Posts about Bike Lanes

It's impressive that so many cyclists are willing to ride on 19th Street, which seems harrowing; trucks are constantly pulling over to both sides, blocking a lane for deliveries, while cars go into the many parking garages with curb cuts right on the street. When traffic was stopped at a light, the cyclists had to squeeze through very narrow spaces to move up.

Is this one of those situations which is actually safer than it looks because there are so many cars, trucks, bicycles, and pedestrians going every which way that everyone knows to look out and be careful? Or can we accommodate all these southbound cyclists with some kind of dedicated facility, either on 19th or on a nearby parallel street?

Yet numerous early- to mid-twentieth century thinkers actively promoted this vision as an ideal. Byrne showed slides from Hugh Ferriss's visions from the 1920s of giant skyscrapers amid lifeless voids, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City of huge skyscrapers amid lifeless voids, Buckminster Fuller's plan for Harlem of huge skyscrapers amid lifeless voids, and of course, the most well-known of all, Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse of... you guessed it. Corbusier's plan was considered "enlightened," Byrne noted, "because it had little green patches in the middle."

Why can't we just put on the coats? Why can't people cycle in the numbers common in many European cities? Blumenauer and Byrne know why: bicycle infrastructure. We don't have enough of it, at least outside Blumenauer's hometown of Portland, Oregon. Its residents drive 30% less than in Houston, the Congressman said. They spend $2,500 less per year on transportation than the national average, and keep that money in the local economy instead of sending it overseas in oil payments. According to Blumenauer, Portland's bicycle share has increased 400% for less than the cost of one mile of freeway.

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan revealed one of the most vexing absurdities of all: federal rules that make it extremely difficult if not impossible to build good bicycle infrastructure. For a city to build a bicycle lane requires a detailed air quality conformity analysis and a long checklist of approvals, she explained, and requires the involvement of the state DOT. "There are no national street designs that accommodate best practices" in bicycle lane design, she added.

DC's new protected, contraflow bike lane on 15th Street, NW is in no manual, added Sadik-Khan. Nor are bike boulevard markings, lanes painted with a color, or even bicycle signals. Wherever cities have built such projects, they're in spite of accepted industry standards. "My favorite 5-letter word is PILOT," she said; most of New York's greatest successes in bicycle infrastructure have been officially pilot programs, like the protected lane through Midtown Manhattan which increased bicycling by 46% in that area.

In Sadik-Khan's experience, getting approval to spend federal money on a project has typically been the most difficult part of the project, more even than the oft-vehement opposition from neighbors. Blumenauer, too, feels that opposition is not the major obstacle to progress, noting the over 180 members of the Congressional Bicycle Caucus. What are the obstacles, asked moderator Bruce Katz, Brookings Vice President and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program? Some people are "nervous about change," Blumenauer noted, but worse is the "dysfunctionality of the system."

Led by Sadik-Khan, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) launched Cities for Cycling, an effort to create a new manual for street design that includes good bicycle infrastructure. They hope to make bicycle lanes, protected lanes, bike boulevards, bike signals and more official parts of a 21st-century version of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the bible of traffic engineers that currently enforces design around cars instead of people.

Blumenauer has another prescription: Political organizing. He called on those who support bicycle infrastructure to defend officials like DDOT head Gabe Klein as he tries to build lanes like that on 15th Street or one on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol that Blumenauer has been pushing for. If just five people email a council member about a bicycle lane, Klein added from the front of the audience, that can make an impact. (And now, we know that's true; your emails on Riggs and South Dakota triggered a change.)

If a small group can make a difference, the next questioner hoped to: He pointed out that Brookings itself has no bicycle parking at its Massachusetts Avenue headquarters, and a sign on the door prohibits bicycles inside. A law in New York just took effect requiring office buildings with cargo elevators to accommodate bicycles if the companies leasing space want to let employees bring bicycles into the office; Sadik-Khan noted that safe, indoor bicycle parking is the leading obstacle for people to bike to work. For his part, Katz promised to look into the issue. Local cyclists will be keeping an eye on their progress.

Cross-posted at Next American City.

The Office of Planning will be taking comments until January 11, including choosing which alternative they like the best or mixing and matching parts of them. At the next meeting, they hope to present 2 "hybrid" plans that will the most popular choices, and make a final decision among those. Traffic analyses of each alternative will happen between now and then.

• Alternative 1 moves the bus-only lane on 7th street to the curb (eliminating the parking lane), and adds a two-way cycle-track to 9th street. (Diagram)

• Alternative 2 widens the square on all sides (pushing the sidewalks out 12-24 feet) and encourages westbound traffic on New York Ave. to take L Street to avoid the square. It turns 9th Street two-way, adds curbside bus only lanes (north and southbound) to 7th Street, and adds a two-way cycle track to 9th Street. (Diagram)

• Alternative 3 makes traffic one-way around the square (similar to Stanton Park or Lincoln Park on the Hill), widens the square, and adds mid-block crosswalks to the square on the 8th Street and K Street axes. 7th Street becomes one-way northbound, paired with 9th Street as one-way southbound. Traffic is discouraged from cutting through from NY to Mass by using L Street. Both 7th and 9th get two-way cycle tracks and curbside bus lanes. (Diagram)

• Alternative 4 has 7th and 9th Street both two-way, with a curbside bus lane and a bike lane between the bus and traffic, and parking lane between the bike lane and two-way traffic. The north and south sides of the square become one-way (eastbound to the south, westbound to the north). This widens the square, only adds mid-block crosswalks to the 8th Street axis, and discourages cut-through traffic on L Street. (Diagram)

I [Geoff] would personally like to see a combination of elements from 3 and 4: one-way traffic around the square, two-way traffic on 7th and 9th with buses on 7th, and a cycle track on 9th.

In addition, 10th Street will become two-way between New York and Mass Avenues, in anticipation of the road being reopened through the old convention center site and the road becoming two-way through the neighborhood to the north. The sidewalk on the west side of 9th north of the square would be widened to allow for better access to businesses there (current and future business).

À la carte options include restricting 7th Street from F to I to pedestrians and bikes on weekends or during big events at the Verizon Center. 6th Street could be narrowed to slow traffic from Pennsylvania Avenue north to Rhode Island Ave. 7th could become bus and bike only from Indiana to Mass, meaning northbound auto traffic would be routed to Indiana Ave and 6th Street.

In addition to cycle tracks on 7th or 9th, they are also under consideration for Massachusetts Avenue on both sides of the square and New York Avenue to the east.

Discussion about the parks included talk of programming the square similar to how the old convention center space is now, with someone in charge of bringing larger-scale but appropriate operations to the square.

The "very preliminary" cost estimates for the options developed by the study come in around the $450,000 range according to the document, but this is a study, and not the final plans, and the numbers could go up or down.

There apparently were some business owners at the BID meeting who were displeased with the plans, centering mainly around the traffic implications of the loss of one lane in each direction, which during rush hour and ballpark events are travel lanes and which are parking for customers/workers/residents/etc. the rest of the time.

This could especially be an issue during events at Nationals Park. The feasibility study doesn't mention this scenario at all, but it has the Nationals particularly concerned (as apparently voiced by the Nats' Gregory McCarthy at the briefing). It's not out of the realm of possibility (my words, not theirs) that attendance at the ballpark could rise substantially if the team's fortunes improve, making the backups that are seen when the stadium is sold out — such as during the Red Sox series this summer — considerably worse.

There's been no meeting with ANC 6D commissioners yet about this, though reportedly one is coming soon. I've got a request in to Tommy Wells' office for more information.

Cross-posted at JDLand.