Neighborhood Notes - Foxhall: 22 November, 2000

Community reps are now working with MedStar Health to select a Traffic Consulting firm for the Reservoir Road corridor between Foxhall Rd and 35th Street. Unlike past institutional studies, both the community and the hospital are being treated as their customer, with provision for community input on study designs. An overview of the approach will given at the December ANC2E meeting, with a Special on-site Meeting to be held soon after, so the community could provide specific input to the consultants. Actual field data collection will be done after New Year,
rather than using atypical data from the season between Thanksgiving and year-end.

Short-term measures were agreed to late summer with the city’s Division of Transportation, mainly focused on removing selected meters too close to intersections of streets and entrances. Parked vehicles slow to a crawl anyone trying to safely turn in. In the most egregious example there are actually parking meters in the bus zone of the main hospital entrance! Unfortunately DOT haven’t yet implemented what they promised, and we’ll push to get that done before field traffic counts start.

Preliminary analysis of earlier traffic studies, even though inadequate in number of days and times of day covered, reveal inexpensive changes could be made right now in synchronizing traffic light signal phases along Reservoir Road to improve rush-hour flow. One nagging concern is that, even once we have better data, will our DOT still be   unresponsive regarding changing the traffic light timing? After all, this is still mainly the same crew of people that failed to change light timing around the Key Bridge/M St intersection, even after the completion of the major
capital work on Whitehurst Freeway. We’ll not hesitate to call for Council oversight hearing if unresponsiveness happens again with this Reservoir Rd study.

 © Bob Andrew, Foxhall