Reply to Alexandria Bike Lobby wins again

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most drivers are too stupid to understand this because they think the throughput on a road is simply a function of how many lanes you have but reducing a travel lane doesn't necessarily reduce the carrying capacity of a road or may only reduce it very slightly during periods of peak travel.

The reason for this is that most congestion and delays happen at intersections because of turning cars and multi leg traffic signals.

On Seminary Road there are some intersections with turn lanes that come from the left lane which reduces traffic to one through lane and there are some wider intersections with left and right turn lanes that also reduce the road to one through lane.

But the proposal for Seminary basically creates a continous center turn lane while currently at a lot of intersections the turn lanes don't occupy the same channel in the road.

One of the advantages of this is you create one smooth flowing lane and eliminate the lane jumping around queuing in what used to be mixed turn/through lane and that lane jumping actually reduces travel speeds and causes accidents.

Sure travel will likely be a bit slower in sections of open road but it really doesn't matter because it is the average speed, not the top speed, that determines how fast people get through an area or the total number of cars you can move through a corridor.

What is being proposed here has been done successfully in lots of other places with minimal impacts on traffic and we also know that improvements in the built environment and particularly protected bike lanes greatly increase biking and walking which help to get people out of their cars and reducing inefficient driving is actually the best way to reduce traffic congestion.

Seminary is not even congested outside of rush hour.

There is a good write up including lots of links to studies of similar road diets here:

https://ggwash.org/view/72330/bike-walk-drive-will-alexandria-virginia-make-seminary-road-a-complete-street

Also please let me know how to contribute to the "bike lobby" - I'd love to support it if someone can point the way.

[/quote]

Get out of here with your calm, rationale post filled with data!   :wink:  
Seriously, though, thanks for posting. [/quote]

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