Barbara Patton: A quick education on road diets

Road Diets! Now that’s a new use for the word “diet.” Does it mean that roads no longer can eat cars?

That’s a little far-fetched, I know, but according to an article in The New York Times on Traffic in which Keith Schneider interviews Dan Burden, who is a photographer and planning consultant, roads can actually go on a diet. What going on a road diet does mean is for a road to lose some of the lanes.

A couple of months ago, I was in the town of Fairhope and noticed that one of their five lane roads now has a median constructed in a portion of this particular five lane road and it brought to mind this article.

I don’t know why Fairhope made the decision to do this. This may not have been the reason at all but I do think this is an interesting concept and one worth considering in planning.
We all know that the five lane road has been the norm all over the country for a long time and was thought to move traffic faster by increasing the capacity of the road, allowing a driver to make turns – usually left turns – without holding up traffic, and reducing the number of accidents.

Apparently, now some cities are downsizing their roads and building boulevards with divided medians.

According to Burden, a typical boulevard has an opening every 660 feet and a lane to allow people to make left turns.

It reduces the possibility of crashes by no longer making it possible to turn into every single driveway and it also increases the carrying capacity by 30 percent.

Burden used Hartford as an example of a city that is doing this with 12 of their roads. These roads are dieting and losing lanes. He said everywhere in Hartford that the diet has taken place on a road, the traffic has actually improved. Also, speeds have come down and safety has gone up.

The design on Frederick Road is being reworked to remove the medians and make it a five-lane road. I wonder, if while it is being redesigned, there is some compromise to use a combination of some medians – perhaps at the Auburn end of Frederick – and then five lanes in another portion of it. I understand that an environmental study is being done at this time so maybe it’s not too late to at least “take it under advisement.”

In this article, Burden also mentions other traffic-calming remedies, including making intersections smaller, constructing roundabouts, and designing places where people walk, bike and use public transit.

With the price of gas escalating, it would be in the best interest of all of us for planners, designers, and engineers to consider all these ideas when designing new roads.
Decision-making is not easy and decisions will be different for different times.

At any rate, if someone mentions a “road diet” to you, you are now educated on what is meant by that phrase.

Barbara Patton is executive director of Envision Opelika and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.