PlanItMetro

As daylight hours shorten, the region’s Street Smart initiative takes to the streets to reduce collisions involving bicyclists and pedestrians.

Alexandria Mayor Euille kicks off safety campaign

Daylight saving time ended on November 1 and evening commuters now have one less hour of daylight. In 2013, 72 percent of pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. occurred in the dark. To mark this transition and remind the region’s residents to be extra vigilant when travelling during these darker hours, the region recently kicked off the Fall 2015 Street Smart Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety campaign at Alexandria City Hall. Metro Board member and  Alexandria Mayor Euille opened the campaign with some personal remarks about ensuring his own safety.  He and other local officials were on hand to remind motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists to be extra vigilant as they travel throughout the region.  ‘Walking billboards’ also will be out and about near heavy pedestrian areas handing out safety information and highlighting safety messages for those who pass by. 

Street teams hand out safety materials to Metrobus riders

Metro riders use many modes to travel to and from our services, and each and every one is a pedestrian at some point along their trip, so we partner with the Street Smart campaign to spread these safety messages:

• If you are a driver, slow down and watch for pedestrians and cyclists.  Stop for pedestrians in crosswalks and leave at least 3 feet when passing a cyclist.
• If you are a pedestrian, use crosswalks and be sure to look left, right and left again before stepping off a curb.
• Cyclists, obey traffic laws and ride with traffic.
• And for all, pay attention to your surroundings as you travel, do not let your devices distract you.

To make it easy to keep these tips in mind, we also like Arlington’s transportation team’s  handy acronym that offers an easy reminder to keep us safe on the streets: be a PAL – that is, be Predictable, Alert, and Lawful.  It works for everyone.

We all have a role to play in keeping each other safe – let’s be sure we do our part.  Stay safe out there.

We all know improving station access is good.  But, how do we rank access projects relative to each other?   Step 1: Ridership

In our recent post, we gave you an overview of our Station Access Investment Strategy project.  We’ve identified 1,000s of recommendations for new pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure near our Metrorail stations and need a way to prioritize them.  After some thought, we’ve come up with a number of potential criteria.  In this post, we’ll discuss those that deal with ridership.

Map of the Southern Ave walk shed from July 2014 Post on Ridership Potential from New Ped./ Bike Projects

Once again, one of key concepts we’ve been telling you about in recent months is that by improving access to stations we can grow ridership.  For stations with relatively small walk sheds, we’ll conduct a detailed analysis of what happens to the walk shed when the proposed projects are built.  For example, add a sidewalk at Cheverly and the walk shed will grow by X%.  We will then look at the amount of households and jobs in the newly connected area and, using some methods we’ve shown you in other posts, calculate the potential ridership gained by the new project.  The higher the potential ridership gain, the better the project scores.

But, we also want to understand the value of a new project to a part of the station that is already connected to the network and how this could relate back to ridership.  To do this, we’ve come up some other metrics.  They include: Read more…