Lifecycle of a road diet: DDOT dashboard offers insight into traffic safety investigation process

Let’s say you live near a problem intersection in DC: one with rampant speeding, poor visibility, and drivers that don’t bother stopping for pedestrians. Maybe a few drivers have crashed there; maybe you’ve had to jump out of the way one too many times.

You finally decide to report the intersection to the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) and ask for an investigation. What happens next? A new interactive DDOT dashboard attempts to answer that question.

The dashboard was published as part of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s road safety push in response to outrage over the deaths of children on DC streets.

It walks through the timeline and process for Traffic Safety Investigation requests. These requests can lead to things like traffic changes and “medium-scale” safety improvement projects — “relatively rapid deployment” of solutions such as new traffic signals, road diet tools like bump-outs and median islands, and bus and bike lanes.

In mid-October, Bowser announced a push to expedite these processes, including by “truncating” the public engagement process for some projects.

But what does that process look like in the first place?

DDOT’s estimated timeline for safety improvements

On its dashboard, DDOT outlines the timeline it says people can expect after submitting a 311 service request for a traffic safety investigation. The total process is estimated to take 130 business days.

First, DDOT says it asks the resident for additional information — if it’s not submitted, the request is closed. According to the dashboard, this step includes a questionnaire and endorsement from the local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner.

As of Nov. 1, according to the dashboard, 202 TSI requests were pending resident action, the oldest dating back to June of this year. This category includes a request for a study of the intersection where 5-year-old Allison Hart was struck and killed by a driver in Brookland in September, at 14th and Irving, filed weeks after her death.

But according to the dashboard, this step is going away in November.

“Starting November 1, 2021, ANC Endorsement and a questionnaire will no longer be required to submit a Traffic Safety Investigation,” the website says. DDOT says it will continue to process TSIs submitted before that date, and plans to clear them by around December 10.

Next, DDOT conducts its own engineering evaluation of the site. “DDOT reviews the information, checks for existing data and studies, and conducts other reviews to determine whether the location warrants further data collection,” the website says.

As of Oct. 29, 384 requests were listed as pending DDOT review. More than 80 of these pending requests were initiated before 2021 began; the oldest dated back to December 2017. Three days later, on Nov. 1, DDOT had cleared nearly 200 of these requests; as of publication, only 191 total requests pending DDOT review remained.

After that, some projects are sent for further data collection, including: “intersection signalization, lane configuration changes, vertical traffic calming (e.g. speed tables) on non-local roads, one-way conversions, stop signs, and other traffic calming measures.”

Only 10 projects are currently awaiting these studies as of Nov. 1, according to the dashboard.

“Once data collection is completed, DDOT will review the study results to determine what mitigation measures are recommended,” the dashboard says.

Finally, if DDOT decides a change is needed, the agency develops recommendations and prepares a work order for installation.

If the changes include traffic control or parking, the agency is legally required to issue a Notice of Intent that includes a 30-day comment period. For changes that don’t require that step, DDOT says they are usually installed in the following quarter after the TSI is completed.

The dashboard currently doesn’t show any projects with open work orders. It notes, however, that Bowser’s fall safety “blitz” is a special project, set to be completed this season. A DDOT press release on Oct. 25 said in the first two weeks the agency installed 91 speed humps at more than 30 locations as well as right-turn hardening devices in four places, and installed or updated 16 stop signs.

What’s next?

Despite Bowser’s promise to speed up this process, some street safety advocates have said it isn’t enough.

A recent public hearing about whether to nominate interim DDOT Director Everett Lott to the permanent position drew hours of testimony criticizing the agency on traffic safety and raising concerns about the process for installing safety improvements. (Disclosure: GGWash Deputy Director Caitlin Rogger and Policy Manager Alex Baca both testified in support of Lott’s confirmation. Neither had any editorial input into this article.)

In testimony and on Twitter, people complained that DDOT can close safety investigations without an appeal process, often based on things like traffic crash reports some say are incomplete. It’s not yet clear whether any of DDOT’s planned changes to the TSI process will address those concerns.

The public record for the roundtable on Lott’s confirmation closes November 9.