Speeding up Oxmoor with roundabouts, while adding a bike lane
In the previous post, I’d said we need to make neighborhood roads slower and intra-city roads faster. I used Oxmoor as an example street that encourages offloading into neighborhoods. The reason this happens is because Oxmoor is too slow. I can hear you say “What?!? You want people to drive slower, yet you think Oxmoor should be faster!?!” Let me re-define that: the realized speed on Oxmoor is too slow. Currently, on Oxmoor,
- traffic lights slow down cars and give drivers incentive to cut into neighborhoods
- left turning cars on Oxmoor cause slowdowns in traffic
- Oxmoor divides the north and south sides of the city, yet because Oxmoor has so many crossing streets, it allows a driver to dip in and out of neighborhoods with ease
The solution? Put a small barrier down the middle of Oxmoor to remove all left turns, then put 3 roundabouts along the road, as shown below:
Placing the roundabouts at Edgewood, Central Park, and Business district would allow cross-Homewood entrance into the 3 main areas served along Oxmoor. The “low” wall dividing road would be curb height to dissuade drivers, but not prohibit emergency vehicles. Additional marked, lighted, and raised pedestrian crosswalks could mark each block to continue to encourage foot traffic across the city.
This would prevent the Manhattan cut-through of Oxmoor highlighted in the previous article. It would increase the realized speed on Oxmoor for people going from end-to-end. It would remove the possibility of using Homewood as a north-south cut-through.
Below is an example round about at the Central / Oxmoor intersection:
A side affect of removing left-turns would be freeing up 10 feet of road space. This would enable 5 feet of bicycle lanes on each side of the road. However, let’s get a little crazier. Instead of putting bicycle lanes on the outside of the roads where bicyclists are susceptible to the right hook, let’s put bicycling lanes inside the center-curb where they are protected from cars. Below is an illustration of that — of course, we’d go for lower barriers to allow for emergency traffic:
With this design, we take a that currently encourages over-aggressive drivers to get away from red-lights as much as possible, and turn it into a road with good car flow while providing alternative means of getting around. Bike lanes would enter the roundabouts the same way cars do. Bikes would be able to take the full lane. The reason for this is that bikes can turn in round abouts faster than cars can turn. Thus, the 10mph a bike would go in the roundabout will not inhibit the flow of cars.
Long story short:
- speed up Oxmoor to a higher realized speed
- Prevent north-south cut throughs on Oxmoor
- Remove left-turns throughout the road, which is a common cause of slowdown
All of these things will remove the incentive of drivers to offload into neighborhoods.
