Right is Not Right: New Traffic Pattern on Southern Park Place an Epic Fail
Confusing Traffic Signs on Park Pl NW
As pointed out in September 2010, DDOT’s lane reconfiguration of southern Park Place NW has created confusion. Over time, drivers have not become familiar with the lane reconfiguration. As a result there are daily near-accidents and a total disregard for the bike lane. Most audibly, the use of car horns is prevalent as drivers warn those that do not maintain their lanes.
Let’s backup … one-way south-bound traffic starts on Park Place at Rock Creek Church Road. As traffic crosses over Kenyon Street there are three lanes of traffic. The furthest lane to the left is a turn only lane onto east-bound Irving Street. At the Park Place/Irving Street intersection traffic is supposed to merge into two lanes. The middle lane traffic is meant to merge to the left-most lane and the right-most lane merges into the middle lane.
Recent signage (above) located on both sides of the street helps neither lane of traffic because the implied action is not right. The sign says ‘MERGE RIGHT, which makes sense only if ‘Right’ is to be interpreted as Correctly — as in Correctly Merge. Perhaps the sign is warning ‘MERGE (Coming from Your) RIGHT’.
With all kidding aside, the traffic warning sign should read “MERGE LEFT.” Right?
Tags: DDOT, Park Place, Park View, traffic
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May 25, 2011 at 9:40 am
Thanks for this post. As someone who cycles through this intersection on an almost daily basis, I understand the problems for cyclists and vehicles.
I have been in communication with DDOT and have received confirmation that plans are in the works to modify the lane configuration to make them more clear.
May 25, 2011 at 10:33 am
I have no doubt that the lane configurations can be tweaked. At the end of the day, though, there are too many lanes, the roads are too wide, and coming off/getting on the speedways around the Hospital Center and North Capitol, everyone is going far too quickly.
May 25, 2011 at 12:10 pm
I agree with Patrick. Much of the road/ramp structure around the Hospital Center dates to the days when they were planning to extend the Interstate there. DDOT needs to adjust the scheme to treat these as neighborhood roads. DDOT also has a rather peculiar mindset of choosing to narrow roads like Sherman Avenue (ie making that road less attractive to cars) while maintaining the two-lane, one-way speedway on Park Place. In the end, the DDOT scheme will only divert more and more cars to the attractive Park Place speedway. One thought is that DDOT maintains the speedway for the purpose of ambulance access. This makes no sense, as ambulances use neighborhood streets to get to the speedway and that seems to work just fine. If Park Place was narrowed to one lane, wouldn’t cars get out of the way of ambulances just as they do in the rest of the city? I also note that ambulances seem to have speed governors (they go about 25-30 mph) and blair the sirens anyway on Park Place, even in the middle of the night when there are two lanes, no cars and ample space to go as fast as they want on the speedway. In short, (apologies for the long post) DDOT needs to get with the program and treat Park Place as a neighborhood road, just as it does with 5th Street, Rock Creek Church Road, Sherman Avenue and other roads in the area.
July 21, 2011 at 7:05 am
[...] unsafe. Recognizing the failure of the design, the next solution was the addition of an incoherent sign in late May of this year. At that time it was obvious to all that DDOT’s failure was of epic [...]
November 20, 2011 at 9:47 pm
You are indeed right on this piece.