Parking

A better 14th Street coming soon

by David Alpert   •   February 25, 2008 11:09 am

The plan substantially upgrades the street's appearance, from better tree boxes to nicer paving stones on the sidewalks. Curved benches will line up with colored lines in the pavement to create an artistic appearance, and some of the large empty sidewalk areas will get trees and bike racks. There may even be an archway built over the street at 14th and Florida to create a "gateway" to the street from the north.

In addition to making the street more attractive, there are a few key improvements, like bulb-outs (including bus bulb-outs) and even the possibility for demand-based parking pricing.

The street will get bulb-outs at most of the busy corners. A bulb-out is where the sidewalk sticks out into the corner, at the end of the row of parked cars. This increases space for pedestrians at corners (the most crowded places) and shortens the distance pedestrians must walk to cross. These are so great and simple I'm disappointed the nearby 17th Street project didn't include them.

This plan also places bus stops on the bulb-outs. This lets buses stop right in their lane, without having to pull over and then wait to pull back into traffic. This speeds up the buses, and since one bus carries as many people as the whole lane of traffic, it moves more people more efficiently.

The transportation section suggests a variety of mechanisms to improve the parking situation beyond today's reality of more demand than supply for extremely cheap to free parking. It recommends creating a TDM (transportation demand management) entity to coordinate between businesses, institutions and residents, and recommends coordinating parking (for example, a bar could encourage patrons to use a garage that's otherwise used by offices during the day). It also suggests a high-frequency shuttle to get people to nearby garages.

But more importantly, it recommends variable pricing on 14th Street to encourage turnover, extending the meter hours to weekends and until 8 pm, and enhanced resident parking (similar to that proposed in the ballpark area and Columbia Heights) to protect residential parking. I want this around Lauriol, but 14th Street is a great place to try it. Anyone at the meeting want to post in the comments about how these parking innovations were received?

See the complete proposal (PDFs): streetscape improvements, transportation improvements, and long roll-out diagram of the entire street.

Update: Bloomingdale (for now) attended the meeting and was particularly pleased about the bike lanes and bike parking. Apparently there will be 80 bike racks installed along the length of 14th Street. I was also curious if the bulb-outs would force buses into the bike lanes; apparently DDOT has designed them to minimize these conflicts, though I'd be interested to hear more about how this exactly works.

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.