Broadway, 17th getting closer to calmness
Plans to slow traffic in two parts of the Westside are moving forward. “Traffic calming” devices are slated for temporary
installation on Broadway Street through the Midland area and 17th Street between Uintah Street and Colorado Avenue next
spring.
The idea in both cases is to make those largely residential streets less enticing to drivers who want to go fast or to use them for shortcuts. Residents in those areas have been working with the City Planning Office's Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP) - most recently at meetings this fall at which the city unveiled the physical steps its traffic planners believe will do the trick. “We're happy about it,” said Anna England, who has helped lead the Broadway neighborhood's NTMP over the past two and a half years. A similar satisfaction was expressed by Marc Jenesel, who lives on the curve at 17th Street. He was also pleased that Kristin Bennett, who heads up the program, agreed to modify the 17th Street plans in response to concerns expressed at his neighborhood's recent meeting about cut-through traffic on Armstrong Avenue (a block south of Uintah). Changes on both streets will be temporary at first to allow traffic planners to assess how well the fixes are working, Bennett explained. The city has flexible, reusable materials that can be bent into such shapes as medians, bump-outs or traffic circles, she said. (An example is the temporary median on 21st Street just south of Highway 24.) At Broadway, Bennett said the goal is to make the street between 21st Street and Westend Avenue narrower and to provide physical impediments to speeders and late-night drag racers. At 17th, speeders are also a problem, as are commercial trucks cutting through the neighborhood and lack of stop-sign compliance at Platte Avenue and Bijou Street by Buena Vista School. The fixes on Broadway will consist of the following:
On 17th Street, the current plan calls for:
Bennett said she does not have an exact date for the fixes to be installed in either neighborhood, but she is hoping for earlier than April. “We want to test it for 8 to 10 weeks before school gets out (in June),” she said. After that, Bennett expects to get back with the neighborhoods to see if the fixes should be made permanent or revised. The NTMP is a competitive program, in which the city considers applications from various neighborhoods for calming work. The Broadway and 17th Street areas were the two from the Westside this year that were chosen. Westside Pioneer article |