different categories – deer, bicyclists and the “elderly.”

Jackson Avenue: Historical Background

Some of the conversation among Ann Arbor residents about the 4-3 lane conversion has focused on the question of who’s responsible for the decision – MDOT, city staff, the city council, or residents? For Ann Arbor, we go back 10 years.

Jackson Avenue: Historical Background – Ann Arbor

City of Ann Arbor traffic engineer Les Sipowski has worked for the city long enough to remember the early 2000s, when the Jackson-Huron neighborhood association was active in raising awareness about the problems with the corridor. The geographic boundary of the neighborhood association flanks Jackson and Huron, from Maple to Main.

In a telephone interview, Sipowski told The Chronicle his recollection is that members of the neighborhood group had brought the issue of high-volume, high-speed traffic to the attention of politicians in the early 2000s. The association asked the city to “do something” to improve pedestrian safety. So the city’s engineering staff began to explore what that “something” might look like – a decade ago.

A review of city council minutes turned up a resolution from Aug. 19, 2002 that established a task force “to formulate traffic calming recommendations to city council that can be forwarded to the MDOT for implementation.”

From 2007 City of Ann Arbor Non-Motorized Plan: Near-term Road Changes. Red segments are those identified as possibilities for 4-3 lane conversions. Green segments are proposed for motor vehicle lane narrowing with the addition of bicycle lanes. Teal segments are proposed for elimination of one lane.

By 2007, the idea of a change to the roadway – from 4-3 lanes – and installation of bicycle lanes was part of the city’s non-motorized plan, approved by the city council. Those concepts were then incorporated into the city’s transportation plan update. The transportation plan update was approved by the city council at its May 4, 2009 meeting.

When MDOT placed the Jackson Avenue resurfacing project on its work schedule, city of Ann Arbor staff requested the 4-3 lane conversion as part of the project.

So when MDOT held a public meeting on Feb. 16, 2012 asking for input on the proposed project, the slide presentation summary of the 4-3 lane conversion included the bullet point: “Requested by the City of Ann Arbor.” Homayoon Pirooz, head of project management for the city, told The Chronicle that he’d made that request about three years ago.

Based on the modeling and traffic analysis that MDOT did, and the results of the public input, MDOT asked the city to consider a resolution of support for the 4-3 conversion. From the city of Ann Arbor staff memo accompanying the city council’s resolution approved on April 2, 2012: “At the direction of Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) and for MDOT to continue with the process for converting Jackson Ave from 4 to 3 traffic lanes from east of Maple Road to Revena Boulevard, we have prepared the attached resolution for the city council’s approval.”

The city council’s action at its April 2, 2012 meeting met with dissent from two councilmembers – Mike Anglin (Ward 5) and Jane Lumm (Ward 2). Other city councils in Michigan have been confronted with similar decisions about 4-3 lane conversions. In Bessemer, the city council voted in 2009 to ask MDOT to re-stripe a section of US-2 to restore it to four lanes, after MDOT had undertaken a 4-3 lane conversion.

That’s been one selling point of Ann Arbor’s Jackson Avenue 4-3 conversion – that it’s reversible without undue upheaval. Responding to a question from The Chronicle in a telephone interview, MDOT communications representative Kari Arend said that MDOT is not currently contemplating pedestrian refuge islands as part of the project, which would lend the configuration more permanence.

Jackson Avenue: Historical Background – Elsewhere in Michigan

In Owosso, the city council voted in 2010 against recommending that MDOT undertake a 4-3 lane conversion for a section of M-52. It’s described by Owosso city councilmember Tom Cook in a blog post this way:

MDOT has proceeded with this plan because of a request from the City of Owosso several years ago, and because their experience has shown that single lane roads with a center turn lane are safer than highways with two lanes in each direction. However, there has been a large and vociferous expression of public opinion in Owosso against this plan, and the City Council voted 4-3 to request MDOT to keep M-52 a four-lane road. The final decision will be MDOT’s to make.

MDOT’s decision, as relayed by Cook in an email to The Chronicle, was to go ahead with the conversion: “…MDOT felt as if they were too far along in the process and they opted for three lanes on south M-52, which have now been in place for over a year.”

In reflecting on the role of city councilmembers in the decision, Cook made some observations in a blog post on the inherent tensions in decision making that include weighing expert opinion versus popular opinion.

So, what is the expert opinion for 4-3 lane conversion?

Why (Not) Convert from 4 to 3 Lanes?

A central argument for a three-lane configuration is based on an anticipated reduction in accidents. The potential for accident reduction is weighed against the possibility of traffic delays due to capacity issues.

Why Convert: Accident Reduction

Some reduction in accidents and their severity is projected from the expectation of more uniform speeds of vehicles in the roadway.

From a slide presentation by Dave Morena, highway safety specialist with the Federal Highway Administration Michigan Division.

But certain types of accidents are also expected to be reduced by dint of the physical configuration: rear-end left turn; head-on left turn; angle; rear end; and sideswipe.

At an intersection, for example, the driver of a left-turning vehicle in a four-lane configuration has two lanes they must scan for oncoming traffic, compared to just one for a three-lane configuration. And in a four-lane configuration, the driver of that same left-turning vehicle must potentially scan for vehicles in the far oncoming lane, which are obscured by vehicles in the near oncoming lane.

Ann Arbor has accumulated some experience with 4-3 lane conversions on its own road projects. In 2008, for example, Platt Road between Packard and Ellsworth was converted from four to three lanes. The city of Ann Arbor provided data to The Chronicle on various accident types before and after the Platt Road lane conversion. The trend for all types is clearly downward, after the 2008 conversion.

Accidents for Platt Road between Packard and Ellsworth. Lane conversion from four to three lanes in 2008.

Platt Road at the intersection of Lorraine. Top photo is from 2005 – a four-lane configuration. Bottom photo is from 2008 – a three-lane configuration.

For the planned 4-3 lane conversion on Jackson Avenue, the lanes along that stretch measure about 10 feet wide, which is two feet narrower than the preferred width. That’s another reason given for converting to three lanes.

Why Convert: Undue Delay?

An acknowledged potential downside to the 4-3 lane reduction is the loss of passing opportunities to deal with slow-moving vehicles, as well as the “stacking up” of vehicles waiting at intersections – in the Jackson Avenue case, at Jackson and Maple. At the Ann Arbor city council’s April 2, 2012 meeting, Homayoon Pirooz, the city’s head of project management, reported to the council that a simulation model did show some additional waiting time at the Jackson and Maple intersection for the three-lane configuration, but that it was not deemed excessive.

A key factor in possible delays or stacking up of vehicles is the traffic load on the corridor. The rule of thumb guideline currently in place, used by the Federal Highway Administration and MDOT, is that for average daily traffic (ADT) of 15,000 or less, a 4-3 lane conversion is an assumed success. Between 15,000 and 20,000, more review is called for. But the basic rule of thumb is that 20,000 ADT or less is potentially do-able.

By 2013 the Jackson Avenue corridor is anticipated to have an ADT of around 15,500 – over the threshold for additional review, which has been done. The corridor is also somewhat higher volume than previous 4-3 lane conversions in Ann Arbor:

• South Main, from Ann-Arbor Saline to Eisenhower (13,300 ADT)
• Platt, from Packard to Ellsworth (13,800 ADT)
• Packard, from Stadium to Jewett (12,000 ADT)
• Huron Parkway, from Nixon to Plymouth (6,100 ADT)
• West Stadium Blvd., from Seventh to Pauline (14,900 ADT)
• Green, from Plymouth to Glazier Way (9,200 ADT)

In a telephone interview, MDOT communications representative Kari Arend told The Chronicle that MDOT would be taking additional traffic counts in the Jackson corridor in the fall of 2012 after school is in session to double-check their data and analysis.

Why Convert: New Study?

A January 2012 study by Michigan State University civil engineers, commissioned by MDOT, calls the 20,000-ADT rule of thumb into question, suggesting that it should perhaps be set lower – at around 10,000 ADT. [.pdf of "Safety and Operational Analysis of 4-lane to 3-lane Conversions (Road Diets) in Michigan"]

At the July 10 open house, MDOT traffic safety engineers Wendy Ramirez and Jennifer Palmer said the study had not yet been reviewed, analyzed or formally adopted by MDOT or the Federal Highway Administration, and might not be. So that study is not part of MDOT’s rule set for evaluating 4-3 lane conversions.

The study set out to review 4-3 lane conversions at 24 sites in Michigan, and concluded that significant delays could be caused by ADTs over 10,000 or peak hour volumes of 1,000 or greater. [The Jackson Avenue segment has 15,500 ADT. From the MDOT poster at the July 10, 2012 open house, the peak volume on Jackson at Collingwood was 1,395 – 746 westbound straight, 38 westbound left-turning, 549 eastbound, 62 eastbound right-turning.]

Further, the study found a downward trend in accidents at the 24 sites, but the trend did not reach the level of statistical significance. But other research on eight corridors in Michigan claims crash reductions of 26%.

The “Safety and Operational Analysis” report from January 2012 still gives primacy to a detailed analysis over the general guidelines:

However, it is clear that “local” conditions (e.g., varying geometry, significant variation in turning movements, and variations in cross-street traffic) can have a significant impact on the viability of any proposed road diet. Thus, while an initial culling of potential road diet sites can be accomplished using the general guidelines above, in all instances a detailed operational analysis of the corridor (including operations at each intersection) for both 4- and 3-lane sections should be undertaken before the road diet conversion is implemented

Crash Data: Jackson Avenue

One of the potential benefits of a 4-3 lane conversion is a reduction of accidents. And when the lane conversion is implemented, it will be possible to measure any impact on accidents. At the July 10, 2012 meeting the MDOT poster gave current data on accidents, which The Chronicle has converted to a pie chart.

Accidents from 2007-2011 on the Jackson Avenue segment. The vast majority of accidents were straight rear end, followed by a substantial percentage of sideswipe accidents – likely a function of the narrow lanes. At 10 feet wide, the lanes are two feet narrower than the preferred 12 feet.

Data from 2004 through 2011 for Ann Arbor, taken from the Michigan Traffic Crash Facts website, are mapped below.

Accidents along Jackson Avenue. Dots are accidents, color-coded by year. Elsewhere in this article is a link to a dynamic map with the same data. The basic pattern of more accidents at intersections emerges fairly clearly.

Crash Data

A point of emphasis in the slide presentation by Dave Morena, highway safety specialist with the Federal Highway Administration Michigan Division, is consideration of older drivers. And a point of emphasis in the Michigan State University study is the importance of evaluating any decreases in accidents along a corridor in the context of a community’s overall accident rates. The MSU study also emphasizes the importance of evaluating crash types, not just overall numbers.

In that spirit, The Chronicle has assembled some charts and maps that demonstrate the accessibility of data from the Michigan Traffic Crash Facts website – which would allow for the detailed evaluation of a future 4-3 lane conversion along Jackson Avenue. The crash data website is a collaborative effort by the Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). Data is available from 2004-2011.

Not all of the crash maps and data below are inherently related to the Jackson Avenue corridor. Some have been chosen based on likely community interest. For example, city councilmember Jane Lumm reports that she’s heard recently from residents who’d like to see the deer population culled – in part to reduce deer-car accidents. In the past, however, this idea has received some limited discussion, but not really gained very much traction with councilmembers or city staff.

Charts on accidents involving older drivers (> 59 years) are included, because discussion of Ann Arbor’s aging population has been noticeably more frequent at various city boards and commissions. No assumption of causality or fault is intended for crash data involving older drivers.

Ann Arbor crashes involving older drivers (> 59 years) as a percentage of total crashes. The upward trend, from 15% in 2004 to around 21% in 2011, can be interpreted as a clear indicator of Ann Arbor's aging population.

Total Ann Arbor crashes compared to crashes involving older drivers (> 59 years).

Total Ann Arbor crashes from 2004 to 2011

Ann Arbor crashes involving deer, bicycles and pedestrians from 2004-2011. All categories show a slightly increasing trend.

Image links to interactive map of all Ann Arbor crash data from 2004-2011.

Image links to interactive map of crashes involving older drivers from 2004-2011.

Image links to interactive map of crashes involving bicycles from 2004-2011.

Image links to interactive map of crashes involving deer from 2004-2011.

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