By Scott Corzine
Alexandria’s transportation model is out of balance and likely to get worse. Why is it complicated?
We are the most densely populated independent city in Virginia. Our strategy is to further densify. Urbanists seem to favor public transportation, bicycles and scooters to get around. Anti-urbanists generally want to drive their cars with the expectation of reasonable traffic flow and space near their homes to park their cars. Both seem reasonable.
Alexandria’s geography, proximity to the federal ecosystem and income distribution all influence where our workforce travels and how they get there. We’re a unique combination of small town, progressive city, suburb, Washington bedroom community and tourist destination.
Each puts a different kind of demand on our transportation and parking infrastructure. Alexandria is a “through route” for regional commuters, further pressuring our transportation frailties, as anyone who has traveled Duke Street or who has been anywhere near the Gibbon Street gridlock in the afternoon rush knows.
Alexandria grew by incrementally annexing neighborhoods to the north and west without ever developing a transportation system that adequately connected these neighborhoods by widening obsolete arterial roads. Our essential east-west options are narrow, slow and congested much of the time and gridlocked often.
It is doubtful that the “Duke Street in Motion” plan will meaningfully improve movement if the residential density planned along that route overwhelms transportation capacity. We have never built an effective “by-pass” system that routes north-south commuter through traffic around our city center and congested intersections.
Within this complicated transit environment, we seem to be in a zero-sum “bicycle versus automobile” standoff. Bicycle proponents prevail at the expense of drivers, based on policy decisions of City Council and recommendations of the Traffic and Parking Board. These usually result in the cumulative addition of bike lanes, accomplished through road diets that slow traffic further and often eliminate parking.
The result of all this is that Alexandria’s transportation mix is out of equilibrium and needs significant remediation. As density increases, our transportation and parking crisis will only worsen.
We need to develop and execute a responsible plan that moves traffic better through Alexandria. It is foolish to hope that we can compel people facing real transit constraints to change how they choose to get around. It is equally foolish to base consequential policy on unscientific bicycle enthusiast surveys, which suffer from inherent ascertainment and sampling bias.
The argument that connecting disparate bike lanes into an interconnected regional system will result in a surge of usage is an unsupported postulate, since it is impractical for most workers commuting out of Alexandria to use a bicycle.
To address our transportation disequilibrium, we should adopt evidence-based, data-driven policies based on demonstrated demand and utilization that support the reasonable needs of both bikers and drivers. Alexandria’s strategy to build bike lanes and let bikers come strikes me as an ideology-based strategy that seems reverse engineered to a preferred outcome that many reasonably oppose, rather than evidence-based policymaking.
Casual observation shows a dearth or absence of bikers on many bike lanes during different times of the day across the city. That indicates that we probably have too aggressively narrowed streets to accommodate underutilized bike lanes – a consequence of our current mobility plan.
Alexandria will never see an Amsterdam level of bicycle usage with a 27% share of trips. As much as policymakers and enthusiasts may want our city to be biking-centric, only 4% of workers who responded to an Alexandria city survey made any work trips in the last week by bike and only 3% had used Capital Bikeshare. Fifty-two percent had driven alone to commute in the last week, 8% had carpooled and 6% had used a taxi or rideshare service.
Let’s develop empirical evidence to either refute or support these findings. It would be simple and inexpensive to have traffic analysts sit along routes and intersections being considered for bike lanes – or where they already are – and count the cars and bikes that go by. It would also be inexpensive to hire traffic engineers to use in-road sensors, or above-ground microwave, infrared, laser or acoustic detectors to measure vehicles and bikers along routes of interest.
If gaggles of bikers are observed contending for space, it may make an empirical case for considering a bike lane, if the traffic efficiency and safety impacts don’t outweigh it. If we scientifically observe, on the other hand, that a great majority of the traffic is vehicular or that a bike lane somewhere is impractical, dangerous or likely to be underutilized, policymakers then have the basis to vote based on empirical data rather than political pressure, personal preferences or ideology.
Transitioning to an evidence-based policy approach is fundamental to rebalancing our transportation model in a way that meets the reasonable mobility needs of all Alexandrians.
Scott Corzine is the chair of the Alexandria Federation of Civic Associations.
The post The Neighborhood Perspective with Scott Corzine: Our transportation model needs surgery appeared first on Alexandria Times.
