Markeshia Ricks photo
Hausladen unveils strategy Wednesday evening.
Imagine a narrower Church Street with shorter crosswalks and more space for people on foot. Imagine it with a dedicated bike lane separated from car traffic by planters — or less sightly low-cost “delineator tubes.” Imagine it not taking years to plan, more years to design, and tens of thousands of dollars to build.
Low-dollar, quick turnaround projects like the hypothetical Church Street scenario are at the heart of what city transit chief Doug Hausladen and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn are calling Complete Streets 2.0.
Zinn and Hausladen tag-teamed a presentation to a Board of Alders’ City Services and Environmental Policy Committee hearing at City Hall Wednesday night.
A “delineator.”
The presentation focused on a way forward for the city’s plan to design streets that work for pedestrians, bike riders and drivers, known as “Complete Streets.” The vision hinges on what the city can do well, do quickly, and do without spending a whole lot of money.
Hausladen said so far Complete Streets has “created expectations that it has not yet met” with its project request form, and has been hampered by a constrained budget and a lack of feedback from city residents.
Complete Streets 2.0 aims to change that by including more meetings with neighbors like one in Wooster Square the night before about low-cost traffic calming solutions for Olive Street.
Zinn (pictured at a recent Westville community meeting) said the focus also would be on solutions that can be implemented in a few months, not years. “We don’t want to just talk,” he said. “We want to do.”
Hausladen said the goal is to get at least one pilot project in every neighborhood by the end of 2015.
He said the new direction calls for traffic-calming solutions where the city can “fail fast,” meaning if the city uses paint to narrow a street and shorten a crosswalk, and it doesn’t achieve the desired effect, it can be removed without causing the city a lot of financial strain.
“Something like that can be removed the next day,” he said.
“Three hundred dollars worth of paint that doesn’t achieve our objective is a lot less painful than $300,000 worth of curb that doesn’t achieve our objective,” Zinn added.
Plans also are in the works for implementing a computer program that creates a feedback loop on work order requests made through SeeClickFix along with a request for the city to endorse the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) Urban Street Design Guide so that the city’s Complete Streets Design manual might be appended with the guide. Hausladen said that ultimately there would be a need to ask the state to add NACTO standards to state guidelines to provide more flexibility.
He said the city cannot pursue certain ideas — such as a two-way cycle track for bikes — because the state had dubbed them illegal.
“Our engineers would lose their license if they built them,” Hausladen said, so at some point state legislators will need to try to change laws. Until then, the focus will be on what the city can do within the law to make changes.