For some reason, this didn’t dawn on me until today. Sure I understand traffic calming methods and how well-made urban streets see little animosity between cyclists and drivers, but I never thought about the fact that it’s not so much drivers that are at fault when they honk at us. Instead of getting mad at them (provided they do no more than honk/finger/curse) you should direct your anger at those who design the roads. Drivers are just doing what the roads tell them to do: drive fast. What crystallized this was biking up Park St past Goodale. As I was in the middle the intersection of Goodale & Park I could hear a car was coming near. Take a good look (I was heading from where those green lights are towards the screen).
This is not an ordinary intersection: it’s extremely wide and just look at how the curbs are set way back. It simply makes drivers want to go faster. Now just picture little ‘ole me coming down the road towards you with a car behind me. So, car wants to go faster because of suburban road design, bike is in front and what’s on the other side of this picture? Bam! There’s an akward, dangerous median for us cyclists.
Can you guess what happened next? The driver honked at me. The people who designed this road has drivers speeding faster at the intersection only to plop a median immediately at the end of it. Telling cars to speed + abrupt median = wasted money on a miserable, grade-school attempt at traffic calming, a symptom of which is pissed drivers honking at cyclists. Of course, after being honked at I didn’t bear right in the slightest (you don’t want to encourage them) and once oncoming traffic cleared I motioned to pass around me. Nervous cyclists who hug the curb will be able to give vehicles room to pass at first when riding along this median, but then the curb juts out and you can see just how little room there would be for a cyclist if you also have cars passing by where that truck is. A doozy for uneducated cyclists.
A park of all things should be surrounded by slow streets. Come on Columbus, where are some speed humps here? You had no problem placing several on Duncan, or Blake, or those speed tables along the south side of the Franklin Park Conservatory. Fix that median and extend the curbs of the Goodale-Park intersection (it wouldn’t cost us more money if you would’ve done it right the first time). Send your properly channeled anger and frustration (in the form of constructive criticism or suggestions) to the Transportation Division of Columbus.
July 17, 2008 at 2:01 pm
It looks like they were trying to create a gateway affect by placing the median, followed by a choker (narrowing), at the entrance to Victorian Village. It looks like the street is plenty wide for bike and cars side-by-side until they get to the choker, which leaves approximately 22′ of street width. Chokers are meant to improve pedestrian safety by providing a shorter street crossing distance, but in this case it forces cyclists to take the lane. That reinforces the need to think about all modes of transportation when designing streets (complete streets). On a bike route like Front/Park, I would have prefered that the street remain 28′ wide. 14′ is the recommended width for a shared car-bike lane. The median isn’t so bad though, is it?
Otherwise, I would say that maybe we don’t need so many turn lanes. A shared right-through lane once in a while wouldn’t be so bad. The corner radii at Park & Goodale also look really large for an urban area.
July 22, 2008 at 2:48 pm
The median wouldn’t be so bad if the curbs on the intersection weren’t ridiculously set back so far, encouraging cars to speed as they approach that median along with doubling the amount of street that pedestrians have to cross. I think you’re right about the abundance of turn lanes there which leads to a wider road which of course ends up with cars going faster. I wonder what the justification was for making the intersection so suburban.
July 23, 2008 at 9:25 pm
By curbs being set back, I assume you mean that the corner radii are too large. The curb on the SE corner appears to have a 65′ radius. The standard in Chicago is 15′, maybe 25′ if a lack of on-street parking forces vehicles to turn from the curb lane. The problem is that this intersection appears to have been designed so a large semi truck (called a WB-50) can make the turn comfortably. Unless we’re expecting a huge volume of semi’s at the intersection, that is silly. Like you said, in increases the crossing distances and passenger vehicle speeds too much. The design vehicle should be a passenger car or single unit truck (SU), while still accommodating WB-50s by allowing them to make wide right turns or encroach briefly and occasionally into oncoming traffic lanes. If the design vehicle must be a WB-50, channelized right turn lanes should be considered.
As for all the turn lanes, I suspect that the intersection was designed with an over-reliance on the concept of Level of Service (LOS). LOS is valued A through F and relates to congestion, density of vehicles, and seconds of delay per vehicle. Many DOTs require something like LOS C (stable flow) or better, based on traffic volume predictions 20 years in the future that are probably too high anyway. The only way to accomplish this is to over-build the number of lanes and turn lanes. Minor congestion must be considered acceptable in an urban area, especially where there are an abundance of alternate routes. The urban street grid excels at dispersing traffic among multiple routes. One of my favorite traffic engineers here in Chicago once said, “I’ve stopped caring about Level of Service and just started designing the roads the way I want the city to look.” This is a man who is a former commissioner of the department of transportation and sits on many committees that write the AASHTO national design standards. I agree with him.