Category: road diet

New diet coming to Selwyn Avenue

Here’s a tidbit from the city council’s Friday memo. A section of Selwyn Avenue is on the schedule to join some other in-town streets in a “road diet.” As with East Boulevard and with several blocks of South Tryon Street, the city Transportation Department is going to shrink a chunk of Selwyn from four lanes to three.

The idea is that where you don’t need the lane capacity, having fewer lanes can A) encourage bicyclists by adding bike lanes or extra pavement width, and pedestrians and B) work to subtly slow traffic. After all, the biggest contributor to traffic accidents in a city is – not trees, not telephone poles, not bicyclists – speed.

Here’s the section from the memo. Warning, CDOT jargon ahead:

Selwyn Avenue Street Conversion
Staff Resource: Johanna Quinn, CDOT, 704-336-5606, jquinn@ci.charlotte.nc.us

Each year CDOT staff identifies streets scheduled for resurfacing that could be candidates for
conversions. Typically, these are streets where the curb to curb space can be reallocated from four travel lanes, to 3 travel lanes and bicycle lanes. CDOT staff evaluates operating conditions at intersections and street segments, analyzes connectivity and multi-modal travel factors, prepares a technical recommendation, and informs the public. CDOT moves forward with road conversions that provide benefits to bicyclists, pedestrians, and neighborhood residents, while continuing satisfactory traffic operations.

Selwyn Avenue is on the 2010 resurfacing list. Staff has determined that the four-lane segment between Queens Road West and Colony Road should be converted from four lanes to three lanes with a 3.5 ft. wide outside shoulder. The new three-lane configuration will have one through lane in each direction and a two-way center left turn lane with dedicated left-turn lanes at side streets. The installation of a dedicated left-turn lane at Colony Road will require removal of the peak two-hour turn restriction from southbound Selwyn onto Colony Road.

Area residents are aware of this conversion and have had the opportunity to provide feedback at a public meeting, online surveys, and through the Myers Park Homeowners Association. A postcard mailer was distributed May 14, 2010 to notify residents that the changes will be
implemented this summer.

Staff considered a street conversion for the last remaining four-lane segment of Selwyn Avenue between Queens Road West and Westfield Road, but decided against it. A conversion would have to be asymmetrical and would take away some lane width, which would affect cyclists who regularly use this road segment as part of the “booty loop”. Staff took this proposal to the Bicycle Advocacy Committee which decided that cyclists and motorists have settled into a travel pattern that functions well for all users in this area.

Resurfacing Selwyn Avenue is scheduled for June. This will allow resurfacing to take place during Queens University’s summer break and enough time for all resurfacing debris to be cleared before 24 Hours of Booty at the end of July.

Parking, planning and bypasses

Today’s post is a grab bag of interesting items for your perusal.

1. Envisioning development, and making planning more accessible to citizens. The Town of Cary has created a Virtual Interactive Planner. Here’s what Dan Matthys, communications and information planner with the town, had to say about why they did it:
Our development process is actually pretty complex, and it involves processes that have a lot of “it depends” and “maybes,” and it wasn’t clear to our citizens when they had a chance to speak and when they didn’t have a chance, how long the process was or what the different steps are to that process. So the mayor asked us to develop something that would be more intuitive, and we decided we needed something fancier than some sort of PowerPoint decision-making tool.
Read more about it, on this planetizen.com story, “Making Planning More Accessible.”
(Hat tip to Planetizen.com for that one.)

2. Parking space census. The City of San Francisco is probably the first in the country to have actually counted ALL its parking spaces. Here’s a Streetsblog.org piece on the effort. The magic number, it appears, is 442,541 spaces, 280,000 of which are on-street spaces. Its part of a federally funded parking management experiment (“SF’s parking experiment to test Shoup’s traffic theories”) in which the city will experiment with dynamic parking demand management, intended to tell people where the parking spaces are at any given moment so they don’t circle and circle, searching. The experiment is funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant.
Parking is a conundrum for most cities. “How we love/hate our parking lots” was my recent op-ed on the topic.

3. USA Today tells us “More cities ban digital billboards.” Among U.S. cities that have banned the billboards: Durham; Knoxville, Tenn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Dallas and Fort Worth and Houston, all in Texas.

And Charlotte? It had the chance to ban them several years ago and after a lengthy stakeholder process (see my stakeholder thoughts “Pulling back the stakeholder curtain” here) opted to allow them.

4. The South Tryon Street road diet experiment has begun (“Another road diet, this one for South Tryon”). I know this because it is right in front of The Observer building, and because I have walked to work twice since blogging about it and I can verify that the bollards are up, AND that Hill Street between South Tryon and Church Street is now two-way.

5. Your highway dollars at work. Ground was broken today on the Sanford bypass. Here’s a photo of pols with gold shovels. Sanford is a town of about 27,000 people. The fact that our tax dollars are building it a bypass should raise many, many questions in your mind. The Good Roads State has become the State of Pointless Bypasses.

My theory: No city gets more than one bypass. (Monroe, Shelby et al have failed to control their land use development and have both clogged their bypasses – both of them U.S. 74, as it happens – and in so doing managed to all but gut their downtowns. They aren’t the only towns that have done this, they’re just two I’m familiar with. And both want new, bypass-bypasses.)

Another road diet, this one for South Tryon

This is a street project I can love. The city wants to widen the sidewalks on South Tryon Street over I-277, plus create bike lanes. The picture above is an artist’s rendering of what it might look like, looking north toward the skyline. Note the lovely Charlotte Observer building at left, just over the bridge. Here’s what it looks like now. The idea is to make South Tryon Street between Stonewall Street (the corner where the Observer office and the Gantt Center sit) and Carson Boulevard (the street formerly known as Independence Boulevard until I-277 was born) more suitable for pedestrians and bicyclists. If you want to hear more, there’s a public meeting today at 5:30 p.m. at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, in room 280.

The city intends to start with a 90-demonstration project, starting March 15. They’ll temporarily restripe the lanes on the pavement and put up bollards. Tryon will go from four lanes to three – two northbound and one southbound – between Stonewall and Carson. “It’s going to require some signal phase tweaking” for the traffic light at Morehead and Tryon, says Jim Kimbler with the Charlotte Department of Transportation.

The goal is to turn the excessively wide four-lanes into three lanes with better sidewalks, especially over the bridge. Currently when you walk over the I-277 bridge you’re on a 5-foot back-of-curb sidewalk looking down on traffic zooming below. It is not pleasant. And because I work at that spot I can report that traffic on Tryon is usually sparse. Jay-walking is routine, and easy.

Why a demonstration project? The bridge is state-owned, as is South Tryon south of Morehead, so the N.C. DOT has veto power, and it wants to make sure that the changes won’t foul traffic or hurt the bridge. If the state agrees the “street diet” will work, then the city will move forward.

Tryon between Morehead and Carson isn’t as wide as the section over I-277. Kimbler said the sidewalks there won’t be widened right away, because the city hopes development in the near future will produce better sidewalks. Let us hope that is the case, or that the city will improve the sidewalks if no development ensues in a year or so. The photo here is what the sidewalk is like now. It is not a scene that makes your heart sing.

EPA video spotlights Charlotte, Dilworth

New video posted on the EPA’s Web site lauds the city’s Urban Street Design Guidelines and the East Boulevard Road Diet, which illustrates the city’s transportation design goals. Check it out. Mayor Anthony Foxx, ex-Mayor Pat McCrory, council member Susan Burgess, ex-council member and current city department head Patrick Mumford and others talk about how great the Urban Street Design Guidelines are.

It stems from the city’s National Award for Smart Growth Achievement, announced in December, in the “Policies and Regulations” category for the USDG.

Yet the developers’ lobby, the local Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, as well as influential, long-time real estate magnate John Crosland Jr., are still urging the city to dial back – or un-adopt, or never actually codify into ordinances, or otherwise eviscerate – those same USDG. They don’t like the requirements for modestly shorter blocks, or the width of the planting strips (wide enough so street trees will survive) or the general policy to build more streets and sidewalks in new developments. It’ll add cost, they say. And yep, it will.

But what’s the cost of congestion? What’s the cost of not being able to ride a bicycle or walk anywhere? What’s the cost of street trees that die? What’s the cost of having to retrofit streets and build sidewalks into already built neighborhoods – at taxpayer expense. The costs exist. It’s just a question of where you inject them into the growth process: at the start, or later on and spread among a wider group of payers, i.e. us taxpayers.