A Tour of the New Sections of the Atlanta BeltLine

If you’re curious as to what the new sections of the Atlanta BeltLine look like, here’s a tour I wrote up on LinkedIn.

An Open Letter to People Who Bike & Walk in DC Regarding the Atlantic Gateway Project

To those who walk and bike in Washington, DC: 

I attended a press conference today in which Virginia's Governor, Terry McAuliffe, promised to end congestion (his words) by widening I-95 near Fredericksburg and inside the Beltway with HOT lanes. From the amount of time he spent on this aspect, this was clearly the primary component of the Atlantic Gateway project. You might not immediately realize the implications of that statement. 

Virginia Governor McAuliffe addresses a small crowd in Alexandria, vows road widenings will "end congestion."

Most of you reading this are already one up on the governor's staff, as you are familiar with induced demand: more road capacity yields more traffic, which yields more congestion. As Houston's Katy Freeway shows, more HOT lane mileage will also yield more car traffic. Those additional cars have a destination: DC's streets. More drivers, many of them distracted, mean more risk to people who walk and bike in DC.

The only way to protect DC's livability from the traffic induced by the Atlantic Gateway project is to embark on an emergency program of road diet implementation throughout the downtown area. If you take away capacity at the destination, you will mitigate the threat posed by Virginia's attempt to shove more cars your way.

Any street with more than one car lane in a particular direction is a candidate. So, for a two-way street, look at those with four lanes cars are allowed to use and reduce them to two. For one-way streets, look at those with two lanes and reduce them to one. Substitute whatever works best in that area: bus lanes, bike lanes, wider sidewalks, or loading zones. Just reduce the throughput for cars.

You will also need to eliminate as much of your public parking as possible. If suburban Virginia commuters cannot park in DC, there's no point in hopping in a longer HOT lane. They simply will have nowhere to go.

As someone who lives in Virginia, I apologize for the shortsightedness of our politicians and planners. I hope the DC political and planning establishment will act quickly, preferably before this new tsunami of traffic breaks upon DC's streets.

A Road Diet for the George Washington Memorial Parkway

My latest post is available via the Virginia Bicycling Federation. If you have ever biked on the Mount Vernon Trail, you will want to consider this idea. Link: http://bit.ly/1NbNeun

The Unintentional Road Diet

In June of 2015, one of the greatest experiments in road diets took place on one of the most prominent commuter routes in the United States. Ironically, it was entirely unintentional. One-third of the motor vehicle lanes on Memorial Bridge between Arlington, VA, and Washington, D.C., were closed to allow for emergency repairs. The repairs would last for many months. 

The bridge handles a whopping 68,000 cars per day. The Federal Highway Administration recommends that only streets with less than 25,000 cars per day should get road diets. Given the huge disparity in these numbers, a traffic apocalypse should have happened by now. It should be impossible to enter the District of Columbia from Virginia, unless you’re prepared to swim. U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia warned of “unbearable congestion” due to the closures.

So where is the apocalypse? Why aren’t people abandoning their cars mid-span and walking across, as though an invisible snowstorm had struck? Simple: motorists had warning and changed their habits.

A Wednesday afternoon: no apocalypse in sight.

The truth is that any road can have a successful implementation of a road diet. In the latter part of the 20^th century, Groningen, The Netherlands, narrowed a road with 4 through-lanes, a center turn lane, and 2 parking lanes. This was no unimportant side street, as it lies between the center of town and the central train station. The current configuration is now split into sections with 2 through-lanes, a bus-only lane, and two protected bike lanes. The turn lane is gone, as is a fair amount of parking. The road’s importance to motorists dropped as they found either alternative routes or chose a different mode, such as buses or bikes. Since the initial narrowing, parts of the street have been further restricted to motorists, with buses getting priority.

How can the Dutch stand all this gridlock?

The obstacle to road diets isn’t the traffic count. It’s politics. Even when the traffic count is low, politicians will thunder forth about the need to keep motorist convenience has a higher priority than the safety of people who walk or bike, as the mayor of Gainesville, FL, did in 2014. The mayor successfully campaigned to remove bike lanes from a road with a mere 14,551 vehicles per day. No evidence of congestion caused by the bike lanes existed, but political posturing is seldom backed by facts.

That is the inherent problem with the debate over road diets: those who oppose them use unverifiable anecdotes (to be generous) and never manage to offer scientific data to back up their arguments. That can be forgiven from a public that is largely uninformed on matters of transportation, but it is inexcusable from professionals in the field.

Consider New Orleans: much like another Dutch city, Amsterdam, the city is largely below sea level. That means the topography is ideal for biking and walking. But, as I found on a recent trip, current street conditions are hardly up to the Dutch standard. Bike lanes are rare, even though streets are often very wide. That makes life a little tough for all vulnerable road users, but many leaders in post-Katrina New Orleans recognize the need to better. So, the Baronne Street road diet project was put forward.

Nice lane markings, eh? When waiting on the streetcar, don’t stick your rear too far out in the street.

The Baronne Street project would be no mere set of stripes on the road, but a protected bike lane buffered from moving vehicles by a parking lane. The bike lane would be created via a reduction in motor vehicle lanes on a one-way street from 2 to 1.

Image courtesy of Bike Easy

As with all things, it isn’t considered perfect, but people who bike love it. Yet they had opposition from a transportation professional. 

A New Orleans transportation engineer  wrote emails to his supervisor claiming that traffic would be gridlocked with the loss of a lane. Although he cited little more than anecdotal evidence and an internal Level of Service (LOS) study, his emails were enough to persuade a judge to grant a temporary order freezing the project. Thankfully, the judge later ruled that there were no legal grounds to stop the project.

This engineer thought a shared lane, or sharrow, would suffice. Those who bike in New Orleans thought otherwise, which is why so many of them turned out to the public hearings on the project. So, why couldn’t this engineer produce anything more than discredited LOS modeling? Simple: scientific evidence that road diets cause congestion does not exist. 

The sharrow just visible to the right is fine, but only because the street is empty.

That should not be surprising. Transportation experts who are on the cutting edge of the field have long known that induced demand results from road expansions; why should the opposite strategy not produce opposite results? Even the state of California’s Department of Transportation, Caltrans, admitted recently in public that bigger roads cause more traffic (though I’d heard it from them at an event over a year ago). 

But old habits are hard to break, so Caltrans plans a monumental road expansion via a tunnel project in the Los Angeles area. I cannot argue that switching from surface parking lots (LA’s current freeway system) to underground parking (this project’s certain outcome) is progress.

The utility of wide highways is clearly not as scientifically supported as parts of the profession or the large swathes of the public think it is. Perhaps a few more completed road diets, even if somewhat unintentional like DC’s Memorial Bridge, will finally put an end to debunked, old-school, transportation thinking.

Put Your Road on a Diet

Do you ever complain about the high speed of traffic near your house? When running local errands, do you sometimes glance down at your speedometer and start praying the local police are taking a donut break? If the answer to either of these is yes, there’s a good chance the roads in question are engineered for speeds that are too high. They may be wide and straight like an expressway, but with the hidden danger of cross-traffic and driveways.

In a lot of communities, residents along these overbuilt roads agitate to lower speed limits, but these are inevitably ignored by impatient motorists. In others, local planners opt for speed tables that slow traffic down with the implicit threat of jarring drivers’ teeth out. A better option that can’t be ignored and won’t damage your bone structure is a road diet.

A road diet is a narrowing of the amount of space available to vehicular traffic. For example, if a road is four lanes wide, a road diet might take it down to two through lanes, plus a center turn lane along with two bike lanes. This is exactly what the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) did to Lawyers Road in Reston, a community near Washington, DC. 

Lawyers Road in Reston, Virginia. Now you can turn left and ride your bike with less fear of imminent death. Courtesy of VDOT

By giving bicyclists their own reserved space, VDOT sought to reduce the risk of a car/bike collision. Traffic attempting to turn left could get out of the through lanes and into the center turn lane, thus reducing the risk of rear-end collisions. The center turn lane also served as a buffer between the through lanes, so head-on collisions would be less likely. 

So far, the diet appears to be working. An unscientific VDOT survey found that 69% of the respondents felt safer on the reconfigured road, while 47% biked on it more often. That perception of safety was real: crashes were down from 15 in the year before the diet to 3 in the first year afterwards. What is really interesting is that 71% wanted to see similar diets elsewhere in northern Virginia. 

Sounds great, right? Sure, but keep in mind that most people have no idea what a road diet is. When you tell them, “We’re going to narrow this road to make it work better,” they look at you as though you have begun speaking to them in an obscure Dutch dialect. I know this because I’ve tried it (the road diet suggestion, not the Dutch dialect). At least one person I floated the concept by vowed to fight to his last breath to stop it, because he thought it would hinder his daily commute. 

Cameron Street, a one-way route in Alexandria, Virginia near King Street/Old Town Metro Station. This is about as busy as it gets, yet some find the idea of replacing a vehicular lane with a bike lane to be tantamount to setting their car on fire. Photo by the author.

As a chocoholic would find when confronted with Mississippi Mud Pie, diets don’t always stick. A DDOT (District Department of Transportation) planner recently told me that Benning Road in Washington, DC underwent a road diet that created substantial backups at some traffic lights. Complaints from users and residents in the area forced the city to remove it. Why did it fail? Simple: the traffic count was too high.

Road diets only work if the road isn’t already a parking lot. One study from the University of Kentucky showed that success was likely if the traffic count was 17,000 vehicles or less per day. In some cases, that number could be as high as 23,000. That maximum depended on the side street volume and the number of traffic signals. Lawyers Road in Reston handled a mere 10,000 vehicles per day, perhaps explaining its success.

Road diets need not be confined to multi-lane thoroughfares. Two-lane roads can benefit from these. In a park near Williamsport, PA, planners narrowed the road by adding bike lane and closed a gap between two bike trails. Drivers slow down because they perceive their space as being tighter, like you might feel on a narrow mountain road. Drivers have been trained for generations to stay between the lines; bike lanes such as these play off of that indoctrination. 

Note how much narrower this road near Williamsport, Pennsylvania, looks with the bike lanes added. Although this location is semi-rural with long sight-lines, vehicles moved a lot slower than I expected. Photo by the author.

Going back to the Lawyers Road example, the success of this project has spawned an extension that will imitate the Williamsport example. VDOT is thinking of replacing each of the two 18-foot lanes with a 12-foot lane plus a 6-foot bike lane. Crash rates, based on previous experience, are expected to decline by 30%. Plus, cyclists who refuse to ride in traffic will be encouraged to use this route (see my previous post on the advantages of separating bikes and cars).

So, if transportation planners propose a road diet along your route, take a deep breath and don’t panic. Unless the traffic count is well over 20,000 vehicles today, which would be a major road as opposed to a simple street, traffic will actually flow better. Fewer crashes mean fewer bottlenecks. Plus, some of those people who blocked your path before might get out of their cars and use their bikes in lanes that are out of your path.