Man vs. Machine: 2011 Traffic Counts in Uptown
Featured, Policy — By Anders Imboden on June 10, 2011 12:10 pmIt’s so nerdy even nerds think it’s lame, but let’s celebrate it anyway: 2011 traffic counts are appearing on the City of Minneapolis Transportation Data Management System website! Automated counts have been conducted over the past couple weeks in the Uptown area, and some of the data have begun to pop up on the TCDS (or Traffic Count Database System, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing).
Early take-homes? Traffic is indeed quite nasty. Hennepin Avenue between Lake/Lagoon and Franklin sees some of the highest–perhaps the highest, but this would require more research–daily traffic counts in the City of Minneapolis, excluding highways or de facto highways (e.g. Hiawatha Avenue, Lake Street above Calhoun). Of course, given that the Uptown area also has some of the highest volumes of pedestrian and bicycle traffic in the city, you can guess what this means.
While you wait for our elected officials who have directed city staff to finish the very important business of finding problems for their solutions, take a look at the graphic below, which highlights some of the new data in a way that’s hopefully at least a little amusing, or, if nothing else, more pleasing to the eye than a Google Map with a 20-field spreadsheet on the left column. And all of this is really hinting at a serious issue: how can we make our streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, and anyone else who doesn’t have a couple thousand pounds of steel surrounding them? Be as specific (or broad) as you like. And most importantly, once you’ve thought about this a bit, why not share your thoughts with your voice in local government?
Click to enlarge to full size.
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7 Comments
I really wish it were feasible to get rid of street parking on one side of Hennepin in order to widen sidewalks and/or create bike lanes. But god forbid we ever decrease the stock of city-subsidized parking.
The city has a street-car system planned and one will run down Hennepin and they have already started requesting money for doing the necessary studies for a line. So all parking will be eliminated some day on Hennepin, and hopefully the restructuring can provide a very much needed bike lane.
I wouldn’t count on that, Andrew. The streetcar initiative has been coming along really slowly, and any Hennepin Avenue line south of the Walker would come as a second phase of a shorter starter line (at least according to the existing study). It’s extremely unlikely that streetcar line would eliminate most on-street parking, in any case: streetcars, by definition, don’t use dedicated rights of way for most of their routes.
This isn’t to say new approaches to transit can’t be a part of a larger improvement of traffic-choked Hennepin Avenue, but the current plans are many years from fruition and currently very uninspiring.
I was nearly run down on one occasion and clipped on another while crossing Lagoon on foot at Hennepin by the Walker Library.
Just the other day, my wife and daughter watched a southbound driver on Hennepin start to turn left at Lagoon. (A flurry of honks and waves from cars and pedestrians caught his attention at the last minute, preventing a possible head-on collision next to McDonald’s).
Minneapolis and its suburbs so car-oriented that many drivers have little or no awareness of pedestrians. I feel safer crossing the street in Rome or Paris than I do in Uptown.
These numbers are shocking. An earlier email to me from Meg Tuthill’s office had seemingly attributed the increase in traffic through Uptown to the neighborhood’s new developments; the traffic patterns here, however, seem to suggest otherwise — would you guess that the extremely high number of turns onto Lagoon are people heading towards west Calhoun and St. Louis Park? If so, perhaps some of the traffic will ease if and when LRT ever opens along that line. Of course eased congestion won’t solve the problem of cars simply not seeing pedestrians. So many drivers just aren’t paying attention and aren’t used to seeing people out walking around. What are the options here? Turn lane changes? Eliminating one ways? Installing diagonal crosswalks? (I’d love to see one of those four-way stops/”all walk” crossings — the kind where the lights turn red for ALL cars and pedestrians can cross in any direction) at Hennepin and Lake; it seems an obvious fit for that intersection.
I remember reading a comment on the Star Tribune website on one of their news stories that in Denver, one intersection does a light for each direction of traffic only and then a third light for all pedestrians. That’d really solve every problem at Lake and Hennepin once people adhere to it. Although then comes the question of traffic in the other lanes due to the extra cycle.
Agreed, but unfortunately Denver is getting rid of most of them [see link at bottom]. I also wanted to agree with posters here in that the traffic issues are not an issue of “increased density”. It is likely a result of people cutting through Uptown …
http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-diagonal-crosswalks-denver-20110406,0,6550310.story