It’s not your imagination. Lexington traffic is inching back to pre-pandemic levels.
If the traffic on Nicholasville Road is any guide, Lexington must be nearly 100 percent immunized — we are back, baby, and we’re all headed to the mall. A recent trip on our busiest road on a Saturday afternoon was bumper to bumper to bumper, a memory of pre-pandemic life that we thought would never return.
In reality, we are at about 25 percent vaccination rate statewide, possibly higher in Lexington, but we do appear to be nearly 100 percent out driving around.
“It seems to have picked up a lot with school getting back in session,” said Jeffery Neal, the city’s Director of Traffic Engineering. “Overall, traffic is getting worse, or at least getting back to normal. The a.m. and p.m. traffic are not quite back to where they were, but lunch traffic is probably higher than it was was before the pandemic,” possibly because people who work at home are doing errands at lunchtime, rather than commuting to and from work.
“We typically see about a 20 percent increase in peak traffic when school is in session but the recent opening is undoubtedly causing a higher jump in traffic volumes,” Neal added. That might also include the fact that more parents are driving their kids to school to avoid tightly packed school buses, one small bit of social distance before the kids hit the tightly packed school halls. A Fayette County Schools spokeswoman said bus ridership appeared to be down anecdotally, but an official count would not be done until after spring break.
If there are a few things that improved in our pandemic lives, traffic has to be at the top of the list. Do you remember those long, empty roads, just you and few other cars purring down the road? As a nervous, inexpert bike rider on Lexington’s busy streets, I wobbled and white-knuckled less. People walked and walked and walked just to get out of their houses. Are more people ready to continue more walking and a little less driving?
(Sadly, it turns out that fewer cars were not any safer. A study by the National Safety Council estimates in a report issued last week that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, an 8 percent increase over 2019 and the first jump in four years. The reason? People drove faster and more recklessly with so much less traffic.)
There were some other pandemic-borne improvements to our lives, and many of them seemed to involve less emphasis on cars. For example, Lexington loosened rules on both outdoor dining and parking, turning a lot of parking spots into curbside pickup spots and room for tables.
Oscar Diggs restaurant was the first to apply for a “parklet patio,” where they took up two or three parking spaces on North Limestone, and created seating space and barriers in the street. That added on to the sidewalk dining they already had.
“It’s been great,” said Oscar Diggs owner Ralph Quillin. “I would love to see them block an entire block off from traffic, and use all those parking spots for outdoor dining.”
Business has gone up over pre-pandemic levels the past couple of weeks, with nice weather and folks ready to get out. Not to mention that to-go cocktails are now allowed under state law. “Someone said to me ‘you remember the Roaring ‘20s, that was right after the Spanish flu,’“ Diggs said.
Lexington waived a lot of permits and fees associated with dining areas, and it will stay that way until Oct. 31, said Brandi Peacher, the city’s director of project management. Restaurants and businesses still have to get approval to use up parking spots, but the process now moves quickly and smoothly, she said.
“If expanding into parking spaces is something that businesses are interested in long-term, by no means are we shutting the door to those options,” she said. “I think we’ve seen form a national standpoint that people have really leaned on our public spaces.”
Lexington should certainly take the best of whatever innovations they started during a long year. Pre-pandemic, we blocked off Short Street from traffic for the Farmer’s Market and Thursday Night Live; why not do it all weekend, every weekend in the summer, when people like to wander around?
“We have plenty of space but we designate it for car travel and car storage and there are plenty of ways to make things better for people,” said Blake Hall, author of the Build a Better Lexington blog.
He hopes Lexington will take its innovative pandemic spirit back to Nicholasville Road, to the recommendations coming out of the Imagine Nicholasville Road project, things like bus rapid transit with a bus-only lane, plus the removal of reversible lanes, a shared use path for bikes and pedestrians and fewer left turns, which often slow traffic to that crawl we know so well. These kinds of ideas would move more people with fewer cars.
“My biggest fear and reservation is that it will become another plan that will sit on a shelf,” Hall said. “It has great goals and great direction, but I’m worried it will either not lead to better regulations.”
Einstein said that in every crisis lies great opportunity. We have some new ideas about better quality of life. Lexington should not let these drive away.
This story was originally published March 23, 2021 at 10:19 AM.
