Category: Transportation

Anything related to transportation, including cars, traffic, other modes of transport, and so on.

Post #377: Rental scooters, the Town begins to get ready.

For background on the rental scooter issue, see these posts:  Post #338, Post #330.

In a nutshell, due to a change in Commonwealth law, the Town needs to have some sort of program in place to regulate the use of rental scooters and bikes.  If not, then on 1/1/2020, the rental and use of such devices is deemed legal, including, if not explicitly barred, use on the sidewalk.  We probably don’t want that, based on the problems reported in cities that underwent unregulated use of rental “shared mobility devices” (see examples in Post #289).

The Town will begin discussion of this issue at the 9/9/2019 Town Council work session.  You can find the relevant meeting materials on this web page.

To cut to the chase:  My best guess is that the Town is developing a pro-forma way to satisfy Virginia statute.  We may or may not attract any dockless scooter or ebike rental operators to Vienna.

Continue reading Post #377: Rental scooters, the Town begins to get ready.

Post #374: Behavioral modification for Maple Avenue traffic

 

(Photograph taken from the website of the Ohio Department of Transportation).

The gist of this post is the following:  Maybe we could reduce some of the peak-period congestion on Maple by changing driving behavior.  First, maybe  dynamic messaging signs could “push” the message to drivers that they might be better off going around Vienna rather than going through it, under certain traffic conditions.   Second, possibly, through use of traffic cams and dedicated smart phone apps, we could “push” a message to Town residents to avoid doing their shopping during peak weekend traffic periods.

This is such an oddball idea, and one with so little available data, and so little prior discussion that I have seen, that I’m just going to describe what I mean, and leave it at that for now.  Obviously, that Town would have to make the investment to implement either of these.

Continue reading Post #374: Behavioral modification for Maple Avenue traffic

Post #373: The 9/4/2019 Multimodal study community meeting

My wife attended this meeting, held last night at Town Hall.  I believe she left slightly before the meeting finally broke up.

The contractors talked for about the first half-hour, and then people were invited to get up and look over some maps.  And chat.  There did not seem to be much newsworthy to report, but I am providing a copy of an audio recording of the first 35 minutes at this Google Drive link (download “2019-09-04 …”).  The discussion of traffic begins about 22 minutes into the recording.

I have said everything I care to say about this study in a series of recent posts, ending with Post #364.

The only thing of particular interest to me is that one my my neighbors quietly let the contractor know that there is some long-standing interest in this neighborhood for closing Wade Hampton at Maple.  This would be one way of dealing with the cut-through traffic that will be generated by 444 Maple West, 380 Maple West, and all the rest of whatever-the-Town-approves for my end of Vienna.  Apparently the contractors had never heard of that and were taken somewhat aback by it.  So while this was a study about changes in land use and so on, there was no attempt to address the details of the actual near-term land use changes that have already been approved for my neighborhood.  Certainly not changes that are being suggested by the residents, as a way to keep the burden of MAC-generated traffic off their streets.

FWIW.

 

 

Post #359: The Town’s multimodal transportation study, Part 1

In Post #358, I discussed what I saw as the single most important finding of the Town’s “Joint Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study“.  This post discusses the rest of that study, as presented at the Town Council (and PC and TSC) joint work session on 8/19/2019.

To cut to the chase:  There’s nothing (or almost nothing) useful in the rest of the report.  Not just because much of the detailed analysis was just-plain-wacky. It was, as I hope to discuss in a later post.  (Example:  Let’s let people park on Maple.)  But mostly, the basic approach was fundamentally wrong, in a way that prevents the Town from using the results to make rational decisions about Maple Avenue.  At best, I guess you might call it a place to start.  Or maybe a relatively inexpensive mistake, so that you know how to try to structure a usable study.

This posting is only about big-picture overview issues.  It’s already too long as is.  If I want to talk about the details, I’ll have to do yet another posting.

First, I’m posting my recording of this joint work session.

Why?  See Post #260.  Hope I’m wrong about that, but … just in case, my recording of the 7 PM 8/19/2019 work session is at this Google Drive link.

There’s no index, because it’s only 45 minutes.   Audio is lousy because there was poor microphone discipline, so it’s a mix of amplified and unamplified sound.  That requires a lot of post-processing (amplification, noise removal, compression) just to make it audible.  The heavy post-processing and low original volumes left a lot of artifacts in the recording.

But if you want to know what was said, and you weren’t there — sadly, looks like this is your one and only opportunity to do so.  See Post #260.

 

Continue reading Post #359: The Town’s multimodal transportation study, Part 1

Post #338: Rental electric scooters, again.

This article is about decisions that the Town must make, in the near future, regarding rental electric scooters and rental bicycles.  It ends with some discussion of the presumed environmental benefits of electric scooters.

Bottom line:  Thanks to a change in Virginia law, the Town needs to come up with some form of regulation for “dockless” rental electric scooters by 1/1/2020.  If not, we end up with open season for rental electric scooters in Vienna, which we probably want to avoid.  Unregulated dockless bike and scooter rentals have become a nuisance in many major cities (see examples in this post).

Here, I line out what a minimum set of regulations probably ought to cover.  (Which is no great shakes — just look at what other local jurisdictions have done.)

Separately, the Town needs to find places for racks for the “docked” Capital Bikeshare rental bikes.

N.B:  In “docked” systems, bikes (or other devices) are picked up from and returned to dedicated racks.  (If not, steep charges mount up for the renter.)  Smartphone apps show how many bicycles/scooters are available for use at each rack.  By contrast, in “dockless” systems, scooters or bikes may be picked up and left anywhere, tracked by a combination of on-board GPS and internet connectivity.  Smartphone apps show the location of available scooters or bikes.   Rental is accomplished via smartphone app and account, or in some cases, via credit card swipe.

Continue reading Post #338: Rental electric scooters, again.

Post #330: Scooter alert

I was driving in the City of Fairfax last week and had my first sighting of rental electric scooters there.  First time it was a set of red devices parked on the sidewalk, and I was not quite sure what I was looking at.  But when I saw a couple of lime-green ones in action, that’s when it hit me:  the scooters are here.

Turns out, if I had been paying attention, I’d have been prepared for it.  You can read news coverage here,  or here.

For us, note the key paragraph from that second news article:

"H.B. 2572 also amended the Code of Virginia to state that, if a locality does not adopt a licensing ordinance, regulation, or other action by Jan. 1, 2020, motorized skateboards, scooters, and dockless or electric-powered bicycles can be deployed without formal regulation."

That’s not exactly how I read that law, but it’s close enough.  In so many words, time is running out for having any orderly introduction of electric rental scooters or dockless rental bikes in Vienna.  We have five months to get our act together, or we’re fair game until such time as we do establish some rules.

There appear to be two main objections to rental scooters from the standpoint of the general public.

One, these scooters can typically do about 15 MPH top speed.  That can be a safety issue if allowed to be ridden on the sidewalk. 

Just as a point of reference, 15 MPH on level ground is a pretty good clip for a bicyclist.  I doubt that I have ever managed to achieve that, for any length of time, along any Town of Vienna sidewalk.  And on many parts of those sidewalks, you don’t dare ride at speed.  For example, my least favorite stretch of Maple Avenue sidewalk is below.  The doors of the shops literally open onto the sidewalk, and there’s no place to go.  I traverse this section at a walking pace.

The emergency stopping distance for an electric scooter traveling at 15 MPH appears to be around 30 feet (per this reference).  (About half of that is reaction time, the rest is braking distance.)  This does not strike me as being hugely different from the stopping distance for a bicycle at that speed.

So, in terms of hazard, my guess is, you are relying on the good sense and skill of the sidewalk scooter rider, same as you are relying on the good sense of the sidewalk bicyclist.  Scooters will attract a different type of person, will be ridden (at first) by inexperienced riders, and are capable of speeds without the corresponding physical exertion.  So they may be more dangerous than sidewalk bicycles for those reasons. But not inherently different, in my view, from a sidewalk bicyclist.

Furthermore, if you expect people to get around Maple Avenue on scooters, practically speaking, you have no choice but to allow them on the sidewalk.  I think you’d be borderline crazy to ride a scooter on Maple Avenue at almost any time.  (I feel the same about riding a bicycle on Maple.)   And the presence of scooters in the roadway would substantially disrupt traffic flow.

Two, people leave them anywhere, so they become a nuisance when parked willy-nilly. You can see some discussion of this issue in this post, which is my write up of dockless bike sharing.  Various cities have tried various solutions to this issue, as outlined in that posting.

Other issues with electric scooters are more of a non-public nature.  For example, rentals do not include helmets and (my best estimate) users tend to have a high rate of injury (compared to bicyclists, for example).

Back to Fairfax City: 

Fairfax City expects scooter riders to ride in the road, and not on the sidewalk, among other things explained in this FAQ on the Faifax City website.  But, I also note here that, apparently, Fairfax city does not allow bicycles on the sidewalk, either.  (The exception appears to be routes that are marked bicycle routes, as explained in this Fairfax City ordinance.)

To which I can only say, good luck with that.  The Lime scooter users I saw on Old Lee Highway were cruising down the sidewalk, and I doubt that any no-sidwalk rules will be stringently enforced.  The reason I doubt that is my experience as a bicyclist.  Mainly, a) I never knew that City of Fairfax banned bicycles from sidewalks except along marked bike routes, b) I’m pretty sure I’ve bicycled on the sidewalk there many times and never been hassled. So they may enforce that in the Old Town section of Fairfax City, but certainly not city-wide.

Here’s news reporting on how Vienna is planning to handle this.  That article helpfully gives a link to audio for that meeting.  (Kudos to the Town of Vienna for proving timely audio for Town Council work sessions.)  The discussion of rental scooters starts about 33 minutes into the recording.  Discussion continues for about another 45 minutes, but after listening to most of it, I didn’t detect a lot of clarity there, and not much nuts-and-bolts discussion of how this should play out in Vienna.  It appears to me that Town government is nowhere near prepared to act.  They actually spent some time discussing whether the Virginia legislature is likely to change that January 1 2020 deadline noted above.

Also absent from the discussion — or maybe I missed it — is any notion that, as an ordinance, the Town could bar the use of these devices (say, on any public sidewalk).   The Town already has the right to bar bicycles from the sidewalk if it so chooses.  But near as I can tell, the discussion was all about how Vienna was going to allow electric scooter use in Town, and not really focused on whether Vienna would allow it.  It seemed to be taken as a done deal that they had no choice but to allow scooters here.  That’s not how I read the law, but I’m not a lawyer.  As I read it, if the Town hasn’t acted in some fashion, then rental scooters are legal here.  I didn’t read anything in the law to suggest that (e.g.) barring scooters from the sidewalks was not a legal course of action.

So the clock is ticking on this one, and we seem to be running late.  If you have an opinion on this, it will soon be time to make that known to the Town Council.  Hope the Town can get something reasonable enacted in time.   For a discussion of dockless bike rental — which shares some but not all the problems and benefits of scooter rental —

Post #284: CORRECTED: They’re going to do what at Nutley and 66?

In my original posting, I downloaded the draft plans on the Commonwealth of Virginia website explaining the proposed changes to I-66.  A colleague pointed out that these plans are obsolete.  Virginia Department of Transportation substantially altered the plan for the I-66/Nutley interchange, they just they just didn’t replace them on their website.  The corrected plans can be seen in this newspaper article, and a copy in full detail is on the Town of Vienna website (.pdf).  I have yet to determine where they can be found on the VDOT site.

I am going to walk through the new plans in the same orientation as I did in my  original posting.  To get oriented:  I-66 runs top to bottom, DC would be at the bottom.  Nutley runs left to right — Pan Am Shopping center is to the left, Vienna is to the right.

 

Under the new plan, the exits from Nutley to I-66 will be more-or-less as they are now.  But the exits from I-66 to Nutley will be quite different.  There will be a single exit ramp from each side of I-66 to serve both Nutley northbound and southbound.  The ramps will split — one side will feed directly onto Nutley in one direction, and the the other will terminate in a partial roundabout that will allow you to (in effect) to make the left turn onto Nutley in the other direction.  In addition, the westbound I-66 Lexus lanes will have an exit onto Nutley.  Again, using the partial roundabout, you can access Nutley north-bound or south-bound.

The proposed plan makes a hash of the existing pedestrian paths through the interchange.  Right now, there are sidewalks on either side of the road, you can walk from Vienna to Pan Am on either side, and on either side, you have to cross a total of four single-lane entrance and exit ramps.

Under the new plan, if you opt for the sidewalk (dark green) you must start on the east side of Nutley in Vienna, end up on the west side of Nutley at Pan Am, and cross the full width of Nutley (without a light!) at the left-hand roundabout in the picture above.  This is in addition to crossing four entrance/exit ramps.

Alternatively, there is a multi-use path (orange) that appears designed for bicycles.  If you take that option, you avoid the at-grade crossings of the road entirely, but take a much longer path and end up on the east side of Nutley at Pan Am.  By my measurement, the distance from Marshall Road to Lee Highway is currently about 4000 feet by sidewalk.  It will be over 6000 feet with the new multi-use path.  Trivial for a bicyclist, but burdensome for a pedestrian.  That said, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone walking that route.  If there are any pedestrians crossing that bridge, they are few and far between now.

They will also take out the collector-distributor lanes at this interchange. Presumably they needed the room; plausibly I-66 will now fill the entire available area under that bridge, so the “through” part of the collector-distributor lane was no longer feasible.  At any rate, instead of passing under Nutley to access one of the directions on Nutley from I-66, the exit ramp splits and leads directly to each direction.  That’s now feasible because the partial roundabouts allow you to, in effect, make a left turn across Nutley, if need be.

 

Post #238, Revised: Wade Hampton Parking

In my initial write up of this, I swapped Park Street and Center Street while looking at Google Maple satellite view.  This post corrects that, but also corrects my statement that Center Street south of Maple is 32′ wide.  It is 32′ wide well away from Maple, but widens as it approaches Maple.   At Maple, it is substantially wider than the 32′ proposed for Wade Hampton Drive.

A corrected and revised posting follows.

My earlier contention (Post #232) is that 11 people can park legally on Wade Hampton now, and that, looking at the diagram of the future Wade Hampton, with the majority of it striped to accommodate three lanes at the end, almost all of that parking would be eliminated.

The Town, as reported by the developer, says otherwise.  In particular, the report was that no parking would be eliminated on the side of the street across from 380 Maple West.

What’s the correct explanation?  Somebody has to be wrong here.  At this point, the easiest way to resolve those two views is to suggest that the diagram of the street, as offered by the builder, is incorrect.  As long as you take away almost all the lane striping that is shown, and make the street more of a free-for-all, then you can plausibly claim more-or-less no loss of parking on the west side of Wade Hampton.

To be clear, you have to assume that the lane striping on the 32′-wide Wade Hampton will be nothing like the striping on the 32′-wide Park Center Street, as it meets Maple. Even though the setup (one lane incoming, two lanes outgoing) and width (32′) are the same.  And even though the striping on Park Center Street is almost identical to the builder’s diagram.  But if the Town stripes Wade Hampton as it did Park Center, all streetside parking would be eliminated.

So, I could be dead wrong.  But I had some help getting there.  To get to the Town’s reported position: you have to ignore the Builder’s drawing of Wade Hampton, you have to ignore the real-world example of Park Center Street at Maple, and you have to ignore one legal space on Wade Hampton that nobody uses anyway.  And if you do that, and leave most of Wade Hampton as a free-for-all, so that we can drive down the middle of the road as we see fit — then you can see that the Town’s reported claim of no parking loss is credible.

Detail follows:

Continue reading Post #238, Revised: Wade Hampton Parking

Post #268: HAWK light timing issue, fixed

In two earlier posts (Post #260, Post #225) I raised an issue about the timing of the new High-Intensity Activated crossWalK (HAWK) lights in Vienna.  These are the new lights located on Maple at Pleasant Street and at James Madison Drive.  Their purpose is to allow pedestrians to cross Maple safely at those locations.

The issue is the timing of the “walk” signal.  I thought there needed to be a longer delay between the red light, and the walk signal.  See the posts cited above if you want the full story.

This is not an issue.  I used the Pleasant Street HAWK light earlier this week, and there is a roughly 2.5 second delay between the red light and the walk signal.  So either I hallucinated the problem, or the Vienna Department of Public Works (DPW) already fixed it.  For purposes of this post, I’ll assume that I am sane and that DPW did, in fact, change it that fast.

A little more about HAWK lights follows — because I literally had to look it up to understand how you are supposed to deal with them.  The key point is that you should treat the flashing red lights like a stop sign.

Continue reading Post #268: HAWK light timing issue, fixed