Norfolk lane repurposing offers broad benefits
The Norfolk’s Granby Street Lane Repurposing project repurposes the outside travel lanes from Willow Wood Drive to Admiral Taussig Boulevard. The proposed work solves two significant problems and benefits all road users.
The first issue is excessive speeding and resulting car crashes. The good news is the redesign, when combined with a traffic light synchronization project, will move traffic through the corridor more safely, and faster than today. The second problem is providing a safe north-south connection for micro-transportation modes such as bikes, scooters and wheelchairs. This issue is solved by installing a protected bike lane.
Cromwell Farms resident and prior civic league President Will Spiedel said, “The civic league’s main complaint for the last decade, mentioned at nearly every civic league meeting, has been speeding on Granby Street.” Speeding was a primary factor in many of the 181 crashes that resulted in three deaths and 11 severe injuries documented in the city’s 2015-2019 Crash Analysis Memorandum. The three travel lanes carrying a traffic volume appropriate for two travel lanes encourages speeding on the roadway.
The solution to reducing the speeding-related car crashes is lane repurposing. Lane repurposing is the process of right-sizing an overbuilt, overcapacity road that, by design, promotes speeding. This lane repurposing project was highly ranked by state officials, which resulted in the Commonwealth Transportation Board awarding a fully funded grant for design and construction.
The city of Norfolk has taken further steps by completing a 192-page traffic study containing design concepts. Study results and design concepts have been presented to stakeholders along the corridor at three public meetings and seven civic league meetings. Also, project resources are available on the Norfolk. gov/granbybike website. Norfolk has proactively provided this information for the purpose of educating its citizens, and receiving comments and feedback before accepting the VDOT grant to formally begin project design.
Automobile travel time was the major factor in developing the preliminary design concepts in the traffic study. For example, a proposed design at Wards Corner retains existing lanes along certain blocks, moves bicyclists to a widened sidewalk, and now results in faster automotive travel time than today at this intersection. Other improvements to benefit automobiles, such as adding left turn pockets, are also being discussed.
The guiding values embodied in the city’s Multimodal Transportation Master Plan are “safety, freedom and prosperity.” Protected bicycle lanes on this section of Granby Street would further those values. The lanes would enhance safety for everyone and would augment the freedom to choose transportation modes on a more equitable basis. This would provide citizens more opportunities to ride bikes rather than drive will reduce local pollution, production of greenhouse gases, and encourage physical activity for individuals and families.
Finally, lane repurposing has been successful in Norfolk. Lane repurposing on Llewellyn Avenue, West Olney Road and 35th Street have given bike and scooter riders space to move safely into Colonial Place, Park Place, Ghent and Downtown. Llewellyn bike counters show an average of more than 2,000 monthly trips from April-August. This Granby Street project will provide a safe bike lane connection to these neighborhoods and other parts of the city.
This project will improve safety for drivers and riders, decrease driver travel time, and promote freedom of transportation choice. Citizens who bike will enjoy the benefits of physical exercise and will help reduce environmental damage caused by pollution and greenhouse gases in the process. To learn more and support the project, please visit BikeNorfolk.org.
Dr. Terry Whibley is a Norfolk resident, practicing gynecologist, a former member of the Norfolk City Council and serves on several local nonprofit boards. Travis Davidson is a Norfolk resident working as an engineering project manager and has managed the design and construction of several roads. He is also the advocacy director for Bike Norfolk and serves on Norfolk’s MTMP Advisory Committee and Norfolk’s Granby Street Bike Lane Advisory Committee.