I’m gonna go ahead and say it
2 way car traffic on downtown streets is overrated
Protected cycle tracks and dedicated bus lanes are much more important.
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To follow up on the impacts that the bike lane at the intersection of Peace and Person is having:
GoRaleigh bus #1 (Capital Blvd) is detouring to avoid this intersection. The barriers for the bike lane are making it difficult for the bus to turn and head north. They’re looking to remove a couple of the barriers so that the bus can go back on route. I can only imagine that this will make it easier for people to get confused and drive thru the bike lane more than is already happening.
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I still feel like the better option is to just shift the bollards a bit closer to the curb. There is no reason a one-way bicycle lane should be wide enough for a car to fit in. Puts cyclists at risk.
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(This is probably the one time you’ll ever hear me suggest taking space away from cyclists.)
Even as a cyclist, I’d take excess space from cyclists if it meant that it could be given to pedestrians.
Pedestrians should always be #1 downtown. Transit and bikers #2. Cars should be dead last. Unfortunately it is not that way right now. I didn’t notice much a decade or two ago when the traffic was lighter but now with more people in downtown it is more clear how much cars rule things currently.
Sidewalks are narrow and unwelcoming even on streets that are supposedly ‘nightlife districts’ like Glenwood South, and cars drive by at highway speeds constantly now, instead of sporadically like before.
If a street has no negative space to make more room for pedestrians, the things that can be sacrificed to make that room are extra lanes or onstreet parking. Yet we go out of our way to cater to onstreet parking over pedestrians or cyclists. Every street doesn’t need it! There are a surplus of decks.
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I could not agree with you more.
My guess is that business owners (in general) are the ones who are most adamant about keeping on-street parking.
How else am I supposed to park 10 feet away from my destination and walk my fat ass as little as possible???
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A local advocate group named Oaks and Spokes reported the city will add bike lanes over the Atlantic Avenue bridge. They said more details will be announced on Monday during the meeting. The only brief information says the bike lanes will be conventional, but I’m not sure if that includes losing a vehicle lane.
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Drew,
Maps of the proposed lanes are here. Looks like they will be 6’ wide unprotected lanes. There will still be two 10’ wide car lanes in each direction.
There will be what looks like a tricky navigation between people on bikes and people in cars traveling south as they approach Old Louisburg Road.
Plans for these lanes and other will be presented at tonight’s BPAC meeting. Bike lanes are being added because the subject roads are due to be resurfaced anyway.
Do you ride this corridor? I do not, so I’m not sure how riding here feels now and how much different it will be with the addition of unprotected lanes.
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It looks like it will improve the bridge. But heading southbound, its gonna dump you into the mixing bowl intersection at Brookside. The continuity of the bike facilities is going to be crucial here. That intersection should really be a roundabout like they proposed in the Capital Blvd planning report like a decade ago.
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I am not a big fan of the mixing zone between the conventional bike lanes and the right turn traffic from southbound Atlantic Avenue to southbound Capital Boulevard, especially with cars coming down that hill fast and potentially not yielding. (Could argue that the bike lanes make it worse in that scenario in that I usually take the lane so that nobody passes me as I try and merge into the lane that goes straight through that intersection). But oh well, better than nothing?
I agree with Brian that I don’t think it will make a huge difference - it will just be as awkward, and uncomfortable but at least there’s an indicator now that bikes belong on that stretch of the road.
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The intersection of Old Louisburg Rd. and Atlantic will be very tricky you’re right, especially with the bike lane moving towards the center, while the vehicle traffic merges right onto Capital.
I’m just surprised there will be room for two 6’ bike lanes, which makes you think why not make a 10’ protected bike lane on one side?
@Brian I have only ridden this corridor on a Bird scooter when I traveled from my house downtown to Lynnwood Brewery. Once you travel North beyond the Brookside intersection things become almost life or death. I’m one of the biggest two wheel advocates you’ll meet, but in terms of riding a bicycle on the road especially in Raleigh, it’s still not worth it to me. There have been too many instances locally where blame can’t be cast in any way towards the cyclists.
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that’s an interesting thought. There are no driveways on the northbound side so you could stick it over there and add crosswalks at Old Louisburg Road to transition coming southbound.
I’m doubtful the city would do it though because then there would be a major shift in the vehicular lanes at Whitaker Mill Road (also by sticking this with resurfacing, they’re probably just looking to do the bare minimum here)
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Lots of good thoughts! Wanted to share this blog post too from Oaks and Spokes looking at some of the things we will be advocating for going forward on this corridor. https://oaksandspokes.com/atlantic-avenue-bridge/
This is not an all ages and abilities, optimal facility but it is a step in the right direction and can be improved over time. Encourage folks to attend the BPAC meeting (6pm tonight, 2/15) to provide additional input! Link below, if prompted the password is “walk”) City of Raleigh WebEx Enterprise Site
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Bike lanes on Atlantic are a step forward, for sure. Unprotected facilities like this should certainly not be the endgame for cycling advocates, but nonetheless, forward progress is good.
The blog post you linked includes this tasty morsel:
More substantial improvements could be made if we were willing to keep the traffic pattern that continues south of the bridge along Wake Forest Road, where there is a north bound and south bound travel lane, and a center turn lane. NCDOT has overbuilt car capacity across the state and it’s vital that advocacy organizations push back on this car centric dialogue and help to ground this discussion to encourage a more equitable stance on how we build, fund and distribute our transportation network
YES. But wait, why the mention of NCDOT here? This is a city maintained roadway isn’t it? From the state-maintained roads map (colored lines are state streets)
If anything, NCDOT has already taken a bolder step in this corridor than the city, by allowing a 4->3 road diet and painting bike lanes south of the Capital Blvd bridges. In contrast, that’s not happening here, where it seems like NCDOT should be out of the picture? Hm.
So, I wonder what is preventing Raleigh from transitioning to a policy where protected bike facilities are considered an essential component of every repaving of a multi-lane city street? Atlantic is a really critical one since it’s one of very few city owned streets that is contiguous and connects between downtown and North Raleigh.
If council set a policy of “Damn the LOS, we’re cutting out car lanes and putting in the protected bike lanes” would it happen? Or is council just not ready for this because of either personal convictions or fear of electoral backlash? During the election cycle, I do remember some councilors seemed interested in considering bold actions like this. Would be refreshing to see it happen.
Or is it out of council’s hands in some way? Is DOT or the legislature somehow able to control what Raleigh can or cannot do with its streets, regardless of the fact that their maintenance is paid for by city property taxes? Or is there some technical or bureaucratic hurdle like the difficulty and/or expense of modifying traffic signals? Or could there be some city planners, engineers, or perhaps even the city manager, who are accustomed to managing Vehicular LOS as a top priority and are having difficulty letting that go? Or perhaps they are just too unfamiliar with best practices of protected bike facility design, to feel comfortable taking a bold step forward and implementing them? They were very tetative about the West/Harrington facilities, which took years; Oberlin has been in the works for a long time too.
Anyway, nice to see at least something happen here.
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I do see that traffic counts north of Capital are higher than to the south. 25k AADT vs 17k.
That is the exact reason why a protected lane is all the more important? I’m not trying to punish drivers here, I’m just not convinced you’d be ruining anybody’s life by taking a car lane away in each direction. Might take a few hundred peak-of-the-peak rush hour drivers an extra minute every day.
In contrast, the lack of protected bike lanes could easily ruin (or end!) somebody’s life. To me the values-based path forward (safety > convenience) is crystal clear.
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Those traffic volumes are exactly why I feel you need a protected facility on that section of Atlantic Avenue and why I have heartburn about the southbound bike lane crossing that southbound right turn lane. The volume differential is all going from the northern section of Atlantic Avenue to the southern section of Capital Boulevard and in reverse.
Edit: Also, the city has the ability to reduce the lanes on Atlantic Avenue so I agree that it’s something the city is able to do, but their traffic engineers are just not comfortable doing that at this point.
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Agree, would be very refreshing and will be working hard to see a better solution than what is currently proposed.
FYI, the DOT reference was on the corridor as a whole and stacking occuring on Capital Blvd as vehicles enter (if there is a modification in travel lanes). The bridge itself is City of Raleigh. 
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@orulz Since you’re always great at coming up with ideas. Any thoughts about how a two way cycle track on Atlantic Avenue would transition into the conventional bike lanes at Atlantic Avenue & Old Louisburg Road? If we’re looking at a protected bike lane on that stretch of Atlantic Avenue, the only way that is going to happen is to do a 9 foot wide cycle track with a 3 foot buffer for bollards/barriers. I’m trying to think about how that could possibly work with minimal changes to the configuration of the intersection or the signals because the city will probably balk if there’s too many signal changes. Not coming up with many great ideas that work well from a safety perspective for cyclists.
(My initial thought was putting the cycletrack on the east side. Coming northbound, it’s an easy transition. Coming southbound, you put a signal head facing the cycletrack on the span wire north of the intersection indicating whether it’s safe to go or not, eliminate the Old Louisburg right turn lane and/or implement “No Turn On Red”, maybe move the stop bar back for the Old Louisburg approach, and then put a two stage queue box in front of the thru-left Old Louisburg lane so that cyclists can stage there and turn left onto the bike lanes on the other side of the road…but that seems overly complicated for what the city would want to do)
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