Council OKs accepting $33.5M in stimulus funds
Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 10:51am EDT | Modified: Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 10:56am
Business First of ColumbusMore than $33 million in federal stimulus dollars is headed to three Columbus roadwork projects after Columbus City Council voted to accept the funding Monday night.
Council passed an ordinance accepting $33.5 million in stimulus funding, $25 million of which is headed to a project to widen and improve Parsons and Livingston avenues near the campus of Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Council also accepted $5.5 million for a number of upgrades in downtown’s River South district.
…The third piece of funding council accepted Monday night is $3 million headed to reconstruction and resurfacing projects on eight city streets.
I’m generally leery of “widening and improving” intersections in urban locations like Parsons & Livingston, but I found a project description online and this looks like a genuine multi-modal improvement. I expect that the widening will include left turn lanes which should improve safety and reduce delays. The sidewalks will be widened from 4′ to 8′ wide and bike lanes (although only 4′ wide) will be included.
As for the street resurfacing, that’s always a good thing. I made a map of the streets getting resurfaced here.
This city is going backwards here. Wider roads and sticking me in front of right-turning vehicles just shows they don’t know what they’re doing: the people responsible are amateurs. Make it mandatory for these non-cycling engineers to ride on Morse and Karl before adding anymore and we will not have any more proposed bike lanes, guaranteed.
Schrock Road is another fave. It’s very wide, with four thru lanes, a center turn lane a bike lane on each side and also with sidewalks on each side. The thing is so wide one could run a streetcar line AND wider bike/ped lane in its right of way and not disturb auto traffic!
These bike lanes are suicide lanes. They are narrow and have no protection from careless motorists who whiz by at 50 mph or more. Whoever designed these things obviously had no experience with bikes.
The bike lane on at least one side should be raised to sidewalk level to get it out of the roadway. That makes it harder for motorists to run down bicyclists. The bike lane and sidewalk should be made into one joint use 10′ wide lane.
Yes, this involves some retrofitting, but it’s really a low-tech solution that makes riding a bike less dangerous. I think it’s nuts to have bicycles mixing in heavy traffic on busy roads like these. It might make sense on secondary streets or places where people are accustomed to seeing bikes, but not on Schrock Road.
This is really not the right thread for a discussion of the pros and cons of cycle-tracks (raised bike lanes combined with the sidewalk), but since you brought it up, they might be less safe than you perceive them to be, at least that’s the finding from research from Copenhagen. Although the number of rear end collisions (aka: cyclists being “run down”) decreased, but the number of collisions with right-turning vehicles increased significantly. Since there are a lot more turning collisions than rear end collisions to begin with, that raises some concerns about the overall safety of the facility. Perhaps precautions can be taken to improve the safety of a cycle-track, but I think we must be very cautions when considering these.
I used to live in Westerville and was nearly run over a number of times while on Schrock. Just my thoughts.
There’s a discussion of a ‘new’ idea on metropolitan rail (google amtrak news) called”A Thesis To Build On” from the Atlanta Constitution Journal. Stimulus money for pot holes? How creative can we get?
I thought I got creative here, but nobody commented. I guess a vision involving buses isn’t very inspiring to many people. I think it’s too bad nobody is interested in including something like this as part of the 315 construction project.
[...] transportation news. Here is an update from the Dispatch from a few days ago on the status of stimulus funds. I copied and pasted the parts relevant to transportation. Most local stimulus projects still [...]
Good to hear money is being allocated to the South Front Street revamp. That’s going to look really nice once the construction wraps up. Two-way street. Decorative Median. Improved Street parking. Bike racks. Friendlier sidewalks. Good stuff.