Saturday, March 7, 2015

Recap: Feb. 26 Stadium Blvd. reconstruction public meeting

The city is planning to entirely rebuild Stadium Blvd. in the S. Main St. area in 2016 and 2017. This is a massive project, and I won't try to describe it all here; instead you can read about it on the city's website.

A public meeting was held at Pioneer HS on Wed, Feb. 25, to present a preliminary design and gather feedback from the community. Several city staffers and councilmembers were in attendance, alongside 20 or 30 community members. This was the second of three public meetings to be held on the project. Slides from the presentation are available here, and I'll try to recap some of the highlights from the discussion here.

I'm particularly excited about the bike lane which will be constructed along this stretch of road. Notably, the city is considering a combined right turn/bike lane at Main St. on westbound Stadium, which provides a safer environment for cyclists (and is how I tend to use most right turn lanes when cycling, regardless of markings). I'm pretty excited about that.

The scheduling for this project is specifically being planned to avoid disrupting the football and basketball seasons.

This construction isn't going to address the flooding issues present in the area northwest of the Stadium/Main intersection. However, construction in that area is at least designed to make future improvements possible, and the water-pooling issues that currently affect Stadium itself.



There was a lot—a lot—of discussion about the crosswalks at Edgewood, which connect Pioneer HS with that neighborhood. The city is considering this carefully, and the project manager was genuinely interested in gathering feedback. Discussion centered on whether there should be one or two crosswalks, what sort of lighting/signage/markings would be appropriate, and whether that entrance to Pioneer could be reconfigured to allow a crosswalk closer to the west side of the intersection.

Aerial imagery shows the current configuration of the Pioneer HS entrance along Stadium at Edgewood. Note the placement of the extant crosswalk west of the intersection.

Finally, there's a possibility that the existing pedestrian island west of the Stadium bridge will be removed or relocated, though it's too early in the planning process to say for certain.
Interested community members should read over all the material available via the city's website and keep an eye out for announcements about the next public meeting.

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