Also, I've stumbled a site advocating for narrowing streets in SF, and then putting a new row of buildings in between.

http://narrowstreetssf.com/mcallister/

 

I like someone else's remix of that idea a little better.

http://www.mrericsir.com/blog/local/narrow-streets-remixed/

 

Also, I've found a very cool tool that lets you whip up your own mockup for a road diet.

http://streetmix.net/

 

Change that 5 lane road to have median planters, bike lanes, street car line, parking, center turn lane, etc. So.. The next time you hear your towns safety director claim that "it won't fit", mock it up. It would be pretty nice if this could be a semi-automated data-driven process. Pull down ADT (average daily traffic), find out current widths of roads, and propose alternatives based on needs.

Any time a Department of Transportation temporarily closes down a highway or bridge, the DOT and local media usually freak out about the impending "carmageddon". And usually they are wrong... people find another way to get around, and it's not a big deal. The latest example of this was in Seattle where the Alaskan Way Viaduct was temporarily closed for a weekend earlier this month. Seattle put a few extra buses in operation to compensate. Bike ridership also jumped for the day. And life went on.

 

Which leads me to a point that The Urbanophile made a few years ago: If You Can Repeatedly Close a Freeway For Months At a Time, Do You Really Need It At All?

taestell[/member] - I agree! Are there specific segments in Cincinnati (or Ohio) that you'd like to see closed (or dramatically shrunk)?

Montreal Trades Expressway for “Urban Boulevard”

 

Montreal has begun tearing down its part of a mid-century expressway to make way for a greener, more transit- and pedestrian-friendly boulevard, reports the Montreal Gazette. The Bonaventure Expressway, an elevated 11-lane highway built for Expo 67, will give way to the street-level Bonaventure urban boulevards, a combined nine lanes of traffic separated by a series of green spaces. Montreal’s new, $142 million entryway is scheduled for completion in mid-2017, just in time for the city’s 375th anniversary.

 

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/montreal-tear-down-bonaventure-expressway

Glad to see the elevated highway go... but seems strange to dedicate so much land to create a park that will be sandwiched between traffic on both sides. Will anybody actually want to hang out in that park space?

Does anybody have a detailed overview of the new design for the Bonaventure Expressway?

 

I found an article quoting "Projet Montreal", raising a similar concern to mine:

http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/bonaventure-expressway-remake-plans-unveiled-1.2155623

Projet Montreal isn’t as enthusiastic about the project, pointing out that it may not be as appealing as the mayor thinks.

 

“People will not want to walk around in a space surrounded by nine lane of traffic. Take Parc des Faubourgs, at the foot of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, as an example: it’s twice as wide as the proposed park and yet it is always deserted,” said Craig Sauve, the party’s transport critic, in a news release.

Glad to see the elevated highway go... but seems strange to dedicate so much land to create a park that will be sandwiched between traffic on both sides. Will anybody actually want to hang out in that park space?

 

The park created by the Big Dig is similar.  While not a dud, it doesn't get a ton of use, and seems a bit fake. 

 

"Open space" is a cancer on most cities.  There's so much of it, and so much of it is useless, that it sucks the life out of the city.  Even in Jane Jacobs' day, before even TV was super widespread, let alone video games or the internet, she was warning about all the underutilized parks and especially the nebulous green space around housing projects and how it damaged its surroundings. 

 

The Big Dig should have been a wake-up call.  The whole point was to stitch the city back together after the highway broke it apart, but since they've not actually built anything on the land it's still a scar across downtown.  That Boston can't activate so much park/plaza shows just how much population it really takes.  They could have put two or three small parks and plazas along the route, but the rest should be filled in with buildings.  Unfortunately all anyone can conceive is "need moar greenspace!" 

This is the most detailed drawing or the re-design that I could find:

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-unveils-new-plans-for-bonaventure-expressway

 

If I could have designed it, I would have shifted all the lanes to the north (towards Rue Duke), included a ~15' landscaped median to separate traffic, allow for trees, and make it easier for pedestrians to cross. And then, the opened up space to the south could be used to create developable parcels.

I think the motivation for the big dig parks was in part to keep a huge amount of land from opening up for skyscraper construction.  A bunch of stuff has been built over I-90 in Copley Square instead of a park, and that has helped Copley Square rival DT Boston for office supremacy.  In fact, the Prudential Tower was built in Copley Square back when there was still a skyscraper ban in DT Boston enacted by the city's blue blood families who established a pact back in the 1920s to prohibit skyscrapers.  Meanwhile, the Seaport area is now a second area to rival DT Boston in thanks to the big dig extension being built completely underground in that area.  Eventually that area might surpass Copley Square as the city's #2 employment center.  That wouldn't have been possible if I-90 had been extended over the Fort Point Channel and on the surface to the Ted Williams Tunnel.

 

This is the most detailed drawing or the re-design that I could find:

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-unveils-new-plans-for-bonaventure-expressway

 

If I could have designed it, I would have shifted all the lanes to the north (towards Rue Duke), included a ~15' landscaped median to separate traffic, allow for trees, and make it easier for pedestrians to cross. And then, the opened up space to the south could be used to create developable parcels.

 

Your idea is great but it would be very difficult to implement. This map doesn't show the whole picture. Duke and Nazareth Sts. end just at the east side of the map and become University St. another median "boulevard" that runs through the center of commercial Montreal. Also, just at the east end of the map, the Bonaventure connects with the Ville-Marie (AutoRoute 720) that tunnels under most of the commercial district. It's a very unique and complex interchange. There is a tremendous amount of traffic that flows from the South Shore suburbs on AutoRoute 10 (the Bonaventure) and then splits between people using University and AutoRoute 720. People will be doing a lot of lane switching. These roads are being split so that it can enter/exit that configuration evenly. It's hard to explain unless you've driven this stretch of road.

 

Than being said, I'm glad to see Quebec do this and eliminate the elevated portion. They struggle to maintain existing infrastructure due to the harsh winters.

This map doesn't show the whole picture. Duke and Nazareth Sts. end just at the east side of the map and become University St. another median "boulevard" that runs through the center of commercial Montreal. Also, just at the east end of the map, the Bonaventure connects with the Ville-Marie (AutoRoute 720) that tunnels under most of the commercial district. It's a very unique and complex interchange.

 

I assume you mean the west side of the map... right? It seems like you could leave those tunnel entrances alone, make minimal changes to the configuration further to the west, and still make the roadway more compact between the tunnel entrances and where the road has to begin the bridge approach (at Rue Wellington). Essentially I would take the redesigned layout and swap the green space with Rue de Nazareth. So the tunnel ramp for Rue de Nazareth would simply approach from the opposite side of the street.

This map doesn't show the whole picture. Duke and Nazareth Sts. end just at the east side of the map and become University St. another median "boulevard" that runs through the center of commercial Montreal. Also, just at the east end of the map, the Bonaventure connects with the Ville-Marie (AutoRoute 720) that tunnels under most of the commercial district. It's a very unique and complex interchange.

 

I assume you mean the west side of the map... right? It seems like you could leave those tunnel entrances alone, make minimal changes to the configuration further to the west, and still make the roadway more compact between the tunnel entrances and where the road has to begin the bridge approach (at Rue Wellington). Essentially I would take the redesigned layout and swap the green space with Rue de Nazareth. So the tunnel ramp for Rue de Nazareth would simply approach from the opposite side of the street.

 

You are right about going west. I'm left handed. Always think in reverse. Visually I'm thinking "north" anyway because AutoRoute 10 is labeled N/S through there. The ramp for AutoRoute 720 is going under the city so a simple switch isn't that easy. Like I said, it's complex.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think the motivation for the big dig parks was in part to keep a huge amount of land from opening up for skyscraper construction.  A bunch of stuff has been built over I-90 in Copley Square instead of a park, and that has helped Copley Square rival DT Boston for office supremacy.  In fact, the Prudential Tower was built in Copley Square back when there was still a skyscraper ban in DT Boston enacted by the city's blue blood families who established a pact back in the 1920s to prohibit skyscrapers.  Meanwhile, the Seaport area is now a second area to rival DT Boston in thanks to the big dig extension being built completely underground in that area.  Eventually that area might surpass Copley Square as the city's #2 employment center.  That wouldn't have been possible if I-90 had been extended over the Fort Point Channel and on the surface to the Ted Williams Tunnel.

 

 

A lot of people don't remember or don't know that in the 1980s Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was put in a cut-and-cover tunnel through Back Bay and parks and recreational facilities were placed as occasional caps on top of the tunnel all the way out to Forest Hills. Much of it was the result of moving the Orange Line from an elevated line to alongside the Northeast Corridor. So unlike the Big Dig, there was now a subway line with frequent stations next to all these new parks surrounded by densely developed neighborhoods, some of which got even denser when the Orange Line was routed through them.

 

BTW, when I visited Boston last in 2013, I thought the parks above the Big Dig were fairly well used, especially near South Station and over by Quincy Market.

How to fix the damage from in-city highways

Every time an in-city highway has been replaced by more human-scale infrastructure, the city and region has benefitted, according to transportation experts who led workshops for USDOT.

 

ROBERT STEUTEVILLE    SEP. 1, 2016

 

Transportation and planning experts Peter Park and Ian Lockwood each helped lead recent workshops for US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) called the Ladders of Opportunity Every Place Counts Design Challenge.

 

The events were the first of their kind: USDOT sought to alleviate the negative impacts of in-city Interstates built in the 20th Century that divided neighborhoods and often displaced hundreds or thousands of people. Lockwood served as a leader of two-day workshops in Spokane and Nashville and Park steered workshops in Philadelphia and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. The events occurred in mid-July.

 

Public Square editor Robert Steuteville interviewed Park and Lockwood about freeway caps, highway teardowns, complete streets, and what they learned from USDOT’s “Every Place Counts.”...

 

Read more at:

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2016/09/01/how-fix-damage-city-highways

 

Another Robert Moses legacy to be erased. A highway that few motorists use yet killed downtown Niagara Falls....

 

http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/niagara-falls/cuomo-announces-40-million-plan-to-remove-robert-moses-parkway-north-20160322

More American cities are tearing down blighted urban expressways. Help us find the next candidate: https://t.co/2WCG79fy8D

The Future of Neighborhoods: Removing Urban Freeways Gains Fresh Traction

When highways reach the end of their useful life, it is often cheaper to extract them than it is to replace or repair them.

By Pete Bigelow Sep 30, 2016

 

Growing up on the north side of Charlotte, North Carolina, Anthony Foxx remembers the geography of his childhood being defined by a quiet neighborhood of ranch-style houses, well-kept lawns—and an imposing brick wall at the end of the block.

 

On the other side of the wall, there ran a high-speed on-ramp that connected the eastbound lanes of Interstate 85 with the southbound lanes of Interstate 77, two highways that cradled the northeast corner of the neighborhood. For Foxx, the wall, the highways, and the hum of traffic blended into the background. He knew nothing different. Over time, he came to understand they weren't part of the neighborhood at all but more like interloping house guests.

 

"Those freeways were there to carry people through my neighborhood, but never to my neighborhood," said Foxx, now Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

 

MORE:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a23121/future-of-neighborhoods-removing-urban-freeways/

Tim Davis @kettlemoraine

Carmel, Ind., has ~100 roundabouts, more than any other U.S. city. #Traffic injuries have decreased by 80% since they were installed.

8 Transportation Engineering Euphemisms That Should Be Tossed Out

By Angie Schmitt Jan 17, 2017

 

Have you ever gone to a public meeting about a street in your neighborhood, only to be told that your ideas to calm traffic would result in a “level of service” that would be “unacceptable”? Or that an “alternative transportation” option like a bike lane would render the street “capacity deficient”?

 

Those terms originated in the mid-century highway era, and they remain baked into transportation engineering to this day. There is a whole specialized vocabulary tilted against street design concepts that can improve health, safety, and street life. Ian Lockwood, a transportation engineer and consultant, says it’s time to leave these phrases behind.

 

MORE:

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/01/17/8-transportation-engineering-euphemisms-that-should-be-tossed-out/

Banning words won't fix anything.  It sounds like the issue is with capacity analysis.  To put it mildly Lockwood thinks the standards for that should change, which is a reasonable position to take, but you can't use magic vocabulary to make the opposing position, or the entire issue, disappear. 

 

In the cartoon at the top of that article, the city planner is trying to eliminate a big setback and he's the bad guy because that's "a disaster" for residents.  Gotta have that yard.  Then the article suggests we can make neighborhoods more walkable by making cars sit at traffic lights longer. 

 

The issue for pedestrians isn't the street or the cars or the lights, because they rarely interact with those.  Setbacks, however, are an issue.  Pedestrians care about what's between the intersections, what's along the streets, whether it's worth walking to.  If low density and single-use planning forces them to drive, they'll drive.  Making them drive slower won't change that.  It can't. 

 

Design the built environment for pedestrians and you've solved walkability.  Build mass transit and you've solved traffic, plus you've enhanced walkability.  Walkability has nothing to do with speed limits or lights or lanes, it is a need independent from the need for cars to move efficiently.  Both can and should happen at the same time.  This is not a zero sum game.

The Highway Hit List

The U.S. has no shortage of urban interstates ripe for removal, and some tear-downs are already underway. But planners should tread carefully when “reconnecting” neighborhoods.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2017/01/the-highway-hit-list/514965/?utm_source=atlfb

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I'm looking at various Ohio cities on Google Street View and notice that they have implemented road diets. Most recently I noticed that Lima has implemented them on several streets, removing a traffic lane and adding angled parking and/or bike lanes. It also just makes me sad that we can't do them in Cincinnati because our current Mayor and Dept. of Transportation don't understand them...

Dayton's been doing a great job with road diets recently. They just finished narrowing Fifth Street between Wayne and Keowee, Brown Street now has bike lanes along it (although it's inexplicably still 35 when it should really be 25-30 now), and downtown has a lot of bike lanes that help compliment the region's incredibly robust bike trail network. It's been nice seeing so much proactive work from a smaller rust belt city.

Dayton has it a bit easier than many cities with nearly 50% population loss and excessively wide streets to begin with.  They could go for full on Dutch/Danish cycletracks if they really wanted to. 

Yeah there really aren't too many traffic bottlenecks anywhere where a cyclist would realistically be here, and half the time you don't even need the bike lanes downtown because you have the whole street to yourself. But I've been very impressed with the amount of people who actually get around by bike here, I always see people commuting around on the Link bikes or even just recreationally on the trails along the Miami.

So apparently a bunch of drivers in the Austin, Texas area are really upset about speed bumps being installed on city streets. They're so upset that they are protesting by honking their horn every time they go over a speed bump to annoy the neighbors. They are even creating Facebook events to encourage others to do the same.

 

Someone sent me this story with the caption: Unreal! This is like the street safety equivalent of rolling coal.

That's so Facebook 2017

When I was a kid, my dad and a group of neighbors constructed a rogue speed bump under the cover of darkness one night. Think 10 or so guys, with wheel barrels, shovels, and a few dozen sacks of concrete mix (and, although I didn't see it, I imagine a cooler full of beer).  The city eventually came and ripped it out, but years later they repaved the street and put in a series of official speed humps, so I guess they got the message. I don't remember honking ever being involved at that time, though.

In the Cincinnati area, there was one instance where neighbors painted their own guerrilla crosswalk and it wasn't discovered by the city at the time. The next time the city repaved the street, they repainted the crosswalk and made it official.

NARROW ROADS ARE BETTER THAN CROSSWALKS

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/8/20/narrow-roads-are-better-than-crosswalks

^Good stuff... wish the folks at Cincinnati's DOTE had more appetite for road narrowing.

^ As I mentioned earlier (kinda), Dayton’s been doing a phenomenal job with road diets and bump outs in the core of the city. Of course, as was also mentioned, traffic really isn’t an issue in Dayton which makes things easier, but it’s good to see that they’re doing the right thing and actually narrowing roads when they rebuild them.

NARROW ROADS ARE BETTER THAN CROSSWALKS

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/8/20/narrow-roads-are-better-than-crosswalks

 

I was watching a whole crowd of Clinic employees cross the new E105 at Carnegie today -- wow, talk about a wide stretch of road to cross.  No wonder the new parking garage is getting an elevated walkway to keep those Clinic employees off the street.  Is that what we're going to get for the rest of the Opportunity Corridor?

Once a city has built something, even something it never should have built, it can be very hard to convince said city that it doesn’t need that thing, & that the city would be much better off without it.

 

Example - most inner city freeways.

 

HT @voxdotcom https://t.co/M1LCWWmklU

Downtown Expressway's Days Are Numbered in Detroit https://t.co/NchqkwaNxq

Once a city has built something [...] it can be very hard to convince said city that it doesn’t need that thing...

 

Kind of sad how easy it was to completely dismantle the nation's streetcar networks but how hard it is to get rid of even a short stretch of freeway.

^When the private sector owns something they bought specifically to destroy, it's easy.

Oakwood, an affluent streetcar suburb adjacent to Dayton, recently completed a nice road diet along Shroyer Road. It went from being 4 lanes with no turn lane to 2 travel lanes, a landscaped median/turn lane, and bike lanes on both sides of the road. They also added very visible zebra crosswalks and flashing crosswalk signs at various midblock locations along the street. The Miami Valley really has been killing it recently with improving its pedestrian and bike infrastructure - pretty much every major road rebuild that I’ve recently witnessed has involved some combination of bumpouts, lane reductions, bike lanes added, and crosswalks.

Kudos to advocates in Buffalo, who wouldn't settle for a highway removal plan that emphasized vehicle speeds, not people https://t.co/K1VGPPu9N8

New York City conducted a road diet on its most dangerous street. Pedestrian injuries fell off a cliff. (Down 63%)

https://t.co/45elnIUclZ

Amazing thing is that it's still a horrible road. It's setup in a manner that makes movement as a pedestrian is basically impossible. Crossing it takes forever. The traffic is fast and aggressive, even with these changes. It's split into express and local lanes. The intersections are monstrous.

 

I'm glad they've had success in reducing injuries, but their method of tackling the problem doesn't do much towards giving some of the huge 200' wide ROW back to humans. I actually looked at buying several apartments in Station Square of Forest Hills Gardens (look that area up if you want to see great early 20th century planned commuter suburbanism) but hated the idea of having to get off the train along Queens BLVD and having to use stores on that road.

 

It should be turned into a more typical BLVD with driving lanes on the outside and the entirety of the center should be turned into a tree lined median with bike lanes built in and parkspace in the leftover area. There's certainly room for it.

The U.S. has DOUBLE the traffic fatality rate of Canada. The U.S. traffic fatality risk is 4Xs that of the UK.

 

For those out making guns-cars comparisons. Reminder, he U.S. is really bad at traffic safety *as well as gun* safety...

 

America’s Progress on Street Safety Is Pathetic

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/08/20/americas-progress-on-street-safety-is-pathetic/

 

Russia has nearly twice the fatality rate as the US, but it's nowhere near as bad as much of Africa and Asia.  Yes the US is terrible compared to the western world, but that map is pretty misleading otherwise.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

 

Ever been to any of the former Soviet Union? The roads are crap and traffic laws are a rumor because the police are corrupt as hell (Why Russians, Ukrainians, etc. all have digital video cameras in their cars). They're a notch above third-world.

 

The US should have traffic fatality rates comparable to the civilized world. The fact that it is doesn't is why that article was written. Maybe we just don't belong with the world's elite nations anymore?

Great piece. You can't make this kind of stuff up. The problem isn't primarily pedestrians who are distracted by smart phones, and the solution isn't more elaborate technology. It is streets that are designed to be streets, not freeways...

 

Drivers Declare War on Walkers

By LEWIS MCCRARY • March 2, 2018, 12:01 AM

 

Over the last decade, it’s become safer to drive and more dangerous to walk. That’s the conclusion of a new report on pedestrian safety released earlier this week, which documents that from 2007 to 2016, “The number of pedestrian fatalities increased 27 percent … while at the same time, all other traffic deaths decreased by 14 percent.”

 

Alarmingly, this is not just a medium-term trend, reports the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). In the U.S., “pedestrians now account for a larger proportion of traffic fatalities than they have in the past 33 years.”

 

Why the increase in drivers killing walkers, as opposed to drivers hitting other drivers? The report fingers those dreaded accessories of the Millennials, smartphones and marijuana, suggesting that increased legalization of the latter—and widespread adoption of the former devices—is leading to more distraction, impairment, and death.

 

MORE:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/drivers-declare-war-on-walkers/

Detroit to reduce lanes, make room for cyclists on East Jefferson

 

 

 

The city of Detroit plans to start changing lane markings along East Jefferson Avenue in early May, adding protected bike lanes and reducing traffic from three to two lanes each way.

 

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20180409/news/657481/detroit-to-reduce-lanes-make-room-for-cyclists-on-east-jefferson

 

Unsurprisingly, the comments have people freaking out about how horrible traffic is going to get, plus some other nonsense about how bike lanes are racist. Never mind that Jefferson is already overbuilt to begin with and there are plenty of other roads on the east side that are devoid of traffic (or houses, or people...).

I have a question for people familiar with the Vine Street hill in Cincinnati about how the street can be improved, to make it more safe and comfortable, considering both the residents who live here and the many people who use it as the primary connector between downtown and uptown. It's an incredibly important street for Cincinnati, and right now it feels like a total mess. Currently, it's a 4-lane layout (2 lanes northbound, 2 lanes southbound). The on-street parking has "rush hour" restrictions (southbound restricted 7-9am, northbound restricted 4-6pm). I suspect these "rush hour" restrictions don't make much sense here due to the fact that there's no standard "unidirectional" commute along Vine St. I suspect it's much more random and evenly distributed throughout the day than typical commuting patterns.

 

If a car needs to wait to turn left crossing traffic, it results in either a) cars getting backed up behind it or b) cars swerving quickly into the curbside lane to pass. Both cases seem dangerous. Due to the curves in the street and the steep incline, it *feels* (I don't have any crash data to support this) like cars drive much faster than is safe.

 

There's no place where cars are always allowed to park. Because traffic moves quite fast on this stretch, most parked cars take a couple of feet *ON THE SIDEWALK* so they have enough buffer with the moving traffic: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1222526,-84.5149409,3a,60y,195.73h,70.4t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3wLNMgwwDjKHUvbJYCGUwA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

In a few places, the city has taken ~2' from the sidewalk to give the bus stops a bit more lane width: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1214287,-84.5155074,3a,75y,259.96h,72.26t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sbiNqEGeM6kLnozWtdJmF8g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1256632,-84.5132269,3a,66.3y,80.16h,81.47t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sXrdJUSdwEIXYboKZL346VA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

 

These two bus stops (for lines 78 and 46) are roughly 200' (0.03 miles) apart:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1201393,-84.5169128,3a,45.4y,123.19h,81.73t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s94ELTRsrTPYhMiB7voZ_QA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1209508,-84.5158825,3a,45.9y,93.02h,89.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sk5ZzAQBy7V-eenkRRi84aw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

My list of ideas to improve the Vine St hill:

• Reduce traffic down to 1-lane in each direction
  
• Add center turn lane, ensuring left-turning cars don't cause back-ups or dangerous swerving
  
• Strategically determine where to put on-street parking (based on creating safety buffer and allowing parking for residents). Where parking is designated, allow it to be 24/7 with clearly painted lines
  
• Consolidate bus stops where possible, placing bus stops in parking lane with clearly painted lines
  

Thoughts? I'm curious to hear from folks who actually know something about traffic engineering and road diets: what would be the best ways to improve the Vine St hill?

 

There's potential yes.  If you add a center turn lane, then you only have parking on one side of the street.  That also means on the no-parking side buses still have to stop in traffic.  Then you run the risk of motorists using the turn lane as a passing lane, which is also dangerous and illegal.  Also, having buses pull over actually hurts bus service because they lose time having to merge back into traffic from a stop.  Overall, is left turning traffic and/or bus stops on the hill really that big of a problem? 

 

Just a couple other notes, parking on sidewalks is happening all over the city.  I don't think it's because of any actual risk, but because police aren't ticketing for it (heck, I don't think they're even ticketing for parking in front of fire hydrants).  The lack of enforcement, plus low curbs, leads to lazy parking and feeds into motorists' sense of entitlement if not outright contempt for pedestrians.  That said, Vine Street is only 36' wide from curb to curb in the hill, so there's not much room to play with.

 

Second, the extra space at bus stops is actually a holdover from the streetcar days when there was a small concrete platform flanking the tracks.  You see it on Riverside Drive a lot, along with newer full size turnouts to "get the buses out of the way." 

Many places with legacy streetcar lines have waiting passengers stand at the curb and, when a center-of-the-road streetcar pulls up to a stop, the waiting passengers step out into the street to board. It was a compromise to end the practice of people standing in the street, as shown above.