DDOT hosted the 4th public meeting on the New York Avenue Trail last month and there are a few changes since the July meeting, including a change in the already-installed 4th Street cycletrack.
One of the biggest changes is in the arrangement of the area north of NYAve. In July the bike facility was placed between the tree boxes and the sidewalk and now it is farther from the street, with the sidewalk between it and the tree boxes as is shown in the rendering above. This will result in a mixing space at 4th and New York, whereas before, the bike facility continued west. The new design is on top and the old one on bottom.
New design
Old design
This allows for a redesign of the intersection of 16th and NYAve that allows for the bike facility to stay behind the sidewalk instead of mixing as was done previously.
At the intersection of 3rd and M, there was an unusual set of sharrows to let cyclists know how to navigate the intersection where the cycletrack moves from one side of the street to the other, but that has been removed.
Along 4th Street from Morse to NYAve the plan was to add sharrows, but that's now listed as an interim design with a protected bike lane (PBL) as the ultimate design. The new design also removes a connection from 4th to the old rail spur to Morse.
West Virginia Ave has been changed too. In the old design, it had a raised two-way cycle track on the north side between 16th and New York and now it has a pair of one-way cycle tracks on each side at street level (which was an identified alternative in the old design). That change also comes with a removal of the path across the south half-circle at Montana.
New Circle
Old Circle
The new design also identifies a "potential future bike facility" on the south side of NYAve from Montana to Blandesburg and bike lanes (instead of sharrows) on T Street east of Blandensburg Road.
Finally, the new design adds some sidewalks to 24th south of S and potential interim bike facilities on Montana and S Street.
But these changes in most cases are small, and the trail will fundamentally perform the same way. It will connect to the MBT in three places - on street at M Street, via stairs on the south side of NYAvenue and via a ramp on the north side on NYAve.
It will proved 5365 linear feet of separated bicycle facilities and the bike facility on NYAve will get its own lighting. It will also realign some bus stops, remove a few trees and plant over 300 more and add storm water management elements to the area.
DDOT is still moving its way through the process which will include future studies of the New York Avenue/Montana Avenue intersection (which I hope will recommend a name for that circle) and of a Bladensburg Road to South Dakota Multimodal
Connection.
They've identified 6 phases, but not when or which order in which to do them. A final report on
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