Asheville – Carrie Simpson, a safety engineer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT), shared a preliminary analysis of the Merrimon Avenue road diet with Asheville City Council. She compared data from the five years prior to and the first 1.42 years after the road diet. Annual crashes averaged 82.4 before and 63.38 after. There were no fatal crashes in either period.
Class A accidents, which result in fatalities or permanent disabilities, averaged 0.6 per year prior and 0 after. Class B crashes, which cause permanent partial disability or hospitalize at least three people, averaged 5.6 prior and 1.4 after. Class C accidents, with nonpermanent injuries bad enough to result in lost workdays, and accidents involving only property damage also went down. Average annual incidents before and after were, respectively, 10.8:10.6 and 65.4:51.4.
Simpson next looked at “crash types” before and after. Post-road diet, rear-end crashes increased 67%, but frontal impact crashes decreased 55%. Rear-end crashes now constitute almost half of accidents, with frontal impacts accounting for around 30%. The silver lining here, explained Simpson, was “frontal impact crashes include crash types such as head-on, angle, left-turn, and right-turn crashes. Those crashes typically result in higher severity.”
The road diet was advertised as incentivizing bike and ped traffic, and the presentation reported “an overall reduction in vulnerable road user crashes.” As with a lot of popular traffic presentations, the sampling sizes here were not impressive, with a total of nine pedestrian accidents and two bicycle crashes in the five years prior. Before and after annual rates for pedestrian and bicycle crashes were, respectively, 1.8:0.7 and 0.4:0.7. Not only did crash rates for bicycles increase in the period investigated, an additional Class B bicycle accident occurred in May this year.
At 12,000 to 19,600 motor vehicles a day, traffic volumes were down 1-8% on the road diet and down slightly less immediately to the north and south. Pedestrian volumes were varied, “but part of that is likely due to rainfall that occurred during the after data collection,” explained Simpson. Insufficient parameterization was provided to comment on how much daily bicycle counts increased, but the number of cyclists traveling in the road increased from 28% to 82%.
That didn’t mean people were getting out of their cars to pedal. Traffic volumes increased 5-16% on Broadway, Kimberly, Lakeshore, Woodward, and Farrwood. On Broadway and Kimberly, volumes increased by 600 to 900 vehicles a day. On alternate routes, including interstates, state highways, and city roads, travel times were only impacted by seconds. With a twist of anthropomorphism, the preliminary study concluded, “There may not be substantial migration of crashes, particularly for injury crashes.”
No numbers were presented for collisions on spillover roads, but Simpson stated, “The preliminary results for total crashes have shown a slight increase in crashes on Broadway, no change on Kimberly, and a reduction on Lakeshore; and injury crashes for all those three routes have shown reductions.” Average speeds on Merrimon Avenue dropped 3-5 mph in the road diet zone and no more than 1 mph to the north and south of it. Average speeds on spillover roads (Kimberly, Lakeshore, Murdock, Woodward, and Farrwood), based on a day’s worth of measurements, increased 0-2 mph. Anomalously, 85th percentile speeds dropped 6 mph on Woodward while increasing up to 1% on the other cut-throughs.
Following the presentation, Mayor Esther Manheimer and Councilwoman Kim Roney asked about future design modifications. Councilwoman Sage Turner added, “We have a really robust community of petitioners and really folks that are wanting to see differences in how we move people around the city, and I would love to unleash them on you all, so you could hear their voices, but I don’t know how to do that.”
NCDOT Division Engineer Tim Anderson, who had already said that the NCDOT was getting a lot of emails, said the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) was easy to reach. People may email mpo@landofsky.org, call 828-251-6622, or complete a public comment form available on frenchbroadrivermpo.org. Public comment is also taken before and after each board meeting. A calendar is available on the website.
In other matters, Terrelle Bowen was honored by City Manager Debra Campbell for receiving the 2024 Herman Drake Award. The competitive distinction is bestowed each year on a North Carolina solid waste employee selected from peer nominations. Most remarkable among the sanitation driver’s accomplishments was an incident from 2018. Bowen and an unnamed coworker observed an elderly driver sliding down an embankment and were able to manually hold the car in place until the Asheville Fire Department arrived on the scene.