Neighborhood cut-throughs no longer quick, easy ride
Medians, bump-outs, other methods used to slow nonlocal traffic
Monday, September 29, 2008 3:13 AM
By Martin Rozenman
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCHCut-through traffic is the curse of many neighborhoods.
Motorists on a mission to avoid traffic lights and busy streets speed by, endangering pedestrians and children. They even dent property values.
To slow them down, traffic engineers have gone beyond the speed bumps of the 1970s. Now, they narrow roads with curb bump-outs, traffic circles and medians. Brick crosswalks, stripes and raised intersections keep drivers on their toes and their toes on their brakes.
…Cities across central Ohio are incorporating them to preserve their neighborhoods.
Tara Hill Drive, which runs 1.3 miles between Coffman Road and Muirfield Drive in Dublin, is the epicenter for speed control.
There are curb bump-outs at 12 intersections, six medians, three traffic circles and two midblock bump-outs, said Jean-Ellen Willis, the city’s engineering manager for transportation.
The $660,000 project gained momentum in 2002 when residents complained of high-speed, cut-through traffic, notably from Dublin Coffman High School. Four years later, Tara Hill Drive became the poster street for neighborhood speed control.
A study showed that safety improved while speed and traffic volume has been reduced, Willis said. In addition, property values have been maintained.
Tara Hill Dr - Dublin
If only Columbus saw this the same way. The corner of Calumet and Crestview Road, at the corner that is occupied by the Clintonville Community Market, is constantly seeing accidents due to poor visibility and the aforementioned speeding issues. This is one of the most pedestrian-heavy corners in our entire neighborhood due to the Market’s existence there. Yet the city has designated Calumet as some sort of rapid thoroughfare and no amount of petitioning and pleading has led to a four-way stop going in there.
It seems to me that the citizens of those areas should have more say than the city does as to whether such intersections should be more controlled than they are. After all… the people who live there know better what is needed!
$660K to put lipstick on a pig. Tara Hill Drive is just the typical winding cul-de-sac laden sprawl that encourages all traffic within 2 square miles to feed onto it. Looking at the map, do you see a single obvious way to get from Coffman to Muirfield Dr. without traversing Tara Hill? I’m not picking on Tara Hill: it’s just one of the more (but certainly not the most) egregious examples of typical suburban design favored by planners and traffic engineers.
Compare Tara Hill – and much of Dublin – to the traditional American style grid pattern used all the way up to World War II, where you have an exponentially greater number of potential paths from one place to another with multiple cross streets, greatly reducing traffic on any one leg. As an example, the Fifth by Northwest area, a traditional grid, affords multiple main cross routes, King, Fifth and Third, intersected by North Star, Grandview, Broadview and others. The traffic in that vastly more populous area, with an infinitely greater number of businesses, is probably less stressful and dangerous than Tara Hill, and no speed bumps are needed or desired. Tara Hill and everything within miles is devoid of any retail, forcing people into their cars just to obtain the simplest staples of life, just adding to the traffic.
I wonder if removing all stop signs from the side cul-de-sacs was considered? If it’s a mystery as to who has to yield at any intersection, it has a remarkable traffic calming and slowing effect. Is parking allowed on the street? That further “narrows” the street and calms traffic.
Jamie,
1. Stop signs are not traffic calming devices and they are not safety devices. They are traffic control devices, meant to assign right-of-way. Sometimes, they can reduce the frequency of angle and turning collisions, but they may increase other types of collisions, such as rear end collisions.
2. The city is probably following the national standards in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. To warrant multi-way stop control, an intersection should meet one of the following criteria:
a. Volume Warrant – 300+ vehicles per hour on the major street and 200+ vehicles plus pedestrians per hour on the minor street for at least eight hours of an average day. The volumes should be approximately equal. You could count the peak hour to see if these conditions are met. If it’s not met in the peak hour, it won’t be met for eight hours of the day either.
b. Crash Warrant – If there have been five or more crashes in a 12-month period that would be correctable with multi-way stop control, sign installation can be considered. You may be able to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain crash data for the intersection.
3. In my opinion, lay-people (ordinary citizens) should not have more say than trained and licensed professionals in what traffic control devices go on the street. They tend to make decisions based on emotion and gut feelings instead of traffic volume data, police crash data, national standards, and engineering research.
William,
Looking at Google Streetview, it seems that parking is permitted on Tara Hill, but lightly used. I would also guess that Dublin would prefer through traffic to use Post Rd between Coffman Rd and Muirfield Dr.