How to Be Excited About the Lomas Redesign
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Albuquerque's arterial streets have a complicated role in the city's cycling network. Some, like Indian School and San Pedro, host bike lanes already and are marked for further improvements in our Bike Plan. More frequently, however, the major roads form barriers to safe and convenient cycling, forcing cyclists to take long detours or play frogger in order to reach their destinations in other city blocks. Worse, these major roads host important destinations for Burqueños: schools, shops, restaurants, trail connections, and numerous others. We wrote about this phenomenon this summer in relation to the upcoming road diet on 4th Street, where the presence of parallel infrastructure is welcome but not sufficient to enable access by cyclists.
Few streets form stronger barriers in Albuquerque than Lomas, which between University and San Pedro hosts the northern entrance to UNM, the southern entrance to UNMH, the southern end of the North Diversion Channel, two grocery stores, numerous restaurants, access to several schools, and no bicycle facilities. While Constitution and Marquette/Campus provide some level of parallel access on either side, their proximity (Constitution is a half mile from Lomas) and/or crossing quality (Marquette has no signalized crossings) limit their utility. Worse, crossing Lomas also substantially obstructs north-south travel, with limited signalized crossings that all host signal cycle lengths much longer than the Complete Streets recommended 60-90 seconds.
With that all said, it is initially difficult to get excited about the planned improvements on Lomas (which currently is limited only to the Girard to San Pedro section), which in consisting solely of converting the outer lanes to BAT (Business Access and Transit) lanes and upgrading traffic signal infrastructure provides little improvement for cycling in the area. If Lomas currently rates at 2/10, the outcome of the road diet might be closer to a 5/10. While in grade school a 5/10 would still receive an "F", we should keep in mind that the City holds the ultimate trump card: they can always do nothing. Additionally, if we can get excited about the new protected bike lanes on Martin Luther King that upgrade that route from perhaps a 7/10 to a 9/10 (which I certainly can), a similar improvement in absolute terms is worth at least some accolades.
So, before continuing further on the project, I encourage you to submit public comment in support of the current state of the Lomas project. The comment submission form is available here.
What truly can serve as a source of excitement for this project are the upgrades to the traffic signals. Currently, the signal infrastructure on Lomas is controlled by "twisted pair" cables, which I'm told are incompatible with modern traffic signal boxes. This project will upgrade the traffic signals to enable more complex---and more efficient---signal cycle patterns, including leading pedestrian intervals, bicycle detection, and more flexible signal lengths. It might be more accurate to call this project a road “refresh”, rather than a road “diet”. While these more efficient signalizations will be possible, I do admit to some hesitation regarding the City's inclination to actually implement them: certainly Central also has similarly modern traffic signals that were installed as part of the ART project, and yet even intersections like Central and Washington have excessively long signal cycle lengths (~110 seconds) that do not give late-arriving pedestrians permission to cross the street, nor do they provide special one-sided pedestrian signalization for leaving the ART platform. If the City is unable to provide pedestrian-conscious traffic signals on Central at an ART station in Nob Hill, it is worrying whether they will be willing to do so on Lomas. But certainly the possibility of them doing the right thing is exciting!
The context of the road design in this area is important to consider as well: unlike on 4th Street, it is actually difficult to find space for additional bicycle facilities without rebuilding the entire road. This is because even though a typical section of Lomas is about 80 feet wide, it is comprised of six 10-foot lanes and a 20-foot raised median that hosts periodic turning lanes. Where other road diets---like 4th---could piece together the 7 feet per side needed to install a protected bike lane by narrowing oversized lanes, Lomas's appropriately-sized lanes preclude this option. This ultimately means that---unless the median is going to be rebuilt---the only options for bicycle infrastructure are to convert one lane into a somewhat cramped protected two-way cycletrack, or take two lanes and convert them into spacious protected bike lanes (as was done on Louisiana).
As impactful as that would be, it's not as if the BAT lanes are without justification. Under the city's ongoing transit redesign, this section of Lomas will see buses every 9 to 15 minutes each direction, higher than almost any road not named Central on our current transit network. The BAT lanes on East Central are new enough that it's not fully clear yet what the safety impacts have been, but anecdotally it appears that the lanes have been successful in moving traffic away from the curbs and keeping the way clear for transit vehicles. If the City is looking to improve Lomas while spending the least amount of money, what they have envisioned here is likely close to the best they can do. I have long been willing to accept half-measures, so long as we get twice as many of them: if going cheap here means we get projects like the Buena Vista Bike Boulevard, Lead/Coal Road Diets, and widespread installation of MLK-esque bike lane upgrades completed on a faster schedule, in addition to these signal improvements on Lomas, then perhaps that's not too bad. We would like to see a more aggressive investment into making Albuquerque's roads more hospitable to all, but that complaint is certainly outside the scope of this singular project.
Finally, I would like to raise my perennial complaint about the conduct of the contractors who perform these traffic studies, in particular around the way they treat Level of Service. Lee Engineering presented only a map of the implications for Automobile Level of Service (LOS), despite Albuquerque's Complete Streets Ordinance directing that the "overarching goal of any project" be the improvement of Multimodal Level of Service. Moreover, Lee's presentation material on Automobile LOS describes a LOS of "E" as having "intolerable delays", which sounds somewhat contrary to the guidance of the Albuquerque and Bernalillo County Comprehensive Plan, for which E is actually the minimum acceptable Automobile LOS on roads like Lomas. We hope that future studies by the city's consultants will take seriously the Complete Streets Ordinance and the trade-offs involved in road design.
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