Today, as I was driving home after a trip to one of our local parks, I got honked at on Maple Avenue, in the Town of Vienna, where I live.
My offense? Failing to cause an accident on Maple Avenue. Apparently the Tesla driver behind me wanted me to clear the roadway by running into the car that was blocking the lane ahead. Instead, I stopped. (It’s not as if I had a choice, because I literally couldn’t get around the lunkhead blocking the lane.). In any case, after a three second delay, the lane cleared, and we all proceeded merrily down the road.
Despite the stupidity of honking at me for failing to run into somebody, maybe that impatient driver can be forgiven. Because, unless you’ve bothered to look at the data, you probably don’t realize just how many car accidents occur on that innocent-looking two-mile stretch of road we refer to as Maple Avenue.
So in this post, I’m going to dig up a few pieces of data on reportable accidents along Maple Avenue in Vienna. Just to remind myself that on this stretch of road, the occasional bit of defensive driving is no sin.
Saturday afternoon is the pits.
The main commercial district of the Town of Vienna, VA lies along an arterial highway, Virginia Route 123. Although here in the TOV that stretch of Rt. 123 is called Maple Avenue.
It’s a congested urban arterial highway that sees about 30,000 vehicles per day. With all that implies.
In the past, I outlined the fundamental reason why traffic is so consistently awful on this piece of road. The Washington and Old Dominion railroad was here before the roads. There’s roughly a five mile stretch of the old W&OD rail bed that acts like a fence. For that stretch, the only gate in the fence — the only road that crosses that old railroad bed — is Maple Avenue (and a couple of nearby side streets). As a result, anyone who wants to move north-south in this area, or east-west in this area, and doesn’t want to use the interstate, ends up driving on Maple Avenue in Vienna. Either that, or do an end-run around that old railroad bed.
This road is congested during the AM and PM rush hours every business day. But at least during rush hour, the traffic flow is predictable. Almost everybody is just passing through.
For my money, the absolute worst time to drive on Maple Avenue is Saturday afternoon. In addition to having the road packed and the traffic slow, traffic is chaotic. Cars are moving in all types of unpredictable ways. It’s jumbled mix of people running errands locally, and people just trying to get from one side of Vienna to the other.
Traffic crawls.
To add to the fun, in order to squeeze five lanes into the road bed, the lanes are about as narrow as they can possibly be. The travel lanes are about 10′ wide.
But the real killer is is that the center turning lane is just 9 feet wide. Which, if you drive a small car, is OK. But if you drive a large SUV, crossover, or truck, you need some real skills to get your vehicle fully out of the travel lane, and fully into the turn lane, on-the-fly. And, since many people lack those skills, but still drive those vehicles, the result is that people making left turns consistently block the adjacent travel lane, because they haven’t pulled their vehicle fully into the allotted 9′ space.
Which is why I got honked at today. I couldn’t move forward, because the rear bumper of the left-turning SUV in front of me stuck out about two feet into the travel lane.
I’ve lived here long enough that I’m completely used to this. I expect it. If it’s Saturday afternoon, you aren’t going anywhere very fast on Maple Avenue. And you’ll be dodging a lot of bad driving along the way. That’s just the way it is, as we all try to negotiate this narrow urban arterial highway.
Nor is that ever going to get any better. The Town, in its Wisdom, ensured that some new, large, and very expensive buildings were going to get put up right next to the road. (They made it a condition of the zoning that the face of the building could be no more than 15′ from the road.) So, short of Armageddon, there will never be any way to widen that roadway. There’s a roughly 49′ curb-to-curb distance now, and that’s the way it’s going to be.
If that’s not enough, we’re now in the middle of changing the zoning in order to pack in some high-density housing directly on Maple Avenue. Because, apparently, what we think we need here in Vienna is thousands of additional residents, all living directly on Maple Avenue.
Congestion has predictable consequences.
Here’s a map of reportable accidents that occurred in 2021, on or around Maple Avenue in Vienna. As you can see, there were 100 car accidents involving significant property damage, injury, or both.
But 2021 was a good year, as traffic was down due to the pandemic. If you look at the last pre-pandemic year, the count was 134 accidents. More-or-less an accident every three days, along Maple and vicinity.
Source for both maps: VA TREDS system
I guess I’ll stop there.
Fact is, every year, a whole lot of people damage a whole lot of expensive hardware, doing stupid things in Maple Avenue traffic.
And so, if some yoyo is partially blocking the travel lane, yeah, I think I’ll stop. Honk at me if it makes you feel better. Because it’s probably smarter to stop, than to roll the dice and see if I can squeeze by without doing any damage.
I am not, in general, a patient or polite person. But on Maple Avenue, on a Saturday afternoon, I purposefully strive to be both.
At the end of the day, I guess I pity the folks who still can’t manage to figure out that no matter how much you honk your horn, if you’ve chosen to drive in that traffic, you aren’t going to go anywhere very fast. It’s just the way it is.
