Posts about Road Code

Roads

Design for speed, collect the dough

by David Alpert   •   February 12, 2009 4:22 pm

Maryland is considering a bill to allow more speed cameras throughout the state. Supporters argue that the goal is safety, while opponents claim that local jurisdictions use the cameras more as a revenue tool than anything else. They're both right.

Lon Anderson, director of public and government affairs at AAA Mid-Atlantic, felt that Chevy Chase had taken advantage of the pilot program by designating Connecticut Avenue, a six-lane boulevard that leads into Washington, as a "neighborhood street." Last year, the city reported $1.2 million dollars in earnings from the cameras, he said.

I actually agree with Lon this time. Chevy Chase, and Montgomery in general, has created a double standard with Connecticut. On the one hand, it's a huge, six-lane road with wide lanes, broad sight lines and a straight, flat course that makes drivers feel like they can go about 50. On the other hand, the portion in Chevy Chase has a speed limit of 30, rising only gradually as you move north, and speed cameras hit drivers with fines for simply obeying their instincts.

The average driver would argue that we need a higher speed limit. Maybe. But there's another side to this coin: If the road didn't feel like such a freeway, people would drive slower even without the speed traps. As soon as drivers cross into DC, they slow down. That's not because the speed limit drops, but because the road feels slower. Lanes are narrower. Buildings come right up to the sidewalk. All of the visual cues tell drivers that this is a 25- or 30-mph area instead of a 50-mph area.

If Montgomery County or Chevy Chase Village wants a 30-mph neighborhood street, they ought to design one. Unfortunately, Montgomery is moving the opposite direction. The recent Road Code, which our buddy Lon helped write, bans trees in the medians of boulevards to avoid narrowing drivers' fields of vision. The longer sight lines from treeless medians encourages faster driving. If Maryland officials are serious about slowing traffic instead of just raking in the dough in Chevy Chase, they'd allow trees and start slowing drivers by designing slower streets from the start.

Roads

MoCoCo agrees with Planning Board on Road Code

by David Alpert   •   October 7, 2008 4:15 pm

The Montgomery County Council thinks the Planning Board—and the GGW community—are right about the flaws in the Road Code. Six of them sent a letter to the MoCo DOT concurring with the Planning Board's objections. From the letter:

We are very concerned about the target speed, lane width and other cross-section dimensions, and street tree provisions in DOT's proposed regulation. ... We strongly urge that you propose a regulation to us that incorporates the Planning Board's and it's staff's revisions. By doing so the regulation will lead to the best opportunity to improve automobile, bicycle and pedestrian safety.

Council President Mike Knapp and Councilmembers Nancy Floreen, Roger Berliner, Valerie Ervin, Duchy Trachtenberg, and Don Praisner signed the letter.

Marc Elrich sent a separate, concurring letter which specifically says, "the target speed for streets in the Business District classification should be 25mph," but that "we should provide the flexibility to design roads with greater target speeds on some of our roads in Arterial classifications." Elrich is with the rest on road width and street trees.

Neither letter specifically mentions bicycle facilities.

And from their silence, we must assume Phil Andrews and George Leventhal think the original anti-tree, pro-high-speed-traffic Road Code is just peachy.

Roads

MoCo road code, AAA oppose tree-lined medians

by David Alpert   •   October 1, 2008 9:47 am

Montgomery County is finalizing a new "road code" to define basic standards for roads of different types across the county. It's a good idea to update the standards, but in the hands of MoCo's traffic engineers and some county leaders, it's become a blindly pro-traffic sledgehammer that will force pedestrian-unfriendly design throughout the county.

Unveiled by Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett during Pedestrian Safety Week, the road code actually works against pedestrian safety. It sets a minimum speed of 30 mph for all streets, even those in urban areas (like downtown Bethesda) that should be 25. Arterial streets like Wisconsin or Georgia have even higher minimums, whether or not that's appropriate.

"We're very disappointed that the road code revisions didn't focus enough on pedestrian safety and putting a greater priority on making our vibrant urban areas safe and walkable," Cheryl Cort of the Coalition for Smarter Growth told the Gazette. The environmental provisions are more laudable, requiring all roads to absorb stormwater runoff, though, according to the Gazette article, environmentalists feel the absorption requirements don't go far enough.

The Planning Board wasn't pleased either, writing that the proposed minimum speeds are too high, the minimum widths too large for pedestrian safety and important traffic calming, the bicycle facility requirements too vague, and the standards too devoid of trees along the edges and in the medians.

That upset AAA spokesperson Lon Anderson, who participated in the working group that formulated the initial proposals. Anderson, whose organization consistently advocates for devoting as much public space as possible to cars, slammed the Planning Board and its non-car-centric ideas:

"Park and Planning thinks if every road was 20 mph or 25 mph that'd be great and every road should be tree-lined," Anderson said. ... "'It's our way or the highway' is an old maxim that apparently planners at the Montgomery County Planning Board take very seriously," said Anderson, who called the decision by the planners to offer separate recommendations "an outrageous and arrogant attempt to circumvent an appropriate study process."

Of course, Anderson's way is the highway. But while not every street should be 20 or 25 mph, some should, and many should be tree-lined. The road code prevents that. Anderson, though, thinks no streets should have tree medians. Commenting on an article in Just Up the Pike, Anderson wrote:

We are all for trees, but want them set back adequately to ensure they don't limit motorists' and pedestrians' site[sic] distances, and obscure things like traffic signals, stop signs, and pedestrians and children preparing to enter the roadway. Additionally, trees set too close to roads can kill motorists who run off the roads.

Please know that AAA has long played a role as a leader in the fight for pedestrian safety, and sponors over 36,000 children as AAA School Safety Patrols in the DC area, and I served on Doug Duncan's Pedestrian Safety Task Force a couple of years ago. We must design our roads in ways that encourage pedestrians, bikers and all users, but in the safest possible ways, and that's what I worked for in my efforts on the Road Design Study Commission.

If Anderson is sincere, he's woefully misinformed about traffic safety. "Blocking sight lines hurts safety" is a 1950s concept. But, in truth, when sight lines are blocked, motorists drive slower; when they're wide open, they drive faster. And since a pedestrian is 85% likely to die if hit by a car at 40 mph but only 5% likely at 20 mph, we do more for safety by slowing down the cars in areas where pedestrians will be crossing. A narrower street without sight lines, therefore, is often the safest kind precisely because the driver can't see everything and has to proceed with care.

There are two ways to keep pedestrians safe. One is to keep all the pedestrians far away from the main roads, build big barriers against crossing roads and locate buildings far apart, and giving the cars lots of room to run off the road without hitting anything. Problem is, then nobody can get anywhere without driving, we get crushing traffic (which Anderson professionally complains about), high rates of car crash injuries, asthma-inducing pollution, and depressingly sprawly communities. Or, we design our environment for cars, people and bicycles to coexist smoothly and, in the denser areas, at slow speeds. The Planning Board wants more of the latter, while Anderson, Leggett, and the rest of the authors of the Road Code want the former. That's only a recipe for more sprawl, which helps nobody except, perhaps, AAA Mid-Atlantic.

P.S. Remember that if you belong to AAA, part of your money goes to lobby against tree-lined streets and against pedestrian safety. There's a better choice.