DDOT’s newest plan for this dangerous Eckington intersection is a dud

When a DDOT update about park space at North Capitol Street and Lincoln Road NE appeared on the ANC5E agenda in September, there was buzz among neighborhood street safety advocates. As one of the most dangerous streets in the city, many of us have been clamoring for action on North Capitol for years, and advocacy efforts specifically for Lincoln Road NE have emerged recently as well.

The intersection of Lincoln Road and North Capitol Street is particularly in need of serious safety adjustments. Over-enlarged by the removal of Truxton Circle in the 1940s, the diagonal Lincoln Rd intersects North Capitol with no controls whatsoever; northbound drivers wishing to proceed onto the two-lane Lincoln simply veer off North Capitol, almost always at the same excessive speeds they were traveling at on the six-lane arterial.

Far too often, they carry that speed all the way up to the next block where they pass the Harry Thomas Sr. Recreation Center and threaten the hundreds of children and families who use that park every day (not to mention the outdoor pool in the summer). And they are aided by the fact that the signal timing on Lincoln Road matches North Capitol Street–which means they can build up a head of steam as they hit the neighborhood.

The problem is magnified when North Capitol is congested, as impatient drivers find it irresistible to use Lincoln as a bypass and attempt to make up lost time.

All told, Lincoln Road needs edits to disincentivize this speeding cut-through traffic and prioritize the Eckington community instead. Given that context, the District Department of Transportation’s (DDOT) agenda item at the September ANC 5E meeting offered some hope there might be some initial steps underfoot.

DDOT’s plans would make permanent a very unsafe design

But the plan DDOT presented (start video at 0:00) came nowhere close to addressing that central problem. Rather than offer any safety improvements, it narrowly and exclusively focuses on turning a few square feet of asphalt into grass. Minimizing non-permeable roadway surfaces is certainly an important goal, but it should be incorporated into a larger project that at least makes some progress on dangerous speeding. Anything less is an enormous waste of political and staff capital.

In fact, aspects of the plan appear to be a step backwards for safety. While a new crosswalk is added on the north side, DDOT is proposing to eliminate the southern crosswalk and the sidewalk on the existing island in the outdated hope that a lack of good infrastructure will discourage pedestrians from using this space. It’s the kind of head-in-the-sand victim-blaming that was supposed to characterize the past generation of street projects, not our safety-focused future.

What’s even more confounding is that DDOT already has a good plan for this exact intersection. The 2014 Mid-East Livability Study was an extensive, comprehensive planning document that incorporated years of community feedback—it even won an award for excellence in planning! That study produced a concept that would eliminate the veer-action entirely by closing Lincoln on that block and creating a larger, more usable mini-park space instead (while preserving local vehicle access to the alley).

The plan additionally suggested other improvements like squaring and narrowing the North Capitol and Q Street intersection, closing the other slip-lane on the west side of North Capitol, and filling in the missing crosswalk on the south side of the intersection of North Capitol and Quincy Place.

While not perfect (this plan punted on the defining problem of North Capitol’s 6-8 lane highway nature, and the proposed bike lane configuration seems unrealistic), this tactical design at least represents a more serious approach to the specific problem of speeding on Lincoln Rd.

When 5E10 commissioner Sally Hobaugh asked during the presentation if closing the south end of Lincoln like this was an option, DDOT presenter Noah Bell said the agency rejected that idea because it would limit residential access. But this explanation doesn’t make much sense.

For one, as the Mid-East Livability Plan concept showed, closing the southern entrance to Lincoln doesn’t have to mean also closing the northside access. That plan envisions essentially expanding the alley up to Quincy Place with some of the Lincoln right-of-way. Indeed, that alley already provides direct access to all seven of these properties. What’s even more, this 1600 block of Lincoln is very short; the perpendicular streets of Q St and Quincy Place are incredibly close and provide curbside access no greater than 120 feet from any of these houses’ front doors.

Given that, it feels like when DDOT says “preserving access” what they really mean is “preserving street parking.” But in context, this excuse is even worse. Closing Lincoln would probably necessitate replacing either two or four street parking spaces (depending on how wide you want to keep the street north of the alley exit). Not only do the intersecting blocks of Quincy Place and Q St have hundreds of total street spaces, the residences on these blocks are also flush with private garages and parking pads – including the seven residences on the 1600 block itself, which have five private spots between them.

To achieve zero traffic deaths and injuries, a goal that DDOT recently recommitted itself to, we need the agency to weight these tradeoffs very differently. Eliminating 2-4 parking spots without materially impacting vehicle access to a couple of properties is a very small price to pay to close a known safety risk like this.

This project was presented by a member of DDOT’s hydraulics and stormwater team, so it may simply be a case of one part of the agency not communicating with another very well. Let’s hope the whole agency can get on the same page and come back to the community with a better plan.