Be sure to check out my latest article, Making a Street Safe for All, at the Virginia Bicycle Federation: http://wp.me/pafPZ-2w6

A Note to VDOT that One Alleged Transportation Advocacy Group Won't Like

Thanks to David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington, I was recently made aware of an effort by the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance (NVTA), an organization hopelessly mired in old-school transportation thinking,  to mount an email (or letter-writing, as they're VERY old-school) campaign to push the state of Virginia to cut spending on transit and nonmotorized modes, such as bikes and pedestrians. NVTA wants this money re-tasked to highway widenings.

So, I set out to write Virginia's Department of Transportation a note of my own. But as I did so, I realized that what I was writing was applicable throughout much of the U.S. Too much, really.

Most regions have organizations stuffed with wealthy, generally older, business owners and CEOs frustrated by congestion created largely via previous plans that they, themselves, advocated. Rather than read up on the field of transportation, or even notice what's going on around them, they advocate the same failed solutions they tried before.

So please read the note below and, if you like, cut and paste to suit your own needs. The only way "Dumbgrowth" organizations like NVTA will be thwarted is if those who favor "Smartgrowth" speak up. If you'd like to submit a comment to VDOT, click here.

Here's my note:

"I understand that the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance is asking its allies to push VDOT for more emphasis on reducing road congestion via widenings. As a realtor and a northern Virginia resident, I strongly DISAGREE with this approach.

One need only look at the congestion on newly-widened roads in northern Virginia to realize that our state's reliance on road widenings has utterly failed. I see the result firsthand in the staggering residential price premiums near transit stations. Nobody pays a premium to live within easy reach of a highway these days.

While that's good for me, as a realtor focused on areas close to DC- and therefore close to transit- it's bad for Virginia. Those areas without good, rail-based transit and high levels of walking and biking infrastructure are doomed. Their prices have already stagnated as Millennials stay away; soon they will drop as their neighborhoods age.

The ONLY way to stop this is via a full embrace of transit and Complete Streets by VDOT. Anything else will merely add to Virginia's legacy of transportation failure."

Wider roads worked great in Atlanta! Here's downtown at 4 PM on a Monday.
They might as well get out and start walking.

Will Bikes Eliminate the Need for Big-Ticket Highway & Transit Projects?

I like innovation. Creative thinking to me reflects intellectual vigor. When we become afraid of change, we age all too quickly.

Miami, a beacon of youthful vigor in a state with the opposite reputation, is the site of an idea that takes poorly-used space and makes room for one of the most sustainable transportation modes available: bikes. The proposal, which unsurprisingly comes from consultants from the Dutch Cycling Embassy, is to build a linear park and bike path under Metrorail elevated transit in the southwest corner of town. This Metrorail line already has a pockmarked, bumpy, sorry excuse for a path underneath it called the M-Path. However, like so many similar asphalt afterthoughts built by DOTs in the latter part of the 20^th century, it’s hardly used. The new path, entitled the Underline, would seek to recreate the same allure and excitement that the High Line created in Manhattan in these early years of the 21^st century, except the addition of a proper bike route makes it far more useful.

A usable, attractive corridor is bound to attract economic growth. Witness the sustained boom taking place in the intown areas of Atlanta, particularly near the still-unfinished Beltline. The Beltline may seem to be a bit grandiose, with its promise of light rail transit, redeveloped neighborhoods, and multiuser paths. Expensive light rail projects are getting harder to fund as infrastructure spending throughout the US withers under conservative pressure.  For example, Arlington, Virginia, surrendered to such antipathy when it chose to kill a streetcar project in a low-income corridor after strenuous objections from right-leaning county board members, Libby Garvey and John Vihstadt.  Luckily for Atlanta, the economic benefits of the Beltline are already coming in with only multiuser paths in place in some areas.

That raises a rather unsettling question for transportation and city planners: is the key to neighborhood vigor and economic growth a combination of low-impact, low-cost transportation infrastructure and parks? If the High Line, Underline, and Beltline are all successful in injecting vitality into close-in neighborhoods, with the latter two offering new connectivity, should we re-task funding away from elaborate road and transit projects designed to expensively move people between outlying areas and the central cores of metropolitan areas? If a rail transit system is too much for Arlington to stomach, for instance, should the county look to a long corridor of bike paths and parks paralleling the route of the defunct streetcar as a replacement?

Some signs of a new trend in this direction are starting to appear. In the early 1990s, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) finally realized its collective dream of building an expressway through the heart of north Atlanta after years of opposition during Atlanta’s Freeway Revolt. Georgia 400 was initially built as a toll road with an expensive MARTA heavy rail line in the center. The road recently lost its tolls (cue massive backups).

In a glaring oversight, GDOT chose not to include a bike path alongside the new road, as Virginia’s DOT had done years earlier along I-66 inside the Beltway (the Custis Trail).  GDOT is now going a little way towards rectifying that error by donating right-of-way along part of GA 400 to Atlanta’s PATH organization. PATH is part of a consortium constructing a multiuser path through north Atlanta’s Buckhead community that will connect to the Atlanta Beltline. The beginnings of a citywide bike network are starting to form.

That this is occurring in Georgia is positively earthshaking. This is the same state that gives no money at all to Atlanta’s MARTA transit system. That’s not to say that the Republican governor, Nathan Deal, has turned his back on that most traditional of congestion relief measures, the widening of urban expressways. Years of repeated failures of such projects to alleviate congestion have yet to have an impact on the governor’s transportation policy. However, big changes often have small beginnings.

In this era of diminishing budgets, more regions should look to these innovative ideas from Miami and Atlanta. It’s better to build something cheap that will keep its full functionality many years after completion than waste time on projects that will never get off the ground (Arlington Streetcar) or will ultimately fail to relieve congestion (any given urban highway expansion). If the Underline and Beltline can be completed and grow in popularity, as well as economic impact, the consultants at the Dutch Cycling Embassy will get a lot busier.

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.