Trinity Park, Watts-Hillandale traffic calming update

Some good news on the local traffic calming front to report:

First, planning continues to move forward for the addition of neckdowns/curbouts on Duke and Gregson St. NCDOT and the City agreed to jointly fund the $300,000 project, initially proposed as part of a neighborhood traffic calming study almost five years ago, after years of squabbling and state resistance  to the project.

The City has engaged traffic engineering firm Kimley Horn to work on this and other calming projects throughout Durham, and a meeting between neighborhood representatives and city staff to discuss the project and design elements is pending. Best estimate is an implementation later this year or early 2008.

Curbouts should provide a long-needed brake on the frequently reckless speeding that takes place on both city streets, by providing repeated visual (and actual) narrowings of the road, frequently at intersections. Currently, drivers can careen down the left lane of the road in particular, drifting off into the on-street parking lane -- since few car owners are brave enough to actually use the on-street parallel parking given the speeds. (Chicken and egg, no?)

An additional benefit of curbouts is the encouragement they provide to on-street parking by creating a protective barrier for cars parked near them. Increased street parking in turn helps decrease the perceived width of the road throughout its length, further slowing traffic, and so on.

Meanwhile, over in Watts-Hillandale, a similarly-delayed project to add traffic calming along W. Club Blvd. near the popular Oval Park was approved by the Council on the consent agenda at the June 7 meeting. This project calls for the creation of neckdowns and raised medians in the immediate vicinity of the park, along with a design that will force drivers to both slow down and engage in a "mild weaving movement" in order to proceed down the road. The project also includes the repair of existing damaged sidewalk and improvements to crosswalks and curb ramps.

Comments

[Steve Graff]

Thank goodness! I was beginning to lose hope that this city had any clue whatsoever about the rampant speeding/hazardous driving problem we have in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown. Our neck of the woods, E. Trinity Ave., is like a NASCAR training ground - on Sunday I saw two drivers race by, one car in the opposing lane, at well over 60mph (speed limit is 25mph).

I still want to know where the hell the police are, though. The city did a traffic study which confirmed the speeding problem, a group of concerned neighbors met with the city, and after talk of installing crosswalks and possible other measure such as neckdowns, and six months later - nothing!

Hopefully this is a sign of long overdue improvements. I'll put this on my "cautiously optimistic" list, right next to the sidewalk repairs that we passed bonds 2 yrs ago to fund, but haven't seen anything happen yet.

[barry]

Kevin asked the question earlier this week in relation to the Parks and Rec budget - When do we start following our master plans?

We've got master plans for pedestrian safety and for bicycling, which lay out citywide priorities for sidewalk, crosswalk, intersection safety, new construction, yadda yadda yadda.

In the end, though, whether any particular project is funded still comes down to whether or not you live in a neighborhood that is well organized, and whose leaders know how to work the system.

Granted that Club Blvd. bisects Oval Drive Park, and that kids need to be able to cross that street safely, but i'd be real curious to see where Club fits in an objective ranking of Durham streets with speeding problems and a high concentration of pedestrians, or streets that might be expected to have a lot of pedestrians but don't due to perceptions of safety.

Having lived on Oval Park for 4 years, walking my dog twice a day, and running through that neighborhood 4 or 5 times a week, it's certainly my subjective impression that any number of other Durham streets would benefit from the substantial chunk of traffic calming dollars being spent on the Club Blvd. project.

Steve - if you want to see traffic calming improvements on East Trinity, i suggest you start getting your neighborhood organized, and set up regular meetings with your city council members. Otherwise, you could be waiting for a very long time.

[Michael Bacon]

I've proposed this in the past a couple of times to little effect, but what's wrong with one more...

I would very much like to see the city adopt an ordinance that either specified that speeding more than 5 MPH over the posted limit in residential areas was reckless driving, or simply double the fines for speeding in residential zones.

The goal here would be to provide both incentive and funding for DPD officers to ticket residential speeders. Neckdowns, traffic circles, and other traffic calming measures are great, but fundamentally, I want patrol cars sitting in our neighborhoods with radar guns, pulling over the leadfoots who can't be bothered to let up. I've got two major reasons for this:

1. Residential speeding is a major problem that I have yet to see anyone in City Hall take seriously.

2. There are a lot of controversial aspects to Wilson and Kelling's "Broken Windows" theory of policing, but the one thing that nobody disputes is that serious offenders commit lessar crimes too, and if you start enforcing the lessar crimes, you end up turning up a lot of the guys you were looking for for the serious ones. As long as you don't get unreasonable in your enforcement of lessar crimes (arresting jaywalkers, etc.) increased enforcement there can tone down lessar crimes.

I've got others, too, but they don't stand on as strong an emperical ground. I have this hunch that catching young offenders for minor violations that merely have fines and no jail time is a good way to introduce them to the deterrent effect of police without throwing them in prison. Young men frequently are under the impression that they are invincable and more clever than all who came before. I'm in favor of disabusing them of this notion at an early age, when the consequences aren't so dire. Young men under this impression generally like to drive fast.

My one concern is that this many traffic tickets would flood our overextended court system. But maybe the increased fines could pay for that too.

[Barry]

Michael - a couple of weeks back on the bike and ped list, there was some discussion about contemporary practice in some European countries, and enlightened parts of this country, of doing away with traffic calming devices, road signs, markings, etc., and by virtue of creating uncertainty in the minds of people behind the wheel, forcing them to behave responsibly out of, one assumes, a sense of enlightened self-interest.

There was a discussion of the state of things in most US towns, which was shorthanded as the three Es - engineering, education, and enforcement.

The current state of things, as i see it, is to design roads that still encourage rapid throughput of the maximum number of vehicles.
(See Guess Rd., North Duke St., any of the new off-ramps from I-85, etc.) Education - well, look how difficult it is to get a driver to stop for a pedestrian walking across the street. That's failed as well.

But enforcement, especially on neighborhood streets in Durham, of speed limits and other traffic regulations, is essentially non-existent.

Whether that's because Durham really has too many other law enforcement issues to devote resources to this problem, or it's just not been a priority for the law enforcement decision makers, is for someone besides me to figure out.

So we've got to figure out how to bring our system up to the point where the 3 Es have maxed out their effectiveness before we start this sort of post-modern traffic calming that some people seem to think is th answer.

My instinct is that the enforcement side of the triangle has to come first. That will help with the education.

[MarcusOne]

Barry, you're absolutely right about the fact that we need to exhaust the options under the "3 E's" before spending all our time in engineering and building further traffic calming structures on our MAJOR downtown connectors such as Club, Duke, Mangum, Hillandale, Alston, and Roxboro streets. One such way is computer-controlled traffic signals that we have in Durham. Who says these streets in some of our prized downtown neighborhoods have to be set up to move traffic along at 60 mph?? In Richmond, the lights on West Main, Grove, and Cary streets in the Fan are set up along with 4-way stop signs to keep the speeds low. All this without speed humps, neck-downs, two-way streets, and traffic islands.

People need to get over the fact that some of the major streets have ALWAYS been major streets, and we should be very careful trying to create a suburban streetscape out of an urban street grid.

[Bull City Rising]

Hi Marcus -- I'm responding to your comment here as well as the similar one on the brewpub update.

I want to take some kind exception to the idea that supporting urbanism and supporting traffic calming are somehow at loggerheads. I say this as a person who's supported urban developments like the brewpub, but also as the co-chair of TPNA's traffic calming committee.

First, the idea that the support for traffic calming in neighborhoods like TP and W-H comes just from profit-minded suburbanites who've never lived in a city is really a stretch. I moved here from Cambridge, Mass., one of the ten most dense cities in the country -- yet also a place where traffic calming is extensively used. Or look at Brooklyn, whose residents fought for years for traffic calming measures.

When the TP traffic calming committee started meeting anew this year in the wake of the death of pedestrian Deborah Culmer on a neighborhood street, we talked about priorities. The clearly overwhelming feeling of the committee was that our goal was not to divert cars off Duke/Gregson... after all, they'd just move to other neighborhoods' streets. No, the issue in question is changing the engineering of the road to help allow the street itself, and the friction from increased parking, to help enforce the speed limit.

The last thing I want to do is to turn the streets into "suburban cul-de-sacs." I chose to live on a street grid for a reason. And I do so knowing that there is a steady stream of cars parading by my home each day. That's okay.

What's not okay is a road design that -- for the stretch between Markham and Club -- is too wide, lacks any traffic lights, and has hills that are "fun" to go up and down. Drivers have been clocked going over 70 mph on Duke and Gregson. Stopping that is the issue.

Your idea of 4-way stop signs and traffic lights is intriguing. Problem is, that would do more than calm traffic -- it would bring it to a screeching halt. These streets *are* major thoroughfares currently, and it's not fair to neighbors in North Durham to stop traffic every block. That would induce gridlock far beyond any effects of traffic calming.

Regarding the EEC -- take a look at the population projections for Durham in the next 25 years. Exactly how will those cars, those drivers, navigate from the quadrant north of I-85/east of Roxboro to their jobs at Duke, downtown, RTP, or the rest of the Triangle? It literally won't happen on the existing roadway capacity. There just ain't enough asphalt to go around. Will it have an impact on roads in urban neighborhoods? Without a doubt. But that's by no means the main reason it's getting built.

[barry]

"People need to get over the fact that some of the major streets have ALWAYS been major streets, and we should be very careful trying to create a suburban streetscape out of an urban street grid."

I'm not at all sure what you mean by "ALWAYS".

There was a time when I-85 and NC 147 didn't exist, but people lived along Duke and Gregson Streets. Mangum Street used to have a street car, and, if i read the maps on Gary's blog correctly, the whole Mangum/Roxboro corridor was configured quite differently.

Alston Avenue now looks very different than it will look in 10 years, if the NCDOT has its way; and if that's the case, we'll be talking about how to calm traffic, save pedestrian lives, and make that corridor more liveable 15 years from now.

Unless you've moved here within the past two years, you no doubt remember when Guess Road was essentially a two lane street. Now it's an extra wide 4 lane, with an unbroken left turn lane all the way from Carver to Horton that has already claimed the life of one high school student walking to class at Riverside.

Those are the kinds of engineering decisions i refer to when i say that we need to do a better job engineering roads for the co-existence of multiple modes of transportation (including walking and bicycling), not just increased throughput of motor vehicles. Given that we're doing none of the three Es at this point, expecting Durham to adopt some of these cutting edge traffic solutions now would be like letting someone with 4 hours behind the stick of a Cessna pilot a jumbo jet. You just know someone's going to get killed.

[MarcusOne]

Thanks for your response, Kevin. I think we can agree that the speed on Duke and Gregson are way to high, I just don't think you can agree that they are thoroughfares on one hand, and propose such traffic calming measures as have been proposed by some folks such as traffic islands, speed humps, and two-way streets. Four-way stops and additional traffic light timing may not be the answer for Duke and Gregson, but perhaps for the rest of the sidestreets. You may propose a rational solution such as the neckdowns creating a psychological way to slow down speeds. This seems like a reasonable way to slow speeds as long as they still attract and move the volume of traffic during a normal rush-hour. My concern is that if you install such hard-scape solutions today, later on the neighborhood will want to go several steps further until the area becomes another suburban street plan with a 15mp speed limit, and everyone travelling to RTP from North Durham clog up the EEC if it ever gets built. It's better to find other law enforcement solutions, in my opinion, than to re-engineer our main roads to deter people from using the road capacity in exchange for slower speeds. As I said, too much of a good thing can lead to everyone wanting them for their neighborhood, resulting in greater congestion and higher taxes for everyone.

I don't know what your final proposals will be, I just wanted to respond to some comments that seem overly optimistic about "calming" and "controlling" traffic flow in that sensitive area of the city that would make many people want to avoid the area and clog up someone else's road to get to their destinations.

[MarcusOne]

Barry: I've lived in Durham for 23 years, and the area for 35, and yes I do remember. I've seen the are change quite a lot, because we have a good thing going on here.

These roads of which I speak have ALWAYS been the major roads, even when they were two-lanes and I85 and the DF didn't exist. Progress and population growth means that yesterday's roads need to handle more traffic, not less. We can't keep building urban loops and putting in speed humps to avoid older established neighborhoods, and we can't deny that there are other people living outside downtown that need to get to work everyday without having to travel clear across the county on a congested freeway, bypassing Durham downtown to get to RTP because the neighborhood committees decided to close it down. Perhaps you should put the sign up at the county line if you don't want more people moving in and using your particular road.

As far as the deaths, they happen everywhere, on every road, not just on our hilly, high-speed Duke/Gregson thoroughfare. Some of these tragedies are carelessness on the part of the pedestrian. When a car is involved, why do we have to automatically blame the driver?

The fact is that Durham is becoming a bigger city, and we need those 4-and 5-land thoroughfares right where they are as long as we keep lettin' them in!

[barry]

"and we can't deny that there are other people living outside downtown that need to get to work everyday without having to travel clear across the county on a congested freeway, bypassing Durham downtown to get to RTP because the neighborhood committees decided to close it down.

As far as the deaths, they happen everywhere, on every road, not just on our hilly, high-speed Duke/Gregson thoroughfare. Some of these tragedies are carelessness on the part of the pedestrian. When a car is involved, why do we have to automatically blame the driver?

The fact is that Durham is becoming a bigger city, and we need those 4-and 5-land thoroughfares right where they are as long as we keep lettin' them in!"

OK, i swear, i'll answer this, and then i'll get back to work, and post more at my blog this evening.

It is the law that drivers must yield to pedestrians crossing at or near intersections. This is the case whether or not there is a crosswalk.

This is similar to the rules of the water where a larger boat must yield to a smaller boat, and a motorized boat must yield to a wind-powered boat.

Near as i can tell, the neighborhood roads, where kids (yes, there's that nasty word again) wait for school buses 9 months a year are more congested than than the freeways that i travel on my commute. Creating a freeway option from northern Durham to RTP via the East End Connecotr will give us, by NCDOT numbers (admittedly possibly inaccurate) another 40 years or so of acceptable volume.

There are many alternatives to "4-and 5-land thoroughfares right where they are" for dealing with our increasing traffic issues. People on bicycles and on foot have every right to use our public streets in safety. Your convenience (or anyone else's for that matter) in shaving 2 minutes off of your commute by driving 50 mph through a residential area is simply not an acceptable argument. By continuing to make it, you reveal the mindset of automotive privilege which really needs to be re-examined, thoroughly and without prejudice, if we are ever going to build a city (let alone a nation) that can thrive through the 21st century. Pedestrian safety is really only a small factor in the reevaluation of the car culture, although it's one that many of us have to deal with both personally and daily, and it's an issue that we can address on a personal, neighborhood, and citywide scale.

If you choose to live 35 miles from your job, and your commute must by needs take you through my neighborhood, that does not mean that i have to grant you certain privileges such as being able to drive through that neighborhood at whatever unsafe speed you wish. Rather, it places the burden on you to acommodate my safety when you pass by my residence. And yes, i (and the other residents of my neighborhood) have every right to expect that our tax dollars will be used to increase our safety when you refuse to voluntarily make those choices and accept that burden.

[Michael Bacon]

To be fair to Marcus, long before Duke Park got their paegent up and going, OWDNA referred to WHHNA as the "beavers," because of their propensity to build dams all the way around their neighborhood. WHHNA was originally highly opposed to our ideas of traffic calming, which involved keeping the grid open so you don't dump all your traffic on your neighbor's street, and just trying to slow everyone down a bit, and maybe even let them stop a little less. We did this with neckdowns, traffic circles, and median islands, and it's all worked very well. With the exception of Carolina, which was closed 20 years ago, there are no blocked streets in OWD. (the west end of Englewood is blocked, but DOT did that because of the Fulton/Hillandale connector.)

I know where Marcus is coming from, because we had to work extra-vigilantly to keep WHHNA from dumping all the traffic off of Club on to Hillsborough with their little reindeer games. That said, objecting to enforcing the speed limit, building crosswalks, two-way streets, and other ways that we can try to make our urban neighborhoods livable without turning them into Cary is way over the top.