My contribution to the conversation, besides this post, is below. I shot a video this morning on the way to work, so everyone can see all the pretty barrels. It’s Main Street from 8th Street down to 4th Street.
This week kicked off one of the largest street improvement projects in the city and it’s happening in Springfield. You might not have even noticed if you don’t travel down Main Street, North of 4th.
I first heard about it (I bike down Silver and Laura) when my wife got home late one night talking about how all the cross streets on Main are barricaded. She said it looked like the barricades extended to 20th Street and beyond.
As any good Springfield resident knows, if you want to know whats going on in the neighborhood, check the SPAR forum. Most of the discussion was of this variety:
It’s just a freaking mess and will make it really hard to get around that area….especially anyone needing to get to the post office
But there was some actual information that could be gleaned from the posts. As usual the dude with all the info is Downtownparks. Here’s some of what he had to say:
- There is a lot more to it than just medians. There is millions of dollars of facilities work being done too. The water and sewage lines are in horrible shape under there. Thats why this is so much bigger a job than just slapping in some medians, and why it has taken so long to happen.
- It would be impossible to replace sewage and water lines without doing that (blocking all the streets), I believe. At some point they will actually block off the cross roads at the curb, rather than in the middle.
- Our facilities are over a hundred years old, and have failed in most places. It sucks, but it will be better in the long run.
The Lakelander, of Metro Jacksonville, also had something to say:
As for the “future” medians, if they do come in, the most visible impact will be the business corridor along Main. Poor accessibility is normally a major negative for the commercial sector. Its going to be interesting to see how this plays out three or four years down the road.
and
Its just the age old case of suburban traffic management and planning in an urban community. In Jax, its pretty common. The Riverside Avenue/Forest Street expansion, Hendricks streetscape and Main Street (Metro North) projects are all examples of this. On the bright side, at least they didn’t decide to rid the entire street of its parallel parking spaces in favor of poorly maintained medians or a suicide lane or turn an urban street grid into a system of cul-de-sacs.
Unfortunately, the only true way to impact this design process is to push for a better solution during the conceptual planning process. Once the engineering plans are close to completion and funding has been found, its too late. This is one of the reasons we’ve been attacking the BRT plan so much in the past 18 months. If we wait 5 more years to organize, Springfield’s Walgreens will be a bus stop and the warehouse district will still be heavily blighted and abandoned with no hope in sight.
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biking viking
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adam beaugh
