Five Corners finger pointing

As of yesterday afternoon, they are "fixing" some of the mess at League City's infamous Five Corners intersection (post category here), specifically at FM 518 and FM 270.

The previous S-curve lane divider has been torn out and reconfigured to (drum roll, please!) actually follow the traffic lanes.

This is an iconic Five Corners photo to be sure, with traffic shown as characteristically backed up in my rear view mirror.  

This is what the original construction looked like a few weeks ago.  I wonder would they have fixed it if I had not complained and published this picture??  Never doubt the fact that every voice counts.   

However, this work does not change the overall Five Corners situation, which I (and others) believe is being worsened by all that concrete.  

The barriers are worsening congestion.  Note the black truck can't even fit into the now-overly-short left turn lane FM 518 EB to FM 270 NB. Photo taken yesterday.  

Nobody has stepped forward to explain to the public why stuff like this makes sense.  Photo taken yesterday.  

A reader from the east side of League City emailed me and told me that she complained about this project to Mayor Paulissen.  She sent me a copy of his email reply to her which read, "I just talked with staff this morning about this. This is a TxDot project and we have to work with them."  

But if you remember from this previous post of mine, when I complained to TxDOT, they replied by tweeting, "This project was initiated by @LeagueCityTX".  

So this appears to be a classic political response.  For those of you accessing this post on small mobile devices, the sub-caption reads "No one EVER admits to a (brain) fart."

Base image courtesy of Cheezburger.  

A classic political response of buck-passing.  In response to this, I said to my husband, "Well, look on the bright side - neither one of them is trying to blow smoke up our tailpipes by telling us that this project is a GOOD thing.  Maybe we can work with that as a starting point."

I encourage each and every one of you to email or call both Paulissen and TxDOT.  I believe the TxDOT project number is 097603100 and here is the general contact page for TxDOT Houston District (the easiest way to get to them is via @TxDOTHoustonPIO if you use Twitter).  

But all this bemoaning of concrete belies a larger issue:  

With or without a concrete Band-Aid, they still, after all these years, have not fixed Five Corners the way it needs to be fixed in order to serve the people of League City.  

Who are all these League City residents and where are they when we need them?!

Unfortunately on the issue of Five Corners, we've had a lack of continuity leading to a loss of momentum in public pressure.  Welcome to League City, Texas because that's the story of our collective lives.

Photo courtesy of Bay Area Citizen from this September 24, 2010 article describing a public meeting on mobility solutions for Five Corners.  

Did you know that Seabrook and Kemah are slated to receive TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS for improvements to FM 146?!  

Wrap your head around this:  Seabrook and Kemah, combined population 14,314 (2010 Census), will get $200 million to fix their main TxDOT-related mobility problem.  League City, population 84,112 (2010 Census per Google) is apparently getting diddly squat to fix its main mobility problem, namely Five Corners.  

Yes, I know that more people than live in Seabrook and Kemah drive on FM 146.  But League City has literally tens of thousands of people whose lives are negatively impacted by Five Corners on a daily basis.  And yet somehow we cannot get a couple of million bucks worth of solution for this thing.

What is the cause of this?  Really really bad political representation?  If more people would start hounding the decision-makers, maybe we'd get some answers to that.  

Description of the FM 146 improvements screengrabbed from this Bay Area Houston Magazine report.  I'll have more to say about this later.  

Five Corners, Part 5: The scooch and the damage done

In post from a few days ago called Five Corners Futility, I made a statement which I will now explain further.  I said, "I tend to look at right-of-way segments not the way they should be driven, but the way they actually are driven"

This is an example of what I mean by that.  This is FM 518 westbound at Highway 3.  I was driving this time (not my teenager), and I stopped at this red left-turn light. I am presenting an un-cropped picture here as taken from my driver's seat.  What you can tell is that my left wheels were well over into the yellow painted exclusion zone, just as this pick-up truck's wheels were also over.

The road is not really supposed to be driven the way both of us were driving it here, but the left-turn lane for Highway 3 southbound is only half as long as it would need to be in order to accommodate normal traffic.  What happens as a result is that drivers naturally choose the lesser of evils - left-turners universally scooch over like that is so that we don't block the center westbound lane of FM 518 because through-traffic proceeds on green even as accumulated left-turners are forced to remain stopped on red.

FM 518 is so inefficient and so under-designed for its carrying purpose that it's just plain *stupid* to block half the traffic merely because that left turn lane is so woefully short.  Therefore, everybody scooches over like this so that traffic can continue to pass.  It's the neighborly thing to do.  And if you watch this intersection, you'll see that it's universally driven like this.  That's the net result of collective informal driver negotiation.  Nobody objects to this, and I personally have not witnessed any significantly elevated risk because of it.  No left-turner is dumb enough to scooch so far as to put their tires into the oncoming east-bound lane, for instance.

In sum, this is not necessarily what the original engineering foresaw here, but the driver adaptation actually works better than what was intended.  There are only two choices - either we scooch, or FM 518 effectively reduces to one westbound lane at this location.  

In sharp contrast, this is what happens instead when concrete prevents people from scooching in order to naturally accommodate other drivers on the road for maximum efficiency:

FM 2094 eastbound traffic at the FM 518 jog now squanders about one third to one half of its green light to lane congestion because drivers can no longer scooch in this area.  The red arrow points to a left-turner who cannot access the lane here because the lane is way, way too short and already full of cars and the new concrete blocks the previous open space.  The middle lane occupied by me and this dry cleaning van was blocked for most of the green light.because of that, whereas it would not have been blocked before the concrete.    

If you've perceived Five Corners to be getting slower and slower lately, this is one of the reasons - the full effects of the concrete are now coming home to roost.  It's happening because we've been effectively reduced to one lane moving for a big part of each green light.  It won't matter how well the lights are ultimately synchronized if the lanes are this significantly undersized to start with.  If left-turners can't squeeze over because of concrete obstructions, they are going to block through traffic - it's that simple.  And how would that possibly constitute a mobility improvement?  

I'm still waiting for answers from League City on what's going on here (they know I've asked).  It's an even more important question than it may first seem.  On my first Five Corners post, someone commented with a link to this page, which discusses in general terms the "access management" project scope.  The corresponding CIP report (2014 Q1) doesn't give any detail as to design, but it does provide a map that I personally dread:

Crummy resolution, but Centerpointe is in the lower section of the grab and that red squiggle suggests that they might also be planning to concrete up the Highway 3 intersection, which means that we would also effectively reduce to one lane westbound at that intersection, too.  In other words, the functional scooch by me and the white pick-up truck in the pic above would also become a thing of the past.  

I'll leave you with an excerpt from that CIP.  I converted to JPG because Blogger won't allow hosting of other content formats such as PDF.  It'll be a bit blurry as a result.  It doesn't describe the scope of the design, but it does indicate that we're spending about two million dollars on this thing.  I await with bated breath someone's explanation as to why that makes even partial sense.

Five Corners fellow sufferers

OK, sometimes I like going beyond the trilogy, especially when new information comes to light.

Translation:  "That ain't our mess."
Now that we have a clearer view of who the responsible party is, I will attempt to get more information on the full scope of the changes that are in progress.  Such as, how much of our tax dollars are being spent on this mess?  

I want to provide you with some additional photographs of this "project" so that you can make up your own mind about what's happening here, rather than just listening to me beat my gums post after post.

But first, a digression for the purposes of expounding on context.

I'm the proud 'rental unit owner of a newly-learner-licensed teenager, and one of the things I've been teaching her is how to evaluate autobody language as it expresses itself uniquely on our different local roads.

Screengrabbed from this 2012 post.  My Dad and I are in a friendly competition to see who will manage to go the longest without having a car accident.  I'm currently at 31 years.  My Dad is at a remarkable 55 years and counting.  There's a good chance that only one of us will live long enough to see who actually wins this competition.   

Learning to read autobody language to the depth that it can be achieved is like defensive driving on steroids.  During Sunday's practice session, for instance, my newbie driver learned that there's a subtle but important difference in driver expectations between SH 96 and SH 146.  The headspace changes the instant one makes the turn from one to the other, and the wise driver accounts for that in his or her own mental state and driving style.

Similarly, left-turning from SH 146 onto FM 518 needs to be done with a degree of responsiveness that isn't necessarily expected at every similarly-configured intersection.  Drivers don't like being on SH 146 - it stresses them out - and they want to get the hell off it ASAP.  If you don't accommodate the implicit demands of your fellow left-turners, they are going to get just a little bit antsy, and when drivers get antsy, surrounding people get just a tiny bit distracted, and then the chances of accident go up for everyone involved.

Five Corners has always been unique in the degree to which procedural expectations and negotiated rules of mutual exchange dominate driver behavior.  Most of the people who drive Five Corners do it daily, so they've seen every possible transactional scenario hundreds of times and they're pretty comfortable with the long-established de facto rules of driver conduct there.

It is that status quo that the curb improvements are interfering with now, and not in a particularly functional way.  In other words, it's not that we're changing to a new status quo that simply happens to be different.  In my opinion, we are devolving.  As my teenager was honing her skills yesterday, here are a few pics that I took from the passenger seat to further illustrate this.

Here's a lesson in exasperation:  This driver is mentally still trying to operate under the pre-concrete rules.  Nobody would have the guts to attempt this maneuver in this spot unless they already knew from previous experience that (a) it was physically achievable and that (b) other drivers would tolerate it without getting antsy.

And it was achievable, right up until the point where that barrier went in.  This is what I meant in my third trilogy post when I said that we can't afford to be forfeiting even one foot of space here and there at Five Corners.   All this fellow needed was another foot of space to complete a legal traffic move.  I see nothing to be gained by not letting him (and those like him) have that foot which was there to start with but which has now been taken away from all of us.    

Here's a lesson in impossibility:  Compare the size of that extended-cab pick-up truck to the width of the opening in the left-turn center lane.  How is that even remotely supposed to work?!  If that pickup were traveling in the opposite direction intending to turn left, could he make it through the almost 90 degree turn that this configuration obligates?  

Here's a lesson in autobody language:  Have you ever taken a plastic laundry basket, turned it upside down, and plopped it on top of a cat who was curled up on your living room floor?  Cats *hate* that.  They get that sour, withdrawn look on their faces as they try to figure out how to flee the situation with some small portion of their dignity still intact.

That was the analogy that occurred to me as I watched the driver of this Toyota.  (S)he was being a nice driver who was doing the things that are expected of drivers at Five Corners - responsive to the needs of the larger situation, aware that there were other drivers to the rear who were also needing to turn left.  So (s)he pulled way up in order to give those other drivers room to also enter this ridiculously small turn space, only to end up trapped in the laundry basket that this configuration represents.  There's no way (s)he could have completed that turn without scraping that barrier or maybe even hopping it.

It's a mystery to me as to how such a restricted turn lane could be placed on a sharp curve such as this one and function, even if it the concrete had been cast correctly.  

In just one single back-and-forth pass through Five Corners yesterday, I took pics of two drivers who were obligated to smack the concrete barriers.  Both of them were acting within bounds according to the unwritten rules that govern behavior at Five Corners.  It's not going to matter whether these barriers are "painted yellow for safety" or not.  They're still not going to help the situation there.

My daughter was initially skeptical that a thing called "autobody language" even existed.  The challenge for her now as a beginning driver is to learn to partition her finite attention resources such that she can register those large-scale manifestations of driver behavior and road conditions and still have enough mental reserve left over to devote to monitoring the fine-scale, subtle behaviors that paint a deeper picture of what's happening in the roadway at any given moment.  It takes years and years to develop that capacity - Gladwell's ten thousand hour rule comes to mind.

In the meantime, Five Corners will continue to give us both a constant run for our money.  My Dad has an unfair advantage in our crashless competition.  He doesn't live in this area, and so he doesn't have to drive Five Corners.

Quote screengrabbed from this post.  

Five Corners futility

Y'all know how I love writing trilogies.  This post completes my first and second on the subject of the notorious Five Corners traffic intersection in #LeagueCityTX, the so-called third worst intersection in the Houston-Galveston area.  (Update April 3, 2014:  I spoke too soon and have since added a new blog category called Five Corners because it's becoming more apparent that this issue is going to persist).

Here's the biggest issue that I have with the modifications that are being done thus far:  I simply don't think they'll improve traffic flow at this intersection.  I suspect they'll make it worse, and I explain why below.    

Just for openers, they ain't even finished yet, and they're already broke.  The end of this curb was sheared off sometime around March 23, and I noticed yesterday afternoon (March 28) that another one seems to have been snapped off maybe within the past 24 to 48 hours.  

Close-up.  What's going to happen here is that drivers are going to hit these things over and over and over until they're worn down to not very much.  There's going to be a lot of people upset over damaged tires and ruined alignment.  Have you paid for an alignment  job recently?  I have.  It sucks.  

So there's the breakage problem just for openers, but for another thing, I don't think that FM 518 was ever originally designed to take these kinds of improvements.  That's why they're being built with such a thin, tire-disrupting configuration - there's so little room available here.

Look at this poor guy in the dually.  He's in the EB FM 518 left turn lane waiting to head north on FM 270, and he's barely got any room at all on each side of him.  There's little margin for error.

This is just a dually - this is not a full-sized bus or a delivery truck.  I personally do not think that we can afford to sacrifice a couple of feet of right of way to a concrete barrier here.  

And speaking of which, why is that particular concrete barrier so wonky in the first place??

It bumps out unnecessarily into the turn lane, and to this unexplained wander we lose about another precious foot of space.  You can already see that this hump is covered with black tire marks from folks who have hit it, and it's only been there a couple of weeks.

It's like a shallow S-curve when it should instead be a nice smooth curve that follows the expected lane trajectory.  I believe this causes a degree of visual confusion among drivers.  They expect to see a regular curve and instead they see this obstacle that they need to be mindful not to hit.  And when they're paying attention to that little inconvenience, they're paying less attention to the rest of the intersection.

This is a subtle distraction, sure, but every bit of attention counts when you're navigating Five Corners.  I got distracted by the thing enough to take this phone pic and draw a curve to suggest what it should look like instead.  My point being, it's noticeable to drivers.  

I'm not a traffic engineer, but I do have 31 years of accident-free driving to my credit and I do have an energetic obsession with details of all kinds.  I don't always agree with what @TxDOTHoustonPIO does.  I tend to look at right-of-way segments not the way they should be driven, but the way they actually are driven, and I think I know how people drive through Five Corners, having done it about three billion times myself.  One of the biggest challenges with Five Corners has always been that there are too many mental transactions that need to take place within a frighteningly short period of time.  On top of that existing burden, we have now overlain an absolute maze of new concrete lane restrictions.  What I already see happening in response is that a lot of drivers' eyeballs are pointing down when they should be pointing up.  They're looking twenty feet ahead of themselves trying not to hit concrete barriers in overly-narrow spaces when they should instead be taking holistic stock of the massive intersection that confronts them.  Either that or they are looking up and some of them are smacking the barriers as a result.

I think I understand why the engineers decided to try adding these barriers (for brevity, I won't go into that in this post), but I'm not so sure that what we'll gain from the restrictions outstrips what we're losing.

I guess we'll have to see the whole picture before the full story makes itself apparent.  Unfortunately, the degree of public outreach has been so poor that the whole thing might end up being built before any of us really become aware of what it consists of.

This is a partial screengrab from this map which was published on this undated LC webpage as of March 2014. The map itself is dated 2011 (three years old) and if I'm understanding this correctly, it doesn't appear to show the same improvements as are actually being built right now.  For instance, left-turning onto FM 518 from the Kroger parking lot has been eliminated via the questionable concrete improvements shown in pictures farther up in my post, but I don't see anything drawn on the left side of this map to indicate them.

Furthermore, the LC page states that "TxDOT eliminated the bypass".  So what does this whole present-day picture actually consist of??    

Five Corners flaws

I'm still waiting for some kind of explanation of what's happening right now at Five Corners.  Meanwhile, I thought I'd piggyback on my first Five Corners post to draw additional specific attention to one of my long-term least favorite subjects, which is the lack of pedestrian access in our area, and the fact that Five Corners is not safely navigable for anyone traveling by foot or bicycle.  And this has serious ramifications for many local families.  Case in point.

Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money is.  Street Smart Driving School set up shop near Clear Creek High School because that's where the driving students (and their moneys) are.  

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.   

If you examine that map grab, you'll immediately see that the distance across the Creek campus itself (that pile of development to the northeast, wedged between Marina Bay Drive and FM 518) is not much different than the distance from the southwest corner of the campus to the driving school.  It should be a very easy and quick walk from one to the other.

However, given the ill-conceived configuration of this area, the only way to get from the high school to the driving school is through Five Corners.

And Five Corners is simply not safe for pedestrians.  There are umpteen lanes of intense traffic and virtually no pedestrian improvements.  You can see white crosswalks painted on the road itself, but they largely don't connect to sidewalks or other non-motor vehicle conveyances.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.  

I'm not one of those overprotective parents who wants to pamper my child with chauffeur service and 24/7 climate control.  I raised her free range, and she describes herself as having "grown up playing in the streets".  She's not the kind of helicoptered kid who can't handle normal challenges presented by her surrounding environment.

We are not one of these families.  Screengrabbed from TIME magazine's seminal article on helicopter parenting.  

But I can't allow her to traverse either Five Corners or FM 270 on foot - without supportive infrastructure, it's simply too dangerous.

So what happens instead??  Sixteen times thus far, either my husband or I have had to leave work in the late afternoon on weekdays, drive several miles to the high school, pick her up, and drive her the whopping 3,500 feet (as the crow flies) from the high school to the driving school.  Sixteen times, and we're not nearly done with it because she hasn't even started the behind-the-wheel portion of the training course.

Now, mentally integrate that impact over time and space.  If you check the driving school's class schedule, you'll see that they have new classes starting every other week.  Each one of those classes is typically so chock full of students that most of them must queue up for class by waiting outdoors on a series of benches that the school has set up to handle the volume.  An enormous number of local students use this resource, but none of them can drive there under their own power because, duh, they're all in driving school.  I see a few of those students walking from the high school, but most do not because of the safety issues I've described.  Most get driven by family members.

Integrate mentally and what you come up with over time is thousands of impacted families, tens of thousands of hours of lost productivity due to the driving burden, and who knows how much extra money spent on gasoline and per-mile automotive depreciation.  

And that's just from that one isolated Point A to Point B transaction.  The amount of money squandered locally on the sum total of all student-schlepping simply boggles the imagination.  And a lot of that is done because parents correctly deduce that their kids can't walk safely around here for lack of infrastructure.

And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, we've got THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND CARS PER DAY traversing the area in question.

AADT stands for "average annual daily traffic" and this table is screengrabbed from this report.  However, this is probably way out of date because it's ten years old and League City's population has almost doubled (!) in the past ten years.  Today's AADT number is probably much higher than 31,000.  

So what seems to happen in public policy is that the decision-makers say, "Ah, we will eliminate sidewalks, curbs, shoulders, and other safety features from our new roadway project and this will save the taxpayers money."  But then what happens in response is that we have all this extra driving and we have to start spending major money to handle the extra driving that develops because there's no other safe option but to drive.  Right now they're apparently in the middle of spending another $5.5 million trying to fix the mess that is Five Corners, but what would it have cost them to have included sidewalks in the first place?

I'm not even remotely suggesting that sidewalks would be the total answer to all of this, but hopefully I've been able to make the point that they would be an integral component of any sensible solution.  Meanwhile, I'll just keep doing my part to help congest Five Corners multiple times per day because I don't have a viable alternative.

This is what it looks like when Clear Creek High students walk north on sidewalk-less and shoulder-less Egret Bay Blvd.  Tell me that this is even remotely safe or sensible.  Who designed this jack-ass right of way, and according to what hare-brained justification?!

Five Corners frustration

If you drive on FM 518, you've no doubt experienced what's been transpiring at League City's infamous "Five Corners" intersection these past several weeks.

Traffic has been even crappier than usual as new turn lanes and new turn restrictions are installed.  I had plenty of time to snap cell phone pics such as this one, given that it sometimes takes me three light cycles to get through the danged intersection.  

BTW, how did a Minnesota contractor get this job?  If we had a local newspaper, we might see stories on that kind of thing.  

I haven't heard commentary of any kind on this latest Five Corners project.  There's this City of League City page, but I have the following concerns with it:

1. It's undated.  The relatively new League City website rarely adds dates to any entry, making it pretty much impossible to verify whether the information presented is the latest and greatest.  There have been so many detailed historical accounts of what may or may not happen at Five Corners that I can't be sure this information is applicable to what is occurring present-day.  Other official documents such as this one are similarly un-dated.  I have to go back to commercial news stories such as this one in 2010 before I can even get a sense of where we were (past tense) on this issue.  
2. It's nebulously written, without context, and with a lot of stuff undefined.  "A new design that reduces the turning movements through this acute angled intersection was adopted and approved by TxDOT eliminating the bypass".  Really?  Adopted by TxDOT when?  Why?  And what happened to this "bypass" idea and why?  Context, anyone?  Frame of reference?  Timeline?  Rationale?  
3. It lacks visual aids (diagrams, maps, photographs) that would help the reader to comprehend the full scope of work.  A total of $5.2 million will be spent here??  Surely a few concreted turn lanes do not add up to that kind of money?  What else can we hapless League City motorists expect?  

If I had the time, I'd pay more attention to this issue because it affects my family greatly.  It is not uncommon for me to have to drive through Five Corners a mind-numbing six times per day (three traverses in each direction).  If that sounds bat-sh*t crazy to you, then you probably don't have a young high-schooler in your household.  Even if my child takes the morning bus alleviating a need for me to drive her to school, I still need to pick her up at Clear Creek High School following afternoon tutorials and club meetings, and then drive her to her Drivers Education program, and then pick her back up from Driver Ed after class.

Hopefully this post will plant the seed in the mind of one of our local journalists to do a piece on this latest realignment work, because I haven't seen one yet (hint, hint).