I suppose the real question is whether enough members of our city council are capable of doing math. I don't know the answer to this, but I am not optimistic. Even if they can do the math, I suspect their ideologies will trump the math.

But the really good point here is how misleading the statistics the city gives are, much more so than the bit about calculating the accident rate.

Gee, if you found fewer accidents in crosswalks we have far fewer of, and more accidents in crosswalks we have more of... Well gosh, that finding just must mean the flashing crosswalks are relatively safe and the community shouldn't be worried about what the city is doing with them.

Move along folks. Nothing to worry about here. (Sarcasm alert over.)

Foremost: What part of--

> "Ideally that would be calculated on a per crossing basis, but the report doesn't contain per crossing data. An imperfect but simple way to calculate the accident rate.."

--did you fail to read?

It seems to me that this editorial is an honest attempt to do the best available calculation given the poor quality of the information the city report contains. The city is the one that should be doing this better, and in the first place.

I think the article is an admirable job of deconstructing the spin the report gives in an effort to whitewash the flashing crosswalk debate. "Not a valid community debate", indeed!

1. Can anyone really tell whether flashing crosswalks are actually more safe than other crosswalks from the information in the report? A recent letter to the editor suggested that you have to compare the accident rate per pedestrian crossing. Would that be a better measure?

2. Are flashing crosswalks more or less safe just because they flash, or because the city has put a crosswalk in a dangerous location for pedestrians to cross a highway? Or are there other reasons?

3. Does the fact that it seems to cost about $70,000 more to put in a crosswalk with a full traffic light imply that the city has determined that that is the value of a human life or limb lost to an accident in a flashing crosswalk?

4. The city just added a couple more flashing crosswalks on 30th street. Is it time for a moratorium on constructing more flashing crosswalks?

Superior appear to be a small outpost of sanity in traffic planning in Boulder County.

>"Vehicles come across that bridge (over U.S. 36) at a pretty good clip," said Martin Toth, Superior's acting public works director. "We're trying to pre-empt a crisis situation." ....

>The town staff looked at several other options for slowing traffic or enhancing pedestrian safety at the crossing, including installing flashing beacons or building an underpass, but rejected them due to perceived ineffectiveness or excessive cost.

>"A pedestrian-activated light is what gets you to that proper level of safety," Toth said.

Compare that to the city of Boulder, where the planners install more flashing crosswalks every year that CREATE crisis situations, when their own data has shown that when they replace a flashing crosswalk with a traffic light the accident rate drops to ZERO.

All I Want for Crosswalks is a sane city government, sane city government, sane city government (sung to the tune of All I Want for Christmas...)

I've not been able to read the report yet as it does not seem to be available on the city's website. But so far, everything I can find ( www.bouldercolorado.gov/files/Transportation/TAB/... ) seems to indicate that the "study" is pure spin and not science.

For example, in neither the article nor the powerpoint presentation does the city ever bother to give a breakdown as to what percentage of the 8500 collisions fall into which category--crosswalks at signalized intersections v. flashing crosswalks and so forth, but we are told (in both documents) that "only 6 percent of the [ped/cyclist-vehicle] accidents actually took place in a flashing crosswalk."

Of course, that percentage means nothing without knowing whether the flashing crosswalks are more or less than 6% of the total number of crosswalks of all types studied. If either the city's powerpoint or the article gave that percentage you might be able to infer something about whether the flashers are more, less or about as safe as other types of crosswalks.

If anything the article makes me wonder whether the flashing crosswalks are in fact more dangerous than city is claiming, since the presence of 2 flashing crosswalks in the top 15 means that they comprised just over 13% of the most dangerous crosswalks in the city.

While that might sound twice as bad as the 6% accident rate for crosswalks, none of these percentages can mean much of anything until we know more about the entire dataset. If (for example) the number of flashing crosswalks make up a far smaller percentage of total crosswalks than 6% (and I suspect that is likely to be true), then actually the study would show that the accident rate is higher in the flashing crosswalks than in all the other types, not lower.

All I come away with so far is that the city wants us to believe that the flashing crosswalks are safer, but I can see only spin when I try to make sense of their numbers. I hope the report has some real content, but I fear Don Wrege is correct.

What bothers me about the Office of the Consumer Counsel's position that every individual's intervention should be judged on a case-by-case basis is that it exemplifies a typical bureaucratic strategy to kill off quietly the individual's right to intervene. By making you constantly fight, over and over again, for just a chance to speak at the table, they hope to wear out their opposition--a classic big government/big corporation move.

I may not always agree with Leslie's views on what the PUC should or should not do, but I am going to Max Tyler and thank him for introducing this bill. All of us should have the right to make cogent arguments at such hearings.

Since the city has apparently arm-twisted the Camera into turning off comments on the front page article in which Heath Urie repeats the city's spin on the purported safety of the deathtrap crosswalks, and today's letters to the editor include one about traffic planning idiocy (ie a proposed traffic circle at McCaslin and 36th), I'll comment on both here.

Our traffic and transportation planners, at both the city and county level, have totally lost touch with reality. The traffic circles along Pine in Boulder don't work because Pine is an arterial and the cross streets are not; drivers know this and disregard the circles. Their primary effect is to make cars swerve into the bike lane and crosswalks of the cross streets, making bicyclists and pedestrians less safe--or precisely the opposite of what they are supposed to do.

LaRocque's letter accurately points out that the result with McCaslin and 36 is likely not to be different. In the name of traffic safety and efficiency, the planners will likely install something experimental that doesn't fit, is poorly designed and won't work as intended. And later, we will pay to have them--AGAIN--to engineer a fix.

That's precisely what has happened with Boulder's deathtrap crosswalks. In a puff piece on today's front page, the Camera uncritically repeats the city's spin concerning how the flashing crosswalks are among the safest in Boulder. But a little careful reading shows that that sentence is 100% spin, or what grass comes out of the bull as.

Consider: "He [Cowern/city traffic engineer] said the city removed the most dangerous flashing crosswalk -- on Baseline Road just east of Broadway, now scheduled to receive an underpass -- which has helped improve the overall safety record of the flashing walkways."

Well of course the safety record improves when you finally start to fix your mistakes! In fact, the safety record for many of the crosswalks has been so poor that the city has had to replace not just that crosswalk with a traffic signal, but also the ones along Broadway by the university as well. We taxpayers have had to pay twice for work that should have been done correctly the first time!

The second point the Camera article fails to note is that the city's spin presented only raw numbers of collisions, without mention of how many pedestrians, bike, or vehicles use these intersections, or what the accident rate was relative to the number of peds and vehicles. Without norming the data, an apples-to-apples comparison isn't possible.

The Camera article swallows this sort of spin whole, even to the point of repeating the city's "theory" that Colorado and Regent has a high number of ped-vehicle accidents because there is a lot of pedestrian traffic there. Of course, the raw numbers at one intersection will be higher where there is more traffic than one with less traffic. That's trivial and utterly uninformative.

What would be interesting is if one compared the rate of accidents at different intersections and found that the rate was abnormally high (or low) at one type of crosswalk v. another. Then we might be able to conclude that one type was safer than another. But making the statement that the study finds that flashing crosswalks are safer than crosswalks at traffic signals based on raw numbers alone is just mathematically foolish.

If we need a "midblock" crosswalk across multiple lane highways, we need one that has a proper traffic signal. The best test of that would be to compare the accident rate at such multilane crosswalks without proper signals with those that do have them--ie the ones on Table Mesa between Broadway and Moorhead (roughly at 39th & 42nd), the ones on Broadway (roughly at Elder and at High). I'm willing to bet than in a proper apple to apples comparison, the accident rate at signal-controlled crosswalks is significantly less than for other multilane crosswalks, with or without the flashing nonsense.

Please, city council and planning staff, quit wasting our money constantly redoing intersections and starting PR spin campaign. No amount of Orwellian whitewashing by studies presenting bad math is going to make us believe that black is white, or that the deathtrap crosswalks are safe.

Volc said "It's not that I don't have offers, but the library is my first love," she said. "I support what the library is trying to do. I just don't understand why it excludes me."

Because, Judy, the new library director made a mistake and is too proud to admit she made a mistake. She didn't listen to her staff, who advised against it and don't support it; she didn't listen to the public, who let her know she had made a mistake.

It's the same problem throughout city government. When a city official makes a mistake, whether it is with the deathtrap crosswalks across multiple lane highways or firing volunteers at the library, the city doubles down and makes matters worse. Hypocrisy and hubris seem to be our main exports these days.

Tony,

I checked with my local PLAN-Boulder guru and she said you will have development in East Boulder because building homes out east is in the Comprehensive Plan and its attendant Master Plans, floodwaters be damned. But of course we can't allow any homes to be built in west boulder, on the junior academy land, wherever. Because the Plans are written by, and for, west central boulder residents.

Your opinions don't count, because of where you live in town.

I'd gladly pay the tax ONLY IF it was earmarked for removing the crosswalks across multiple lanes of traffic, or upgrading them to a full traffic light where they are really necessary.

Those deathtrap crosswalks just saw another pedestrian injury a few weeks ago--this time, in a crosswalk across multiple lanes without blinkers. Haven't the city's experiments toying with human life gone on long enough?

It's high time we, peds and motorists alike, storm a city council meeting to demand the city remove or replace these multi-lane crosswalks before another person is hurt in them. The signup for public comment is always possible at and just before the start of the meetings on Tuesday.