Officials release new design ideas for Central Parkway
Three of four proposals would take the Parkway down to two lanes between Plum and Liberty streets. All include increased provisions for pedestrian and bicycle safety.
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Personal take:
1- Symmetry is quite nice. Good use of space.
2- Might be nice on game days for FCC but I'm not sure why we'd need all the room on the one side and less on the other.
3- The median seems like unused space like now. No one goes to "hang out" in the space in the middle so other than looking nice, it's a lot of unused space otherwise.
4- Don't like 4 lanes- 2 is far better for pedestrian, etc.
The benefit of the median is that pedestrians only needs to cross one direction of traffic at a time. But tbh, I don't see a reason to make it bigger.
I don't mind the 4 lanes. I think it's a far better idea to keep the major thoroughfares like central large and to reduce or even eliminate car traffic in the heavier pedestrian areas like vine and main.
You know, I've gone back and forth on 4 but given it's not a high trafficked route for buses or anything (only the 20 and 6 use it I think) I think 2 might work well enough (and I know DoTE wouldn't propose it if it couldn't given their history on the Liberty road diet.) Heavy traffic is mainly for FCC games and Music Hall events and FCC shuts it all down from the curve up to Liberty anyhow so not a huge loss IMO.
And understood about the median but if we went with a 2 total lane solution (with bumpouts too) then crossing the entire width would be extremely easy as it were. No need for a big median at all then.
IDK, I think we are in for some rough traffic if 75 entrances are reduced (something I wholeheartedly endorse) and we put all the major arteries on a diet. IMO, give cars their their ways in and out of the city and start reducing the amount of cars on the local and residential streets. My dream would be for the entire length of vine south of Clifton Ave to turn into something akin to 16th Street in Denver. Pedestrian and bus traffic only. And I don't think we will get to that point any time soon if people feel like they need jump over to vine to avoid central. I'm fine with letting the cars keep central and reading. I could be convinced to attempt diverting the central traffic to linn. But that street would need a major rehab and no one would take that bait if the west end stays divided from the rest of the city.
I get what you mean about the median, but I don't think bumpouts are enough on a street with that much traffic, even with only one lane each way (look at Hamilton Ave to see why). Plus the median holds space for future streetcar expansion or busways that have their own right of way.
Is this not two lanes with curbside parking?
When I said option 4 I meant this- https://www.centralparkwaycincinnati.org/_files/ugd/e63c00_a44f657037404c79826efadb47ccfb8b.pdf
I count it by total lanes so 4 total (though if you did count parking it'd be more but since it's permanent parking it appears then I wouldn't call that a lane.)
One thing I did leave out is that I really like that they are looking into doing grade separated cycling paths. That's a big improvement over everything we currently have. That and pretty separate from actual traffic.
When I looked at the proposals and when I got to number 4 I thought yep, the other three are there to get people to choose number 4.