After about three years of work, a Lincoln group is putting the finishing touches on a long-term master plan to make Lincoln’s roads safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
More than half of Lincoln’s residents would like to walk or bike more on town roads but feel they and their children would be unsafe, according to research by the Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Committee (BPAC), which summarized its work for the Select Board on April 25. After more public outreach and listening sessions, the group plans to finalize its master plan and submit it to a Town Meeting vote in 2023, though officials are still researching exactly what voter actions are required.
The early draft includes a list of almost 70 potential safety projects sorted by region of town and by category (intersection, crosswalk, road segment, trail, and special cases, which will require approval and/or funding from more than one source, such as the MBTA, MassDOT, easements from property owners, etc.). Ideas will be added, removed or altered as time goes on.
“This is probably a 30- to 40-year plan. Do I think [everything] is going to happen in my lifetime? No… but it’s something that needs to be at the table every year,” said BPAC member Bob Wolf.
The committee is an outgrowth of the Cycling Safety Advisory Committee, which was formed in 2017 after three bicycle crashes (two of them fatal) in Lincoln involving motor vehicles in the summer of 2016.
The master plan is based on a federal philosophy known as the Safe System, which assumes that people make mistakes and accidents will still happen, but aims to eliminate fatal and serious injuries for all road users by minimizing impact energy. This can be achieved by lower vehicle speeds, safer roads and vehicles, and educated road users.
Lincoln has already introduced a pilot program on Farrar Road with the creation of advisory shoulders, one of the suggested roadway measures intended to physically separate people traveling at different speeds). Other techniques include:
- Clarifying stop lines and intersection boundaries (something that’s already been done where Tower Road northbound meets Route 117)
- Tightening the marked turning radius at intersections to slow vehicles
- Painting “bike boxes” at intersections where bikes can wait in a separate area from vehicles
- Improving access to existing rail trails in neighboring towns, and/or creating new “rail to trail routes” (pedestrian/bike paths built alongside railways tracks that are still in use).
Better road maintenance is another important way to improve road safety, the BPAC noted. A wide crack along the side of Route 117 recently caused a crash when a cyclist’s tire was caught in the crack and he was thrown from his bike, causing multiple injuries (the crack was patched the day after).
Wolf and fellow BPAC member Ginger Reiner listed some “quick hits” (improvements that could be made quickly and easily) and “high-value opportunities” (those in locations that link a large number of Lincoln households) when they met with the Select Board. Among the former:
- A crosswalk on Bedford Road just south of Route 2
- A contraflow bike lane on Winter Street between Old County Road and the Waltham town line
- Bike boxes, lane markings, and tightened intersection at Routes 126 and 117.
High-value opportunities include further improvements to the Tower Road/Route 117 intersection, upgrading the trail surface for family cycling on Bedford Lane south of Route 2A, and laying the groundwork for a grade-separated crossing of Route 2, as well as applying lessons learned from the Farrar Road advisory shoulder pilot to other minor connecting roads.
Once the various improvement opportunities are further studied and prioritized with resident input, the town will apply for grants and additional state highway maintenance funding to pay for part or all of as many projects as possible. The town also gets help for a nominal fee from a consultant from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
“What is most important is a very subjective call,” Wolf said. “Each [project] requires a group to dig in and figure it all out.”
I really welcome this initiative. I walk, dog-walk, run, skate, bike, and drive on Lincoln roads, and the advisory shoulders on Farrar Road have made a significant improvement to drivers, bikers, and pedestrians sharing the road safely. Most cars travel a bit more slowly on Farrar since the shoulders were painted (the 30 mph speed limit is pretty high for this road), and give pedestrians and bikers a wider berth when overtaking. And pedestrians and bikers now have a reasonably-wide, clearly marked section of the road they can travel in, which is particularly helpful for folks with dogs or kids and for groups of people. Great work, BPAC! I look forward to additional changes going forward.
Greetings from Geneva, Switzerland where large numbers of commuters and kids safely cycle to work and school. We’re returning to Lincoln in the fall and I would love to help Lincoln become more bike and pedestrian-friendly. Electric bikes are the future. There is no turning back. Might as well make it safe for everyone to use them.
À bientôt
Julie Brogan
Tightening the intersection at route 117 and 126 makes no sense to me. There is a lot of truck traffic on these roads, many of the trucks long enough to have long turning radiuses. Every week or so the sign at 126 and 117 is knocked down because a truck has not been able to make the tight turn. I urge the committee to make sure they have taken into account truck traffic before they make their final decisions. While none of us like trucks on our roads, these trucks provide important services to small stores that need new inventory delivered. Route 126 connects stores in Concord, Lincoln, Wayland, and Natick. It’s not reasonable to think that trucks are going to go out to 128 and come back in again to service these stores. I haven’t even mentioned the moving vans that many of us need from time to time. While I am very much in favor of making our roads safer for bicyclists, we also have to make the roads safe for all the other users.
RAH, BPAC understands your concern. Trucks are vital to making the community work with deliveries to businesses and households and accommodating public safety vehicles. And we certainly aware of the short life of signs at several intersections in town. There are a number of approaches, however, that would slow and better direct cars while accommodating large trucks turning. One example, so called “mountable” barriers that a large truck easily navigates, but a car would not. Small changes that the town has not heretofore deployed to existing intersections can produce wins for all road users while keeping commerce and public safety working. We urge you to stay tuned and offer your thoughts as we proceed through the next year.
A channelized turn lane may be in order. There would be a pedestrian refuge between the right turn lane and the through lane so you only have to cross one lane at a time, and trucks could still make wide radius turns.
“Safe system”, like “Vision Zero”, tells you the speaker or writer isn’t interested in facts but loves slogans. A bicyclist died after falling under a stopped truck and we’re supposed to make roads safer by slowing traffic even more. What’s slower than a stop? I guess that makes sense to somebody in Lincoln government. We had to destroy the traffic in order to save it.
Hey John, got a bike? I’d be happy to take you out for a ride around town. Compressing the risk to a single freak accident (bicyclist under truck) is essentially making your own slogan. Give me a call and we can go for a ride. I’ll even loan you a bike if you need one… I’m serious.
Thanks.
Noah
If Lincoln uses a freak accident to justify a policy, I think calling them on it is fair, and it’s not as much of a freak when placed in context. The death follows a pattern in injuries to non-motorized road users. They disproportionately (1) are not classified as “speed-related” by investigators, (2) involve heavy vehicles, and especially (3) are related to passing trucks on the right. Pedestrians too in the last case. Dead guy starts walking when the light changes and doesn’t see that the truck behind him has started turning right. Where I used to live in Belmont, a woman was killed when she was knocked down by a turning van starting from a stop sign at a traffic-calmed intersection.
I’ll link two good articles calling out the SUV in particular as a dangerous large vehicle. I do not endorse every conclusion but they are worth reading.
Malcolm Gladwell, “Big and Bad”, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/01/12/big-and-bad
Eric D. Lawrence et al. “Death on foot: America’s love of SUVs is killing pedestrians”, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/06/28/suvs-killing-americas-pedestrians/743139002/
As for riding, I think it has been so long since my last bike ride that I would be a traffic hazard. But I do walk on public roads in Lincoln about 350 days per year, for more miles than I drive and usually without a usable sidewalk. I have never looked at an oncoming vehicle and wished there was a cop or a speed bump or a chicane around.
If anybody along one of the major roads has a webcam and time to spare, point it at traffic and we can see how a random sample of bikes and cars interact. Some complaints vanish when examined closely. I enjoyed the engineer’s reports when I lived in Newton when a heavy flow of traffic or line of parked cars turned out to be literally one vehicle.
There is a conflict in traffic policy between the data-driven and emotion-driven camps. The first measures safety by accidents and injuries. The second defines “safety” to mean how comfortable people feel.
In my mind, “an accident waiting to happen” is high praise. It means there has never been an accident.
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As a Lincoln cyclist, I am grateful to the BPAC for the work they have done. I look forward to safer biking this summer, with the changes already in effect, and in the future.