Month: June 2018

 

Hardesty Regional Library, Tulsa  ID by Vince Taylor

First published at Nondoc.com

Because I know an article written by a geezer about zippers could be scary for some let me assure you this has nothing to do with clothing malfunctions.  As a 45-year Tulsa mid-towner my usual city driving is all about four or six lane arterials and expressways.  Then two summers ago, as Uber driver for my grandchildren, I began negotiating South Tulsa’s many two lane streets feeding into six lane intersections and back again to a two lane street.

Having served as an elected City of Tulsa Commissioner and Councilor for fourteen years and having listened to many presentations by city engineers about street construction projects, this seeming incongruity did not surprise me.  The City simply did not have the financial resources to expand city services at the same pace as commercial and residential development was occurring.  Other than required right-of-way donations there was no favored mechanism in place to secure funding for the expansion of streets and intersections.  Water, sewer, storm-water and refuse disposal were better positioned so most public concern seemed to be about the traffic congestion resulting from Tulsa’s southward growth.

Most of those years I represented downtown and midtown areas so mostly I just listened to South Tulsa woes while privately thinking “it was your choice to move there” and that we “established” neighborhoods would also have to pay for the costly street-widening that was demanded.  I remember clearly in those meetings hearing city engineers emphasize that intersection improvements were the logical priority which made perfect sense to me since intersections are more likely to be a bottleneck than the streets leading to and from.  But I gave little thought to how one moves from a two-lane street through a six-lane intersection back to a two-lane street because where I mostly drove were four and six-lane streets.

My primary driving experience with losing a lane, until recently, involved highway and expressway driving, often related to closures due to construction.  I confess that I always opted for the “polite” approach, and still do, choosing to merge out of the lane to be closed sooner than later.  In addition to being rude when traffic is slowing down, it also seemed potentially reckless to continue on at a high speed not knowing whether a safe opportunity to merge would occur at the point of road closure that was not always clear.

Then I read about “zipper” merging, I think based on the practice being encouraged by the Minnesota highway department.  The main focus, as is much of what pops up in a Google search, is on improving traffic flow when a highway/expressway lane is closed due to construction.  Engineers argue that flow can be improved as much as 40% if drivers continue in both lanes, at reasonable speed, to the point of closure and then merge every other car in a zipper like move.  I still struggle with that, especially when the line has already formed.  Here’s a sign:

But it did come to mind two years ago when I began driving daily on far south Tulsa streets.  After weeks of following my polite instincts and sitting through sluggish signal cycles, I consulted my engineer daughter whose children I was transporting and we agreed that using both lanes to clear the intersection, followed by zipper merging, was the right and efficient action to take.  Hence she and I, and a few others, regularly drive “rudely” but in a way that moves traffic more efficiently and helps everyone.

So I perked up when this letter to the editor appeared in the Tulsa World, May 31, 2018:

Anyone who regularly drives on area streets plays the two-lane squeeze all too often. Intersections widening from two to four lanes only provide passing lanes for those who never learned to wait their turn or want to show how their fast car can dart in front of you. It’s only slightly better going from six to four lanes.  These situations are road rage incubators. Then again, to paraphrase one local councilor, “We knew the poor shape our roads were in when we moved here.”  It is apparent that it is more important to develop our cities in ways to attract and please strangers and visitors than to make the quality of our neighborhoods better through carefully planned road construction and traffic control.  These are thoughts developed while sitting through lengthy signal cycles at numerous locations in Tulsa and Broken Arrow. I can and do avoid those streets and intersections whenever possible as well as the businesses on those streets and intersections.  It seems the avenue for growing a strong economy and investing residents with pride and confidence in their city and neighborhood is to develop better streets.

Here is the letter it inspired me to submit in response:

As a mid-towner rarely driving anywhere with less than four lanes I had a rude awakening when I began Ubering my grandchildren around far south Tulsa and encountered the plethora of fully developed intersections fed by two-lane roads about which John Paul Day wrote in “Develop Better Streets”.  I first followed the “polite” protocol lining up in one lane awaiting my turn wondering why traffic engineers insist that intersections be developed first when the two-lane bottleneck remains.  Then I read in the World about “zipper” merging and realized, as a Google search confirms, that the intersection, not the two lane road, is the greater bottleneck so clearing the most cars during a signal cycle works best.  Since then I move to the lane with fewer cars knowing I am less likely to impede a car behind me from getting through the next cycle.  Usually the natural spacing that occurs when cars accelerate from a stop allows me to easily zipper in; occasionally I encounter a driver outraged that I broke the “polite” protocol.  By being “rude” I help move traffic; “polite” drivers are preventing cars behind them from clearing the intersection.  The City should erect signage that will guide drivers to zipper and reduce congestion.

I also reached out to the City of Tulsa engineers to see if there is an official position on zippering after moving through an intersection but got no response.  We did encounter zipper, or alternate merging, instructions heading south on I-49 from Kansas City this week where bridge work takes it from two to one lane–it didn’t help since the heavy traffic backed us up to a complete stop.  Meanwhile I’m getting a bumper sticker that says “Zipper Is Quicker”.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.

Washington Irving monument on Edison in Tulsa, ID’d by Jim Campbell.

When Governor Fallin issued an executive order in January directing the State Board of Education to compile a list of every public school district “that spends less than sixty percent (60%) of their budget on instructional expenditures” I wrote a post showing that, using statewide data, the percentage spent on instruction could be as low as 36.4% or as high as 68.6% depending on the definitions of “instructional expenditures” (the dividend) and “their budget” (the divisor).  So naturally I was amused to see a political ad for Todd Lamb, candidate for governor, touting his plan to “maintain a focus on improving academic achievement, and reduce administrative costs so we get a minimum of 65% of every education dollar spent directly with teachers in the classroom.”

His website goes on to say:

Based on reports from the State Department of Education, currently fewer than ten of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts are spending at least 65% of their education dollars in the classroom. The low number of districts reaching even that modest threshold potentially understates how inefficiently our schools’ finances are being spent. One study shows that on a statewide basis, less than 45% of total education expenses went to instruction in 2016. For this reason, Todd Lamb will work to create a more transparent and accountable system for our schools so we will know we are getting the appropriate funds directed to the classroom. In-classroom expenditures include teacher salaries, textbooks and smartboards.

What candidate Lamb seems to believe is that a very few “districts are spending at least 65% of their education dollars in the classroom”, while statewide, according to “one study” less than 45% went to instruction.  That means there are just a handful of superstar districts making the right choices while the vast majority are wasting our education dollars on stuff that doesn’t benefit kids or teachers or classrooms.  I suspect the “fewer than ten” count came from the State Board of Education’s response to the executive order but I have not seen the list and don’t have access to the data in an easy to compute format (Excel), so I went in search of the few superstar districts by hand calculating the percentage for some districts from a list of those that do not receive state aid.   I think those 39 districts are on the list because they receive enough local property taxes that they don’t qualify for state aid, meaning these are property tax wealthy districts.  That also means they have a robust building fund that can be used for many non-instructional expenditures, like insurance, utilities and custodians, that poorer districts must pay from their general funds.  I’ve written about this in several posts.  When non-instructional expenditures are off-loaded from the general fund to the building fund then the instructional percentage increases in the general fund.  After checking fewer than ten of the 39 I found two of the superstars, independent district Pryor in Mayes County and dependent district Banner in Canadian County.

What is it about these two districts that distinguishes them from the 500 others that expend less than 65% on instruction?  Is it their local school board’s commitment to following Todd Lamb’s goal of putting more resources in classrooms, a commitment the other 500 don’t share?  Or maybe, just maybe, it has to do, as I suspected, with their property tax wealth.  Pryor, which serves about 2700 students, has benefitted greatly from the 2007 decision by Google to construct a data center there.  Since then Google reports having invested $2.5 billion in the facility.  No wonder then that its property tax valuation per student is $160,545, more than three times the statewide average of $49,471.  Banner serves about 230 students and enjoys a property tax valuation per student of $246,403, five times the state average.  The school facility appears to be located near several major industrial and supply firms with access to I-40 between Yukon and El Reno; it only takes a little good luck to skew Oklahoma property tax wealth for a very small district.

The specifics of why these two outlier districts are so property tax rich doesn’t matter.  What does matter is having a governor who has some basic understanding of school finance since he or she should drive the policy discussions about how to fund and improve Oklahoma’s public schools which are our largest state service.  If Todd Lamb wants every school district in Oklahoma to be like Pryor and Banner he should explain how he is going to multiply our state’s property tax wealth so every district can be that far above average.

What is also notable about Lamb’s “plan” is that while he pays lip service to the goal of having competitive salaries for Oklahoma’s teachers, nowhere does he take a position on whether voters should sign and/or vote for or against Dr. No’s referendum veto petition that would strip away the revenues passed by three-fourths of our 2018 legislature to fund teacher pay increases that will truly move us toward competitive salaries.  He also wants a “transparent and accountable system for our schools so we will know we are getting the appropriate funds directed to the classroom.”  We already have transparency through financial reports that are regularly published online and are open records available to all citizens; we have accountability through locally elected school boards, State Department of Education financial reporting requirements and annual financial audits.  The information is there but shallow politicians like Todd Lamb will never take the time to “know” much at all about how school funds are used because facts get in the way of the agenda handed to them by their puppeteers who write the checks for their campaigns.

The fact is that if the funding for the teacher pay raise survives the veto referendum then the percentage expended on instruction in every school district will increase because teacher salaries are the largest component (In my post I show how the statewide percentage arguably will be 70%).  Another fact is that if the funding does not survive, then the percentage expended will increase for “non-instructional” purposes, like utilities to light, heat and cool classrooms, like insurance to enable school districts to rebuild classrooms destroyed by fire, flood and windstorms, like motor fuel and parts to assure students get to the classroom, and many more essentials that will increase in cost with or without a teacher pay increase.  Still another fact is that Lamb’s precious 65% does not include the services for students performed by librarians, speech pathologists, counselors, nurses, school secretaries and principals, custodians, bus drivers and the list goes on for both mandated and necessary support provided at the classroom and school levels.

If you are interested in the future of public education in this state and want the next governor to lead the discussion about how to best educate our state’s children for their, and our, future, you should not be interested in the shallow Lamb “plan” that only shows his failure to grasp how school funding in Oklahoma works and to do his homework with the transparent resources available to us all.   He needs to get the wool out of his eyes and start reading.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.