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Originally Posted by Always Sunny in SLC
I have a hard time having any street designed to prioritize the car commuter over the land owner/resident/pedestrian/cyclist.
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Ideally a street should serve all users. I do agree that in downtown, State Street under-serves the pedestrian and bicycle traffic that is prominent.
It's also important to remember that some streets need to serve cars, too. State plays a very important role in meeting regional mobility goals when you get into Murray, Sandy, etc. I admit I sit on a weaker case in the central business district, though.
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Street after street in Utah has been changed over time to accommodate the commuter and because of that screws the property owners along the road and really within 2 blocks.
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Sort of. In the central core, I do agree that the street needs some TLC. At minimum a raised median and narrowed lanes would help. It would be interesting to look at traffic volumes to see if reducing from 6 (3 each way) down to 4 (2 each way) would be do-able. It sure would be nice to free up some space for some bicyclist facilities.
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700 East is a perfect example. I drive that everyday and the common speed is 50-55, with 40 being the limit in SLC and 45 outside of the city. It ranges from 5-9 lanes wide! South of 21st it turns into a de facto highway with 9 lanes and design speed of 50-55!
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That's what 700 East is designed to do. Move a buttload of trips. It serves a role in keeping parallel streets quiet is because 7th East "takes one for the team."
Planners are a bit too enthusiastic in their view that a road diet will
always be accommodated by a mode shift to walking, cycling, etc. I wish they were right, because we could solve all capacity issues by eliminating capacity.
In actuality, at best maybe 5-10% of travelers will shift modes. The rest simply shift to parallel routes.
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At the same time you have single family home front doors 30 feet off the road! This destroys property values
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Debatable. Commercial property along 700 East does great. But do we really want to spread the cancer out by pushing traffic off 7th onto 9th and Highland and 13th north of I-80?
If traffic noise drops property values as you say, I'd think spreading it throughout many neighborhood streets would be a lot worse than consolidating it into one big facility.
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creates a very large impediment for pedestrians.
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I do think a few more signalized pedestrian crossings are possible, and can be meshed into the existing signal timing to activate when platoons of traffic aren't going by.
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All this because keeping commuting times to a minimum is given priority over all other considerations. I think the local residents should be given priority.
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That may be true for local streets, but this is a state highway (US-89). State highways serve entire regions. A balance needs to be struck between mobility needs and local needs.
Outside urban cores, not ever street can be a 20 mile-per-hour lane lined with people drinking coffees at sidewalk cafes. Even the biggest urbanite on this board will, at times, rely on regional mobility to travel outside their neighborhood.
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I think of the phrase, "Can't the Farmer And The Cowman be Friends?" from
Oklahoma. In this case, it's can't the planner and the engineer be friends.
We are both working together to make livable, great cities. In the 20th century, I agree engineers ran away with meeting capacity and mobility and "ghettofied" many urban areas in SLC.
It can be equally bad if planners run away and damage mobility and capacity requirements.
I hope the 21st century is one that strikes a balance.
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