18 hours ago, jmecklenborg said:

It doesn't even seem narrower.  It's like when some extremely obese person loses 30lbs and is upset that nobody notices.  

Diet's can be very short lived and have limited long term benefits, maybe instead of requesting road "diets" we should be encouraging our roads to make "lifestyle changes".

10 minutes ago, ucgrady said:

Diet's can be very short lived and have limited long term benefits, maybe instead of requesting road "diets" we should be encouraging our roads to make "lifestyle changes".

 

Narrow Streets for People

20 hours ago, Ram23 said:

 

Despite the low traffic count, traffic on Liberty routinely backs up onto Central Parkway because of long red lights at Elm. Why are the red lights so long? Because the street is so wide - pedestrians need the time. The same goes for every intersection east of Elm - traffic backs up quite a bit during long red lights. I'm guessing the city wanted to keep two travel lanes on Liberty not to handle the traffic, but for the capacity to store cars during red lights on short lengths of street between each signal. It seems like shorter red lights with a single travel lane could have resolved that problem, if it was indeed the problem.

If you narrowed the street to two travel lanes, you wouldn't need the long lights because the street wouldn't be wide and pedestrians could cross it more quickly. 

 

The traffic engineers just didn't want to fix this problem. And if there were back ups caused by the change, there would be less traffic overall on the street because traffic is self-regulating.

 

McMicken only has 4,627 vehicles per day and Central Parkway, which has the capacity for 44,000 vehicles a day carries only about 25% of that. 

 

Construction crews have finished all but the east sycamore and liberty bump out on the south side. Started today on the north side of the street. 

I really like the dense rectangular root balls from the existing trees now free to expand. Hopefully they all survive and weren't too beaten up during construction. 

 

Overall this project has been pretty underwhelming but now that it's done(ish) hopefully 3CDC and the other owners, especially on the South side of Liberty, can move forward with developments now that the hypothetical project and potentially expanding property lines are set in concrete. Grammer's, Boost Mobile site, and 3CDC parking lot all come to mind.

Does anybody know enough about utilities to make sense of what's going on here? This is directly in front of 28 W Liberty, the Franciscan Media office. The big "box" says Duke Energy and has a bunch of conduit connections on both sides (presumably electric lines). Based on Google StreetView, this Duke Energy box is definitely new. And immediately adjacent to the curb, there is ~6" metal conduit. What is that for?

 

I'm asking because I had been under the impression that this project would NOT be burying utilities (due to insufficient funds and the headache of getting all property owners to pay for re-connection). I repeatedly asked DOTE about underground the utilities and they always said that it was basically too difficult to even attempt. But this sure looks like they're burying at least some of the utilities. Anybody know more about this?

 

I walked across Liberty recently and it was 21 steps instead of 23 steps.  Honestly I can't tell the difference while walking or driving.  

22 minutes ago, jwulsin said:

And immediately adjacent to the curb, there is ~6" metal conduit. What is that for?

 

I am also curious about this. Right before they repaved Broadway Street the placed a similar conduit along the curb (although they put it on the street side of the curb rather than the sidewalk side).

 

Some of the conduit might be for traffic signal controls, which they can bury more easily even if they aren't going to mess with burying the remaining utilities at this point.

7 minutes ago, jmecklenborg said:

I walked across Liberty recently and it was 21 steps instead of 23 steps.  Honestly I can't tell the difference while walking or driving.  

 

Unfortunately it seems like drivers are still flying up Main Street despite all of the work that has been done to add bumpouts and crosswalks between 12th and Liberty, and the reduction in the size of the Liberty & Main intersection itself. Some of this is surely due to the reduced amount of traffic which allows cars to speed. Hopefully under our next mayoral administration, the city will do what the neighborhood has long been asking for and convert Main back to two-way. And Walnut while they're at it.

Edited October 29, 20204 yr by taestell

Would the block between Central Parkway and 12th remain one-way because of the streetcar?

20 minutes ago, BigDipper 80 said:

Would the block between Central Parkway and 12th remain one-way because of the streetcar?

 

Yeah, the southbound lane would be a right turn only at 12th. When this idea was discussed at one of the Liberty Street meetings, the traffic engineer basically dismissed it because of that, saying that it wasn't worth doing.

 

Even having Main two-way from 12th to Liberty would be an improvement for connectivity, though, because people heading south (southeast?) on McMicken could continue onto Main and easily get to 14th, Woodward, 13th, and 12th, rather than having to make a huge detour around the block to Sycamore like they do now. It would be a huge improvement in connectivity for the eastern half of OTR and Pendleton. Not to mention the traffic calming effect.

^Unfortunately, rebuilding the Main St. streetcar track in the right lane from the terrible Government Square lane jump to the right half of the road would cost at least $10 million.  It could probably be done at Central Parkway, but it would require another lane jump in the middle of the intersection.  

 

42 minutes ago, taestell said:

 

Yeah, the southbound lane would be a right turn only at 12th. When this idea was discussed at one of the Liberty Street meetings, the traffic engineer basically dismissed it because of that, saying that it wasn't worth doing.

 

Even having Main two-way from 12th to Liberty would be an improvement for connectivity, though, because people heading south (southeast?) on McMicken could continue onto Main and easily get to 14th, Woodward, 13th, and 12th, rather than having to make a huge detour around the block to Sycamore like they do now. It would be a huge improvement in connectivity for the eastern half of OTR and Pendleton. Not to mention the traffic calming effect.

I recall a DOTE rep saying in a town hall that we can't do two-way Main because of all the double parking.

I seem to remember an OTR resident who thought that two-way was a bad idea because of all the deliveries during the day that block one of the two traffic lanes. Somehow it works just fine on Vine. He also brought up that one-way streets are fine because Portland has one-way streets.

Back to my question about Liberty Street... I'm also just generally perplexed by why the northern sidewalk is being completely rebuilt so extensively. I thought a major aspect of the design was leaving the northern sidewalk as-is to save money.  But perhaps I misunderstood, and they always planned to rebuild the northern sidewalk. In any case, to the extent the City has a limited "street diet budget", I would rather see money go towards more bumpouts (or other calming measures) throughout the City where they'd have real impact. I really hope the next mayor works with DOTE to provide a more coherent strategy to our roads (diets, 2-ways, bike lanes, etc).

1 hour ago, jwulsin said:

I thought a major aspect of the design was leaving the northern sidewalk as-is to save money.  But perhaps I misunderstood, and they always planned to rebuild the northern sidewalk. 

i think this was the case at first, but as the design evolved they took the opportunity to address the north sidewalk which had some genuinely narrow stretches and a streetscape that needed to be improved as well. (Especially after maximizing land on the south side for redevelopment was de-emphasized)

Edited October 30, 20204 yr by thebillshark

4 hours ago, jwulsin said:

I would rather see money go towards more bumpouts (or other calming measures) throughout the City where they'd have real impact

 

Right, residents were repeatedly told that there wasn't enough money to bury utilities or replace the sidewalk on the north side of the street, and then at the last minute, some new money mysteriously came through. I think the city took money from other sources (possibly the Capital Acceleration Program) to pay for the repaving of Liberty Street all the way to Dalton Avenue and the sidewalk replacement on the north side of the street.

 

On 10/29/2020 at 3:30 PM, taestell said:

Unfortunately it seems like drivers are still flying up Main Street despite all of the work that has been done to add bumpouts and crosswalks between 12th and Liberty, and the reduction in the size of the Liberty & Main intersection itself. Some of this is surely due to the reduced amount of traffic which allows cars to speed. Hopefully under our next mayoral administration, the city will do what the neighborhood has long been asking for and convert Main back to two-way. And Walnut while they're at it.

 

I have heard that the city is going to be adding raised crosswalks on Main Street to reduce the amount of speeding. That's fine but they should also make it two way.

 

On 1/13/2020 at 10:39 AM, taestell said:

 I still think that the off-peak lane configuration is going to be confusing for drivers, but whatever.

 

Since the completion of the Liberty Street road diet, I have not seen a single car parked on the south side of Liberty Street. I think it's because the design of the street is confusing and drivers don't realize that the outer travel lane becomes a parking lane during non-peak hours. (It is only a driving lane Mon-Fri 7am-7pm.) I would have given this feedback to the city if they would have bothered to solicit feedback from the community rather than ramming through a completely new plan at the last minute with no community input.

 

Maybe people don't want to bother with an app over 2 hours.

Pretty sure "off peak parking" is code for "we hope nobody even knows this and never parks there so it remains a driving lane but appeases those who want traffic reduction." Seems like this is exactly the outcome this administration wanted.

That parking schedule is fairly confusing and is no better than the myriad of signs that New York City had before they started a program of simplifying them down. I'm also wondering why folks just aren't parking on the street as they are accustomed to doing so on practically every major thoroughfare in the city as is.

18 minutes ago, taestell said:

 

 

I walked by this sign awhile ago and had to stand about 2 feet in front of it to read the little white text. No one is parking there because it's impossible to tell if you're allowed to park there until you've already parked and walked onto the sidewalk. When I lived in NYC a decade ago I used to take photos of some of their ridiculous signs - this reminds me of those.

 

Also, all the temporary parking lanes in the city should be striped as parking lanes, since they are parking lanes most of the time. I think it's less safe to stripe them as driving lanes - people will drive in the lane and not expect to come up on a parked car. If they had perpendicular striping for parking stalls, people would drive more cautiously.

I noticed that on Saturday evening (when there was an FCC match), cars were parked on the southern curb. I haven't been checking regularly, but I was curious if this is now an "official" policy to allow curbside parking during FCC matches?

 

If my memory serves, Cranley's administration insisted that the "diet" keep two lanes each specifically citing the bogeyman of congestion during FCC matches. Does anybody know for certain if the City and/or FCC changed their minds on that policy? 

35 minutes ago, jwulsin said:

I noticed that on Saturday evening (when there was an FCC match), cars were parked on the southern curb. I haven't been checking regularly, but I was curious if this is now an "official" policy to allow curbside parking during FCC matches?

 

If my memory serves, Cranley's administration insisted that the "diet" keep two lanes each specifically citing the bogeyman of congestion during FCC matches. Does anybody know for certain if the City and/or FCC changed their minds on that policy? 

You can park on that side of the street after rush hour and on weekends per the posted signage.