Good news for transit & Cedar Shoals Rd

Some good news for a change...

The commission voted last night to slightly increase the property tax. Some of the revenue generated will be used to increase transit service to the eastside and Atlanta Hwy ($190K).

Also during the meeting, the Commission voted to convert Cedar Shoals Rd to 3 traffic lanes with a center turn lane. With the remaining space on the sides of the road, bicycle lanes will be striped.
Aside from adding safe and equitable bicycle infrastructure, the reconfiguration, slated to occur this summer, will prevent "some of the 54 collisions a year on Cedar Shoals Drive," and "traffic will continue to flow smoothly with three lanes," according to traffic engineering studies.

Details on the meeting and votes available via the ABH here.

Local roads up for reconfiguration

Also from today's Banner-Herald, some important news about road reconfigurations:

Lane revamps advised for busy Athens roads

Athens-Clarke transportation officials say changing lane configurations on three busy Athens roads will make them safer.

Part of Hawthorne Avenue will return to four lanes and Cedar Shoals drive will switch to three lanes, while most of North Avenue will remain five lanes if the Athens-Clarke Commission follows the advice of the county Transportation and Public Works Department.

Full article via link above.

The article does not indicate whether Cedar Shoals will have bike lanes added as part of its potential re-striping to three lanes, but normally that occurs when a street transitions from four to three lanes.

Certainly, the current bicycle lanes on Hawthorne are not an ideal width and are poorly maintained, but their presence creates a valuable safety buffer, both for cyclists and for pedestrians. Hawthorne also serves as a valuable connector for the Oglethorpe and Alps Rd bicycle lanes. Removing them is moving us away from an interconnected network of bicycle lanes.
While the frustration with congestion is understandable, congestion is a result of excessive car dependency. By going backwards in our transportation planning- doing all we can to accommodate the rapid flow of automobiles and eliminating transportation choices- we are guaranteeing further congestion.

Transportation news from Flagpole

Lots of useful news for BikeAthens supporters in this week's Flagpole.

More on the potential for 3-laning Cedar Shoals Drive and North Avenue:

County staffers are not making any recommendation “at this point” on whether to three-lane either street, traffic engineer Steve Decker says. “We are studying all the streets, taking regular traffic data… we don’t even plan to make a recommendation at the meeting; we want to hear what the people have to say,” he says. Without having traffic counts at hand, Decker guesses volumes on both streets to be under the 20,000 cars per day that is considered to be a practical maximum for three-lane streets.

Plus, discussion of GDOT's current budget crunch and new Director:

GDOT has sometimes frustrated local citizens and elected officials in picking which projects to fund, and typically favors expensive road-building and road-widening projects over cheaper sidewalk or bicycle facilities. Adding trees or crosswalks along a state- or federally-numbered road (like Prince or Milledge avenues) usually involves a tug-of-war with the agency, which sees roadside trees as a safety hazard and doesn’t like to see traffic slowed down along the routes that it maintains.
But ... constant local pressure on GDOT, from elected officials and county staffers, has helped to change the agency.

See the link above for both articles in their entirety.
Thanks to reporter John Huie and Flagpole for covering these issues!

ABH: "Three-lane plans to be discussed"

From the Banner-Herald:

The county Transportation and Public Works Department has scheduled a public hearing later this month to talk about repaving Cedar Shoals Drive and North Avenue. Part of the discussion will focus on whether to change those roads' configurations to three lanes.

North Avenue, a commercial corridor that's the busier of the two, now is five lanes and probably less likely to change.

"We have growth going on in that area, which means we're bringing automobiles into the community," said Commissioner Harry Sims, who represents the area. "The way it's set up now, we can move people into Athens and move them out."

On Cedar Shoals Drive, a mix of homes and businesses where traffic is lighter, there may be more opportunity for improvement.

County government policy calls for commissioners to consider whether to restripe wide roads to three lanes - two travel lanes, a center turn lane and often bicycle lanes and sidewalks - whenever those roads are repaved, usually about once a decade. Traffic experts say three-lane roads usually are safer than four lanes because they prevent accidents while cars are turning left, but in some cases, drivers complain about bottlenecks.

For anyone who wasn't around for the tragic Prince debacle, this 3-laning discussion will prompt some unfortunate ugliness. Restriping has worked beautifully on Baxter and Lumpkin, making both roads much safer for pedestrians, cyclists, and cars.

Baxter St Lane Conversion Featured in Engineering Article

The conversion of Baxter Street from 4 - Lanes to 3 - Lanes was
featured as part of a larger article regarding the concept of Road Diets
in this month's edition of the "ITE Journal" (the monthly publication from the
Institute of Transportation Engineers). Baxter Street was one of six
streets highlighted in a recently published book, "Road Diet Handbook:
Setting Trends for Livable Streets," documenting the process and results communities
have followed in converting four lane streets to three lanes in the past
few years. Transportation & Public Works staff worked closely with the
researcher to convey [their] experiences with the concept of road diets and
[their] successes and failures in implementing them on several streets since 1999.
The book was recently awarded the ITE Past Presidents' Award for Merit in
Transportation Engineering.

- from "The Week that Was" - an ACC publication covering weekly goings-on within the government