Last year, the Laurel Department of Public Works conducted a speed study on Montgomery Street, near 11th Street, and determined that there were a large proportion of speeders at this residential location. DPW recently installed a center-island median, bright crosswalks, and a pedestrian pedestal at 11th Street and Montgomery Street (see Figure). DPW then conducted an after study to see if the traffic calming elements had the desired effect. As shown in the Figure below, 59% of all non-turning vehicles exceeded 30 mph prior to the traffic calming installation. After the installation, this number was reduced to 19% of all non-turning vehicles. The graph shows the motorists can still conveniently travel at the speed limit (25 mph), but are far less inclined to speed excessively. This balance of safety and convenience represents a win-win for both motorists driving through the neighborhood and for residents of the area who are more inclined to walk.
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i'm curious if y'all considered bike lanes? they have proven traffic-calming and safety improvements for all modes.
ReplyDeleteevery time i think of medians, i think "there's another lost opportunity for appropriate bicycle infrastructure" -- and it always seems like non-cyclists want medians and trees instead of cyclists and then whatever else there is room for. just my take.
plus, convenience of motorists driving through the neighborhood? doesn't sound right. a neighborhood is where people are supposed to live, and work, and kids are supposed to be able to play and all that, right?
Peter,
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing. First off, to answer your question: Yes! The City is designating this route as a bike route, per our recently-passed bike master plan:
http://walklaurel.blogspot.com/2009/09/bikeway-masterplan-approved-by-city.html
Look for a whole bunch of bike lanes next year. We are in agreement that biking and traffic-calming have a symbiotic relationship.
As for the rest of your comment, you have to understand the context of situation. First, this road is about 4,000 ADT and the land use is single-family, with a smattering of duplexes. Accordingly, there are not a large number of pedestrians, like there would be if we had higher density there. The number of speeders, and the degree of speeding, were high enough that some action was justified (also, there is a school bus stop directly to the south of this intersection). In addition, there is on-street parking that we couldn't remove. Based on the above, plus the road-width constraint, there was limited options to do much in the way of traffic calming.
Yes, I agree that neighborhoods are for neighbors, not thru traffic, but this road has been here longer than all of us, so I had to accomodate drivers, too. Believe me, the City got its share of grief from motorists on this installation. A balance had to be struck. This approach that DPW took, I believe, was the best we could do given all the constraints and the land use. For a little bit of hot tape and some properly placed concrete, we were able to remove hundereds of speeder daily (almost all of them, in fact). Understand that it is a big deal to get a driver to go 25mph when they are used to driving 35. 10mph doesn't seem like much, but it means extra time to see a pedestrian and extra stopping distance if needed. Laurel, and other cities, would go broke aiming to retrofit every collector road to perfection. In sum, we do try and err on the safety of pedestrians (hence, the very existence of this blog), but there are a whole lot of other factors to consider when attempting to retrofit existing roads. Based on your comment and the reaction from motorists, I think that a proper balance has been struck.
Thanks again for writing,
-Bryon
Not to belabor the point, but something that wasn't advertised was that we also reduced the corner radii on a lot of intersections on Montgomery Street in order to reduce pedestrian crossing distance and to slow down right-turning motorists.
ReplyDelete-Bryon