Late last month DDOT issued the final report for the Downtown West Transportation Study which looked at improvements to H Street NW and Pennsylvania Ave NW west of New York Avenue.
Each of the draft designs for Pennsylvania included a protected bike lane for the length of the road. In the first two designs there were bike lanes on each side of the street and in the third there was a bi-directional bike lane on the south side of the street. The first two were differentiated by either a simple buffer or a landscaped buffer. The study recommends the buffered lanes on each side.
Where there are bus stops, the buffer will widen to put the cycle track between the bus stop and the sidewalk.
In front of the Mexican Embassy, things get a little more complicated. In order to allow for double right turn lanes, the cycle track narrows to 5.5 feet, with a narrower buffer and on the south side it ramps up to the sidewalk grade on one end of the block and back down to street level at the other. There is also a separate signal phase for cyclists at 19th Street.
H Street would get a contra-flow bus lane, but it's not stated that bikes would be allowed to use it. I assume not. They do note that
As part of the preliminary engineering phase for the H Street NW bus lane, DDOT will evaluate the feasibility of a bicycle connection on H Street NW, with a particular focus on the 15th Street NW cycle track connection between 15th Street NW and Vermont Avenue NW.
The Pennsylvania Ave redesign would cost $33M and H Street would be $1.14M.
Here's a presentation of the final design.
All of the submitted comments were in favor of the cycle tracks, but I felt I needed to share this part from the meeting notes.
One participant did not believe that implementing a bike lane would be worthwhile because not enough cyclists would use the route. At the other end of the spectrum, another participant believed that a two way, 20’ cycle track should be placed in the center of the street.
I do hope there is some sort of White House free connection . I don't know if I'm unlucky or not but using Pennsylvania avenue on a bike has gotten really, really unreliable thanks to sudden closures (that aren't always obvious otherwise I would have maybe gone a different way entirely).
It's great when its there but when it's not then options get bad really quickly. Building in redundancy would help a lot.
Posted by: drumz | October 05, 2017 at 09:08 AM
Every afternoon for two weeks it has been closed when I go through, so it's not just you.
Posted by: DE | October 05, 2017 at 09:57 AM
Wait---$33 million for a 0.6 mile/1 km segment of protected bike lanes?
That's insane but I guess is in line with how the 2.4 mile streetcar cost $200 million, which is what some other countries spend on full subways.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-construction-costs/
We have to do better!
Posted by: xmal | October 05, 2017 at 11:29 AM
It's more than just the protected bike lane. It's a complete rebuild of the street. The big ticket items are full depth pavement, utility relocation, SWM pipes and structures and intersection signal reconstruction.
Posted by: Washcycle | October 05, 2017 at 12:09 PM
The roadway has to be strong enough to support the tanks and missile launchers.
Posted by: Crickey | October 05, 2017 at 05:57 PM
Ok, thanks for the clarification. Hopefully we won't have to do those kinds of rebuilds everywhere in the district!
(Though just checked and DDOT is the biggest part of the capital budget at around $0.5B and 35% of the total)
Posted by: xmal | October 06, 2017 at 12:01 PM
The White House alternative has to remain H St I think.
Hopefully west bound cyclists will be allowed to use the contra-flow bus lane.
Posted by: Jeffb | October 07, 2017 at 07:03 PM