Quote:
Originally Posted by PLANSIT
The fountain park pork-chop serves a few functions:
- It is a bus stop for many routes (it currently only serves the MallRide until Civic Center station is complete) and will continue to do so when Civic Center Station is done. The station doesn't have enough bays to accommodate all the service. Nor is it always efficient to have buses turn into the station. On-street boarding/alighting is sometimes better.
- Cheyenne Pl. is the right turn for general traffic. With the transit-only lane now in place on Broadway and that section of the pork-chop serving as a major bus stop, it's a safety issue to have cars use the transit lane to make right turns at Colfax. Having them do it at Cheyenne is marginally safer.
- Cheyenne Pl. is also a through-street for the new Civic Center station. See where the underground station "street" lines up perfectly with Cheyenne Pl.? That's intentional, as some routes will use Cheyenne to make their way west.
RE: BRT
If Center-running brt is the preferred alternative, it would stay on Colfax. Routing it into the station is an unnecessary detour that adds time to the service as it heads east or west. People will walk the half-block to Civic Center Station if they need to transfer.
Hope that all makes sense. |
Thanks, it does make sense! So does the BRT go west to Auraria then and Civic Center is not the turn-around?
As for the pork-chop island... I get it, but perhaps I remain unconvinced. I know that right-turn lanes are super popular with engineers (we use them a lot here in Boulder) for their ability to get right-turners out of the way and improve signal timing at congested intersections - but it comes with a pretty serious tradeoff for the pedestrian. And this is at the very heart of our urban downtown too, not some suburban intersection of two Stroads.
I guess I would need to see the schematic for all the routes and give it some more thought before just dismissing it as un-doable... I totally understand how challenging things can be with all the one-way streets and bus routes coming from different directions, but it seems it is always a question of tradeoffs. With a site this complex, there must be more than one way to handle various different vehicle movements. Typically a bus would stop downstream of the intersection to allow for the use of the BAT lane for turns, but doing so here would put it even further from the main CC station, so I get why they wouldn't want to do that. The alternative to this would be for southbound buses to make the left turn into the station at Cheyenne and use the station.
And if the station is so under-built in terms of bus capacity, I may question the utility of keeping it in this location for the long term or doing what seem to amount to cosmetic band-aid fixes. If turning in and out of the station takes so much time that it isn't worth doing, and the station site cannot handle additional bus bays - putting buses in locations that affect intersection operations (to the detriment of pedestrians), then is this location right at the intersection of 3 major travel routes really worth it?
Regardless of traffic engineering realities, I do stand by my assertion that isolating the fountain inside of what is essentially a traffic island does the space absolutely no favors. For better or for worse, it indicates that vehicle flow through this area is being given precedence over the pedestrian environment.
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