I recently returned to my habit of walking the length of the Maple Avenue commercial district in Vienna VA. Just to run errands. These are my observations, after about an 18-month hiatus.
Afternoon rush-hour traffic is … almost indescribable.
Edit 9/22/2023: Greatly reduced Metro ridership may take some of the blame for this, based on reporting in the 9/22/2023 Washington Post. I probably should have started off with this graph, below. As return-to-office occurs, absent a Metro ridership rebound, well … yeah, a tougher road commute should be a logical consequence. So when it seemed to me that traffic was beyond anything I’d observed in the past, maybe that wasn’t just my imagination.
Source: WMATA.
Several road segments in the eastern end of Maple now routinely hit full capacity. That occurred on my walk, at the intersection of Glyndon and Maple. The entire block, from Park to Glyndon, was completely full of stopped cars. There was no room to add another car to the traffic lanes in that block, no matter what the traffic light said.
Cross-traffic, trying to turn onto Maple, is faced with waiting through several light cycles until there is room, or simply barging into and blocking the intersection, so that they can proceed with the next light cycle. Even though there is no room to put their car into the travel lane on Maple.
Given that this is Northern Virginia, I don’t have to tell you which option drivers take.
The result, from the pedestrian viewpoint, is chaotic. My point being that at the far end of town, what we quaintly term afternoon rush “hour” is slowly devolving into a kind of free-for-all, with, as far as I can tell, no effort at enforcing much of anything. At which point, routinely blocking the intersection, so that you don’t miss a light, is perfectly logical NoVA thinking and so is the accepted norm. You don’t even incur horn honks from the folks that are inconvenienced. It’s just the way the world works around here.
Empirically, per VDOT traffic counts, total daily car traffic on Maple has been slowly declining for years now. But I sure wouldn’t have guessed that based on afternoon rush hour. Plausibly there’s been a decline in off-peak traffic, coincident with the decline in bricks-and-mortar retail. But that’s purely a guess.
Electric vehicles are still few and far between.
EVs get a lot of press, and we hear statistics on how rapidly their sales have grown. But almost almost everything currently on the road is still powered by non-hybrid/non-electric propulsion.
For the total US car fleet, even now, electric vehicles of all sorts (EV and PHEV) account for less than 1% of the 250M current registered light vehicles (reference). Hybrids, near as I can figure, account for just over 3%.
In other words, more than 95% of vehicles on the road still use conventional (non-hybrid, non-electric) propulsion. And that’s pretty much the way Maple Avenue looks, during rush hour. When traffic comes to a stop, what you’re left with is mostly a collection of idling gas engines in conventionally-powered vehicles.
Even for new car sales, the majority of cars are still old-tech. In August 2023, 1.33 million light vehicles were sold in America (reference, TD Waterhouse)). Of these, 107,000 were hybrids, and 126,000 were plug-in vehicles of all types (EVs and PHEVs, reference Argonne National Laboratory). Doing the math, then, last month, 82% of new light vehicle sales were non-electric/non-hybrid vehicles. Old tech, in other words.
Who drives their Maserati during rush hour?
Crazily enough, given how slowly traffic moves during rush hour, I saw several different individuals driving two-seater low-slung high-powered sportscars. In rush hour traffic. So, presumably, it has now become fashionable among the wealthy to … use your Ferrari as a commuter car? Beats me. That’s a completely different world from the one I live in.
Pedestrian-inefficient stoplights.
As I found out in analysis years ago, most of our vehicle/pedestrian accidents occur in the roadway, on or around Maple Avenue. The crosswalks can be a fairly dangerous place. You need to take care if you are going to walk the length of Maple during rush hour.
But a side-effect of this (I think) is that the light timing is now set up for maximum pedestrian safety. Which means minimum pedestrian efficiency. By this I mean that the WALK sign will only come on at the start of a light cycle. If you arrive at an intersection once traffic has started moving down Maple, even if you are crossing the street in the direction of traffic, you will not get a WALK sign if you push the request button. Instead, you have to wait until the next light cycle.
Or, at least, I didn’t, for any of the lights, on this walk.
The result is that a walk down Maple involves a lot of standing around, watching traffic flowing in the direction you’re trying to travel. Waiting for the light cycle to end. So that you can finally get a WALK sign, at the start of the next light cycle.
The Whole Foods driveway still takes the prize as the riskiest part of the walk.
This is borne out, I think, by the number of accidents that have occurred there in the past. (It is, I believe, the only place where a bicyclist has been hit by a car, while riding on the sidewalk, in Vienna.)
It’s three lanes across, people are trying to turn left and right into and out of it, exiting and entering rush-hour traffic. The view is partially obscured by tree trunks, so drivers always pull across the sidewalk, then stop, so that they can see oncoming traffic.
As a pedestrian, do you walk in front of the cars blocking the sidewalk, or behind them? In front, you risk instant death if one of them floors it, to make a break in traffic, without looking at the sidewalk for pedestrians. Walk behind them, and you are essentially invisible to cars trying to dive into that entrance, off Maple, through whatever holes may occur in traffic.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I walk behind them, and cross the driveway very carefully.
The truly crazy part is that the other end of the Whole Foods parking lot provides a low-stress entrance and exit to a side street that feeds traffic down to a stoplight-controlled intersection with Maple. But apparently the extra minute or so that would take is just too much for the average Whole Foods user.
So you routinely have individuals trying to make a left turn, out of that driveway, onto Maple, across rush hour traffic. Under the pressure of trying to make that turn, the last thing those folks are worried about is trying to accommodate the safety of passing pedestrians.
Contrary to law, the onus is on the pedestrian to avoid getting hit.
In short, not a lot has changed.
Source: Town of Vienna Newsletter, October 1960. This same intersection (Glyndon and Maple) still backs up completely during rush hour.
Maple Avenue in Vienna is a product of, and a resource for, people driving cars. Its greatest expansion took place in the early 1960s, the heyday of the growth of the car-focused suburbs.
It’s not as if there’s room to add more lanes to Maple, to deal with the flow of traffic. That was a dubious proposition in the past, and now the Town has made sure of that, with the zoning-mandated close-to-the-curb placement of this most recent spate of new buildings.
Eventually, the street might be filled with quiet electric cars. But that eventuality is a long way off.
Today, and for the decades to come, when there’s traffic, Maple Avenue is nobody’s notion of a nice place to walk. Or sit. Or drive, for that matter.
It’s been that way for decades. And no amount of happy talk will change that.
