Prompted by Brendon’s recent post (and a Twitter conversation with Ethan and Janne), I got interested in some of the traffic counts and engineering on Washington Avenue. I looked at the Washington Avenue Traffic Operation Analysis by Alliant Engineering for Hennepin County. On p.11 of this document are traffic “counts” the report said were collected in Spring of 2011. The traffic added up perfectly, and with some experience looking at traffic counts in a previous life (some people’s previous lives were as Cleopatra or the King of England, like Bill Gates I was a traffic counter), I had to believe some massaging was going on, data never comes out that clean, especially when it is collected on multiple dates. For instance, there is conservation of flow in traffic, every car that enters and intersection must leave it (unless it is raptured). A traffic count at one site on one date will ensure this. Similarly every car that leaves an upstream intersection must arrive at the downstream intersection, after controlling for driveways. A traffic count on one date is likely inconsistent with another date. Other reasons for massaging include inconsistent peak periods (the peak time at intersection A may differ from downstream intersection B).

In one of the great blessings of open data, Minneapolis makes its raw traffic counts available online. So I went to their website and looked for myself, under turning movement counts [TMC] on Washington Avenue South. These counts are summarized in Table 1 for Eastbound traffic (and the first 5 columns of Table 2 for Westbound traffic), along with the numbers from Alliant’s report. As you can see Alliant’s numbers (data column 3) are 10 to 35% higher than the counts in the City of Minneapolis database for the same period (data columns 1 and 2) (and I assume these are the source of Alliant’s resulting numbers, though the report is vague on the traffic count details). The ratios are given in data column 4.

Why does this matter? By being “conservative” and adjusting traffic counts up, they are over-estimating the need for roadway capacity, that is, they are being “liberal” with the number of lanes required to ensure a particular level of service.

Table 1: Eastbound AM flows on Washington from Hennepin to 11th Avenue

Table 2: Westbound AM flows on Washington from 11th Avenue to Hennepin

Reversible Lanes

I was also interested in some other aspect of traffic. Ethan said the traffic was balanced on Washington after I posited that it was unbalanced, and we could consider reversible lanes. In fact it is both, depending on where you are looking. The final columns of Table 2 identify the dominant direction, the directional ratio (WB/EB flow), and what flows would be with the lane split given in the final column. At 3rd Avenue, traffic is balanced, to the East there is much higher westbound traffic in the morning, to the West there is much higher eastbound traffic in the morning. Along Washington Avenue, the midpoint of downtown traffic is 3rd Avenue (not Nicollet as I would have supposed before looking at the numbers).

Is the imbalance sufficient to justify reversible lanes? The case is marginal. In general, with two lanes in each direction, left turn lanes, and good signal timing, I think a 2/2 split should work well enough. Near I-35W a 3/1 split (3 lanes westbound, 1 lane eastbound in the AM) is plausible. Similarly on the westside of downtown, a 1/3 split is also plausible in the reverse direction.

I am leaving the PM analysis as an exercise for the reader.

The Minneapolis Turning Movement Counts can be found here: WashAveAMFlows.pdf andWashAvePMFlows.pdf.