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@JustMe: I brought up 6th St NE the other day on GGW for precisely this reason. For its entire length through Capitol Hill, 6th St has a normal-sized painted bike lane. South of K street, the road is one way, and somewhat (but not extremely) narrow. On these portions, cars drive at a somewhat reasonable pace.

North of K, however, the street is bidirectional, has no trees, and is designated as a truck route. Accordingly, the street is much wider, there's a turn lane with a traffic island, and people drive much, much faster (to the extent that I frequently hear screeching tires when drivers unexpectedly encounter the stop signs). These stop signs only exist because a young girl was struck and killed by a speeding motorist here a few years ago.

I'll grant you that a street would either need to have lots of speed tables, or be unreasonably narrow (and cyclist-hostile) to enforce a 15mph limit. However, DC has plenty of streets that could be redesigned to encourage drivers to obey the already-existing 25mph limit. 6th St is a great example, because it does this very well south of K, but sucks north of there.

I suppose you could make a narrow road cyclist-friendly by installing a curbside cycletrack. However, this is expensive, and would create safety problems for pedestrians in its own right, as you'd just be encouraging cyclists to go faster.

A 15mph limit would also drive a lot of traffic off of "neighborhood streets", and onto "through" routes (which would also necessarily be in *someone's* neighborhood). This might be okay for the "neighborhood streets", because cyclists wouldn't have many cars to contend with, but would funnel lots of traffic onto a few unfortunate streets.

I get the point of lower speeds, and sympathize with the goals. However, I worry about the unintended side-effects of such a policy, and whether or not those effects would offset the benefits. For this reason, I'd rather focus our efforts on designing streets to conform to the limits that are already in place.

(Oh, and on the transmission point, I kind of get what they're talking about. To achieve better fuel efficiency, most cars will shift up to 2nd as soon as it's physically possible, which can make driving at 15mph bit difficult, as you're either lurched into a too-high gear, or keep shifting between first and second. Manual transmissions also have their own set of issues in stop-and-go traffic)

by andrew on Nov 28, 2011 12:37 pm • link • report