Strangely enough, there were fewer people at last night's Brady/Harrison/Welcome Way corridor meeting than there were at the one a few weeks ago, despite it being considerably more interesting. RDG Planning and Design present some of their preliminary ideas for revitalizing the main North/South artery through Davenport. Apparently much of this will be on the web (somewhere) within a week or so, so I'll keep my comments brief until I can link to the study.A few things that were presenting that jumped out at me:
- Keep the streets one way, because there isn't room for a 5th lane for a center turn lane, and 2 lanes each way without a center turn lane would be a disaster
- Instead of changing to 2-way traffic, change to 3 lane 1-ways in each direction, and add bike lanes on both Brady and Harrison, along with wider sidewalks set farther back from the curb.
- Work to help the Hilltop district be more of a Campustown type district for both St. Ambrose and Palmer (I got emails after my last corridor study post suggesting this, so I was glad to see it in the presentation)
- Possibly change the intersection of 12th and Harrison, dead-ending 12th at Ripley (connect the tennis courts) and creating a T-intersection at 12th and Harrison, potentially with 12th being an eastbound one-way from Harrison to Main (Apparently something the school district likes)
- Orient the rumored CVS or mystery pharmacy at Brady and Locust so the parking is away from the intersection, instead of having the building separated from the intersection by a parking lot.
- Connect St. Ambrose with Vander Veer by adding a "scramble cycle" to the light at Lombard, which gives all traffic red lights and allows diagonal intersection crossing by pedestrians
- Make Dubuque Street more of a circulator street to get traffic from Harrison into the rear of the businesses along Brady.
- Extend 32nd East to connect to George Washington Blvd and then on to Brady to provide a connection from Harrison, instead of having people drive through the Wayne Montgomery parking lot (QCI says: excellent idea)
- Add a bike bridge aligned with Fair that helps allow bikes to get to Northpark
- Add a bike path to the west of Welcome Way out toward Goose Creek Park
- Install more signs or other ways to let interstate traffic know that there's more than what they can see immediately after getting off the highway, especially since they may get to industrial and abandoned buildings and turn around instead of making it to the top of the hill and the Northpark/Kimberly retail area.
- Add various landscaping along the entire corridor
- The RDG guys seemed to feel that Northpark is a very successful mall, and should be emphasized
- Redevelop the old cinema/hotel site near 65th (Doesn't take a consultant to figure that one out)
- Change the frontage roads north of 53rd to 2-way on each side, and move the east frontage road farther away from Brady to allow retail in between the frontage road and Brady, with less retail-oriented uses behind
- Different strategies are required for different segments of the corridor, as Brady SoLo has little in common with Brady north of Kimberly
2 comments:
Too bad the meeting was held on the same night as the last Wednesday Lenten services. Although there weren't as many people at the last meeting as I thought, it's still good to see the city seeking public input.
Do you see any reason for the big difference in attendance at these meetings versus the public input sessions for LeClaire park? There were at least 10 times as many people for those sessions. Curious!
Well, there was more advertising for the riverfront meetings, but I think the main thing is riverfront development is a lot "sexier" than corridor redevelopment. The QCTimes and RCReader both did editorials encouraging folks to come down and participate in the LeClaire Park process. The 300 or 400 people that I think are the "blog audience" isn't a big enough crowd to draw from compared to the thousands of newspaper readers. I can hype something every day and it might only add 3 extra people, but the QCTimes can mention something once and get 75 down there.
Also, one was the public kickoff, and the other wasn't the first meeting in the series. I know that if I miss an early meeting on a topic, I'm less likely to go to later meetings about it.
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