The city showed plans for improving safety at the College and Walnut corridor during an open house Thursday.
The city launched a study to look at safety and traffic flow issues along the northbound section of College Avenue and the southbound section of Walnut Street, from the State Road 45/46 bypass to Allen Street.
Ryan Robling, planning services manager for the city’s planning and transportation department, said between 2018 and 2022, there were 40 serious injury crashes along the corridor. Since January 2019, there have been three fatal crashes.
A presentation from a June public workshop meeting reported 150 crashes per year.
“We can aim to eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes,” Robling said. “People make mistakes. They just shouldn't die when they do make a mistake.”
The city presented two plans, the first of which keeps both roads one-way and adds a “protected urban trail” along both streets, as well as improved pedestrian crossings and intersection safety improvements.
The second option would make both streets two-ways, include intersection upgrades to manage traffic flow and improve safety, in part by adding loading zones for delivery trucks.
The open house gave community members the opportunity to provide feedback on the designs. People could share their thoughts about specific parts of the corridor on sticky notes. One note asked the city to not add any roundabouts, while another asked for a traffic light to be added towards the beginning of College Avenue.
Resident Zach Ammerman bikes downtown almost every day but doesn’t feel very safe doing so. He prefers the proposal that would make College and Walnut two-way because it could slow down traffic.
“I think slower traffic also means it's safer to cross for myself when I'm biking, and for pedestrians as well,” he said.
Local business owner Lisa Renee Wilson, who likes to walk a lot, appreciates the increased accessibility an urban trail would provide to the area. But she’s concerned the proposed back-end parking for the two-way design would create issues.
She’s also worried about how construction will impact businesses along the corridor.
“I think just knowing how construction affects downtown businesses, lane closures, things like that, anything that we would be doing to alter the roads around downtown, obviously would create some disruption,” she said. “And that would be fine to do that, but I think right now, trying to introduce that on top of all kinds of reasons that businesses are struggling to get people in the door right now would create too much of a negative impact.”
She hopes the final design will create a safer environment for people not traveling by car.
“We have far more people doing the electric bikes and scooters, so we have a lot of mingling of ways of transportation,” she said. “And I just want to see ways that people can get around town, outside of cars in more safe and accessible ways.”
Robling said one-way streets often produce the highest speeds and are the most injurious. The safety action plan found that all multi-lane one-way streets were in the top 10 for most fatal and serious injury crashes.
The proposal to keep the streets one-ways aims to decrease the risk of crashes while still maintaining the same basic design.
“You’ll see more mid-block bump outs, more intersection improvements, and so that'll eat into things like parking and other access improvements,” he said, “but essentially the idea will be to slow the cars down while still maintaining that one way.”
The main benefit of making the streets two-way, Robling said, is to slow down traffic.
“When you feel a car coming towards you, you instinctively go slower,” he said. “The two-way street also has the advantage of, if someone is obeying the speed limit, everyone behind them has to obey the speed limit. On a one way you just go around that person who's not speeding.”
The city will continue collecting public input and aims to adopt a design into the transportation plan by early spring. Construction on the project could start by 2029.
