Transit Time: Better street design is no panacea for traffic deaths
You’re reading Transit Time, a weekly newsletter for Charlotte people who leave the house. Cars, buses, light rail, bikes, scooters … if you use it to get around the city, we write about it. Transit Time is produced in partnership among The Charlotte Ledger, WFAE and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.
Analysis: Charlotte leaders want to redesign streets to save lives. At the current pace, that will take hundreds of years.
One of the best-known street redesigns in Charlotte was on East Boulevard in Dilworth. Beginning in 2006, the city removed lanes on East Boulevard to slow traffic and make it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. But Charlotte maintains more than 2,500 miles of streets, and most are not suitable to be redesigned.
by Steve Harrison
Earlier this fall, the Charlotte City Council discussed the rise in traffic fatalities, both for pedestrians and people in cars and trucks.
They debated how to attack the problem.
The traditional way would be for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police to write more traffic tickets. In 2008, officers wrote one ticket for every 22 Charlotte residents. That fell to one ticket for every 68 residents in 2018.
The other idea was more radical: Redesign the city’s thoroughfares to make them less conducive to speeding.
“We know we can’t enforce our way out of his,” said at-large council member Braxton Winston. “We built our way into this.”
He added that giving people speeding tickets on, say, Sharon Road West won’t make it safer.
“I will also say that giving people a speeding ticket on the network — you are not going to make that stretch safer for giving people [tickets for] 54 miles per hour in a 35,” he said.
The city several years ago made a pledge for zero traffic fatalities by 2030, but it’s going in the wrong direction. From 2008-2012, the city averaged 39 traffic fatalities from vehicle crashes and pedestrians being hit. Last year, there were 81 fatalities.
In an interview on WFAE’s “Charlotte Talks” in October, host Mike Collins asked Mayor Vi Lyles whether the city should have police write more traffic tickets to slow drivers down.
“What are we going to do that’s technology based? And how do we design intersections and highways, your thoroughfares in Charlotte, to make them more safe?” Lyles said. “Technology is going to help us. Design is going to help us. …Enforcement is one way to do this, but it’s a flash in the pan versus a continuous improvement. We want the continuous improvement that will change behavior.”
But Lyles’ statement might be too optimistic.
The problem is simply too large — and the city’s current street redesign efforts too small — to move the needle.
Hundreds of miles to go
The city of Charlotte maintains 2,528 miles of streets. More than 1,700 miles are local streets, which presumably don’t need to be redesigned to force people to drive slower. That leaves 300 miles of thoroughfares and 482 miles of collector streets.
That doesn’t count state-maintained roads like W.T. Harris Boulevard and North Tryon Street.
The Charlotte Department of Transportation does have a program to retrofit streets to make them safer for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists.
CDOT’s work has been praised by neighborhood groups, as well as Sustain Charlotte, which lobbies for more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. In other words, the city is doing exactly what Winston and Lyles want.
It’s just not doing it very fast.
Since 2000, CDOT has finished 38 street retrofit projects. Most of those projects are designed one way or another to slow down vehicles. The total number of “centerline” miles they have improved is 20.
Twenty miles in 21 years.
If you do the math, you can see retrofitting 300 miles of thoroughfares would, at that rate, would be finished around 2321.
And the pace of making streets safer may slow down.
“All the easy street conversions have been done,” said CDOT design section manager Keith Bryant. “Now we are left with really difficult roads.”
By difficult roads, he means thoroughfares like Sharon Road West, which handles so much traffic the city doesn’t believe it can place a deliberate chokepoint on the road to slow people down. Or Pineville-Matthews Road. Or South Tryon Street.
Not only are there no firm design plans to change them, there aren’t any conceptual plans.
A relatively new concept
Bryant said the very first street conversion he can find was in 1986 on Park Road, from Kenilworth Avenue to Ideal Way.
Since then, the city has done others, mostly inside the Route 4 corridor within a few miles of the center city.
Those easy conversions include projects like removing traffic lanes last decade from East Boulevard in Dilworth, one of the most high-profile “road diets” or street conversions the city has done.
And the city recently did a high-profile street conversion on Parkwood Avenue to serve Belmont, Villa Heights and Optimist Park. The city removed one lane of traffic and added 0.8 miles of bike lanes.
The total cost was $3.7 million.
(The plan to redesign streets is also likely to get more expensive: The N.C. DOT has seen the cost of its projects balloon this year, and it faces a $12 billion shortfall.)
Bryant said the city will be monitoring traffic on Parkwood to see how the fewer lanes handle the traffic. The city is hesitant to remove a lane of traffic on a road that handles more than 20,000 vehicles a day. Parkwood carries more than that.
“We have pressed the boundary on Parkwood,” Bryant said. “It’s in the mid-twenties. We will have to see what the crash history does.”
Bryant noted that new streets under construction are being designed to make vehicles drive slower, and to allow for pedestrians and cyclists.
“There has been a shift,” he said. “There has been a re-emphasis in creating complete streets. You will find we have a lot of good projects in the hopper.”
He said CDOT is no longer designing roads to handle as many cars as possible.
“It’s like the shopping mall parking lot that they design for Christmas time of year,” he said. “We aren’t doing that.”
CDOT’s philosophy aligns with Lyles and Winston.
But asking CDOT to reduce traffic fatalities through street conversions is a bit like draining a bathtub with a thimble.
Steve Harrison is a reporter with WFAE, Charlotte’s NPR news source. Reach him at sharrison@wfae.com.
In brief…
No urgency for red light and speed cameras: A few weeks after City Council talked about using automated traffic cameras to ticket drivers and cut down on Charlotte's soaring vehicular deaths, the council's Intergovernmental Relations Committee seemed cool to immediately pursuing the idea. At a meeting this week, city lobbyist Dana Fenton suggested Charlotte should wait until the 2023 legislative session to pursue legislation in Raleigh that would allow Charlotte to use the cameras again. “I’m not debating whether they’re effective or not, but there are some privacy issues around it,” Fenton said. “That would also give you time … to do a more thorough analysis." Council members agreed to discuss the issue more in the future.
Brookshire Freeway bridge work: The N.C. Department of Transportation said it has awarded a $26 million contract to American Civil Constructors West Coast of California to repair a series of bridges on I-277 between 10th Street and I-77. Work is expected to start by the end of this month and be complete by the fall of 2024. It includes “deck repairs, substructure work and painting of existing structures” as well as repairing concrete and replacing guardrails and fencing. (NCDOT)
Transit officers with no masks: After Twitter user CLT Development posted a photo of “transit cops” issuing citations on the light rail line but not wearing masks, CATS replied that “All CATS employees + contractors are required to comply with the mask mandate. These officers are certainly in violation of the mandate.” It said its contractor, Allied Universal, would raise the issue with the officers.
Infrastructure bill’s effect in N.C.: President Biden signed the federal infrastructure bill into law on Monday, which is expected to provide an estimated $7.2 billion for North Carolina roads and highways over the next five years. But the N.C. Department of Transportation has even greater funding needs. “The way I like to think of it is we have an $11 billion hole — an $11-plus billion hole — so this new money helps, but it does not fill up the hole,” an NCDOT official said. There’s also about $457 million for bridge replacement, $910 million for public transit and $100 million to expand broadband. (WCNC, WTVD)
This week on Nextdoor: From Grier Heights: “On several mornings during rush hour traffic, the same brunette woman insists on running in the road on 7th Street vs. using the sidewalk and will not move. I have almost clipped her as there was a truck in front of me and I didn’t see her, then I have honked to remind her that the road is for cars and not her personal running track, and she couldn’t care less. I understand that the sidewalks are uneven, but if you care that much about your running, then please go find a track or another paved area to run on vs. putting yourself and others in danger.”
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