Category: News

Transit advocates see midcounty problems

“Even more telling is that in the draft EER (Environmental Effects Report), you can see that with alternative 9, the same intersections in the southern (already built) portion of Midcounty Highway continue to fail. If you open up a new stretch of road that will attract more commuters heading north to south to the same failing intersections, what do you think is going to happen?” Blynn said.

Dollars and sense: City Council aims to ease the pain of Richmond’s approach to economic development

“On the one hand, it makes perfect sense to have an at-large, directly elected mayor,” says Schwartz, who lives in Richmond and is a board member of the Partnership for Smarter Growth here. “But the separation between the executive and legislative branch seems to create inefficiencies, and it can create a system where the executive branch is not as willing to share all the information it should with the legislative branch. “It puts staff in a difficult position because they’re hired and fired by the executive and yet they’re asked to be completely forthcoming by the legislative body.”

Double deck I-66? Travelers stack up against it

In my Sunday column, a letter-writer suggested that one alternative to putting HOT lanes on Interstate 66 would be to double deck the highway, thus expanding its capacity. Readers responded with their own proposals for improving travel on one of the region’s most congested highways. While most travelers dismissed the idea of double decking as too expensive and way too ugly, many many do like the idea of expanding capacity by expanding the pavement.

Malleable: Willow Lawn returned to its roots. Cloverleaf was torn down. So what will become of Regency Square?

Meeting the surging demand for walkable urbanism is one of the great challenges facing Henrico today. Most of the county’s development took the form of post-World War II suburbia – low-density subdivisions and shopping centers knitted together by connector roads and arterials. By design, no one walked anywhere; everyone drove. But it’s not clear that the development formula that worked for Henrico in the 20th century will continue working in the 21st century.

An affordable housing crisis with no end in sight

nclusionary Zoning battled a lot of developments that were grandfathered in before the law went into effect, said Cheryl Cort, policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth. And much of the program’s focus has been on rentals, as it will remain until the building market falls under these new regulations. So far, they have 48 units rented under Inclusionary Zoning rules — or a dismal eight rentals a year.

Montgomery chooses route for new road between Gaithersburg and Clarksburg

As with any major transportation project, the Midcounty Highway extension is controversial. Some residents and smart-growth advocates say the road-building money would be better spent on a bus rapid transit system to reduce traffic by allowing people to forego driving. Other critics said it would cause too much environmental damage and run too close to neighborhoods.

Transit advocate backs bus-only lane as traffic solution for D.C.’s busy 16th Street route

A prominent advocacy group for smart growth and transit challenges the views that a letter-writer and I expressed about the future of bus service on one of the District’s busiest commuter routes.

Sixteenth Street buses are squeezing out all the capacity they can under current conditions. There’s no more room to add additional capacity for cars to the road without harming neighborhoods adjacent to 16th Street NW (nor is driving an option for many residents along 16th Street anyway).

Yet our region continues to grow, and more people need to commute to downtown D.C. from D.C. and Silver Spring neighborhoods all along the corridor. What are we going to do to address that?

The 16th Street bus lanes proposal, in which the current reversible rush-hour lane from Arkansas Avenue NW to downtown would be transformed into a dedicated bus lane, is our best option. With the rush-hour bus lane, we would increase our capacity to move the greatest number of people through this important corridor and with the least disruption to commuters using different transportation modes.

A 2013 feasibility study for the District Department of Transportation showed that creating a bus lane in that stretch of 16th Street would still leave two lanes for cars and only slightly increase delays. Meanwhile, buses, which move half of rush-hour travelers on 16th Street, would move 30 percent faster with a dedicated lane and, most important, would increase capacity for [moving people through the corridor] by 10 percent.

All of this can be done without sacrificing any parking spaces or narrowing 16th Street to one lane for cars in the peak direction south of U Street NW, as the letter-writer in your column suggests.

The same 50-foot right-of-way along this corridor has sufficient room south of U Street to be restriped for three travel lanes in the peak direction during rush hour, and to allow the non-peak direction to remain as it is — with one parking lane and one travel lane. Traffic volume is not as high south of U Street as it is to the north, where street parking isn’t allowed during rush hour in either direction.

As to your other points about bringing signal prioritization to the corridor and increasing the number of Metro supervisors along 16th Street to improve the efficiency of bus spacing, we agree, but it’s not enough.

Buses get stuck in traffic and are thrown off their schedules for two big reasons: They are stopped at red lights, and they are held back from moving through intersections because there are a bunch of cars in front of them.

Dedicated bus lanes free up buses from being stuck behind a line of cars trying to get through an intersection, and signal priority gets the bus through the intersection. Together, bus lanes and signal priority do more than the benefits they offer individually to get buses moving.

When we can do this with a marginal effect on traffic congestion, but a real increase in overall capacity, it’s a win for everyone.

What should be our next move? Do the detailed evaluations, approvals and plans to assess and implement a bus lane. DDOT should also expedite implementation of transit-signal priority, which is scheduled to be operating in the next two years.

The current status of the bottled-up transit service on 16th Street leaves more than half of the corridor’s commuters with a substandard option that is not only unacceptable, but also fixable. Why would we be so biased against effective solutions to make a corridor work for a majority of its travelers?

Cheryl Cort, policy director, Coalition for Smarter Growth

DG: A woman who lived at 16th and U streets in the late 1980s told me the Metrobuses were referred to as the “Banana Bus Lines,” because they always arrived in bunches. Many of today’s riders who try to board in the Mount Pleasant/Columbia Heights neighborhoods and farther south say that’s the most predictable part of the rush-hour bus service.

But to really succeed, a transit service needs the schedules to be predictable, not the bus bunching and crowding.

Metro and the District Department of Transportation consider 16th Street part of a regional bus priority corridor network, but DDOT has not yet presented an official proposal for bus-only lanes on 16th Street.

Maryland-to-D.C. commuters and D.C. residents along the corridor need to see such a proposal to make a proper evaluation. DDOT’s abortive experience with reconfiguring Wisconsin Avenue NW highlights some of the difficulties in translating what looks good on a map into what works for commuters in rush-hour traffic.

Before bus lanes arrive on 16th Street, drivers and bus riders alike need to know the District will be committed to enforcing new rules on lane use, parking and turning.

Bus-only lanes in an urban core are a block-by-block experience in engineering and transportation politics. If 16th Street becomes an initial experience, it needs to be a good one. Otherwise it could poison the environment for other transit improvements.

Read the original article here.

Traffic light approved for Clarksburg school

Parents with children at Wilson Wims Elementary School in Clarksburg finally got what they wanted after years of campaigning for a traffic light and crosswalk across Snowden Farm Parkway. The Montgomery County Department of Transportation announced in a March 13 letter that it will install a traffic signal at Snowden Farm Road and Grand Elm Street by the fall of 2015.

Viewpoint: A smart investment in Maryland

O’Toole may not buy the estimate that the Purple Line will carry 69,000 riders per day by 2030, but that just shows he doesn’t understand our success in linking transit with transit-oriented development. Less than two months after opening, the Silver Line carried 15,000 riders per day, representing more than 60 percent of the 25,000 riders projected after the first year of operation.

D.C. group launches email campaign to save H Street streetcar

“We want to be sure we’re doing what we can to look out for the mobility needs of D.C. residents,” he said. D.C. residents can express their frustration in an email to Bowser sent through the organization’s website. “I believe that the streetcar can be a prominent part of a larger transit investment strategy — with the right modes selected for the right corridors,” the email says.