Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
I would run transit right along Spring Garden Road. It would be a big mistake to build streetcars somewhere else and make the street inconvenient for transit users and pedestrians.
Spring Garden Road is congested but its role as a traffic corridor isn't important. I would guess that it doesn't carry a lot of vehicles and isn't popular for people commuting into the downtown. The parking issue is also overblown and just doesn't make much sense. How many car spots could you even fit along those blocks given the corners and hydrants and crosswalks and everything else? 100? It seems like such a stretch to believe that having those few spots on SGR instead of on a sidestreet or in a garage is somehow critical to the businesses. It's even harder to believe that it is more important than having foot and vehicle traffic move better.
And of course the SGR design of lowest-common-denominator patching is not what you see in busy and successful cities (e.g. West Coast). It's what you see in faded cities stuck in the 1950s (worst parts of the Midwest).
The street would be dramatically improved if it had wider sidewalks, places to sit, maybe some more trees, a few sensible spots for delivery vehicles, and electric streetcars instead of loud diesel buses spewing out exhaust. Too bad the city can't get it together enough to make those things a reality.
|
Going from memory; there is no main on street parking for people on SGR. The parking is either for delivery vehicles, bus stops or taxis. So parking isn't really an issue in a way (beyond deliveries). The main reason I kept it off SGR was with the number of bus routes during peak times, my concern was the conflicts between SC and buses. With some many routes trying to get through a narrow area (in both directions), I felt adding a SC to the mix would likely cause the efficency of any SC in terms of speed and ontime performance to decrease (even if you included transit priority). Added to this, the concept was to have the inbound routes come through Hollis and outbound through Lower Water (using the one way flow) it would be tough to get a SC up from Hollis to SGR. I had thought about Barrington, but the same problem exists on Barrington as SGR with deliveries. That could be solved by exluding delivery trucks from both streets during peak periods, but then how do you deal with it off peak?
I think a SC could work in either sense, but one of the key issues with public transit is ontime performance. If you put the route on Morris St then the conflict with buses decreases. I'm just not sure you could have a conflict free experience through DT (be it on Hollis/Lower Water or on Barrington).