Street smart

Illustrations by Dana Heimes

When your car crawls through a stretch of road where a crash is being investigated, you may think about your own driving behavior in the moments before you were forced to slow down. Were you speeding? Aware of the cars around you? Distracted by a phone? 

But chances are, your self-reflection ends when the gridlock does.  

Now, the city of Spokane, Washington, is trying to change that, with an assist from faculty and students in CMDI’s environmental design department.

Last spring, students in an interdisciplinary design studio course created plans to roll out a proposed solution, Emergency Streets, on a pilot basis in the city.   

Under Emergency Streets, when a crash occurs, workers set up traffic-calming devices like drums, cones and panels that force motorists to drive at or below the speed limit in the miles around the site of a fatal wreck. The installations remain in place for two weeks, drawing attention to a systemic failure in the planning process that led to a death. 

“If you reduce the speed at which a crash occurs, the outcome will probably be better,” said Kevin J. Krizek, a professor of environmental design and a former senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State. “And you’re changing expectations about what the road should look like after a crash. It shouldn’t just go back to normal—because normal, for whatever reason, just killed somebody.” 

Krizek’s academic and government work led him to conclude that crashes are a failure of infrastructure planning and a public health crisis. 

“In my architecture classes, I learned about urban planning principles and how cars have taken over American cities,” he said. “Then, my civil engineering classes would teach you how to move more of those cars across a city at higher speeds. And this dichotomy is baked into our policy, legislation, modeling—everything.” 

A matter of physics, not blame

Krizek co-taught the studio course with Tila Duhaime, an instructor, lawyer and former chair of Boulder’s transportation advisory board. What she most emphasizes about Emergency Streets is its focus on the simplest contributing factor.

“This is about reducing the kinetic energy in the system—reducing the potential of harmful energy being released on human bodies, whether on a bike, in a stroller, on a bus, using a walker, or in a car or motorcycle,” Duhaime said. 

“If you set aside blame and say, it’s just physics—well, we can do something tomorrow to address the physics involved in a crash and improve outcomes.”

For Spokane, Emergency Streets was intriguing, but the city needed communication plans to notify residents of what they were about to encounter.   

Nick Haseman (InfoSci’26), who graduated with a minor in environmental design, worked as a design lead, tightening up presentations to different stakeholder groups—a skill he honed in two internships. 

“My information science classes taught me a lot about user experience and user interface design,” he said. “When we started telling personal stories of crashes in our presentations, and connecting them to how Emergency Streets could help address this challenge, it really helped our audiences understand the problem and our proposal.” 

Students working on public outreach designed infographics, door hangers, digital materials and more to introduce residents to Emergency Streets. Leighton Warner, a senior majoring in sustainable planning and urban design, said the course challenged students to approach the problem like entrepreneurs. 

“In a lot of studio courses, the professor kind of holds your hand, to make sure you’re on the right path,” Warner said. “There was more freedom to take chances in this studio. And the realism of the project—having a partnership with a real city—was incredibly motivating.” 

At the conclusion of the course, Jon Snyder, director of transportation and sustainability for Spokane, visited the class to meet with students, who ran a simulated field test and demonstrated communication strategies showing how experts might deploy Emergency Streets.  

“I was pleased that it’s not just conceptual. We will adapt some of these creative ideas and use them directly,” said Snyder, who helped secure a grant to develop and implement Emergency Streets. “This is a hard problem we’re trying to solve, and you could tell from their work that the students really took it to heart.”

By the end of the class, the seriousness the students brought to the work was on full display, and not just in their presentations. Duhaime created a sign counting the days since the last “accident” in the course, but it’s not what you think: She set the counter to zero every time someone referred to a car crash as an accident. By the time of Snyder’s visit, it had been two weeks since an accident. 

“‘Accident’ is a loaded, weighted term, implying that this event was unavoidable,” she said. “If we are responsible, we talk about crashes, collisions or incidents.” 

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.