Category: Transportation

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

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

Post #260, James Madison Drive HAWK light

The new High-Intensity Activated crossWalK (HAWK) light is now up at James Madison Drive.  I’m writing this post based on a bad experience I had with the other HAWK light, just up the street at Maple and Pleasant (Post #225.)

The issue is the timing of the walk signal.  I think there needs to be a long lag between when the HAWK light turns red, and when the walk signal comes on.  In this post, I will explain why. Continue reading Post #260, James Madison Drive HAWK light

Post #238: Wade Hampton Parking, revisited (error fixed 5/22/2019).

Corrected 5/22/2019 for my mixing up Park Street and Center Street in Google Maps satellite view.

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: Wade Hampton Parking, revisited (error fixed 5/22/2019).

Post #235: Please keep the sidewalks open

I got an email today from a reader asking about the sidewalks.  Specifically, is the Town going to keep the sidewalks open as developers build the three (four?  more?) MAC buildings on Maple?

Turns out, all I can say is, that’s a great question, I can’t even come close to an answer, and please start asking the Town about this. This has the sound of one of those decisions that might (e.g.) be made by Fairfax County months before we even know there’s a decision to be made.  It would be nice to think that the Town of Vienna was on the case and acting on our behalf.

Sidewalk closure on the west end of Maple will (e.g.) inconvenience students walking to Madison.  If 444 closes the sidewalks,  students walking to Madison from my neighborhood will first have to walk away from Madison (to Nutley/Courthouse or to Maple/Pleasant HAWK light), cross the road, and the continue to Madison.  Not the end of the world, but clearly a disincentive to walking.

Continue reading Post #235: Please keep the sidewalks open

Post #228: Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study

For those of you who are already confused, merely by the title, I’m talking about the Maple Avenue traffic study.  That official title is why I keep referring to it as the (thing formerly known as the) Maple Avenue traffic study.  For the official title, I literally cannot remember all the buzzwords in the correct order.

I’m eventually going to have a lot to say about this, but here I’m just going to say two things.  First, the study, as scoped, is fundamentally inconsistent.  Briefly, if taken at face value 1) it’s impossible to predict traffic 10 years ahead, so we’re not going to do that and instead 2) we’re going to talk about “multi-modal strategies” that could only have significant impact decades into the future.  Second, I’m going to do my own analysis of these issues.  That part will take a while.

Continue reading Post #228: Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study

Post 226: #closethecurbcutsnow

The Town has made much about closing curb cuts (parking lot entrances) along Maple, under MAC.  And the consultants for the (thing formerly known as the) Maple Avenue traffic study (post #223) duly echoed this with extended reference to the many curb cuts on Maple.

At various times, these curb cuts have been blamed for a) slowing traffic, b) increasing vehicular accident rates, and c) endangering pedestrians on the sidewalk.  For the moment, let me put aside truth versus fiction in these claims, and ask a simple question:

If these Maple Avenue curb cuts are such a clear public menace, why hasn’t the Town already started getting rid of them?   The Town owns the sidewalk.  How can our elected officials idly stand by, when the menace of excess curb cuts stalks the Town, threatening our prosperity and our very lives?

That was sarcasm.  But it’s a legit question.  It’s a question that I naively asked.  Seriously, if curb cuts are so bad, why don’t they close some of them? And the answer to that shows you exactly how proponents of MAC zoning will tell you only what they want you to hear. And not the full story.

After some research, my conclusion is that, practically speaking, the only way the Town can close a curb cut is to stuff a whole bunch of high-density housing on the lot behind it (i.e., MAC rezoning).  And so, the only practical way to close a curb cut is to have a more people  turning on and off of Maple, during the rush hour periods.

Once you figure that out, then it’s clear that the full effect of “closing curb cuts on Maple” is not the rosy picture painted by the Town.  You have to pay for that curb cut closure by adding to traffic turning on and off Maple.  Anyone who tells you that “getting rid of curb cuts” is an unalloyed positive for the Town is pulling your leg.  To put it politely.

In fact, I’ll up the ante on this.  If a property owner voluntarily agreed to allow it,  the Town could close a Maple Avenue curb cut.  So, with all the mayhem now being attributed to curb cuts, has the Town done anything at all about them?  Has the Town systematically pressured Maple Avenue property owners about closing Maple Avenue curb cuts?   Has it offered (e.g.) a property tax incentive for closing off curb cuts?   Has it identified the ones apparently associated with high accident rates and developed policies targeting those specific locations?

In short, if this is such a problem, then has the Town done anything whatsoever to address it?  Other than to use it to flack MAC?

Detail follows.

Continue reading Post 226: #closethecurbcutsnow