Road Diet and Humble Pie
The noise, inconvenience and traffic cones are gone from the section of Lawyer’s Road that went on a diet and I have to say . . . it’s great. Granted, I don’t commute daily on this road, so I’m not going to suffer as much as the commuters who are all in a hurry to get to the 2-lane bottleneck. And I haven’t tried to turn left or right out of my street with a lot of traffic each way, so I reserve judgment on that. And I’m sure the most obnoxious of the pack bicyclists will still be their cheerful selves. But, it occurred to me as I drove on it yesterday that in the winter when my kids are standing on the verge of Lawyers Road awaiting a school bus in the dark, there will now be a bike lane between them and the cars, giving them a little more room for safety. The turning lanes added at Steeplechase and Soapstone are wonderful too.
I guess the only thing left to complain about is that I still don’t like the way RA assumed they could speak for those residents who live over here and say “yes”. It isn’t as if DOT was going to stop the project based on RA’s opinion. It was just more of RA showing it has some authority over us in an area where they have none at all.
So I’m eating humble pie and enjoying the nice new road.
The part I like best is that I can observe a respectable speed limit of 35 mph and there is nothing the jack-asses behind me can do about it. It only takes a few people going a safe speed and Randy Dittberner of VDOT won’t even have to do his traffic study. 35 mph will be the new speed limit. Cyclists stand a much better chance of surviving an impact at the lower speed.
The travel lane seems much narrower and the bike lane seems very narrow, more like 3 ft wide than 5 ft wide. I miss being able to go into the left lane to give the cyclists lots of room.
I would have rather had a raised median strip than the middle turn lane. I have yet to drive Lawyers in the dark, or in the rain in the dark, or in an ice storm. As my old friend used to say, the proof is in the pudding.
Kathy, the speed limit is and was 45 for most of the stretch from Fox Mill to Pony Lane.
That said, there is a certain amount of mental retraining that needs to occur. As I drove at the speed limit near the Steeplechase intersection yesterday, a person in a BMW sportscar was climbing up my tailpipe. This is obviously someone used to the old traffic pattern who was frustrated he couldn’t slip into the ‘fast’ lane. So perhaps a little speed/courtesy enforcement will help that learning curve along.
And as someone who can’t get in or out of our street without turning onto Lawyer’s I can say I’m extremely glad they didn’t do a raised median. At least with this arrangement I can be in a turn lane to go home rather than sitting in the left (FAST) lane hoping someone’s not so distracted by their cell phone conversation they’ll rear-end me!
I’ve drive it at night several times now. The markings are so bright they’re lovely and clear and make it easy to navigate. No rain/dark or ice yet.
I concur with southlakesmom. In my native Scranton, PA there were often violent rear-end collisions caused when distracted drivers (or drivers blinded by the sun) suddenly came upon someone stopped directly ahead of them waiting to turn left in the passing lane. I was the victim of one of these back in 2005, and more recently a man was killed trying to turn his vintage car left into a restaurant parking lot when an elderly woman coming down the steep hill in an SUV behind him in the left-hand lane didn’t see him in time and struck him, causing his car to burst into flames as he was burned alive in front of a crowd of shocked onlookers (including family) at a festival in the restaurant’s parking lot. I can rattle off many other tragedies as well that could have been prevented if there was a median left-hand turning lane instead of just expecting people to always stop in the passing lane as people are trying to make left-hand turns. There is still concern about some impatient motorists (such as the BMW tailgating you) potentially using the center lane to PASS, only to hit oncoming traffic attempting to turn left head-on at a high rate of speed, but no matter what the configuration there’s still going to be the propensity for erratic driving. Heck, I used to work for Lowe’s Home Improvement and witnessed numerous moderate accidents in our PARKING LOT, which is supposed to be “low speed!”