A diet you can live with – Msg from DOT Administrator
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A msg from the DOT Secretary:
A diet you can live with
Posted by Anthony Foxx
http://www.dot.gov/fastlane/diet-can-save-lives
2015 is just around the corner, and that means New Year resolutions. Many of us will resolve to get to the gym more or go on a diet to get a little healthier. At DOT, our resolution isn’t necessarily to put ourselves on a diet –but to put some of our roads on one. A road diet, after all, is one that can do more than improve your life; it can save it.
A typical road diet takes a segment of four-lane undivided roadway and reconfigures it into three lanes with two through lanes and a center two-way left turn lane. Often, a road diet creates space for bicycle lanes. The newly configured stretch improves safety by including a protected left-turn lane for motorists, reducing crossing distance for pedestrians, and lowering travel speeds with very little increase in travel times.
To help cities and towns deliver this safety innovation to their residents, the Federal Highway Administration recently published a Road Diet Informational Guide that walks communities through the decision-making process to determine whether a road diet is a good fit.
One community where a road diet was a good fit is Reston, Virginia, where two roads recently shrank, and motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians are safer for it. In Reston, the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) implemented a road diet on a two-mile segment of Lawyers Road during an already scheduled 2009 repaving project. Reaction among residents was mixed before the project, but views shifted to strong support after the project helped reduce crashes in the corridor by 67 percent—that’s a full 2/3 reduction! A second road diet was installed on nearby Soapstone Drive in 2011, and that diet resulted in a 65 percent crash reduction.
These two safety reconfigurations have helped make the area’s linked network of bicycle routes a more viable travel alternative for access to northern Virginia’s newly opened Silver Line rail transit service.
Road diets also aren’t expensive; sometimes, they can be undertaken and finished with not much more than a few gallons of paint for new lane markings. And they provide opportunities to assign excess roadway width to bike lanes, on-street parking, transit stops, and other amenities that residents appreciate.
I first heard about road diets when I was mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. They’ve become popular features there, and FHWA has singled them out as one of nine proven safety countermeasures for cutting fatalities and serious injuries on America’s roadways.
Better roads, more options, and safer travel – that’s a diet we can all live with.
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