Abreu asks DOT what LTN before-and-after report should include
Abreu asks what a before-and-after LTN report should include. DOT says safety is the minimum, but it also wants to measure emergency response times, bus speeds, and spillover effects on surrounding streets, citing London's evidence of no significant surrounding traffic increase or emergency response delay.
A critical piece of this legislation is reporting on the impacts of the LTN pilot areas.
What would a before and after data report look like?
And what data does DLT think would be important for understanding success?
Sure.
And, you know, we can talk about everything that might go into a report, but it, of course, starts with safety, right?
But I think everyone expects there's less traffic in an area.
It's likely to lead to safety.
So that's kind of a minimum level.
But we also want to look at things like making sure that we're not affecting emergency response times.
We want to make sure that as traffic is diverted to other streets, it's not affecting bus speeds, say, on those other streets.
We want to make sure that we're not benefiting one area at the cost of another.
And again, some of the lessons from London are that you don't see those spillover effects.
But as we measure it in New York, we want to know for ourselves and be able to tell not just what's happening in the immediate neighborhood, but also any surrounding area.
And what we saw in London was that the surrounding neighborhood traffic did not increase or significantly.
And so, you know.
Right.
There's variation from place to place, but generally it did not.
Right.
And that's a positive.
And also, what we also found was that emergency response times also didn't significantly, it didn't increase.
And partly because you have less traffic, so it's easier, of course, to get around.
And that's something that we saw over there and hopefully happens here.