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Now that the restoration of Gay Street into a two-way street is almost finished, I think it’s time to figure out where the next conversion should be. I know the city has plans to restore quite a few of the downtown one-way thoroughfares back into pedestrian-friendly, landscaped boulevards that will invite people to do more than just drive downtown, but which one should be next on the agenda?
My vote is for Main Street.
If you’re unfamiliar, Main Street serves as a four-to-five-lane expressway headed east from the riverfront to Grant Avenue where it shifts into a two-way street. Of all the streets downtown, why would I pick this one?
- The Main Street Bridge (Dispatch Article with Rendering | Live Update Cameras) is currently under construction and is expected to be opened in 2009. What better way to accompany our new one-of-a-kind landmark bridge than with a newly revamped Main Street? And the 2009 completion date means that we still have plenty to get Main Street updated.
- There are thriving local businesses located on Main Street that could use the extra attention. Several of the entrepreneurs there have banded together to create The Red Brick District on Main. A little bit of streetscaping could do a lot to help them out. Even though the City Center has sunk, Main Street still manages to thrive with clothing boutiques, jewelry stores, a 160-year-old hardware store, art galleries, restaurants, and the new addition of multiple condo developments.
- Proximity to a NEW City Center. Main Street runs along the southern end of the City Center Parking Garage. Whatever winds up being done with the City Center is going to need to be something important and sustainable to thrive downtown. And all of the streets and sidewalks around it could stand a bit of an upgrade.
- Proximity to the new courthouse building. Main Street runs along the northern end of the new courthouse building that will be completed in 2010. New street level features will be included in the development of this building, and Main Street deserves the two-way makeover treatment to go along with it.
- To connect neighborhoods. Main Street runs from Franklinton, through the RiverSouth area, over to Franklin University, the southern end of the Discovery District, the Market Exchange District, and adjacent to TownFranklin. For such an important connector street to only serve as an east-bound route does little to glue those neighborhoods together.
So there you have it. Main Street has my vote. What street could be a better choice than that?
Related Stories:
- Gay Street Project aims to be Complete in November
Main Street’s as good as any of the many– then after that the 3rd and 4th drag strips from Clintonville to German village- we have freeways now so these dragstrips aren’t needed. There’s no since in traveling 50 mph through Italian Village, or Downtown for that matter!
I think Civic Center (as part of the Scioto Mile), Front St., Main and Town are all earmarked for the two way conversion.
The downtown circulation study was done in ’03 in conjunction with the 70/71 split analysis. Here’s a slide to summarize it…
http://pubserv.ci.columbus.oh.us/transportation/GayStreet/pdfs/circulationstudyslide.pdf
As a person who parks at City Center Parking Garage everyday for work, I would love to see something done if it can impove traffic flow from the garage onto Main Street. Right now, every weekday from 4PM to 6PM there are two police officers who direct traffic (and risk their lives) in front of the garage on Main Street. There is alot of “creative merging” going on once the traffic from the garage is on Main Street because you have 4 lanes full of cars all changing lanes, all needing to go north, south or east to whichever highway exit they need to get to. This is a big headache as far as downtown traffic is concerned.
If I could turn right instead of left out of the garage, I could take Main Steet out to 315 north and bypass all of that traffic going east and the dreaded 70/71 interchange.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
I hope the Main St. and Town/Rich bridge replacements are designed with an even amount of lanes for the possible conversion to 2-way traffic. The railroad bridge just west of the Main St. bridge is pretty narrow – I think it would be hard to squeeze 4 lanes of traffic beneath it. But if only three fit I don’t think it would be a big deal since Town would have 2-way traffic as well.
The biggest obstacle to any of these conversions are city/county/ODOT traffic engineers. The 2-way traffic study mentioned above was panned by many traffic engineers predicting horrendous traffic jams delaying motorists an extra 4 minutes. :shock: For too long we’ve let traffic engineers lead the design our cities (Morse Rd., 161, one-way dragstrips, urban interstates, etc.). I’ve got nothing against engineers – when I flush my toilet, I expect it to drain swiftly. But cities are not toilets and I don’t think they should be designed for a quick vehicular exit as they are now. I think traffic engineer’s should be an intergral part of any city’s design, but not the lead designer!
For too long we’ve let traffic engineers lead the design our cities (Morse Rd., 161, one-way dragstrips, urban interstates, etc.). I’ve got nothing against engineers – when I flush my toilet, I expect it to drain swiftly. But cities are not toilets and I don’t think they should be designed for a quick vehicular exit as they are now. I think traffic engineer’s should be an intergral part of any city’s design, but not the lead designer!
Are you serious? Do you feel the same way about not eating at restaurants who employ trained chefs, or perhaps receiving health care from someone who went to Med. School? Bad news, there’s no such thing as a road “designer”, that’s what civil engineers do.
Well, the real issue is not the civil engineers, it’s what the civil engineers are being told to do. A civil engineer in theory could also be told to design streets designed to maximize visibility, or maximize exposure of businesses along the street, or maximize any number of other things. It’s the client–in this case, the government–that sets the priorities.
Exactly…the ODOT’s priorities are way out of whack. They’ve made it clear over the past 50 years that they’re not interested in smart growth or smart planning. They feel that their number one job is to figure out how to get 100,000 cars from point A to point B as quickly and safely as possible. It’s gotten to the point where that goal is at direct odds with having vibrant cities.
I agree with Brewmaster. Civil engineers are different from traffic engineers. Traffic engineers want to move as much traffic as possible in the shortest amount of time. I would much rather have a civil design my road!
“Traffic Engineering” is a specialty within civil engineering. A traffic engineer would look at proposed or existing roads and figure out how to maximize the amount of traffic that can safely move over them through use of lights, signs, striping, etc.
This is a good thing, because you don’t want to build new roads if you can use existing roads more efficiently.
When a new road needs to be built, or an existing road re-engineered, a group of civil engineers would plan a solution. I hope this helps clarifiy, it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people think development work is just drawing lines wherever seems nice to them and that there’s no need for trained professionals.
I’ve still never understood why they turned Main into 1 way in the area it is. It was a two way street up through the 80′s, and think it was the early 90′s they created that 1 way section.
I think 3rd and 4th should be the last to convert. I want to see some of the east-west corridors convert and do well before we attempt to redo 3rd and 4th. I think those will probably be the hardest to convince people to let go of.
Yeah, quite a few. But I’m sure they’ll probably continue them one at a time as to not distrupt traffic too much.
There’s several spots that like that around downtown. There’s a cop who helps traffic coming out from under the City Center onto Third, and another who helps traffic coming out of the Huntington/Riffe garage onto Front Street. Those are the two I’ve seen regularly. I’m sure there’s more.
I don’t think the number of lanes matter so much as the width. You can always use the middle lane of an odd-numbered-laned street as a turn lane or bouvelard strip or something else. Or even make a street with one lane going one direction and two lanes going the other.
They did that with a lot of streets in that era. I think it was just a shift in mindset that said “we can move traffic faster if these streets were one way” and now there’s a shift in mindset that wants to move them back now that we’ve realized that exporting people out of downtown as quickly as possible isn’t as great of an idea as it was once thought.
The tactic that is used most often to “maximize” the amount of traffic is to increase the speed, time the traffic lights, and convert streets to one-way operation. What they ignore is the attachment to the “neighborhood” completely dissolves when you do that. That’s a huge loss for a city that’s difficult to measure in dollars.
Kinda ironic that Gay St now goes “both ways”. Thank you, thank you….don’t forget to tip your bartenders.
Yea, agree with the other comments. As an engineer we are given the task of fixing problems. If the problem is how do we most effectivly move people around fastest I think our downtown does a pretty damn good job.
I just think we need to redefine the problem.
post of the week!
Funny you mention this Walker. I just spoke with Jeff over at Zettler’s yesterday about Main St. and that what was missing were buildings to fill in the gaps. Of course, city center came up and he’s pretty cynical, which I can understand having seen the city muck that area up for a couple of decades. I was thinking it would be neat if the infill on Main were red brick to help solidify the identity of the area. High St could be a great connector between Gay and Main, but we’re going to have to wait for city center to come down.
You’re right on. Columbus may be the best example of what happens when you let the DOT/DOH (the T and H stands for “Highways”) run ripshod all over the city. You’re left with a big parking lot and tons of highways running through it. That’s why I say ideally we need to totally reverse what they’ve done in order for us to reach our full potential in being real city again, because we actually were until then. Before ODOH, 30,000 people lived downtown. After ODOH, 3,000. The city doesn’t have the balls to go totally against them and are going with caps, which while better won’t add nearly as much usable land were we to tear them down. We handed the city over to people who don’t give a shit about the city whose attitude is; “This street of stately mixed use buildings is in my way, I need a place to park!” before driving off to the burbs at five. If we keep catering to them we will never have a city again.
Hasn’t tube technology been perfected yet? Why are we not all traveling via tubes?
^We know how to build roller coasters. I forget who brought it up, but I’d take a roller coaster from downtown to OSU. :lol:
You know, as a KID I always thought about this everytime I went to the bank drive through. I’d be so up for going into a super speed travelling underground bank tube travel system :)