Suburban-style streets don’t fit a busy Bethesda corner

Cyclists leaving the Capital Crescent Trail and entering Bethesda at the corner of Woodmont and Bethesda Avenues are in serious danger. Pedestrians and drivers, too, suffer unneeded delay at this busy crossroads. There’s a common cause for these problems: planners using suburban highway engineering practices that are unsuited to an odd-shaped urban street crossing. 

Newly built stores and apartments and a big underground garage have replaced a pair of parking lots on the south side of Bethesda Avenue.  Responding to long-standing public complaints about safety, the designers of the new buildings moved Woodmont Avenue slightly and removed a high-speed turn lane.  But county transportation officials vetoed suggestions from bike and pedestrian advocates for more drastic changes in the layout of the streets.

The pavement here, at the point where the trail comes into downtown Bethesda, carries a continual flow of bicycles.  Theaters, restaurants, and shops draw heavy foot traffic.  Plenty of cars come through too, although removal of the surface parking lot, a magnet for drivers, has made traffic on Woodmont Avenue lighter.

Immediate danger to cyclists

As construction now winds down, county traffic engineers are restriping traffic lanes and moving crosswalks.  Their new layout compounds a glaring weakness of earlier designs: lack of attention to cyclists’ turns between roadways and the trail. 

The county has built a curb at the intersection of the trail and Bethesda Avenue, removing a ramp put there soon after the trail opened.  Northbound cyclists arriving on the trail now must either dismount, walk into the street, and climb back onto their bikes while standing in a traffic lane, or ride on the sidewalk. 

From this sidewalk, cyclists continue north across Bethesda Avenue at a crosswalk.  Maryland law requires cyclists to wait at the curb ramp for the walk signal.

The walk signal to cross Bethesda coincides, however, with a green light on Woodmont Avenue.  The signal sends law-abiding, on-road cyclists diagonally across four lanes of moving automobile traffic to reach the northbound Woodmont Avenue bike lane or the Georgetown Branch Trail.  Drivers in these lanes have the green light and do not expect cyclists to be crossing in front of them.  (Few adept cyclists follow the bike trail mapped by the county, which directs them to dodge pedestrians and street furniture on three crowded sidewalks, make repeated 90-degree turns, and, if headed for the bike lane, wait at slow traffic lights three times.)

The county could eliminate this obvious danger by giving cyclists and pedestrians their own green signal, with cars stopped in all directions.  Or the trail could get a curb cut, with or without its own traffic light.  But such fixes would do little for those on foot and make things worse for drivers.

The walk signals at the corner are too short

As things stand, pedestrians crossing Woodmont Avenue get a seven-second walk signal (the shortest allowed under federal guidelines).  A 113-second interval follows when it is illegal to start walking. 

The seven seconds when pedestrians may enter the crosswalk is just the time that cars are most likely to be in their way.  The walk signal begins at the moment the light changes. That’s when drivers stopped by a red light on Bethesda Avenue make their turns.  During the long don’t-walk interval, on the other hand, few cars come by.

People who walk in this area have reacted as one would expect to its nonsensical signal sequences: they now pay little heed to signs or signals of any kind.

As with the bike safety problem, it’s easy to suggest a modest improvement in the Woodmont walk signal: It could be lengthened without changing the timing of the traffic light. But this would leave a crossroads still unfriendly to people on bikes, people on foot, and drivers alike.

The real problem is the traffic engineering doctrine

One fix after another has failed here because Montgomery County remains wedded to old-style traffic engineering.  Two of the profession’s basic tenets are to blame.  First, engineers design streets for cars and see other users as obstacles.  Second, they design the roads to minimize rush-hour delays rather than to work best at all hours.  When you measure success by counting cars in rush hour, wide streets and slow lights are solutions rather than problems. 

At this corner, with its oblique angle and many diverse travelers passing through, the weaknesses of this doctrine are manifest.  The more different groups that must wait in turn for others, and the more time each group needs to get across the wide-angled pavement, the longer all are delayed.  The long waits make pedestrians and cyclists feel unwelcome, and drivers suffer too.  A redesign based on fundamental rethinking would be better for everyone.

A single-lane roundabout could easily handle all the cars that pass through this intersection.  Traffic might back up at the busiest hour on Friday and Saturday evenings, but the time lost in those delays would be much less than the time drivers would save the rest of the week — and pedestrians and cyclists would benefit at all hours.

If all cars feed into a single roundabout lane, turn lanes serve no purpose and the streets can be narrowed.  Narrow streets make drivers slow down — a needed remedy for Woodmont Avenue’s late-night speeding problem.  There would be room for angle parking and protected cycle tracks, and pedestrians would need less time to cross the street.

The two main bicycle and pedestrian crossings could be moved away from the roundabout.  Traffic lights might be needed at these crossings, but if so the narrow roadway would allow them to have short cycles and impose little delay.

My sketch surely needs refinement, and some entirely different concept may turn out to be better.  But whatever the ultimate solution is, it will require new thinking.  This corner has vexed Montgomery County officials, and it has vexed them for a reason.  Car-centered engineering practices don’t make good places for people.