Vanderbilt Ave traffic

WOW!!! 8)

This is great. Is it time for another bake sale?

yes! great news! and we should have another bake sale to raise money for a raised median. I bet the businesses along vanderbilt would also be into helping out with this.

can you guys imagine a soda sponsored planted median? hah.

This is great news. I am prepared to help in anyway I can

Very good news - although I was just getting good at crossing that street.

The u-turning was the first thing I thought of after pedestrian fatalities. The horn-addicted assholes at Evelyn Limo are going to bitch up a storm.

What are you kidding? They honk even when I'm standing outside on my stoop.
But good news about Vandy. I can't wait for a bike lane. Maybe they'll start enforcing traffice signals. When I have to cross Sterling during rush hour it's like a freakin habit trail. Even worse if I'm on my bike.

qtrain wrote: Hmmm. I'm usually taking cars at 5 in the morning; maybe they are a little more conscientious pre-dawn.

I generally use them during busier times. It's good to know they don't honk at 5am.

I would bet it's a matter of the planted median part. They may foot the bill for a standard ugly concrete median, but aren't budgeted for anything more.

I agree, I paid a shitload of taxes last year. I want my services!

Not to rain on everyone's parade, but am I the only one that thinks that reducing Vanderbilt to one lane in each direction is going to result in it being a parking lot? While the DOT may think that the street is too large to support traffic now, what happens after the arena, new commercial space on Atlantic, increased traffic on Flatbush from all of the development, and all of the new residential housing planned for the area?
Flatbush is currently a parking lot and Vanderbilt is one of the quickest ways to get between GAP and Atlantic.

Not to mention, that while I think that bike lanes are great, isn't it better for bikers to be on Carlton or Underhill? It just seems to me that putting them on a street that already has commercial traffic, illegal double parking, and is a high traffic block isn't the best mix. Now, I say that as a recreational biker only, so I'd love for some of the committed bike culture folks to chime in with their opinions.

I do feel for folks who have to deal with the cars whizzing down the street, but it just seems to me like these changes are going to guarantee horrible traffic with all the changes to the neighborhood. What do you guys think?

ETA: This is the pedestrian fatality info for this stretch of Vandy...

http://www.transalt.org/crashmaps/brooklyn/ped/e4.html[/i]

homeowner wrote: Not to rain on everyone's parade, but am I the only one that thinks that reducing Vanderbilt to one lane in each direction is going to result in it being a parking lot? While the DOT may think that the street is too large to support traffic now, what happens after the arena, new commercial space on Atlantic, increased traffic on Flatbush from all of the development, and all of the new residential housing planned for the area?
Flatbush is currently a parking lot and Vanderbilt is one of the quickest ways to get between GAP and Atlantic.

Not to mention, that while I think that bike lanes are great, isn't it better for bikers to be on Carlton or Underhill? It just seems to me that putting them on a street that already has commercial traffic, illegal double parking, and is a high traffic block isn't the best mix. Now, I say that as a recreational biker only, so I'd love for some of the committed bike culture folks to chime in with their opinions.

I do feel for folks who have to deal with the cars whizzing down the street, but it just seems to me like these changes are going to guarantee horrible traffic with all the changes to the neighborhood. What do you guys think?

In MN, they (DOT) kept on trying and trying to solve rush hour traffic backups by adding more lanes... after a while, people learned that it really doesn't help. If there are more lanes on a given route, people KNOW that there are more lanes. People that avoided that route because of the congestion are more likely to use it again, which only returns congestion to the same level as before... I would imagine that the inverse would be true- if drivers know that there are fewer lanes available, some will try an alternative route, keeping congestion at the same relative level.

homeowner wrote: Yes, but my point is what alternatives are there? If you are looking to get to the west side of the park, you can go down Atlantic then up 3rd, up, Flatbush, or up Vanderbilt. The next option is to go up Washington and then come back down eastern parkway. Each of those other alternatives are on streets that are already clogged with traffic. If you are going to the east side of the park every street going south already have heavy traffic flows except for Underhill (Washington, Franklin, and Nostrand). The point being there aren't a lot of alternatives for cars. It just seems that you are reducing traffic flows at the same time that you are increasing the number of people and cars in this neighborhood.

Some people will decide to not drive in that particular scenario, then.

I know, it sounds like a lot of BS, and I truly thought that it was a bunch of BS when I first heard the theory that expanding wouldn't help, but after seeing the results firsthand, I really believe it to a large extent...

The purpose of the median is to slow down traffic that is moving too fast for a pedestrian-heavy street. It's not clear that DOT will actually reduce the number of lanes or just narrow the existing lanes, which are wide enough to encourage drivers to speed. The median will also prevent drivers from making sharp and fast left turns, which has been the cause of many accidents on the corner of Park and Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt Avenue is already a parking lot in the afternoons. From about 5-7, there's a huge backup into Grand Army Plaza that usually stretches north to Park Place or even Prospect. Will it get worse with a single lane? Probably not -- there will be less idiotic merging and you'll have fewer double-parkers.

homeowner wrote: Not to rain on everyone's parade, but am I the only one that thinks that reducing Vanderbilt to one lane in each direction is going to result in it being a parking lot? While the DOT may think that the street is too large to support traffic now, what happens after the arena, new commercial space on Atlantic, increased traffic on Flatbush from all of the development, and all of the new residential housing planned for the area?
Flatbush is currently a parking lot and Vanderbilt is one of the quickest ways to get between GAP and Atlantic.

Not to mention, that while I think that bike lanes are great, isn't it better for bikers to be on Carlton or Underhill? It just seems to me that putting them on a street that already has commercial traffic, illegal double parking, and is a high traffic block isn't the best mix. Now, I say that as a recreational biker only, so I'd love for some of the committed bike culture folks to chime in with their opinions.

I do feel for folks who have to deal with the cars whizzing down the street, but it just seems to me like these changes are going to guarantee horrible traffic with all the changes to the neighborhood. What do you guys think?

ETA: This is the pedestrian fatality info for this stretch of Vandy...

http://www.transalt.org/crashmaps/brooklyn/ped/e4.html[/i]

What the City should do is work on the timing of the lights not squeeze traffic down to one lane, especially with the Arena coming. Much as I love raised medians I have only see them on function streets with two lanes or more in each direction. Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn and Park Avenue in Manhattan are good examples On the flip side, Ninth street by Third Ave squeezes two lanes into one. It's a complete mess. Cars swerve like maniacs out of the left turn only lane to beat the traffic and the light.

Subject: the only way to reduce traffic in bklyn...

is to begin taking lanes that are currently dedicated to private automobile travel and parking and re-allocate that road space to more efficient modes of transportation: buses, bikes and pedestrians.

as a part of that project, we would also need to put many more buses on the street. buses are the big opportunity in nyc right now. we use our surface streets so inefficiently as is. no amount of signal-timing tweaks will change the fact that a car-based urban transport system simply stops working at a certain point, prevents growth and creates all kinds of enviromental chaos (see the honking thread in this very forum for a small example. See the global warming thread currently running in Park Slope Parents for a larger one).

some form of congestion pricing would also help a great deal in places that are full of traffic and have plenty of good transit. downtown brooklyn meets that criteria.

forty percent of the traffic rolling down flatbush avenue during AM rush is thru-traffic. a % of that flatbush traffic consists of south brooklyn drivers choosing to cut through prospect park and go down flatbush avenue to the bridges rather than just staying on the prospect expwy and paying to go through the battery tunnel which, on most mornings, is the faster route. drivers change their behavior based on fees. london reduced traffic congestion by a whopping 30 percent with congestion pricing. drivers aren't complaining either. you can now actually drive through central london without ever getting stuck in traffic. the secret to london's success, though, were the 300 new buses they put on the street as a part of the program.

cities around the world are making themselves less convenient and accessible to private automobiles with great success. nyc is falling behind and we're all suffering for it. the vanderbilt road diet is a good but small start in the right direction.

here is a great study on how traffic "disappears" when you take lanes away from cars as we are now doing on vanderbilt...

http://www.vision42.org/about/traffic.php
In fact, the reality is that, when streets are closed, not all the traffic relocates to other streets. A number of careful studies have been done before and after street closures. The book whose cover is illustrated here — Traffic Impact of Highway Capacity Reductions, by S. Cairns, C. Haas-Klau & P. Goodwin (Landor Publishing, London, March 1998) — details studies of over 200 cases of street closings around the world, where the predicted congestion on adjacent streets actually failed to materialize. More often than not, traffic simply disappeared. And this was passive shrinkage, not shrinkage by the deliberate pricing of tunnels and bridges.