There are cheap fixes to prevent crashes on Law Lane

Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana included in their 2010 master plan an expensive and ambitious plan to extend Law Lane. The plan specified that the updated Law Lane should include bike lanes and off-street pedestrian sidewalks. A 2020 update to the master plan added detailed plans. The angled parking between Fee and Eagleson would be replaced with a protected bike lane. The sidewalk on the north side would become safer by closing five parking lot exits.

An independent pedestrian safety audit of Law Lane reached similar conclusions about recommended updates.

The safety cost of delayed street improvements

Now 15 years after those initial plans these safety upgrades still have not been implemented. At what cost to the safety of the IU community? In the crash data for that period, we can find crashes that could been prevented by the safety updates. Preventable crashes will continue until improvements are made.

Crashes since 2010 on Law Lane would have been prevented if the planned safety updates had already been made

• 13 unsafe backing crashes, which would be eliminated by planned protected multi-use path
• 5 crashes at parking lot exits which are planned to be closed
• 12 walking and biking crashes with cars which might be prevented by protected multi-use path
• 5 pedestrian crashes at the intersections which might be reduced by a shortened crossing distance provided by a protected path
• 19 total injuries related to walking, biking, unsafe backing, or unnecessary parking lot exits

These are only the recorded crashes, reported to the police. I didn't have to talk to many people from IU about this to hear from a student who was struck by a driver in a car exiting the Foster Quadrangle parking lot that went unreported.

The actual number of crashes is expected to be much higher. At least half of all pedestrian and bicyclist-involved crashes are underreported to the police. The rate of unreported pedestrian and bicyclist-involved crashes that required hospital visits was calculated by comparing the details of emergency room visits with the state crash database.

If similar rates hold here, then there have been about 40 preventable injuries on one block of Law Lane in the last 15 years.

What's the cost of a crash?

 In 2012, the National Safety Council calculated the cost of a pedestrian injury to be around $58,700 per event. Crash costs may involve more than just an emergency room visit– there's the cost of the police response, possible legal fees, and opportunity costs related to missing work or school.

More recently in 2019, The Kansas Department of Transportation created a more detailed analysis of different kinds of crashes, including factoring in indirect and intangible costs.

Let's say we round the cost of a crash with an injury down to $100,000– lower than the lowest cost in the Kansas model. Given the estimated 40 crashes with injuries that design changes on Law Lane might have prevented since 2010, that's a total cost of about $4 million from potentially preventable crashes so far.

We are looking at about 12 years of crash data, so that's more than $330,000 per year.

The cost of short-term fixes that prioritize crash reduction

IU's plan to completely overhaul and extend Law Lane is grand and ambitious and doesn't have a timeline or price tag in the master plan. Are there temporary fixes that are cheap and fast enough to do now while waiting for the master plan to be implemented?

A quick protected multi-use path

Replacing the angled parking on the south side of Law Lane would eliminate the ongoing pattern of "unsafe backing" crashes and would allow pedestrians and cyclists to get down the block with no conflict points with cars, a win for safety. Atlanta provides an example of how this can be done quickly, inexpensively and attractively with painted concrete barriers. Here's what that solution would look like on Law Lane:

Research suggests these barriers may cost in the range of $500 for one 10-foot barrier. From Fee to Eagleson along Law is about 950 feet. That's about $50,000 for the barriers if IU needs to buy all new ones– a bargain for a street makeover project.

Reducing parking lot exits with concrete planters

Both the IU master plan and the pedestrian safety audit of the street recommended closing several of the parking lot exits that open to Law Lane. Most other parking lots in the area have one or two exits, but that lot has nine. Closing five exits as the plan calls for would still leave plenty of access. IU already has a fast and cheap way to indefinitely block car access: attractive planters.

Another large street planter is available online for about $2,400. So if another 10 were needed to block five exits, that would cost about $24,000 in supplies. Another bargain. As with the protective barriers, these could be saved and reused for other projects once the final Law Law Extension design is implemented.

What's injury prevention worth?

The quick fixes above total $74,000 in materials– barriers and planters which could be re-used for other projects later.

Compared to the calculated costs of crashes above, the cost of the temporary project could be less than the cost of injury-causing crashes in the first year.

Until IU gets around to implementing its master plan for an IU overhaul, some temporary safety measures to secure the street now are a bargain compared to the risk of a continued stream of injuries from the current design.