Posts about Center Leg Freeway

Transit

2010 wish list for transit

by Cavan Wilk   •   December 23, 2009 12:35 pm

Since many transit projects have either broken ground or are in the engineering phase in the region, it is important to create long-term visions that will continue to make Greater Washington Greater.

Some projects are new, while others repeat from last year's list because they were good ideas then and are good ideas now.

Build a southern entrance to Columbia Heights: A couple of weeks ago, I walked from my office near McPherson Square up to Columbia Heights. It was a very pretty walk up 14th St. NW. After passing U Street, I couldn't help but notice the gap in vibrance and new economic investment between Florida Avenue and the area surrounding the entrance to the Columbia Heights Metro.

Columbia Heights is a reverse cut-and-cover station. It is not too far below the surface, unlike a tunnel bore station like Wheaton. The single entrance to the Metro station is just north of the platform. There would be an improvement in ridership and economic development from having a second entrance to the south of the platform.

Many more residents who live between U St. and Columbia Heights would have convenient, fast transit access. More people would travel to the station in order take advantage of the amenities that would open near the new entrance. It would also be much cheaper to build a new entrance to a cut-and-cover station as opposed to a deep station like Woodley Park.

Roads

Balance the flow, shorten the leg

by David Alpert   •   April 14, 2009 2:58 pm

DDOT is moving ahead with plans to rebuild and widen the 11th Street Bridge over the Anacostia with its stimulus dollars. The project will create a new local bridge so drivers, walkers and bicyclists can cross the Anacostia without merging on and off a freeway. It will also provide space for a future streetcar. However, it will also increase cut-through traffic, enticing some drivers to pass through DC between Maryland and Virginia instead of going around over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. DDOT has asked regional TPB planners to investigate a possible solution: swapping freeway capacity to New York Avenue for the new capacity on 11th Street.

This plan would close the Center Leg Freeway (I-395) between Massachusetts Avenue and New York Avenue. To illustrate the rationale, here are some diagrams showing the traffic on our freeways for drivers coming from the US-50 and BW Parkway corridors to destinations in DC. These aren't to scale or based on hard traffic numbers, but instead illustrate the general concepts. The TPB study, when released, should provide hard numbers to defend or refute this thesis.

Today, the best route from Bowie or Fort Meade to Arlington involves taking New York Avenue to 395, under the Mall, and out the Southwest Freeway to the Virginia part of 395. The other sensible route, staying on Kenilworth/295 until the 11th Street Bridge, is inconvenient because there's no connection from southbound 295 to the bridge. Drivers have to get off 295, circle around on local streets in Anacostia, then get onto the 11th Street or Sousa bridges.

Of course, other drivers use the bridge, such as northbound 295 drivers, but they are mainly headed into DC. For the purposes of this discussion, we're most concerned with cut-through drivers from the north and east.

Once DDOT rebuilds the bridge, a new ramp will let drivers on southbound 295 directly access the bridge. That'll create an appealing cut-through route that avoids the traffic lights and congestion on New York Avenue. According to the Smart Mobility traffic analysis, some people who were using the Wilson Bridge will switch to this new route. It may also entice some commuters to drive instead of taking the Orange or Blue Lines all the way through DC, or to buy houses in Maryland and commute to Virginia thanks to the faster drive.

In exchange, we should discourage cut-through traffic from using the old route. If we add capacity on one cut-through route but substract from another, we can keep the total cut-through volume the same.

New York Avenue is a major boulevard into downtown. It should continue to serve that function. But drivers headed downtown don't need I-395 under the Mall. 395 only goes to Southwest, the House side of the Capitol, and Arlington. Those drivers should just take the new, wider 11th Street Bridge instead.

Drivers using 395 in the other direction don't need this ramp. Those coming from Capitol Hill, River East, and points south who use 395 get off at the US House or Massachusetts Avenue, where they can head downtown. It's impossible to go downtown from northbound 395 at New York Avenue, since all traffic must turn right.

Without the ramp, we can reduce traffic on New York Avenue. It might even be possible to remove one lane each way. With lower traffic, we can make the road safer for pedestrians and less of a forbidding gulf dividing the neighborhoods around Mount Vernon Square. We can remove the freeway-style signs and lengthen pedestrian crossing times.

If we open the 11th Street Bridge and keep the ramp open, drivers will get used to having more and faster options. It'll then be hard to take something away, even if that only restores the total capacity ex ante. Instead, DDOT should close the ramp at the same time as soon as the new bridge opens. It can be temporary at first: a few concrete barriers and signs would do it. Then, drivers will see the new bridge as switching them from one route to another, instead of taking something away. In fact, if traffic models predict that we could remove a lane from New York Avenue entirely without the 395 traffic, DDOT should also close that lane at the same time.

Once New York Avenue crosses Florida, it passes through historic neighborhoods just like Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Georgia and all the other major routes from Maryland do. It should serve as both a commuter route and a neighborhood boulevard, just like its cousins. Yet it's more a freeway than a boulevard, since it connects to a freeway. Now we're building a better freeway route to the same destination.

Roads

Freeways of the south and east

by David Alpert   •   January 14, 2009 4:05 pm

I'm working on a series about the controversial 11th Street bridge project and its impact on the DC region. To illustrate various proposals, I've created this diagram of the major highway routes between Greenbelt/New Carrollton and Springfield via DC and Arlington.

Comments welcome. In particular, please let me know if anything is incorrect, including the numbers of lanes (designated by the numbers with arrows). The complex interchanges on the Beltway and the Parkway are mostly stylized; the specifics of the interchanges isn't relevant to the traffic analysis.

Roads

Transparently slanted Post article pits suburbanites against the city

by David Alpert   •   July 6, 2008 11:20 pm

Post reporter Eric Weiss went trolling for suburban elected officials to condemn DC's pedestrian-friendly transportation improvements, creating an article that casts DC's efforts to improve pedestrian conditions as hostile moves against suburban commuters. It's a classic newsitorial, sporting this opening line: "The District is escalating what some suburban commuters are calling its war against workers who drive into the city."

Weiss bases his findings on a number of pro-pedestrian proposals being considered, some more seriously than others: cutting I-395 back to Mass. Ave., replacing the reversible lane on 16th Street in Columbia Heights with a median, increasing fines for failing to yield to pedestrians, and the Clean Air Compliance Fee. They've already removed the rush-hour one-way operation on Constitution Avenue in Capitol Hill.

The suburban drivers—often, perhaps, drivers of Suburbans—Weiss hunts down to comment on DC's plans have plenty of vitriol. "The District is moving toward becoming 'the most anti-car city in the country,' said John Townsend, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. 'They see commuters as the enemy.'" Your emergency towing memberships at work. And here's NoVa Congressman Jim Moran: "D.C. could wind up as an island isolating themselves with these policies. Don't pray too hard for fear that all your prayers will be answered."

Weiss's editorializing masquerading as news continues:

Auto commuters have long suspected that the city's speed and red-light cameras, along with its famously aggressive ticketing policies, have more to do with filling city coffers than with safety. The city's new parking meters, for example, can be programmed to charge escalating rates.

That's quite a non sequitur. Parking meters have nothing to do with safety, expensive or not. Despite Weiss's slant, performance parking is not about soaking drivers to "fill the city's coffers"; it's about ensuring people who wish to use curb space pay a market price to use a scarce resource instead of just making spaces impossible to find. Which is exactly what DDOT Director Emeka Moneme says, as a matter of fact:

Moneme said the city will continue—and increase—the use of market pricing when it comes to allocating such scarce resources as on-street parking. "Putting the real price of driving out there allows people to make better decisions," Moneme said, not a subsidized rate of $1 an hour.

Moneme, Councilmember Tommy Wells, and MWCOG Transportation Director Ronald Kirby all sound eminently sensible in their defense of complete streets policies over the blind promotion of high-speed traffic that all suburban drivers crave in Weiss's world. But the gold star on this article goes to the one suburbanite who made it into the article despite her refusal to roundly condemn the District:

"You'd like me to lambaste the District, but we're all in the same boat," said Montgomery County Council member Nancy Floreen (D-At Large). "I am sympathetic to some of these initiatives. But the challenge is finding the right balance. Not everyone can ride Metro or walk to work."

She placed blame for the problem, in part, on the federal government, which offers many of its employees free parking in the city.

Floreen makes an excellent point. Free parking does indeed cause problems; policies that mitigate its negative effects are restoring balance, not part of a "war against workers."

Transit

Blue Line in I-395 right-of-way?

by David Alpert   •   June 27, 2008 1:43 pm

The Triangle picks up on the conversation about cutting back I-395 to Mass Ave.

The Office of Planning has a public realm plan for the area, which includes two-way streets on New Jersey and Fourth, some narrower intersections, better landscaping along the streets, reconnected L and 3rd streets across I-395, and a Neighborhood Center plaza at 5th and K.

The Triangle wonders if cutting the freeway back would simply generate traffic through the neighborhood to the Mass Ave ramps. It's possible, but we should also remember the principles of induced demand: adding road capacity induces more traffic by encouraging driving; removing road capacity does the opposite. Removing the appeal of a through route here, especially given alternatives, would most likely reduce more traffic than it reroutes.

And I can think of a great use for a long, narrow, below-grade trench running between M and K Streets: the separate Blue Line, which I guessed might run under New Jersey Avenue. But why not save a bunch of money and build that segment where the highway now sits? Coming along M from the Convention Center station, it could tunnel under New York Avenue, break into the existing I-395 trench, stop at a station around K Street, then turn off at H Street just north of where the freeway would now begin at Massachusetts Avenue.

Plus, maybe one day the tracks could replace the freeway all the way under the Mall and down to the Navy Yard area. With many lanes south of Massachusetts, we could even keep lane or two for cars.

Roads

DDOT suggests cutting 395 to Mass Ave

by David Alpert   •   June 26, 2008 4:24 pm

DDOT has asked the TPB to study traffic on I-395 (the "Center Leg") and evaluate the closing the section between Mass Ave and New York Avenue, according to WTOP. From their letter:

Based on a Transportation Planning Board finding that a high proportion of New York Avenue traffic has neither an origin nor a destination within the District, DDOT has requested the option of closing a section of I-395 between its current northern terminus at New York Avenue and its interchange with Massachusetts Avenue.

This actually isn't a new idea: NCPC brought it up it in 2006. The volume of traffic on New York Avenue and the way those roads have been over-engineered for high traffic volumes makes it difficult to revitalize the neighborhoods in that area. New York Avenue isn't going away as a main route into DC from the BW Parkway and from Annapolis, but it certainly should not be a primary through route.

Ryan Avent:

Some would argue that the solution would be to run the freeway all the way through the city, reducing traffic impacts on non-freeway streets. This is a bad idea from an induced demand standpoint and also completely unrealistic. It would cost billions, and if the city was unable to run the freeway through during the golden age of highway construction, it damned sure wouldn’t be able to do it now.

While we consider making through-driving more difficult on New York Avenue, we're also making it easier on the Southeast Freeway. Maybe the long-term effect would be to move traffic bound for the House office buildings and the Southwest Federal Center area off New York Avenue and onto the newly-connected Anacostia Freeway-11th Street Bridges-Southeast Freeway route? That would enable improvements in Northeast, but at some cost to residents along the freeways. A worthwhile tradeoff?

Development

North Capitol: Competing visions for handling traffic

by David Alpert   •   December 19, 2007 5:59 pm

reported that developers have been chosen for Northwest One, which will replace the Sursum Corda and Temple Court projects near New York Avenue and North Capitol with mixed-use redevelopment that has the potential to become a walkable neighborhood. But it also reveals some very different views on how to handle traffic around New York Avenue and I-395.

The master plan from 2005 has a lot to recommend it. In addition to building mixed-income townhouses on the side streets and larger apartment buildings with retail facing the larger thoroughfare of K Street, it will reconnect many of the smaller streets like L Street. Right now, that area is a hodgepodge of dead-ends and superblocks; the more connected the street grid the more walkable a neighborhood.

But I noticed one very bad idea briefly mentioned on page 24 of the plan, the section on traffic. The neighborhood is very close to the intersection where the I-395 freeway comes out of the tunnel under the Capitol and dead-ends at New York Avenue. This is one of the last pieces to be built of the original DC interstate plan. The Northwest One master plan (from 2005, remember) says, "There is significant congestion along New York Avenue between the I-395 tunnel and North Capitol Street... This study recommends... the extension of the I-395 tunnel from its current terminus to Florida Avenue."

DC planners may have good ideas on smart growth, but at least in 2005 they still were stuck in the past on traffic. Adding more traffic lanes does not reduce congestion; at most it pushes it elsewhere. Extending the tunnel might allow New York Avenue to become a pedestrian-friendly road, but will also make I-395 even more appealing for drivers, increasing traffic volume there. If there are bottlenecks in the tunnel, more drivers may divert to the same city streets the plan aims to protect. And what about New York Avenue east of Florida Avenue? Enabling more traffic will make that area even more difficult to turn into walkable urban neighborhoods one day.

Continuing to surprise me, however, is the federal government: the National Capital Planning Commission conducted a charrette with Federal agencies and six consultants, which resulted in a report recommending the opposite of DC Planning's tunnel extension. Noting that many drivers use New York Avenue and 395 to cut through the District between Maryland and Virginia instead of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the Beltway, the report advocates designing New York Avenue to serve DC residents instead of suburbanites. It recommends planners "encourage more smart, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use development" and "create a corridor with a better balance of transportation modes (e.g. transit, walking, bicycling)."

For the New York/Florida Avenue intersection, the group suggests policies to "discourage drive-through, auto-oriented uses at the intersection" and "employ traffic-calming measures to slow traffic to a level compatible with the urban neighborhood." Most remarkably, the report recomments DC evaluate congestion pricing in the area, and even cutting I-395 back to end at Massachusetts Avenue (a road which leads to DC neighborhoods on both ends, rather than connecting directly to a Maryland freeway).

This is remarkably progressive thinking from a federal board. This is a major intersection that carries large amounts of traffic, but is also ugly and overly designed for cars. Most Departments of Transportation would only be able to think about increasing its traffic capacity, but NCPC is instead recommending restoring the area to a vibrant urban fabric. And it can be done while still enabling people to drive in and out of the city, just as people successfully do along the avenues to the north, which work relatively well as neighborhood main streets and commuter boulevards at the same time.