Nicollet-Central Streetcar

[FISHMANPET]

Yes, close Hennepin to auto traffic. I'll get e memo right out for that one, too.

Random question, would you prefer HCMC psych ward or Bellevue?

So you'd rather optimize an urban street connecting arguably the two most urban areas of the city for cars rather than people?

And if you'll read closely, you'll see that I never advocated closing Hennepin to auto traffic, that's your strawman.

[woofner]

As a baby step towards bus lanes (which are ubiquitous throughout the world, by the way, with the exception of parts of subsaharan Africa and the USA, god bless it) I've thought that it would make sense to use queue-jump lanes on enhanced bus lines. It's relatively easy to work into the layout of a four-lane street with two lanes of parking, because you get four lanes to work with at intersections (left to right that's northbound through lane, southbound left turn lane, bus queue-jump lane, and combined through-right turn lane). Edit: Chicago or Penn N would be ideal testing grounds for this, I think.

But you'd probably have to get political support for actual mobility improvements instead of shiny ribbon-cutable transit.

[exiled_antipodean]

Peak-only bus lanes and signal priority for buses are simple things which can speed buses up significantly and make the ride smoother. They're all over similar cities in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

[UptownSport]

Multi door boarding now.
Your responsibility to have proof of payment same as Hiawatha.
Install readers and vendors near all doors.
*instant* and *radical* speed increase to all lines, and allows driver to drive

[UptownSport]

Narrow trolley is just what doctor ordered-
It runs in it's old path; minimal interference with parking, traffic, peds- just like it was originally

[RailBaronYarr]

Idea, just because I'm stuck on dedicated ROW...

aBRT or Streetcar in center lanes, 11' wide. Moving toward sidewalk is a 9.5' flex space. For most of the block length, it's parking. Mid-block this space becomes an 80' long raised platform for boarding bus/tram. Near intersection it becomes a flex thru/left turn lane. 10' thru lane for vehicles between the flex parking/etc area, followed by 9.5' of sidewalk.

Local buses could do one of 2 things: run in the center lanes with the rapid buses and have mid-block stops with reduced amenities (small raised sidewalk about 20' long with small shelter or just a bench). This forces the rapid buses to pass stopped buses, which isn't outrageous (but does reduce ride comfort). Alternately (or required, if it's a streetcar not aBRT), you could also run local buses mixed in with general traffic and utilize signal timing as mattaudio suggested to do far-block stops (cars can pass through using the lane for parking that is dedicated for this purpose for ~80' post intersection).

Urban design nuts might worry about moving traffic directly abutting the sidewalk, but this has become a very calmed street with mid-block crossings for the tram/bus, slightly narrowed lanes, and hopefully good design with trees/planters. 20 mph would feel very safe. And this is in stark contrast to this: http://goo.gl/maps/3eRVI just south of Lake St. Businesses may complain but reality, again, is that there are still on-street parking spaces, while enhanced transit should make up the difference. A typical block length is ~560', rarely fully dedicated to parking due to curb cuts. This has capacity for a maximum of 25 22' long parking spaces (with what is more like ~20 due to said curb cuts). At minimum (blocks with BRT/tram stations) this proposal has 11 per block, with others retaining 14-15 on blocks without the major transit stops. Obviously, more expensive than the arterial study calculated due to build-out of medians in the street, but everything else should be roughly the same. Thoughts?

[MNdible]

Quick reaction is that a 9.5' sidewalk/boulevard zone is completely inadequate when it's next to a narrow lane of moving traffic.

[RailBaronYarr]

Without sounding like I'm blindly defending a plan just because I came up with it, I guess I'm not sure how wide a sidewalk next to 20 mph traffic needs to be? Shaftesbury Ave in London (beyween Picadilly Circus and Covent Garden, I bring it up only because I was just there) is immensely busier (foot- and vehicle- wise). It runs double decker buses right along the sidewalk, and in many cases it is between 9 and 12' wide (using Google Maps distance measurement tool). If you're pulling away the requirement for cars to open doors in to the sidewalk, have transit benches/shelters, etc, what else needs to go in the 9.5' of sidewalk other than people?

[MNdible]

Not coming out of the sidewalk dimension, but as I understand it, your 10' lanes don't account for any gutter or snow storage, so that's a problem.

Since this is an existing corridor, there are a lot of existing conflicts in the ROW. Outswinging commercial doors, stairs and hand railings, planters, etc. Even if nothing impinged on the ROW, you're talking 6' minimum sidewalks in commercial areas (and that's really inadequate, especially in busy areas like Eat Street), so that means no street trees and very minimal street furniture.

Is it theoretically possible to cram everything in that you're talking about? Maybe. I just don't think it's going to be a very functional space for anybody.

[RailBaronYarr]

My personal confusion comes from the fact that I've been places all over the world where "commercial corridors" (or streets as they're called) have lanes of traffic abutting sidewalks MUCH smaller than 9.5 feet. And the retail/restaurants that abut them have doors that swing open, a row of skinny tables and chairs lining the windows, etc just like we'd expect from Nicollet. Obviously the snow is an issue many global and US cities don't worry about (at least not on the scale we do, yet it doesn't excuse cities in the sun belt for the same over-designed spaces). I also think if we made our places higher value (are we envisioning Nicollet to remain mostly 1-2 story structures or 3-6 along the whole place?) snow storage wouldn't be the 'issue' that it is (ie requiring ROW in our pedestrian space to ensure cars can move through). We could pay people to remove it from the sidewalks with increased tax revenue. Yes, the design needs a gutter.

I just am confused how 80' of ROW can be so difficult to fit this stuff in. My honest answer is that we're so religiously devoted to dedicating space for mostly single-occupancy drivers, both to drive and park, that we don't even question if the space should go to other used. Even I got caught in creating a layout that needs to fit in on-street parking! Basically 9-10' of ROW for the entire length of the street to fit cars sitting idle! My ideal design would nix it entirely, and kindly ask drivers to park on any of the side streets (or a skinny block over) and walk 0.1 miles to their end-destination. Then I'd make a sidewalk space that is 10' wide with a 4' clearly marked bike lane against it, 4' of boulevard space to handle trees, bike storage, and bus shelters, then an 11.5' bus lane (and gutter), then a 10.5' thru-lane. But car-traffic engineers would never let it fly without R/L turn lanes. Oh well.

[mattaudio]

I think there is a certain point where land use becomes valuable enough to justify snow removal rather than snow storage.

[mulad]

Strongly agreed on that.

[UptownSport]

My honest answer is that we're so religiously devoted to dedicating space for mostly single-occupancy drivers, both to drive and park, that we don't even question if the space should go to other used. Even I got caught in creating a layout that needs to fit in on-street parking! Basically 9-10' of ROW for the entire length of the street to fit cars sitting idle! My ideal design would nix it entirely, and kindly ask drivers to park on any of the side streets (or a skinny block over) and walk 0.1 miles to their end-destination.

People won't or can't walk that 1/10 mile and there'll simply be death for those businesses.

It'll be interesting how many are killed on University- and perhaps due to simple laziness- because University changed from auto oriented to LRT oriented.

Hopefully, something will replace them, and not starbucks after starbucks

(Insert obligatory Simpsons "Starbucks mall" screengrab here)

[RailBaronYarr]

I'd be curious to do a count of patrons of the shops/restaurants on this corridor to see what mode they arrived by. I would wager good money that the general public as well as the business owners vastly over-estimate the % arriving by car. A study was done on this very topic: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-a ... rive/3978/ (#2 on the list)

[talindsay]

My honest answer is that we're so religiously devoted to dedicating space for mostly single-occupancy drivers, both to drive and park, that we don't even question if the space should go to other used. Even I got caught in creating a layout that needs to fit in on-street parking! Basically 9-10' of ROW for the entire length of the street to fit cars sitting idle! My ideal design would nix it entirely, and kindly ask drivers to park on any of the side streets (or a skinny block over) and walk 0.1 miles to their end-destination.

The thing you're leaving out here is that if you intend to have cars on the street at all, then your pedestrian experience will be better if you have on-street parking. The reason is simple: parked cars provide a natural mitigation of the cars driving on the street. There are some very specific exceptions, but as a general rule high pedestrian quality means having on-street parking. Without it, even wide sidewalks are unpleasant because of the cars buzzing by. This has been pretty widely established as true.

Anecdotally, I'd note that when I'm running on the River Road I always run on the inside edge of the trail - to be as far from the zipping cars as possible. When I'm running on city blocks I tend to stay closer to the buildings because of the problem of parked cars' doors opening, but I'm more likely to go closer to the street when there are parked cars.

[RailBaronYarr]

^My experience in cities across the road is that this is only true on streets where cars are moving faster than roughly 20 mph (give or take a bit). If we need to store cars on the street to make people safe from said moving cars in every situation, we're doing something wrong. Pedestrian quality can be improved with bollards, trees, bushes, planters, bike lanes, or any other number of barriers/separation, and if the street was on the lower end of the speed range it's not even necessary at all.

I'm not saying ban cars on streets or widespread removal of on-street parking. But maybe we should consider alternatives to the status quo on a corridor we're evaluating implementing high-capacity, frequent transit like a streetcar (or aBRT) and seriously ask the question if storing ~40 cars between both sides of the street is the best use of nearly 1/4 of the public ROW. Has the question ever been asked (beyond "oh noez, small business will wither and die!")

[talindsay]

Heh, personally I think the "business will die" argument is pretty funny since I haven't seen any definitive example given. You're right of course, but I think it would be difficult to accomplish a low-enough-speed road to make what you're describing practical. Remember that trees and bollards also take ROW and if you only have ~10 feet of sidewalk you won't be able to pull it off. Of course, if you have 10 feet *PLUS* the former parking lane, you might be able to do something pretty great in a boulevardesque way.

The big challenge is excess speed. Driving recently in Reykjavik I was struck that drivers there actually honor the 30kph (~20 mph) speed limits, but there's no culture here of honoring speed limit signs and I think it would be difficult to convince people to convert a commercial street to have the physical aspects necessary to bring speed down to that range. Who knows though, given the Mall is already there downtown, Nicollet might be a better test subject for this than other streets.

[Andrew_F]

I agree that as far as business is concerned, it shouldn't be a big deal to remove parking for the vast majority of them. There probably needs to be a small municipal ramp built along the corridor sometime soon anyways.

[RailBaronYarr]

Post wouldn't take and I lost it. Basically the gist is:

- Favorite street in Paris (Rue Mouffetard): http://goo.gl/maps/4jP4I
- ~20' wide total mid-block, with 4-5' sidewalks on each side. Some intersections have 10' devoted to sidewalk ROW
- Tons of people eating, shopping, passing through
- Even if you include total ROW as human area (it's not always, cars, motorcycles, and delivery/garbage trucks do pass through), that's still only 10' per side, exactly what I proposed for Nicollet's sidewalk
- Paris doesn't get the snow we do, obviously design/operations challenge
- Current speed of cars is mostly a byproduct of street designs. Narrow with visual design cues and enforcement can change that within a year or 2

[woofner]

One of my pet peeves is the claim that parked cars are a good method of separating pedestrian space from moving traffic. They can be, but they are far from ideal for two reasons:

-There are much more attractive, useful ways to separate given 8' of ROW, such as a good planter/bench combo
-Parking spaces themselves, if not utilized, do not provide any effective separation, and can even encourage dangerous motorist activities like higher speeds, passing in the parking lane, etc (if you've ever walked down 38th St you know what I'm talking about)

I'm not necessarily opposed to publicly provided on-street car storage as long as there is a fee associated, and I think it can be a good compromise on streets like Nicollet, but the majority of the city has inconsistently utilized on-street parking, so parking on both sides should not be the default option it currently is. And don't give me bs about the parking lane being there for the benefit of pedestrians - if pedestrian separation is the sole reason for the parking lane, then it will not work for pedestrian separation.

As for Nicollet, I think that a through-traffic ban should be considered for the segment north of Lake. That will allow for the parking that is clearly valued there (and should be priced accordingly), and it will also improve transit running speeds a bit.