{"id":119426,"date":"2015-07-28T08:25:12","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T13:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/?p=119426"},"modified":"2015-07-28T09:01:27","modified_gmt":"2015-07-28T14:01:27","slug":"reducing-main-avenues-lanes-wont-improve-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/119426\/reducing-main-avenues-lanes-wont-improve-traffic","title":{"rendered":"Reducing Main Avenue&#8217;s Lanes Won&#8217;t Improve Traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Driven Main Avenue during peak times lately? You&#8217;ve probably found the commute through downtown to be quite a headache. Between parallel parking cars on the right and left-turning cars waiting endlessly on the left, traffic sometimes comes to a halt.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/poll.fm\/5cwz3\" target=\"_blank\">POLL:\u00a0Should Main Avenue Lanes Be Reduced: 4 to 2 With Left Turns?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The city is looking at ways to improve the flow of this busy stretch of road. One\u00a0suggestion&#8230; reduce the through lanes from four to two, with a continuous left turn\u00a0lane running parallel in the middle.<\/p>\n<p>While this certainly tackles the backups caused by left turning cars,\u00a0it also reduces the capacity of through traffic by half.\u00a0Is this an improvement?<\/p>\n<p>I fail to understand how reducing the capacity of through traffic &#8211; the majority &#8211; will improve flow.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What can be done instead?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>First, add left turning signals at all Main Avenue intersections. Once this is done, provide\u00a0one side of the road a protected head start to allow protected left-hand turns. Then, at the end, give the other side a few moments of exclusive protected flow.\u00a0Essentially, each side would receive, say, 15 seconds of exclusive right-of-way. In between each protected session, both sides will operate\u00a0as they normally do.<\/p>\n<p>Is this solution perfect? No. However, it does improve traffic backup\u00a0from\u00a0left-turn congestion without reducing capacity.<\/p>\n<p>Another option to consider: Establish a pair of east-west one-ways traveling the length of the city, similar to 7th\/9th. Rosser and Broadway would arguably be the best choice; removing the nuisance Thayer Avenue one-way in the process.<\/p>\n<p>This option, albeit more costly, would establish two-lane travel for both east and west traffic without reducing capacity for any roads. While it won&#8217;t improve capacity, one-way travel removes the obstacle of left-turn yields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Driven Main Avenue during peak times lately? You&#8217;ve probably found the commute through downtown to be quite a headache. Between parallel parking cars on the right and left-turning cars waiting endlessly on the left, traffic sometimes comes to a halt. POLL:\u00a0Should Main Avenue Lanes Be Reduced: 4 to 2 With Left Turns? The city is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,137],"tags":[1064,853],"class_list":["post-119426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-opinion","tag-ticker","tag-traffic"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckcafe.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}