DDOT's Congestion Management Study identifies areas where more bike facilities are needed

Last year, the DC Council requested that DDOT perform a congestion management study and last week, they delivered the final report of that study. Martin Di Caro writes

D.C. transportation officials are embarking on a five-year project to redefine congestion management, moving away from focusing solely on automobile traffic to creating a “multi-modal” analysis with measures to improve travel across every mode that clogs the roads and sidewalks: cars, buses, bikes, and walking. The new approach makes sense for a city in which fewer than half the residents commute by car.

DDOT researchers identified 10 corridors, each with multiple challenges, from bus route congestion to lack of bicycle accessibility. For instance, ...14^th Street Northwest has... a “high stress” bike lane network

The report has some interesting facts and figures, such as this image on mode share.

Unfortunately, this map of mode share by neighborhood, groups bikes with taxis and "other" making it kind of useless. And the percentiles aren't granular enough to show where bike commuters live and where they don't.

Bike commuters have some of the shortest commutes, and shorter by average

The remaining study  for bicycling deals with the Capital Bikeshare Walkshed (how much of the city is in walking distance of a bikeshare station) and mapping the district's streets for Bicycle Level of traffic Stress. The Bikeshare map isn't particularly surprising, nor are the conclusions that there are more kiosks in the central part of the city than in the residential parts or that the stations follow the pattern of Metro lines.

The level of stress analysis shows, surprisingly, that Wards 2 and 6 have the highest percentage of high stress streets, and Wards 4, 7 and 8 the lowest. They also showed that not enough bridges have facilities for cyclists (other than sidewalks) and that most major arterials are high stress. In some cases I might differ. For example, part of Pennsylvania Avenue EOTR has a nice sidepath (because they couldn't get a bike lane in) and so that's low stress if your going SE, but it's ranked as LTS 4.

All of this feeds into a combined map of all issues residents and visitors have accessing and using non-automobile roads (see map at the top of post) and then the 10 Focus areas mentioned by Di Caro. Of those 6 have bicycle accessibility issues. [Note 6 and 7 on the map aremlabelled incorrectly/reversed, and they're also mislabeled in table 8 in the report)

Those 6, and the actions that may address the bicycle issues, are

• 14th Street - 14th Street Streetscape Construction
• Downtown (H Street and I Street) - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• South Dakota Ave NE - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• New York Avenue - Trail and streetscape studies
• West End/Foggy Bottom - Access feasibility and implementation of protected bike lanes
• Eastside Multimodal crossing - Bike bridge over rail and river trails  (Not sure what this is referring to) 

Comments

[drumz]

Re: H/I street

My own personal experience (here and abroad) says that for the most part combined bus/bike lanes work out pretty well. When my commute demanded it, I loved taking 7th street and its bus lane in the mornings just because I had the lane to myself most days since and it wasn't a problem for buses to pass me.

This could probably work for H/I streets if we installed contraflow bus lanes and then let bikes use that as well.

More radical (for DC) would be to just have bike and bus lanes on the same street but that might be asking too much (though it already exists kind of on 9th street).