City leaders in Ames, Iowa, say these new rainbow-colored crosswalks reflect the city’s efforts to… [+]
The city council in Ames, Iowa has decided to keep its colorful, inclusion-themed crosswalks at a downtown intersection, despite a sharply-worded request from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration.
The crosswalks on Douglas Avenue feature a minority-inclusive rainbow, which adds brown and black to the traditional rainbow colors first arranged by the late Gilbert Baker for the first LGBT Pride flag. The crosswalk to the east on Fifth Street features gender non-binary pride colors of purple, black, yellow and white, and the crosswalk to the west features transgender pride colors of blue, white and pink.
Earlier this month, the city received a letter from FHWA assistant division administrator Mark Johnson, informing Ames leaders their newly-christened crosswalks represented a danger to pedestrians. Johnson’s letter suggested the city “take the necessary steps to remove the non-compliant crosswalk art as soon as it is feasible,” and for traditional white-marked crosswalks replace them.
“The white crosswalk markings allowed are tested and proven to be recognized as a legally marked crossing location for pedestrians,” Johnson wrote in the Sept. 5 letter to Ames City Manager Steve Schainker. “Crosswalk art diminishes the contrast between the white lines and the pavement, potentially decreasing the effectiveness of the crosswalk markings and the safety of pedestrian traffic.”
Although Ames receives a small amount of federal money to fix roads, Ames City Attorney Mark Lambert told the Des Moines Register neither Douglas Avenue nor Fifth Street are federal roads, U.S. highways or interstates.
“In terms of jurisdiction, we don’t believe the highway administration has any,” Lambert said. He wrote a memo to the council explaining that.
“With the system of federalism in the United States, the federal government does not have jurisdiction over everything,” Lambert wrote. “I note that the FHWA’s letter included a ‘request’ — not a demand — for the city to remove the colored crosswalk markings. This is not a lawful order or demand by a federal agency, it is merely a request.”
On Thursday, the council met to consider what to do next, and the consensus that emerged was to do… nothing.
“My only question is, do we need to do anything?” asked council member Chris Nelson, according to the Ames Tribune. “Can we just accept the letter and say thank you?”
Lambert told Nelson that since the request did not ask for a response, written or verbal from the city, the council could simply ignore it.
“As I said in my memo, [FHWA] couldn’t explain to me how they had jurisdiction over city streets, they were unaware of any penalties, and said they were still researching that,” Lambert said. “Frankly, I think that according to the manual itself, there’s a good argument we’re not violating the manual, since there’s no prohibition on colors.”
Ames is hardly alone in adding colorful crosswalks.
Crosswalk-art programs have become popular across the country in cities looking to foster more inclusive communities and beautify their downtowns, according to National Public Radio. Crosswalk drawings ranging from rainbows to piano keys have been added by cities from Rochester, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri.
And all those projects have run afoul of the FHWA. Although the highway administration ruled in 2013 that some forms of crosswalk art with paints devoid of reflective properties in muted colors would meet its guidelines, it said painting pavement in colors for aesthetic reasons does not qualify as a traffic control device.
Ames resident Bill Diesslin testified at the hearing this week that he believed the federal agency was “wrong, just outright wrong,” and accused the FHWA of misinterpreting its own rules and regulations. He called the crosswalk “compliant.”
“They have a definition of crosswalk, which where I think the [FHWA] is getting bent out of shape,” Diesslin said. “The crosswalk lines are white pavement marking that identify the crosswalks — the rainbow crossing in Ames has white lines demarcating, so it’s consistent with federal recommendations.”
The debate didn’t matter much to Jacquelinne Haller, a Navy veteran who also happens to be a transgender woman living in Iowa. This week, she shared photos of the crosswalk in Ames on social media. Haller called it “a pilgrimage.” And whether the crosswalk worked as a traffic control device or not, it did give the city a small return on its $4,000 investment of paint and labor: it brought Ames a new visitor.
