[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.