We’ve been trying to get an update on Phase 2 of SDOT‘s 35th Avenue SW project, which has gone without a public update for 9 months now, since an “open house” last August and a followup walking tour. Today, we found an update in the Vision Zero progress report published as part of the agenda for the City Council’s Sustainability and Transportation Committee meeting Friday morning. The report includes summaries of several road-redesign projects around the city, including 35th, which was rechannelized south of SW Holly in fall 2015:

35th Ave SW

On 35th Ave SW, a 1.75 mile redesign and speed limit change has reduced collisions and speeds.

Left-turn collisions have been virtually eliminated. The street redesign has also allowed SDOT to mark new pedestrian crossings.

While we’ve successfully reduced speeds on this street, it took some tinkering with signal timing and public feedback to get operations dialed in.

After initial implementation, we nearly eliminated collision types like sideswipes and left turn crashes.

We did, however, see an increase in rear-end crashes, on Saturdays in particular (which is not uncommon with projects of this nature). We collected additional data and began tweaking signal timing on Saturdays. Since then, we’ve improved operations on 35th and rear-end crashes on the weekends are down by 72%.

To date, there have been zero serious or fatal collisions since redesigning the street.

We’ll release a before and after report in summer 2017 and our work on the northern segment of the corridor will begin in earnest shortly thereafter.