Should Main Street be a 20 MPH street?

Main Street is Laurel's original commercial corridor and currently the only stretch of retail/office that was designed for walk-up traffic.  It has wide sidewalks (up to 10' including the tree boxes).  It is a designated bike route in the City.  The buildings are not set back from the property lines and there are no parking lots in between the road and the building entrances.  In short, it was designed for the people that live on and adjacent to Main street - like a traditional city.  It, however, has a speed limit of 25 mph, which is often the default lowest speed limit assigned to roads.  Residents have often stated that drivers were going too fast on Main Street.  Data shows that the average speed is about 22 MPH with 70% of the traffic traveling below the speed limit. However, a better question may be:  Is 25 mph the correct speed limit for Main Street?

A trend that has been developing in Europe and is just beginning here in the US, is 20 mph streets.  Typically, 25 MPH is the default minimum – often reserved for residential roads, but based largely on the design speed that the roadway was designed for. Somerset, MD, a small lovely residential hamlet in Montgomery County, has made a policy decision to reduce the speed limit for the entire town to 20 MPH. 

This decision was not an engineering one (which typically deals with only the safety of drivers that are already pretty safe wrapped up in a 3000 lb steel box).  Rather, it was a decision based on planning for slower roads and roads that are safer for all users (children, joggers, cyclists, etc.). 

Some of the the positives and negatives of a slower Main Street are:

Positives:

·       Slower speeds making walking more comfortable for pedestrians.

·       Slower speeds are better for bikers (speed differential between cars and bike is a main factor in bicycling level of comfort and broadening its appeal to more users.

·       A pedestrian getting hit at 25 mph has 4-fold higher likelihood of dyeing than at 20 mph.

·       Slower drivers are more apt to see the types of businesses that line Main Street.

·       There is simply no engineering reason to allow/encourage 25mph speeds on Main Street, but there are certainly economic and safety reasons for lowering the speed limit.

Negatives:

·         A driver will need an extra 23 seconds to travel the main retail stretch from MD 216 to US 1.

That’s it.  On the surface, relying on planning and policy, rather than what a roadway could handle, sure seems to be a better way for towns to assign speed limits.



Using Traffic Counters to Target Speeders

Typically, when DPW puts out a traffic counter, we end up with data that provides an overall speed profile, something similar to this:



Typical Speed profile for a road

By itself, this chart gives you high-level data such as average speeds, and percentage of speeders.  While this data is useful in determining if a road has an overall speeding problem, it doesn't provide the micro-level details that tells you if a problem exists during certain times.  For example, last year we presented speed data to residents on Main Street that showed that, on a relative basis, instances of speeding were low.  However, the data didn't break down the speed distribution as a function of time-of-day.  For example: what if all the speeding occurred at night? Or maybe they're all morning commuters?
To try and resolve this, DPW has a borrowed a new counter for the summer that outputs more manageable data that can be graphed into something like this:

The 3-D graph above shows how the speed distribution varies throughout the day.  In the above street, for example, we can see that there is a spike of speeding in the 7:00 hour and the 8:00 hour - meaning that these likely are morning commuters exiting the neighborhood.
Also, we can drill down and see if there are individuals that may speed at the same time every day.

The above graph is a scatterplot of all the vehicles going over 30mph, broken down by time-of-day and by day-of-week.  From this data, we can see that if there are speeders who speed every day at roughly the same time.  Of course, there's no guarantee that it is the same driver, but the data still provides the opportunity for:

• Selective and efficient radar enforcement; using radar enforcement only when the data shows it to be useful. 
• Micro-targeting speeders using radar enforcement on small time intervals to target likely repeat offenders.

Decorative sign posts on Main Street

At the intersection of 5th & Main Streets, DPW is replacing wooden 4x4 sign posts with black aluminum historic sign poles to match the existing historic luminaires. Three wooden posts will be replaced, and the new crosswalk sign pole will be moved off of the sidewalk and onto the new bump-out to increase its visibility. In addition, the sign frames have been added to match the historic-style sign poles.



Main Street: 100 years ago

Here are pictures of Main Street, with captions on the back stating that they were taken between 1906 and 1908 - when on-street parking was meant for horses.

Click on each photo for a larger image:




Main Street showing P.O. and Bank, 1908

 

View of Main Street, 12-1906

Alcorn's Store 10-6-1907, 3:00 PM

Washington Ave and Main Street, 1908

Here is the same building, as it currently stands over 100 years later.


View Larger Map

Notable Main Street features already in place back then:  granite curbs; brick sidewalk; overhead electricity; domestic water supply and underground stormwater management.

Main Street in the Washington Post

Flipping thru the Washington Post's weekly Magazine yesterday and saw a picture of a popular street in Laurel, deluged with snow from this past year's storm.  I wonder which one our intrepid residents braved the elements to take the photo.

Crosswalk Facelift on Main Street

The City of Laurel is field-testing a crosswalk enhancement procedure to make a busy unsignalized crosswalk on Main Street at 5th Street more visible to drivers. The procedure will replicate the decorative crosswalks recently applied to  Montgomery Street. 

Here are some photos mid-application.

And here is a before-and-after comparison of the visibilty of the crosswalk from a driver's perspective.

Bump-out on Main Street at 5th

This Next week, contractors will be installing a brick sidewalk bump-out on the north side of the intersection of Main Street and 5th Street. This bump-out will extend the sidewalk 7.5 feet into Main Street at the existing crosswalk location in front of Selborne House.  The bump-out will allow for vehicle and crossing-pedestrians to better see each other without any reduction in on-street parking.  This sidewalk extension will also reduce the incidences of speeding at this location.  In addition to the bump-out, both ramps on the south side of the intersection will see improvements in alignment and ADA accessibility.

Sidewalk Repair Contract Starts up Again

After a long weather-induced hiatus, the current sidewalk repair contract has re-started this week.  This contract will also cover:

• New sidewalk along Van Dusen and 
• Bulb-outs at Main/5th.