ALSTON AVE - Op-Ed Piece

Above, Main and Alston.

DOT Plan for Alston a disaster for neighborhood
by Michael Bacon and Gary Kueber
Published in the Herald-Sun, Feb. 18, 2007


Alston Avenue needs to be widened; so says our state Department of Transportation. We are willing to accept the widening, but DOT’s design, sadly, contains too many mistakes we've made before in Durham. We all can attest as to exactly what goes wrong when you take inner-city streets and try to turn them into mini-freeways.

Making the street too wide, too fast, and too hard to cross would be bad enough in any neighborhood. This project, however, runs right through the middle of one of Durham's most historic neighborhoods, and one that the city and federal governments have spent tens of millions to stabilize and improve. DOT's design for the widening threatens to undo much of the positive impact from projects such as HOPE VI and Barnes Avenue. And yet, DOT continues to push its design with minimal compromise, despite the concern and opposition of the community and our elected officials.

At the core of our objection to this project lies a disagreement about what constitutes a 'good road.' DOT bases their measurement on two primary outcomes: 1) Maintaining the free flow of traffic, as measured by delay and capacity, with the intent of reducing congestion, and 2) engineering of roadway characteristics (such as lane width and turning radii) to provide a wide margin of error for vehicles, with the intent of reducing vehicular crashes.

While the intent of these goals suggests a benefit to the driving public, we question the efficacy of DOT’s methods. Recent transportation studies suggest that increasing roadway capacity induces demand (more traffic). Thus traffic on a roadway increases to the point that congestion once again reigns. Ignoring this basic principle of supply and demand, DOT continues to operate on the assumption that adding roadway capacity actually decreases congestion.

Similarly, over-engineering a roadway to provide a margin for error fails to decrease collisions and induce safer driving; anyone who has driven on Duke Street just north of the Durham Freeway or on Mangum St. by our burgeoning Performing Arts Center understands that people intuit the roadway tolerance, and drive accordingly (i.e. a 35 mph speed limit means little on a 5 lane, one-way road).

The most concerning element of DOT’s methods lies in the damage they do to the surrounding community. Evidence from public health and urban planning studies suggests that those who live in close proximity to high capacity roads suffer the unhealthy consequences of air pollution, poor access to parks, libraries, schools, groceries and other walkable neighborhood destinations. Making Alston a wide, high-capacity roadway will endanger the lives of children trying to cross Alston to get to Eastway Elementary or East End Park.


Above, A boy waits to cross Liberty St. at Alston with Eastway Elementary in the background.

DOT's computer-based traffic models omit any assessment of these other costs borne by the community. Additionally, while models exist to measure whether adequate capacity exists for safe, effective pedestrian traffic, DOT does not use them. Transportation designers will typically estimate these effects with more qualitative methods, such as through a community impact assessment. While such assessments provide valuable and needed information, the vague nature of the conclusions means that they will typically be trumped by the ‘certainty’ of the engineering standards.

Hence. the cost of these projects to the neighborhood, in real terms of economic development, property value, public health, and community, remains unmeasured or underestimated. DOT now asks the neighborhood to bear the costs that the widening project will incur, while providing disproportionate benefit to through-traffic from northern Durham.

This conflicts directly with the federal HOPE VI and the city-funded Barnes Avenue projects, both of which have had undeniable positive impacts on the neighborhood by creating a more pedestrian friendly, human-friendly urban environment. DOT’s design for this project will sever the east side of the community development project from the west side, impeding pedestrian access to schools, parks, the library, social services, public transportation and jobs, thereby throwing away the hard-won gains made by massive neighborhood investments.

Community Builders, the developer of the HOPE VI project, understands the negative impact of the current design on their project, and has voiced its opposition. The City of Durham, Durham County, and the Durham-Chapel-Hill Metropolitan Planning Organization (our regional transportation body) have all voiced their concerns with the project as designed, and provided good, pragmatic alternatives. DOT has largely ignored these suggestions, despite little basis for doing so.

Finally, with the East End Connector to provide relief for drivers traveling north-south through the city, in the form of an all-freeway route between I-85 and 147, the problem this project was designed for may already be addressed by the time it gets finished. By then, DOT may have inflicted yet another disruptive road project on east Durham for no good reason.

Should this project be scuttled? No – we fully agree that the Alston Avenue infrastructure is decrepit and in need of an update. Creating four lanes of traffic rather than the current three may not be a bad idea in-and-of-itself. But rather than continuing a slavish adherence to outdated, community-damaging standards, DOT needs to both listen to the community and follow the latest recommendations of their own profession – in the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Context Sensitive Solutions manual - by

1) Eliminating dedicated right-turn lanes that widen intersections to six-lanes wide
2) Striping the currently-unstriped bike lanes providing dedicated space for bicyclists (currently just an extra-wide right lane that will encourage higher truck speeds)
3) Improve safety at corners by reducing wide turning-radii that further widen intersections
4) Reducing the length of dedicated left turn lanes that further widen the road.
5) Creating appropriate street trees, median trees, and neighborhood-scale street lighting to promote safety and compliment the neighborhood.

These changes, based on documented evidence, will promote a safer, more walkable pedestrian environment, while still allowing the expansion of roadway capacity that DOT desires. If done well, this project could significantly enhance the neighborhood – something DOT has struggled to do with past projects. But it’s never to late for DOT to learn from its previous mistakes.

Dr. Gary Kueber is an urban planning/public health consultant and publisher of Endangered Durham

Michael Bacon is a Geographic Information Systems analyst and holds a Master’s degree in Geography.