Baby steps toward new urbanism

The City Council has shown that it will spend money on new urbanist projects.  It is about to commit itself to investing millions of dollars to the Seaholm redevelopment.  It's spent who knows how much just planning for transit-oriented development around Cap Metro's commuter rail stations; it will take millions in infrastructure investment to spur the development the city wants.  Then there are Mueller and the Domain.  New urbanism can be expensive, but Council is willing to spend the dough.

Let me suggest my own new urbanist project (again).  It might not be as glitzy as the ones listed above, but I think it will yield a good return on investment (and I'm pretty sure that Andres Duany would approve):

Break up the super-blocks on South Congress and South Lamar.

Neither street may appear to have many super-blocks if you go solely by nominal block length.  The nominal block lengths are misleading, though.  When a street carries 38,000+ cars a day (S. Lamar) or 30,000+ cars a day (S. Congress), it is almost impossible to walk across it without a traffic light or signaled cross-walk.  The effective block length is the distance between street lights.  (And, no, the pedestrian "islands" on S. Congress made of giant tinker-toys don't count.)

Here are three of the South Lamar super-blocks:

• Lamar Square to Hether/W. Mary:  0.45 miles
• Oltorf to Bluebonnet:  0.45 miles
• Barton Skyway to Panther Trail:  0.54 miles

If you want to cross the street from the middle of one of these super-blocks, you have three choices:  (1) walk at least 0.4 miles out of your way to cross at a light; (2) dash into the center turn lane and hope you aren't run over before the traffic slows to a trickle; or (3) don't cross the street.

These aren't suburban frontage roads; these are South Austin's core streets and the gateways to downtown.  It is absurd for the city to treat them simply as commuter arterials. 

I'm not arguing that the City should interfere with rush-hour traffic; these are important commuter arterials.  Feel free to synchronize the new lights to maintain traffic flow.  But it's time to recognize that these streets serve not only commuters, they serve -- or ought to serve -- pedestrians as well.  Let's pick some of the low-hanging fruit.

Comments

[snowed in]

Given that the city of Austin hasn't figured out how to synchronize most of their signals now, I doubt that adding any more will help with traffic flow. Plus, we both know that flow of traffic on Lamar especially is generally quite a bit higher than the 40/45 posted, except for those mornings where Mopac has a wreck and everybody moves to Lamar, backing both it and Manchaca up dreadfully. Then, the new lights will really not help.

Now, if we really wanted to have a pie-in-the-sky proposal, I'd love to see some aesthetically pleasing pedestrian bridges in those areas, but that's not going to happen, especially given the city's current transit focus toward north Austin/central Austin/anywhere-except-south Austin.

[AC]

When S. Lamar backs up, it's almost always due to a bottleneck at the bridge, not the lights between Manchaca and Riverside.

I don't have to go down Manchaca, so I can't speak to traffic jams there.

[M1EK]

si, the city has indeed "figured out how to 'synchronize'" (sequence is a better word) - the problem is that it's not the silver bullet the suburban motorist thinks it is. Try Guadalupe/Lavaca sometime - keep a steady 25, and the lights will usually open up for you.

You can't do that to more than a couple roads in a large area, though, or overall traffic flow actually goes _down_, and 2-way streets are a lot harder to sequence; and anywhere near a highway frontage road is completely out.

AC, the reason they don't want to put signals up is that the streets don't meet any of the signal warrants, and our engineers are a bit risk-averse on using their forward-seeing judgement, for obvious reasons (hysterical local politics). Unfortunately, the warrants in use here are nearly impossible to meet for pedestrian traffic - and they won't take into account future pedestrian traffic concentration.

[M1EK]

BTW, one of the first items I pushed at the UTC back in 2000-2001 was an attempt to get signals put on most of the remaining downtown blocks that didn't already have them, on the theory that it was safer for pedestrians, and that it would improve traffic flow and even safety for drivers (we still had a few 2-way stops back then in surprising places - not just the minor N/S streets with 5th/6th, I mean; and of course 4-way stops aren't much better).

Got nowhere. Brick wall.

Turns out the only real sure-fire way to get a signal is for a bunch of people to get killed in a couple different accidents. That warrant, sad to say, is pretty easy to meet.

[AC]

Yeah, I was about to say, I remember the thing that lit the fire for the Pfluger bridge was a pedestrian death on the South Lamar bridge. I won't push for that particular solution here . . .

[Martin]

Austin actually supposedly have pretty good sequencing for lights:
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/news/2007/traffic_report_card.htm
I think this is a great idea AC. Its too bad most people (as the posts reflect too) immediately think what this means for cars instead of pedestrians. Further proof that its hard to get out of the mindset of designing cities for cars instead of people no matter how hard we try.

[bittergradstudent]

I would also like if they would make south austin less horrid for bicycles. One of the three of S. Lamar, S. 1st or S. Congress should have a bike lane of some sort that connects to a bridge. South Austin is damn close to downtown, and it would be (and is) very easy for a lot of people to forego their cars for bikes. The city should make this easier, rather than make it so that bicyclists constantly feel under siege and get all aggressive (not that there' isn't a lot of stupid bicycle behavior, but still..)

[snowed in]

Martin, the cars are already here, and they're not going away anytime soon. Any improvements to the areas mentioned must take the existing traffic into account. You're not going to make one or two small improvements that convince all the drivers to instantly abandon their vehicles and walk everywhere (especially not with a city laid out as Austin is), but with the wrong choices, you can fairly easily make a lot of residents angry. I'm just saying that anyone planning improvements to the S. Lamar/S. Congress areas needs to think of everyone affected and weigh the importance of the issues.

And no, AC, I'm not saying you didn't think about it...you obviously did. However, there have definitely been decisions made in Austin that only considered pedestrians, while ignoring the elephant of existing traffic. For example: as I recall, the aforementioned Pfluger bridge, while certainly helpful for many, was put in place instead of an improved (six-lane, I believe) Lamar bridge. Now, was something needed for pedestrians? Obviously. But by making absolutely no improvements to Lamar, Austin basically took the "let's ignore it and maybe it'll go away" stance toward vehicle traffic that has characterized its planning for most of the past two decades.

[M1EK]

snowed in, there was no credible evidence that a 6-lane Lamar bridge would do more good than harm - you've got to get over this reflexive road warriorism. Unless you were then going to demolish all the traffic generators on Lamar north of the river to make room for the extra two lanes to continue, which kind of begs the point, you'd have to believe that there's a lane worth of traffic each way headed down to or up from Cesar Chavez, and that's obviously not the case.

The bridge appears to be the bottleneck sometimes - but just as often it's the 5th/6th intersection or even 12th/Enfield. Believe you me, if the case could have been made for a 6-lane bridge on traffic grounds, somebody would have done so with actual numbers (there's more than enough guys on city staff who share that ideological bent).

BTW, that bike/ped bridge sucks because it doesn't go all the way back to 5th/Lamar; but if it did, it'd be a godsend to motorists. I used to ride my bike on the vehicle bridge all the time - even after the b/d bridge was built; sometimes slowing down cars when I did; and that wouldn't be an issue if the b/p bridge had been built as originally planned. As it stands today it's mainly a recreation facility, but it still carries a lot more people during rush hour than does the car bridge (seriously!)

[snowed in]

Don't get me wrong, Mike...I'd love to see opportunities open up that would allow me to use my car less. Unfortunately, I have a job in which I have to drive to different sites around town, and driving pretty much anywhere near downtown after 3:30 pretty much makes me want to pull my hair out, due to all the traffic and the terrible lack of capacity (and the general dearth of Lady Bird Lake crossings). You're right, of course, in that fixing the bridge wouldn't be a panacea, but at this point, every little bit would help.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't any improvements to that portion of Lamar be in TxDOT's court? It is still part of Loop 343, after all.

[M1EK]

Last I remember, Loop 343 starts at Barton Springs and heads south. There's a web interface to the TXDOT route system which I always forget to bookmark and don't have handy right now...

We're never going to return to the time when it was easy to drive in/out of downtown. Best we can do is provide some alternative ways to get there, so more people can get in/out of downtown.

[snowed in]

http://www.dot.state.tx.us/TPP/search/query.htm

According to TxDOT, Loop 343 consists of Cesar Chavez from I-35 to Lamar, then Lamar south to Ben White.

I personally like the idea someone floated over at Ben Wear's light-rail blog entry from this morning (I'm sure you have a comment or two waiting in queue, Mike) of using the rail lines near Manchaca Rd. for mass transit. (Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken, that line has already been claimed for the Austin-SA commuter rail, which probably wouldn't help in-town commuters much.)

[M1EK]

That seems very out of date - I don't believe CC is still state-maintained even between Lamar and I-35, but I suppose it's the best info we've got... (it would seem that TXDOT would have wanted some input on the 2-way changes, for instance; and they don't even address the current 1-way split - which would require Loop 343 to be on either 2nd or 3rd heading westbound for some distance).

I'll be blogging about the rail proposal tomorrow after I go to the meeting tonight. No point in commenting at Wear's site; it'd get lost in the flood.