Speed and Streets

Recently, the City of Davenport held a community meeting about what to do with traffic that speeds off River Drive onto River Street in the neighborhood around McClellan Heights. This feels like a good opportunity, then, to talk about how we design our roads around speed and cars. While my thoughts are inspired by this discussion around River Street, I'm not going to focus directly on that because I'm not a traffic engineer and wasn't present for the meeting. Rather, I want to talk more broadly about how traffic speeds are managed around Davenport and the QCA.

1. Too much reliance on speed limits alone 

The article linked above mentions that the speed limit on River Street is 25 mph but cars have been measured up to 68 mph. This is emblematic of the general way speed is "controlled" in the QCA: all speed limit, no street design. The proposal to actually redesign some of the street with bollards may not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction, because any direction of actually changing street appearance from "giant open asphalt stretch" is the right direction. 

Basically, the speed limits and the street design don't match: roads with slow limits don't look any different from roads with high limits, and so drivers just drive fast.

2. Lane and speed limit mismatch

This gets worse in places like Brady and Harrison Streets, which can be as low as 25 mph while still having 4 lanes of one-way traffic. No wonder people zoom on through! It's as wide as the interstate. 

Does this look like a 25 mph road to you?

When the speed limit drops, lanes should drop out; and honestly some of these streets should just be fewer lanes. Give us some bike lanes or a bus lane or a tram or something. Parklets. Anything but a giant stroad. And the same goes if the speed doesn't drop but just is lower than the road is designed for.

3. Distinguishing roads and streets would help

The overly fast traffic on roads like River Dr, Brady, and Harrison is because these are among the main throughfares for the city. And there's nothing wrong with those roads being fast! But there isn't sufficient distinction between these roads used for fast movement of cars and streets, which should be more about people using the street for things other than moving through. In other words, we have a bunch of stroads. There's actually good potential here for distinguishing them, since we have a clear set of E-W and N-S routes in Davenport in particular and the QCA more generally. But this work hasn't been done; the roads and streets are designed basically the same and don't feel that different to drive on.

This is why people get so wrought up about road traffic going into their neighborhoods: because the cars will treat their streets like roads. And while they're not wrong that that's a problem, the issue is bigger than one intersection at a time. The problem is that we don't have clear design differences and visual (or even physical) cues to drivers that they're in a space they shouldn't be tearing through. Yes, some places have speed bumps, but that's an extreme and usually ad-hoc approach; comprehensive street design on every street is more helpful. That creates a consistent understanding by drivers of what is expected of them, and a larger set of non-driving options for transportation as well, making it more likely that traffic will actually both reduce in volume and in speed.

It's good to see Davenport considering options for River Street off River Drive--but it would be even better to see some more general overhaul of how we treat speed in the city and the QCA.