A blog for better streets and public spaces in Portland, Maine.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Three concepts for Franklin Street - Detailed

These are photos of the display boards that were being shown at last night's public meeting in City Hall. In addition to these, MRLD had also produced a really neat 3-D animation of the three concepts - hopefully they'll be able to put those videos online soon. All of these alternatives have 4 lanes from I-295 to Congress, and 2 lanes from Congress to Commercial.

You can click these photos to enlarge them for more detail.

The "Urban Street Concept"


The "Parkway" concept:

The "Multi-Way Boulevard" Concept

2 comments:

Scott H said...

I wasn't able to make it to the meeting, but a couple of the concepts show very unsafe bike lane design.

Illustration A on the "Urban Street Concept" and illustrations F and G on the "Multi-Way Boulevard" all show bike lanes in the door zone of the parked cars. Did anyone bring up this issue at the meeting?

Cyclists need to travel a minimum of 5 feet from the edge of parked cars. Any bike lanes that are created should reflect that need instead of leading cyclists into unsafe situations.

C Neal said...

I agree, Scott. Actually, the biggest red flag for me was the two-way separated path running parallel to the street in the "parkway" concept. Keep in mind that this is on a hill, and cyclists headed downhill might be going up to 30 mph. Mixing them among leisurely strollers is probably not a great idea, and the intersections with turning traffic at cross-streets are going to be very dangerous.

I think that New York City has a potentially good model in their redesign of the Allen Street mall in the lower East Side, where they're moving bike lanes next to a newly-landscaped median/pedestrian promenade. Check out this PDF:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/allenpike.pdf