Crank the Cogs
It is the ultimate old-man-yells-at-car fantasy. I am working to slow, reduce, and exterminate at times the traffic on my street. As any old man of my ilk will assert, my cause is just.
Our neighborhood association lies along 1.3 kilometers of a narrow street. A quiet street. A nice street with a bit of handsome brick on each side bordering the asphalt center. It is a bit nicer than normal streets because it leads from the nearby train station to the mausolea of the most recent two Emperors to shuck their mortal coils, Taisho and Showa. A modest stream of visitors walks along it; I dare say with enjoyment.
Our street is not safe to drive at more than about 20 kilometers per hour. Along much of it, two cars cannot pass without one pulling to the side or backing up. Sadly, it is a useful east-west shortcut when Koshu Kaido gets congested, so a lot of drivers use it to take people to the train station, particularly in the morning, when my kids and others walk the street to school. The neighbors drive cautiously, but shortcutters are self-selectively in a hurry. They go too fast and often exhibit bad manners, not letting other cars pass. Taxis are a particularly egregious sub-set of these shortcutters.
When a car drives too fast near my house I passive-aggressively step a little further into the vehicle path to make them slow down. I give mean looks. I may have yelled at a taxi or two. The speeding is infuriating. Having now experienced it, I drive much more cautiously in other neighborhoods. Yes, I admit that am the kind of bad person who is best taught by occupying the place of victim of bad behavior. I acknowledge this hypocrisy. But I also avoid taking shortcuts through narrow streets because the risk-reward ratio virtually never makes them worthwhile. I understand that folks hurry through our area thinking they are being safe. Since they are not, I intend to act upon them through the driest of administrative tactics. I shall wield the government against them.
One of the reasons I took a turn as a 理事 director on the neighborhood association board was to address this unsafe traffic situation. Volunteer fire corps members are actually exempted from service in our neighborhood, but the number of people who can serve is dwindling as the old stalwarts age, so I accepted a two-year turn starting April 2022. The neighborhood association president at the time, and his returning vice president, struggled with conducting the board meetings, which were going on tangents and badly overtime without accomplishing much. The president made me a vice president and assigned me that task. I am happy to boast that the meetings got shorter and much more effective with me doing that. The experience of conducting many Ichou Festa Steering Committee meetings was a major asset.
Tangent paragraph: Another thing I want to accomplish in my term is a consolidation of the 組 / kumi / sub-groups within the neighborhood association, into fewer sub-groups with more households in each. The bylaws from 1983, when our association was created, mandate a specific number of kumi, but they are now unable to sustain a reasonable rotation of directorships—the few people able to serve have to serve too often. We need to resolve at the next General Meeting a revision of this and other aspects of the bylaws: They are tailored to a Showa-Era household structure in which the husband works and the wife is at home and has a lot of free time, and everyone is generally more willing to sacrifice time for rote tasks that may not be necessary in 2023. A transformation to update how our association works will save our association from ruin.
Our street is administered by the city, as are most in Japan. Some important thoroughfares are prefectural, a smaller number of even more important ones are national, and most others are administered municipally by default. The city does an amazing job of maintaining many major streets along with hundreds of tiny alleyways, minor waterways and ditches, and myriad byzantine 赤道 / akamichi paths that only exist legally on 公図 official public maps, but are physically paved over and largely invisible, as bits of parking or building lots. It is so much work for the designated section of city hall to manage all these.
An individual who complains to city hall about traffic conditions will get a fair hearing by the 路政課 / roseika / Road Administration Department (hereafter “RAD”). When a neighborhood association does the same thing, though, there is a quicker and more earnest response. It is the right way for things to be: The city’s limited resources can’t be thrown about willy-nilly for an individual who may or may not also be speaking for their neighbors. In some cases, an individual might pursue their own interests above those of the community. But when a neighborhood officially requests something, it is taken very seriously. So I brought the traffic issue before the neighborhood association board, which of course agreed that the situation is unsafe and wanted to see improvement.
In April I contacted the RAD, asking them to meet with us (the association president and me) so we could share our traffic issues. The head of RAD did us one better by offering to visit the gemba to immediately get a firsthand understanding. He came and we and showed him around, communicating the following main problems we are having:
Many drivers use the street as a shortcut to the station when schoolchildren are walking
A lot of these drivers go too fast
A lot of these drivers don’t yield to oncoming vehicles
There is poor enforcement of and compliance with restrictions already in place on another stretch of the same street (past an intersection with traffic signal, on the other side of the intersecting once-prefectural-but-recently-turned-municipal road from my house), which has a “School Zone” designation, meaning that non-resident traffic between 7:30 and 9:00 AM is prohibited
A footbridge leading across the river to our neighborhood is limited to pedestrians, but Uber Eats and other motorcycle/scooter drivers ignore this and drive across it, causing danger to pedestrians
The section of road leading from the above bridge to our main street is also restricted to pedestrians, but drivers use it to access a parking area without going through the necessary exemption procedures at the police station
The only intersection in our neighborhood with a traffic signal experiences heavy traffic, and the backed-up cars often stop on top of the crosswalk there, causing danger to schoolchildren and other pedestrians who have to cross in front of or behind cars outside the crosswalk stripes
The RAD head brought a subordinate to take photos and notes. We brought the then-candidate for city assembly with whose election I was helping. The section head already knew him as a kohai of mine in The Boss’s office, and was well aware he’d soon be elected (and he was). This gave us another bit of juice to incentivize quick and earnest action.
We spent an hour showing them all the problem points. They took photos. They explained the things they have to consider from their position. They performed listening therapy upon us. They commiserated. They returned to city hall. It really was therapeutic just to have someone listen and understand where we were coming from.
The RAD head is so good at his job. He is known throughout city hall as a very capable person. He expertly walks that very difficult line of being empathetic to residents’ concerns, while gently communicating to them the limitations and timelines of a situation, to manage expectations from the beginning. As a sometime practitioner of the same art, I was impressed to see him work.
One of the primary limitations under which the city road department labors is that all legal designations, changes, and application of traffic rules to specific roads are administered by the 公安委員会 Public Safety Commission of the prefecture where the road is located. It is under the authority of the prefectural governor and positioned above even the police as the civilian / bureaucratic body overseeing many aspects of public safety, including roads. It has final authority in setting speed limits, restricting traffic, implementing a one-way street, and so on. The police merely enforce what the PSC has approved.
When a neighborhood wants a street to be restricted to non-resident traffic during specific hours, the process is to make that request to the government body responsible for the road (the city in our case), which will then meet with the police station of jurisdiction to explain the request; if the police station agrees that the request has merit (the main criterion is that it won’t cause harm in the wider scheme of local traffic), they make the request to the prefectural Public Safety Commission for review and approval. This process takes a year and a half at the fastest. It also includes the requirement of getting the signatures of virtually all residents in the area that will be restricted. This is going to be a huge mountain to climb. But I do have experience going door to door here. Sigh.
The section head managed our expectations right away regarding a time-based traffic restriction: Requests to the PSC are reviewed in order of urgency (from the PSC’s perspective). They get a lot of requests, as you might imagine. Many of them are related to admittedly more urgent situations, such as a road or intersection where problems have already resulted in death or injury. We will wait in line on this piece of it, but I have begun the process of talking informally to the Transportation Section head in our police department. Happily, we have met many times and stood together chatting many minutes while monitoring safety during the Ichou Festa.
The RAD head came back to us a couple months later with detailed proposals, maps, and photos of the locations with superimposed images of what to do immediately: Mainly, a variety of 法定外標示 / hoteigaihyoji / non-statutory markings. Essentially, what we can do to work within the current laws governing our street and enhance the visual reminders to drivers to exercise caution and slow down. Specifically, this means painting the street surface with coloring and writing at the two curves that have poor visibility; painting 歩行者専用道路 “Pedestrian-only Street” on the piece that leads to the bridge; and strengthening the signage and markings surrounding the intersection where cars stop on top of the crosswalk. The materials from the RAD totaled about 15 pages. It was a lot of work to make them. None of the immediately possible measures will be a panacea, but at the very least something new will hit the eyeballs of drivers who are accustomed to driving through obliviously. The longer project of enacting restrictions has begun too.
As far as enforcement goes, the RAD mentioned our troubles to the police station, but we need to approach the station directly for best results. This is coming next. I have informally mentioned to the section head at the station, but we need to send a request letter to them too asking for enforcement of the pedestrian-only restrictions on two of our streets.
We received the package from the RAD at city hall. The RAD head and minion who came with him to the gemba spent a half hour explaining it to us. Again, very professional work by them. At the next neighborhood board meeting, I in turn explained everything in the package to the other board members. They were all for the measures.
The next step was to make the formal request for action from the RAD. I needed to go and get a request letter boilerplate example from the RAD, so that our official 要望書 / yobosho / request letter would be worded in exactly the way that pushes the funding and approval forward within city hall. I got super busy and failed to go and get this before going to the US. Then I got back from the US and was busy with work trips and the festival. Finally I went and got the boilerplate. I took it home.
It was nicely built to make clear what kind of language best enables the RAD to take action: “In XXX place, YYY happens, causing danger to ZZZ, so please take safety measures.” That last part’s ambiguity is important. Rather than prescribing exactly what should be done, the request letter is best off giving the RAD leeway in the measures they take. Presumably, the request letter will be cited by the RAD when circulated among higher level authorities or funding decision-makers in city hall in the approval process. Their decision will not need details of what we want the RAD to do. Instead, the letter is evidence of the problem that needs solving. At the same time, the understanding between us and the RAD is that it will execute more or less what it has already proposed to us in detail. The boilerplate is also great for expressing that a lengthy document is not needed. Short and sweet with the right titles and stamps does the job fine.
I typed up our request letter based on the boilerplate, with a paragraph about each of the three problems we are experiencing. I used identical language for each in a very rote way. This is not a time to vary the wording for style and potentially sound like different handling or situations are occurring. Ad nauseam I used the phrase 児童をはじめとする歩行者 / children and other pedestrians to emphasize that the situation is a danger to kids. That places a bit more pressure on city hall than just pedestrians would.
I took the draft request letter to our next board meeting, where it was approved. Like the boilerplate, our request letter was addressed to the mayor; all city hall business is done in the mayor’s personal name, and requests to the city are made to the mayor formally. The request letter was officially from the neighborhood association president, the neighborhood association children’s group president (who happens to be my wife), and the above city assemblyman. Each of these people stamped the request letter with their personal seals.
Yesterday I took the finalized, stamped request letter to the RAD. It was lunchtime. During lunch, the lights on most floors of our city hall are dimmed drastically. Anyone can still receive service from the department upon which they call, but most employees are at their desk eating lunch or having a catnap. I am fond of this convention—they deserve a lunch break. It is good for residents that competent people join and stay in the municipal civil service. One of the people in the RAD who had given and explained to me the boilerplate was there to receive the final request letter.
We will receive word from the RAD on the funding and then scheduling of work resulting from our request. It is exciting to see things moving forward. It is satisfying to understand and then arduously crank the cogs of administrative procedure to produce a public good.