Bike Lanes in and around DTR

[keita]

I was watching a video @pierretong put on another thread, and I was today years old when I learned the bike lanes that just got added on Person and Blount streets could get removed because of BRT. Was this news to anyone else?

The two-way conversion was planned separately from BRT, so the fact that the two projects conflict with each other only became a problem now. Unless one of their designs changes, the two proposals will need more space on parts of Blount St. than what physically exists. Kimley-Horn looked at 4 ways to make the downtown parts of the New Bern BRT corridor work with Blount-Person upgrades:

All of these options assume that bike lanes will get replaced by a BRT lane, since Phase 1 already removed one car lane. But even this had problems:

@From the presentation (20:08)

We did a lot of traffic analyses on all of these [options], and… essentially,… it doesn’t work! I hate to use the word “work” here, but […] a lot of traffic would divert [away from the two streets] if we converted almost anything.

The gist of the problem was that MLK is already a pretty congested intersection, and adding additional traffic phases to deal with left turns was problematic no matter how we approached it.

So we’re now actually looking at a fifth option of just converting north of Edenton […] and seeing what else we can do south of Edenton to slow [car traffic] speeds [with] landscaping options.