Let's look at some of the goofy things Bowser wants to spend our tax dollars on

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC is putting in bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue, one in each direction. While this may seem like an attractive idea, the rush hour carrying capacity of Conn. Ave. will be cut from 4 lanes down to 2 lanes. DC just assumes that the traffic will just go away, or maybe MD commuters will all switch to those little Lime scooters. More likely, Connecticut will be gridlocked several hours a day, with more traffic diverting onto Reno Rd, Porter St., etc. trying to find a way to or from downtown. Nice.

Poor Upper NW and MD drivers. Won't someone think of the drivers?

We need to plan for where the traffic will be diverted, I am thinking os much of the drivers, but of the kids who walk along Reno/34th Street to Much, Hearst, Eaton and several other schools. I'm thinking of people who cross or ride their bikes on Albemarle or Porter, and the folks who live on narrow streets who will find that Waze is diverting commuters all the time from the gridlocked Connecticut arterial. What about their safety? Slogans and wishful thinking are no substitute for real traffic planning.

I went to Murch, Deal, and Wilson and would have killed for traffic calming on Connecticut, Reno, Nebraska and Wisconsin (I didn't have to cross the last one to get to school but friends did). Crossing six lanes of car traffic on Connecticut was harrowing and I assure you that car commuters on did not care at all about school kids so keeping the status quo is absolutely not safer. I had friends who lived a bit further who would have biked if it was safe but instead their parents drove them, creating more car traffic.

The fact that car commuters might feel entitled to speed on side roads is not a reason to keep six lanes of high speed traffic on Connecticut- drivers already speed and break traffic laws, they should not be rewarded with continuing to be allowed to monopolize public space with no consequences.

Despite her "Vision Zero" mindset, Bowser overall has been rather hostile to traffic calming compared to DDOT under mayors Fenty and Gray. But going forward, pretty aggressive traffic calming measures will be needed to keep Connecticut Ave traffic from diverting to side streets in upper NW as well as 34th/Reno. DC should hire someone from Montgomery County to do the job -- they know how to do traffic calming there!

Don't count on it. The people who designed the plans for the Connecticut Avenue redesign have fully admitted they have not studied how taking away two lanes of traffic on Connecticut will affect nearby streets. They also admitted that they purposely did not do this because they afraid of what they would uncover.

When this redesign kicks in, traffic on Reno/34th and the side streets that connect to Connecticut are going to be horror shows, because so much vehicular traffic is going to divert there when the section between Conn/Nebraska and CC circle becomes a parking lot during a.m. rush hour.

I attended the public planning meetings and have reviewed the reversible lane study and this is provably untrue - in fact here is the projects website:

https://ddot.dc.gov/page/connecticut-avenue-nw-reversible-lane-safety-and-operations-study

And the traffic study area in fact included the entirety of of NW DC west of Rock Creek Park.

And the study in fact looked at Reno/34th among many other parallel and intersecting streets and didn't find that it would become a "horror show."

So no the people who did the study did not admit that they purposely did not study nearby streets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC is putting in bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue, one in each direction. While this may seem like an attractive idea, the rush hour carrying capacity of Conn. Ave. will be cut from 4 lanes down to 2 lanes. DC just assumes that the traffic will just go away, or maybe MD commuters will all switch to those little Lime scooters. More likely, Connecticut will be gridlocked several hours a day, with more traffic diverting onto Reno Rd, Porter St., etc. trying to find a way to or from downtown. Nice.

Poor Upper NW and MD drivers. Won't someone think of the drivers?

We need to plan for where the traffic will be diverted, I am thinking os much of the drivers, but of the kids who walk along Reno/34th Street to Much, Hearst, Eaton and several other schools. I'm thinking of people who cross or ride their bikes on Albemarle or Porter, and the folks who live on narrow streets who will find that Waze is diverting commuters all the time from the gridlocked Connecticut arterial. What about their safety? Slogans and wishful thinking are no substitute for real traffic planning.

I went to Murch, Deal, and Wilson and would have killed for traffic calming on Connecticut, Reno, Nebraska and Wisconsin (I didn't have to cross the last one to get to school but friends did). Crossing six lanes of car traffic on Connecticut was harrowing and I assure you that car commuters on did not care at all about school kids so keeping the status quo is absolutely not safer. I had friends who lived a bit further who would have biked if it was safe but instead their parents drove them, creating more car traffic.

The fact that car commuters might feel entitled to speed on side roads is not a reason to keep six lanes of high speed traffic on Connecticut- drivers already speed and break traffic laws, they should not be rewarded with continuing to be allowed to monopolize public space with no consequences.

Despite her "Vision Zero" mindset, Bowser overall has been rather hostile to traffic calming compared to DDOT under mayors Fenty and Gray. But going forward, pretty aggressive traffic calming measures will be needed to keep Connecticut Ave traffic from diverting to side streets in upper NW as well as 34th/Reno. DC should hire someone from Montgomery County to do the job -- they know how to do traffic calming there!

Don't count on it. The people who designed the plans for the Connecticut Avenue redesign have fully admitted they have not studied how taking away two lanes of traffic on Connecticut will affect nearby streets. They also admitted that they purposely did not do this because they afraid of what they would uncover.

When this redesign kicks in, traffic on Reno/34th and the side streets that connect to Connecticut are going to be horror shows, because so much vehicular traffic is going to divert there when the section between Conn/Nebraska and CC circle becomes a parking lot during a.m. rush hour.

I attended the public planning meetings and have reviewed the reversible lane study and this is provably untrue - in fact here is the projects website:

https://ddot.dc.gov/page/connecticut-avenue-nw-reversible-lane-safety-and-operations-study

And the traffic study area in fact included the entirety of of NW DC west of Rock Creek Park.

And the study in fact looked at Reno/34th among many other parallel and intersecting streets and didn't find that it would become a "horror show."

So no the people who did the study did not admit that they purposely did not study nearby streets.

But they did admit that the model they used to predict spillover traffic was more or less a guessing game:

"We stated that the model does have limitations in terms of more accurately predicting travel on higher-level roads such as Wisconsin Avenue and a lower level of accuracy in predicting traffic volumes on lower-level roads such as Linnean Avenue, etc."

That does not sound someone who is at all confident in their predictions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC is putting in bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue, one in each direction. While this may seem like an attractive idea, the rush hour carrying capacity of Conn. Ave. will be cut from 4 lanes down to 2 lanes. DC just assumes that the traffic will just go away, or maybe MD commuters will all switch to those little Lime scooters. More likely, Connecticut will be gridlocked several hours a day, with more traffic diverting onto Reno Rd, Porter St., etc. trying to find a way to or from downtown. Nice.

Poor Upper NW and MD drivers. Won't someone think of the drivers?

We need to plan for where the traffic will be diverted, I am thinking os much of the drivers, but of the kids who walk along Reno/34th Street to Much, Hearst, Eaton and several other schools. I'm thinking of people who cross or ride their bikes on Albemarle or Porter, and the folks who live on narrow streets who will find that Waze is diverting commuters all the time from the gridlocked Connecticut arterial. What about their safety? Slogans and wishful thinking are no substitute for real traffic planning.

I went to Murch, Deal, and Wilson and would have killed for traffic calming on Connecticut, Reno, Nebraska and Wisconsin (I didn't have to cross the last one to get to school but friends did). Crossing six lanes of car traffic on Connecticut was harrowing and I assure you that car commuters on did not care at all about school kids so keeping the status quo is absolutely not safer. I had friends who lived a bit further who would have biked if it was safe but instead their parents drove them, creating more car traffic.

The fact that car commuters might feel entitled to speed on side roads is not a reason to keep six lanes of high speed traffic on Connecticut- drivers already speed and break traffic laws, they should not be rewarded with continuing to be allowed to monopolize public space with no consequences.

Despite her "Vision Zero" mindset, Bowser overall has been rather hostile to traffic calming compared to DDOT under mayors Fenty and Gray. But going forward, pretty aggressive traffic calming measures will be needed to keep Connecticut Ave traffic from diverting to side streets in upper NW as well as 34th/Reno. DC should hire someone from Montgomery County to do the job -- they know how to do traffic calming there!

Don't count on it. The people who designed the plans for the Connecticut Avenue redesign have fully admitted they have not studied how taking away two lanes of traffic on Connecticut will affect nearby streets. They also admitted that they purposely did not do this because they afraid of what they would uncover.

When this redesign kicks in, traffic on Reno/34th and the side streets that connect to Connecticut are going to be horror shows, because so much vehicular traffic is going to divert there when the section between Conn/Nebraska and CC circle becomes a parking lot during a.m. rush hour.

I attended the public planning meetings and have reviewed the reversible lane study and this is provably untrue - in fact here is the projects website:

https://ddot.dc.gov/page/connecticut-avenue-nw-reversible-lane-safety-and-operations-study

And the traffic study area in fact included the entirety of of NW DC west of Rock Creek Park.

And the study in fact looked at Reno/34th among many other parallel and intersecting streets and didn't find that it would become a "horror show."

So no the people who did the study did not admit that they purposely did not study nearby streets.

But they did admit that the model they used to predict spillover traffic was more or less a guessing game:

"We stated that the model does have limitations in terms of more accurately predicting travel on higher-level roads such as Wisconsin Avenue and a lower level of accuracy in predicting traffic volumes on lower-level roads such as Linnean Avenue, etc."

That does not sound someone who is at all confident in their predictions.

Because transportation is always a guessing game and is not a reflection of the engineers or merits of this plan. No one has any firm idea - the price of gas, telework rates, popularity of the Purple Line, congestion from the American Legion Bridge replacement, whether Beach Drive re-opens or stays closed, success of 16th Street bus lanes, whether DC population continues growing etc all will collectively impact the transportation choices people make and how it impacts congestion and mode shares.