DDOT presents new designs for Southeast Boulevard/L Street SE/Barney Circle

DDOT has been planning to convert the highway stub from 11th Street SE to Barney Circle with a "boulevard" that would include a bike path since before the 11th Street Bridge project began. And despite the reopening of an interim road in its place, they still are. 

From a biking perspective, the changing designs have largely been a non-issue. In early 2013, they held a scoping meeting and the rough vision included sidepaths along the boulevard and new possible connections between Hill East and the Anacosita. The concepts presented 6 months later, placed a sidepath along the boulevard, a bike path in the center of Barney Circle and sidepaths around the ouside of it, and provided new bike crossings at 13th, 14th and 15th Street SE; but that design was unpopular because of the road design. In July of this year, the office of planning came out with its own concepts that kept all of these features, though one concept had none of the connects and some had connections at 16th as well. In addition the new designs looked greener with more park-like space. 

Fast forward to this fall and the office of planning has released progress designs (a better presentation is here). These designs show three concepts. All include a bike path along the entire boulevard, sometimes in the middle and sometimes on the river side; a Barney Circle with a bike path in the middle and sidepaths on the outside; connections between Hill East and the river at 13th, 14th and 15th; and (now) green-painted bike lanes as visible in the illustrative rendering above. In two concepts, 16th connects to Southeast Boulevard, but not to the Anacostia. 

For cyclists, Concept C might be the most different, but the center path and its frequent road crossings will be less appealing than L Street or the path along the river side for through-cyclists. 

Concept A places buildings between L Street and SE Blvd. 

 

Concept B consolidates the lanes of SE Blvd and L Street into a new L Street, with the buildings in what would be the median. It also keeps a new connection at 16th Street.

 

Concept C replaces the buildings in the median with a park, has a SE Blvd separate from L Street like in Concept A, and keeps the 16th Street connection from B. It also has differently styled connections down to M Street.

All the concepts would connect at 13th and M to a new bike/ped only Virginia Ave SE from M Street to the waterfront. It also appears that there is another connection through the to-be-built 1333 M Street SE development. 

In the meantime, DDOT is planning to reopen the "interim" Southeast Blvd, which doesn't appear to have any bike lanes, sidewalks or paths. 

Comments

[Bryan]

All the work that went into creating these plans, and yet they still only through in some "door zone" painted bike lanes almost as an afterthought. Planners need to give bike infrastructure 21 century treatment when making these sort of grand designs since biking will enviably rise in the future as car dependence declines.

[washcycle]

There's also a parallel MUP.

[Bryan]

The problem with MUPs (which are really just nice sidewalks) is the fact that you are now mixing high speed bikes (relatively speaking) with slow moving pedestrians who do not look behind themselves before turning (and why should they if they are on a sidewalk). And adding any more than a few pedestrians to makes biking at any normal speed impossible (try biking the Mall during warm weather). Cars need streets, bikes need protected bikeways, and people need sidewalks. Any mixing of these should be the exception, not the rule.

[washcycle]

A 12-foot wide MUP with no grade crossings is an extraordinarily nice sidewalk (I mean a "protected bikeway" is just a really nice sidewalk no?) While biking the Mall might be tough, people seem to manage to use the CCT and MVT for transportation pretty consistently.

But perhaps a Bikeway would be a better option. It wouldn't even require that much more space than the bike lanes do.

[dynaryder]

The problem with MUPs is they're limited access. CCT is fine for going from G'town to Bethesda,but there's only a couple places to get off. Proper on-street bike facilities allow access to everything.

[DE]

That section of the CCT is not representative of multi-use paths since it goes through the Delecarlia water supply area, but even so, there are more than a couple of places to get on or off. Even along Potomac Avenue, where there is strangely no access bikable on a road bike, there's still access.

So, 1) it's hard to think of them being overly limited access in general, and 2) to the degree that they are limited access, there isn't any great disadvantage for most of them (that section of the CCT notwithstanding). It could even be argued that fewer access points improves safety. I greatly prefer riding on them to almost any on-street facility I've seen in the U.S., although I do tend to avoid them on nice weekends, for the reason that Bryan states. They're not perfect because of the mixed use, but it seems unlikely that we'll ever have bike boulevards here. Obviously they're not appropriate for high-speed training or group rides.