Posts about Sidewalks

In the heart of downtown, the CityCenter site has been under construction for over a year. Construction has taken over the sidewalk around more than ¾ of the site, yet only the northern section has any temporary walkway.

On any given day, pedestrians walk along the construction fencing on 9th, 11th, and H Streets, in traffic because they don't want to deal with the hassle and delay of sometimes 4 additional crosswalks to get to their destinations.

Throughout the site excavation, the developer closed all the sidewalks. This happened despite DDOT's policy stating that an open or covered walkway should be provided on the sidewalk if possible, or otherwise in the roadway. Once frame construction begins, which happened recently, the preference then is a covered walkway in the roadway.

At the construction site of the Convention Center hotel a few blocks north, at 9th and Massachusetts NW, the sidewalks there have also been closed for months throughout multiple stages of construction.

The problem is not unique to Northwest. In Northeast, on Bladensburg Road near the "starburst" intersection, the sidewalk is closed for an entire block on the north side, where a new condo development is rising. In Southeast, in the Navy Yard area, sidewalks are closed at 4th Street by the upcoming Boilermaker Shops, and on various blocks around the last phase of EYA's Capitol Quarter townhome development.

In some cases, upon receiving complaints, DDOT has inspected sites like these and then ordered the developer to provide a walkway. This is good, but pedestrian accommodation should not be reactionary. It needs to be a priority in the traffic management and permitting process.

Where sidewalk space is tight, DDOT should show leadership and use road space to create temporary walkways. Pedestrians should not have to bear the sole inconvenience of the construction. Sometimes it means closing a lane of traffic to move the sidewalk (and bike lane where necessary) out from their original location.

Stronger policies and enforcement will encourage developers to use their available space to its maximum extent, instead of leaving tools and junk lying around like the picture to the right. If they are forced to get permits for walkways in the roadway, this will also encourage them to bring construction activities back within the parcel envelope as quickly as possible, to the benefit of everyone.

On the northeast corner of the CityCenter site, the developer has managed to preserve close to 100 public parking spaces. In light of this, saying that the sidewalks have to be closed because of space constraints is simply insulting.

Some may say that the inconvenience people on foot face by having to cross the street is minor, and doesn't merit burdening construction planners with stricter requirements and additional safety measures, or potentially inconveniencing drivers by closing a lane of traffic. Yet we impose all kinds of other, more onerous restrictions on developers for far more capricious reasons.

Closing a sidewalk on one side of the street inconveniences pedestrians in the same way that closing a two-way street to one entire direction of traffic would drivers. If I am walking 4 blocks along one side of the street, and the sidewalk is closed for one of them, I have to cross at least two additional times, assuming there are no mid-block alleys, and the intersections are all simple 4-way intersections. This means waiting at least two additional light cycles and walking out of my way.

Many pedestrians choose not to endure the inconvenience, and instead endanger themselves and others by walking in the street rather than crossing.

Only in the rarest of cases are motorists asked to endure months-long closures like this. Why, then do DC's pedestrians have to deal with this every day?

As DC's urban population grows and development activity picks up again, it may be time to revisit the pedestrian accommodation policy. In the meantime, DDOT needs to better use the policy it has in place to keep pedestrians safe.

Where else in the city have builders been allowed to close sidewalks? Post them in the comments.

Jim Graham also argued against enforcing this law, even though, as Mike DeBonis noted, he represents the (residentially) densest ward in DC. He introduced an amendment that would have restricted fines to only apply on streets which have already been plowed. One of the bill's supporters called the amendment a "poison pill." That sends the ironic message that if drivers can't get through a street, it's not important that pedestrians be able to either.

Kwame Brown, who did support the bill but also supported Graham's amendment, made the amusing comment that Mayor Gray has done a good job with snow clearance this year. We've had only 1.7" of snow this year, compared to an annual average average through January of 8.4" and the lowest in 124 years.

Graham insisted that he wants to do something about shoveling; he just wants to use incentives rather than fines. But he's never given a practical incentive-based proposal.

Many councilmembers opining on this issue would have more credibility if they actually walked to transit to get to work in a snow, or for that matter any other time.

During the years he chaired the council's transportation committee and sat on the WMATA Board, Graham came under periodic criticism for very rarely riding transit. He stuck up for low bus fares, but never addressed the problem of unsafe sidewalks after storm. Graham even bragged during today's debate about not moving bills like this one during his tenure as chairman.

Large numbers of DC residents have to get to work or school on foot and on transit after snowstorms, and unshoveled areas create serious safety hazards. Sidewalks are often completely impassable for people with disabilities or even just temporary injuries.

DC already has a law that residents and businesses have to clear their sidewalks, but it's not enforceable. The government has clear the sidewalk and then sue individual violators to collect up to $25. This bill simply makes the penalty for violating this law a straightforward ticket and fine, just like in most cities including Arlington, Alexandria and Montgomery County.

Cheh made many changes to the bill during the last few months to cut the fines even further from the original proposal, put in exemptions for poor and elderly residents, and more. Property owners get a warning before having to pay any fine until the end of 2013.

It's not clear if this law does enough to push the egregious violators, like the large parking lot in Mount Vernon Triangle, to actually take any action, but a majority of councilmembers have made clear that they don't really care to do anything about those problems.

The bill wouldn't have even taken effect until next winter. Now, we're likely to have to wait until yet another winter. If we get a real snow this year, will the councilmembers who voted to table this bill today try walking their neighborhoods and getting to work on foot or by transit? If they did, they'd very likely look at this issue very differently.

More activity on the sidewalk is a good thing. We want it. Sidewalk activity is what makes for good cities.

To be fair, there are occasional places where adding a walk-up window would be troublesome. Especially narrow sidewalks that already have especially heavy pedestrian traffic, for example. A hypothetical walk-up window at the corner of Wisconsin and M Street might get in the way, and ultimately harm walkability by inconveniencing too many other people. That's a legitimate concern.

But 99.9% of the time, walk-up windows are great. The proposed walk-up macaron shop in Georgetown is way up Wisconsin Avenue, well north of the busiest area, on a stretch of sidewalk with plenty of room for existing shops to put out clothes racks and wicker furniture. It should be approved.

And hopefully there will be even more proposals in the future for these great features of urbanism.

We wound down the banks of Accotink Creek, through quiet woods separating cul-de-sac neighborhoods, and past baseball fields lying in floodplains that seemed hard to access by car. We made our way the north shore of Lake Accotink, pausing at its marina. On the trail's southernmost end, we encountered evidence of both September's flood damage and very recent repairs.

I had planned the route to end at the Franconia station; from there we would take Metro with our bikes back into town. I did so assuming that there would be a sidewalk, or at least a wide shoulder, on the stretch of Old Keene Mill Road between the trail's end at Hunter Village Drive and the turn onto Frontier Drive. No such luck.

Faced with the prospect of pedaling up this hill in the rightmost of four narrow lanes of speeding traffic, we opted to walk our bikes along the road's rocky right edge:

After we finally made it to an area with a sidewalk (albeit a very narrow one), it soon ended as we neared the crossing of I-95. Just past Backlick Road, we reached a point where we had to dodge cars exiting on two rightward on-ramps in order to stay on Franconia Road. We made it.

At the other side of the Interstate, we found sidewalks the rest of the way to the Metro station. But we left with the impression that cyclists are not welcome to actually ride bikes to the southern head of the Cross-County Trail, particularly when coming from Metro.

Not only that, but Old Keene Mill Road's design is highly unsafe for Metrobus and Fairfax Connector riders (never mind that this route doesn't operate on weekends). How is someone supposed to get to this bus stop without jaywalking or bushwhacking?

Fairfax County planners should re-examine Springfield's major arterial roads to ensure that they are safe and accessible to pedestrians, cyclists, and bus riders. Simply adding a sidewalk on this section of Old Keene Mill Road would go a long way.

Julie Lawson tweeted about one case at Carroll and Maple streets, along the main path from the Takoma Metro to Takoma Park. The sidewalk was blocked for construction at an adjacent building site.

Following resident complaints, DDOT sent an inspector to check out that site. ANC Commissioner Sara Green reported in an email to the Takoma listserv that the contractor was required to restore the sidewalk. Next week, when they get a permit, they will be able to close it again but will need to put up barriers to create a temporary walking path.

Meanwhile, Montgomery Sideways posted about a case where the Maryland State Highway Administration closed the Georgia Avenue sidewalk as it dives below the railroad tracks in Silver Spring, despite a policy against doing that. William Smith writes,

I stood there for a awhile and saw pedestrians crossing Sligo Avenue a few yards to the east of the crosswalk. Sure, there is a sign there telling you to cross the street, but if you need to go the other way—say, to Jackie's, or Lotus Cafe—what do you do? Cross illegally, that's what you do.

And if a driver hit one of these pedestrians crossing, would police blame the pedestrian for not walking far out of the way to find a legal crossing?

Each case may be individually relatively minor, but they all create danger that can cause injury or death. And when many exist in the same area, they create a broadly unsafe situation. Worse yet, sometimes these closures last for months or years, like a closing on East-West Highway in Silver Spring which Eric Fidler documented in a video:

Update: Commenter Shipsa01 pointed out a hilarious example in the Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood, where buildings on both sides of a street both tried to close their sidewalks and posted signs instructing pedestrians to cross to the opposite side... where there was an identical sign pointing the other way.

Additionally, the construction process itself is designed to minimize disruptions to pedestrians. The city will require its contractor to work on only one block at a time and will divert pedestrians to the parking lane when the sidewalks are being replaced.

Phase 1 will start in the fall and construction is expected to last 9 months. Phase 2, which stretches from 14th Street all the way to 18th Street, will start after phase 1 and the 18th Street reconstruction project are both finished.

In phase 1, the roadway will simply be milled down and resurfaced, a process that itself takes about 3 hours per block. The sidewalks will also be replaced except in front of the African-American Civil War Memorial and the Ellington, where they are very new. Phase 2 is more complicated, involving digging up the entire road bed, replacing a century-old water main, and rebuilding the entire roadway. The phase 1 section's water main was replaced in the late 1980s with the construction of the Green Line, so the road work is less extensive there.

On the 1700 block, the north side's sidewalk is notoriously narrow, poorly lit, and buckled by tree roots. DDOT will eliminate an eastbound driving lane on this residential block and redistribute the reclaimed area to both sidewalks.

At the intersection with 16th Street and New Hampshire Avenue, the agency will include bulbouts ("B") to reduce the street-crossing distances for pedestrians.

Just east of the intersection and on the north side of U Street, the agency will remove an existing retaining wall ("A") on the public right-of-way and rebuild it several feet back. This move will widen this otherwise narrow section of sidewalk.

The elimination of the slip lanes onto New Hampshire Avenue on both sides discourages speeding and creates small pedestrian plazas.

As we have documented before, some transportation departments are prone to neglecting pedestrians or expecting them to take needlessly long detours around construction. This will not be the case on U Street, much to the relief of pedestrians and business owners.

To minimize obstructions along the sidewalks, the city will install multi-space meters. This will be a good time to consider implementing performance parking for the U Street corridor, as parking becomes especially difficult on Friday and Saturday nights. The increased revenue could be used to improve and maintain the street amenities over the coming years, as is being done on Barracks Row.

The city will save street trees where it can and replant new trees in empty boxes and where trees cannot be saved.

While these improvements will enhance the experience for the many pedestrians who traverse the corridor, this reconstruction lacks many of the decorative design touches of some other projects around the city including the Great Streets projects.

U Street will receive the standard blue-gray concrete sidewalks instead of the beige, exposed aggregate concrete sidewalks now on H Street and currently being installed in Adams Morgan. H Street's sidewalks enjoy pedestrian-scaled street markers etched in granite slabs embedded in the sidewalks. The metal street banners are another nice touch on H Street that won't come to U Street under the current plan.

We can certainly add some decorative elements later, but the sidewalk pavement is something expected to last decades and must be done right the first time. With such a storied history, U Street deserves some of the qualities of a Great Street.

Some suggest that the businesses on this strip can't survive without the service lane and its 25 parking spaces. But every other commercial strip on Connecticut Avenue is able to thrive without a service lane. These businesses are just steps away from a Metro entrance, and are served by a rear alley that would allow people to drop off and pick up heavy items. The nearby Sam's parking lot almost always has space available. Making this area appealing and walkable would attract people in larger numbers, benefiting all of the businesses in the area.

This service lane was a big mistake, but it can be fixed. Imagine what a beautiful and vibrant public space this could be, with room for walking, sidewalk cafés, shade trees, flowers, and benches.

Sign the petition now to ask our elected representatives to restore this vital piece of the Connecticut Avenue boulevard to its original state.

What are the options?

This stretch of Connecticut Avenue was originally designed with broad, pleasant sidewalks on both sides.

Option 1: The status quo (cars first, people second)

In the early 1960s, Washington DC was being hollowed out as people fled for the suburbs. City planners were committed creating an automotive utopia. Cleveland Park's citizens had to fight off a proposal to run a freeway down Reno Road, which would have razed a wide swath of the neighborhood; other neighborhoods didn't escape that fate. Throughout the city, graceful mansions were replaced with parking lots. The streetcars that once ran up and down Connecticut were shut down permanently in 1962.

The service lane was created at the behest of local merchants. This was before Metro, during the heyday of the suburban strip mall; and convenience for drivers was everything.

So the wide sidewalk was dug up and replaced with a service lane, a second row of curbside parking, and a median separating the lane from the avenue. The vestigial sidewalk that remained is so narrow it hardly deserves the name.

This may have seemed like a good idea at a time at a time when public transit was poor or nonexistent, but it's completely inappropriate for what's become a vibrant urban neighborhood served by a metro stop.

• It's unsafe. Pedestrians often step off (or are forced off) the sidewalk, sometimes into the path of oncoming traffic. This is a particular problem for older or mobility-impaired persons. The anomalous traffic pattern created by the service lane is confusing. There's an extra set of stoplights where cars leave the service lane that's disorienting for drivers who are unfamiliar with the area.
• It's unappealing and hostile to pedestrians. The strip is drab and ugly; it feels crowded and unwelcoming. The only shade trees are on the median on the other side of the service lane, so there's no shade or shelter. The whole block feels like a parking lot, not like a place designed for humans.
• It's a waste of space. The median, the parking spots, and the access lane combine to occupy well over three times the space actually used for parking 26 cars at most. This is some of the most valuable real estate in DC, and it's terribly underutilized.
• There's no room for pedestrian amenities. A recent streetscape project conducted by Cleveland Park citizens along with DDOT has provided for beautifying the larger commercial area, with park benches, bike racks, and other amenities. There's no room for any of this along the service lane, nor is there room for any of the 12 excellent restaurants and eateries along the strip to provide sidewalk seating.

Option 2: Angled parking

A frequently proposed option is to replace the row of parallel parking alongside Connecticut Avenue, along with the median, with back-in angled parking. This approach would result in roughly the same number of parking spaces and a much wider sidewalk for pedestrians - seemingly a win-win.

Unfortunately, this proposal would be very expensive to implement (more than $3 million according to DDOT). Why? Because there's a lot of infrastructure embedded in the median that would have to be relocated at great expense: Metro vents, streetlights, a fire hydrant, and so on. And there are a number of mature trees that would have to be cut down.

DDOT has been unenthusiastic about the angled parking approach in the past, and for good reason. It's not really appropriate for a busy thoroughfare just outside downtown of a big city. And it's not exactly been a resounding success where it's been tried elsewhere; the city recently replaced back-in angled parking in Adams Morgan with more traditional parallel curbside parking.

Option 3: Shared road

Another possibility was proposed on the Cleveland Park listserv:

In a shared road, our sharply defined curbs on either side of our service lane would be replaced by a very graduated decline from the sidewalk level to the road level. There is not a hard boundary between what is walking space and what is vehicular space. ...

One would imagine that this creates dangers for pedestrians, but in practice cars naturally slow down to accommodate the pedestrians. There need not be any loss of parking spaces if this concept is applied to our service lane, the designated areas for parking could remain.

Shared roads make sense in cases where you need to provide occasional vehicle access to otherwise pedestrian-only areas; many college campuses have spaces that are configured this way. Some European towns have deliberately blurred the boundaries between pedestrian areas and roads in their historic centers, primarily as a traffic calming device.

In this context, though, this idea doesn't make a lot of sense. According to DDOT, it would be expensive. It doesn't solve any of the problem's we're trying to address. And imagine walking down that block with a family, trying to corral little kids while cars are trying to parallel park on the sidewalk they're "sharing" with us. For that matter, do you want to be the driver looking for a spot to park on the sidewalk while zoo-bound kids swarm around you? Sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved.

If the whole cars-and-trucks-on-sidewalks thing is a good idea, maybe we should let cars and delivery vehicles park and drive on the Uptown's sidewalk, or in front of Medium Rare and Cacao? Or on the sidewalks in Woodley Park or Dupont Circle, or on Columbia Road or Pennsylvania Avenue?

The service lane is already unusual and confusing. This scheme would take the weirdness to a whole new level, at the cost of millions of dollars, without improving anything.

Option 4: Cut-ins

Another proposal is to replace the off-peak parking along Connecticut Avenue with all-day parking by cutting spaces into the median. This would respond to the demand for parking in front of these shops during rush hour.

Unfortunately, it would be expensive for the same reasons as option 3—all the median's infrastructure would have to be relocated.

Alternatively, we could work around the existing trees, vents, etc. But this would yield at most a dozen or so spots along the entire block, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of spaces available.

Option 5: Just restore the sidewalk

Sometimes the simplest solution is best.

We all know what a wide sidewalk looks like—we don't need consultants or drawn-out studies when we can just cross the street and see how this sidewalk was intended to be. This option isn't expensive, either; the sidewalk could probably be restored for less than has already been allocated to study the issue.

All of us in Cleveland Park want our local shops to thrive. Restoring the sidewalk would eliminate just one parking spot per business on this strip, and would more than make up for it by being more attractive to people. For a commercial strip that's right on top of a metro station, delivering more pedestrians to merchants is a smarter strategy than delivering more drivers. We can only accommodate so many cars, with or without this service lane; whereas the number of pedestrians we could accommodate is practically unlimited.

The commercial strips in Woodley Park, Dupont Circle, Kalorama Triangle, and other comparable neighborhoods thrive without surface parking lots. There's no reason why ours can't as well. In the end, the question is whether we want this to be the kind of neighborhood where people drive up, do their business, and leave—the Rockville Pike strip-mall model that results in alienating, unfriendly spaces—or the kind of urban neighborhood where people come and spend time because it's fun and beautiful and accommodating to humans.

Cheap and abundant "Shop-N-Go" parking will never be this business district's comparative advantage, nor should it be. Let's leave that to the suburbs, and focus on making this a lively, walkable, and human-centered place where people actually want to be.

If you agree, please sign the petition now to ask our elected representatives to restore this vital piece of the Connecticut Avenue boulevard to its original state.

And so people are upset. On a neighborhood listserv people wrote:

Just came back this evening to Woodbury Drive to find that the county has put in a sidewalk between the deadend on Woodbury Drive and Fenton Street. Further to do this, they have cut down two large mulberry trees that provided us a buffer between the dead-end of Woodbury Dr and Fenton Street.

Now the buffer that these trees created has gone. None of the neighbors requested this sidewalk. There is already a perfectly good one.

This is really appalling, since those trees probably took a good 15 years to grow. Part of the appeal of this dead-end was that although it was right next to Fenton the trees provided a nice buffer. Now this has been lost!

And:

The sidewalk serves absolutely no purpose, and an existing sidewalk could easily have been widened to be ADA compatible.

They're half right. The existing sidewalk is only 4 feet wide, so to serve as part of a bike route it would need to be widened—meaning the new path serves a purpose, However, they're probably right that the sidewalk could have been widened with the tree trimmed back.

Some of it was over the top though:

We are concerned for the safety of our children who frequently play in this dead-end street. The trees provided a nice buffer from busy 410 and Fenton Street.

The DOT said that the "tree removal and sidewalk ramp was necessary to allow for a safe connection to an existing bike route" but didn't really explain how.

I'm a big fan of these kind of connections that help to make suburban street systems easier to bike and walk by allowing cyclists and pedestrians to avoid traffic sewers. But there needs to be proper outreach. Going a little off plan to avoid cutting down trees—or replacing them as best as possible—would probably help.