Tag Archives: car

How do you get there?

From the pipeline I mentioned…

Splitting pairs

I’ve written once before about traffic flow through Shepherdstown — only as an idea for managing congestion on Halloween night. The suggestion involves a traffic pattern where through-town east and west bound traffic each has a one-way street: Washington for those going east and German for those going west*. While mentioned only as a lark, I did receive a comment implying that the suggestion might be permanent. A number of towns in America have patterns of traffic like this: it is called a “split pair”.

That Halloween night idea was not to increase the capacity of the roadway but the sidewalks. What a split pair for vehicles does best is better manage flow and conflicts. Street grids with one-way patterns help manage traffic conflicts by reducing left turns across traffic. Left turns are like right turns and joining a one way flow is easier. Crossing a one-way flow is easier.

Split pairs are found everywhere in all manner of variations. And, in the end, a true split pair in my mind makes little sense for Shepherdstown traffic flow and would almost certainly have a negative impact on the character of the town. Small variations on the idea are perhaps worth exploring. (I won’t expound on these now.) Can vehicles move through town more efficiently without sacrificing pedestrian comfort?

On road capacity

Traffic planners have attempted to solve problems of traffic flow by adding road capacity. Anyone who travels regularly to the District of Columbia (DC) will question the success of this approach. As an alternative, some cities are addressing in-town congestion by decreasing road capacity.

These places have learned that “if you build it, [vehicles] will come” so why not build less? Provide less space for cars within the city and the number of vehicles entering self-adjusts. Fewer people will drive. Other means of moving people need to be in place for this to work but that adjustment does have one significant benefit: it removes cars from the roads that feed into the city — without changing capacity, traffic moves more freely†.

A smaller scale

But what of small scale Shepherdstown. It has the opposite problem. The Potomac River bridge, 45, 480 and 230 are not going to four-lanes any time soon. Congestion has increased in town without an increase in road capacity feeding into town. One might argue that congestion on the feeders has increased but congestion is not the same as increased use.

Everyone in town knows where the choke points are. Jefferson County and the State of West Virginia are concerned with one of them: the Four Way Stop.

Splitting traffic into two or more paths is simply a component in a distributed grid. Envisioning solutions for expansion to the west side of town might begin to satisfy many concerns of disparate interest groups: WVDOT, developers, residents (in center and west Shepherdstown), patrons of new commercial development and local institutions: e.g.  the library.

Envisioning expansion

This first drawing is a first look at the nodes introduce in the existing figure-ground of Shepherdstown which includes the center-point plan of hexagons. The bold lines are not definitive, but suggestions of main paths of movement through the existing town center and the expansion west. 

This second sketch builds upon the first, this time giving more attention to main paths of vehicular movement. The eggs swallowed by the road might be traffic circles but are diagrammatic functions here, noting points where the flow of traffic is not necessarily as simple as a crossing in the new or existing grid.

These plans are mere diagrams. Aside from the more detailed planning required to bring such ideas to fruition, a master-stroke of policy and team building is required. While this is not my forte, I will attempt, in a future update, to address how that master-stroke resides in the realm of possibilities.

Notes:

*I was speaking to someone earlier today who does this during their daily commute through town. Her morning eastward commute is on Washington; her evening westward commute is on German.

†The introduction of HOV lanes outside of DC is one solution for reducing the number of vehicles on the road. People are encouraged to carpool to shave some minutes from their commute. But what if people chose to carpool simply because when they arrived at their destination, there was not where to put their car? This is an idea that is being put into practice. Fewer places to store cars means fewer cars on the paths to get there.

Four unrelated things

  1. Recently heard (to paraphrase an anonymous source): “The West Virginia Department of Transportation is interested in moving as many cars as quickly as possible.”
  2. As noted on a rendering for the Rumsey Green Facebook page, a value driving the design of Rumsey Green is “retailer friendly visibility”.
  3. The new library site might be close enough to town and schools, but fails a walkability test when pedestrians encounter Route 480.
  4. Jefferson County’s comprehensive development plan marks the Four-way Stop as a “bad intersection” in Map 3  ”Highway Problem Area”.

Did I say these are unrelated things? Let’s connect the dots.

1-3: Ouch: Traffic calming* might be an unknown phrase at WVDOT but pedestrian injuries and fatalities are not.

1-2: Whoops, missed my turn: Taking cues only from a rendering is difficult but what is shown so far is no different from any other auto-centric development — an assumption of visibility is made assuming cars are moving past without significant hinderance and at fairly high rates of speed.

2-3: Visibility: Include a vehicle-pedestrian path to the library directly past-across the retail parcel.

2-4: Distribute traffic: Development to the west of the Four-way Stop is not going to help that intersection. Distributing traffic flow from/within new development to the west of Shepherdstown to both an extension of Washington Street and the Bypass reduces stress on an intersection where other solutions are painful to think about. Bonus: visibility of the retail parcel is increased because it is now part of the city gird — cars pass through it, not just past it.

I started this project to look at Princess Street but issues to the west are stealing the show. I’ve touched on many of the connections of the four points above — these are just the tip of the iceberg.

An extended town presence (grid) to the west is best for all parcel development. Many adjacent parcel owners might disagree now but the “ownership” of land is a fluid concept. I don’t doubt that many neighbors might see only the negative impacts — I’ll wait for some comments and another post to start listing all the positives.

Notes:

*Witnessed on a visit to Denmark, the ultimate traffic calming device — a tree planted in the middle of the street.

Well west of Princess Street

Having previously written about the potential for town expansion to the west, I became interested in attending a special meeting of the town council regarding a petition for annexation for property in that very area. Oddly, the presenters had neither map in hand nor did they mention the reasons why they were petitioning for annexation until someone in the room finally asked that question. I would have thought that would be the first thing discussed. Maybe I did not understand the process as laid out by the mayor at the start of the meeting.

Everyone in the room had a great deal to say about the potential design/layout of the parcel in question which seemed odd, to me, at this stage, although it is certainly important to have ideas out there early. So venture forth into that terrain, I will.

No parcel is an island

A majority of voices expressed a desire for something beyond the typical shopping center development — something which compliments the character of Shepherdstown. The developer discussed ideas to achieve this. Few in the room sensed such an effort must extend beyond the treatment of the development alone. That is the nature of urban design. It involves tendrils which form a community.

The movement and storage of vehicles has the greatest impact on the character of any modern development. Two specifics mentioned in the case of this particular parcel, which I will call the Rumsey Plat, were the desire to avoid “a sea of cars” and to exclude on-street parking. Laudable goals, of course, but I (some would say typically) will present a contrary view. While we might like to think otherwise (and being a person who walks a great deal, I certainly wish it were otherwise) on-street parking is a key component in the character of a town — specifically, as it enhances walkability.

I had long considered that on street parking played a role in this idea, primarily by calming traffic. Coupled with an idea I’ve been floating for years, I will suggest a greater force at work.

Unless the island is a block

Create shopping center parking lots which include contiguous* car-free paths to destinations. While I’ve never tested the idea and, I admit, the economic impact is huge, the intended effect would be to create blocks and urban grids without the direct oversight and-or intervention of a central urban planning authority.

A new car-centric shopping center might indeed be made to “fit in” with the historic core of Shepherdstown. If we have a big enough shoe horn. Efforts through architecture and site planning are laudable but the real force for extending the spirit of Shepherdstown lies in urbanism — parking on the street might just be one of them. On-street parking, as laid out in blocks, is an example of a distributed system and its layout yields what is most missing from any suburban development. The sense that the pedestrian is not forgotten. We arrive by car, yes, but our passengers can, at least, step directly into a car-free space and their movement outside of the vehicle becomes the dominant form of movement through space. Cars must stop when pedestrians cross and the presence of blocks and curbs suggests that each means of movement plays an equal role in shaping the environment: the  pedestrian and car move on equal terms.

*Knowing, of course, that “crosswalks” are part of this system.

Traffic

If you’ve lived in Shepherdstown for over fifteen, ten, or maybe as short as five years, you might have noticed the increase in traffic which flows through town — the key word being through. While the town enjoyed the unparalleled prosperity matched by the remainder of the US economy up until our recent crashing-to-a-halt, it is easily observed that the bulk of daily vehicle load occurs during the rushes, morning and afternoon.

Shepherd University has also contributed to traffic growth but we will save that topic for another time.

Just noticing the traffic is not enough. Some years back I hoped to better understand the flow, taking morning walks to the four way stop which, living just past O’Hurley’s Store, took me past the other hot-spot for town traffic, the corner of Princess and Washington Streets.

I am not a traffic engineer — perhaps some simplicity is lost on me — but that intersection makes for a fascinating conundrum in town planning: 100 yards from a busy rail crossing, a truck route, the main route through town. And half of the flow is stopped in that flow — all the traffic following Rt. 230 to Charles Town. Should a series of cars choose to follow Washington Street, the backup along Princess can grow long. Through a tractor-trailer rig and a train passage into the mix and you can have quite a mess.

Interestingly enough, nearby forms and the flow also provide some accidental traffic calming — indeed, in all these years, I have never observed an accident at that intersection. I’ll write more about that traffic calming in a later post.

Downtown Shepherdstown

Have you ever wondered why the Yellow Brick Bank is at the corner of Princess and German Street? Consider my earlier note that Princess Street once included the river crossing of Route 230…that intersection becomes the most important intersection in town.

Today’s most important intersection? The meaninglessly named “four-way stop”. Everyone around knows the importance of that intersection but it is not, from a perspective of urban form and architecture, the center of town. It is important only in the same manner in which America has fully changed to a car-centric culture — the importance of Princess Street reflects a time when the river and railroad wielded strong influences.

The only impact the railroad has today on Shepherdstown is how it is in full lockstep with the car culture — hence the disappearance of crossings such as Mill Street and, yes, Princess Street at its industrial southern end.