A city government should be about priorities — finding the most important things to do and then doing them
It’s a lesson the city of Wichita has yet to learn, and probably never will
Less than week after a City Council meeting on cutting the budget, City Hall announced Thursday that work is about to start on putting part of Douglas Avenue on a “road diet.”
It’s the first step in a $4.77 million project to narrow the entirety of Douglas where it passes through downtown from four car lanes to two
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Beginning Wednesday and ending sometime in September, the city will be restriping Douglas from Washington to Grove as a “pilot project.”
“The pilot aims to slow down cars, improve safety for pedestrians and students, and reduce crashes,” the city said in its announcement. “Changes for the pilot include converting to a three-lane roadway configuration with on-street bicycle lanes, curb extensions, parking modifications, and enhanced crosswalks.”
Some of those may be good things, I guess. I can get behind enhanced crosswalks, as long as they include audible signals for blind pedestrians, which were notably excluded from the last downtown street improvement project
But I have to admit I laughed when the city wrote this into its justification statement: “Studies on road reconfigurations — such as converting four-lane undivided streets to two lanes with a center turn lane — show that daily traffic volumes and travel times remain comparable.”
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I doubt that “comparable,” means better — more like “not as bad as we could make it.” The city’s post literally said a couple of sentences earlier that the point of the exercise was to slow the traffic
Recent 100+ degree days show the folly of giving up half an arterial street for bike lanes, especially when practically no one uses the bike lanes on the non-arterial street one block north. It’s even worse on the flipside of the calendar when we’ll be contending with 10-degree days and 20+ mph winds
I’ve lived a lot of places, but never anywhere where the conditions were worse for bike commuting than here
Between the heat of summer, the cold of winter and the omnipresent threat of severe storms in the spring, we legitimately have about a two-month window (September and October) when riding a bike for transportation makes sense
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Not coincidentally, that’s when the powers that be conduct their annual bike and pedestrian count to justify more road diets and bike lanes
In fact, while writing this column, I just got an email from the Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization seeking volunteers to help with this year’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Count
In the email, WAMPO described it as “an essential initiative to gather data on bicycle and pedestrian activity in our region.”
The count will be conducted Sept. 16 to Sept. 19. I suspect the data would look a whole lot different if they’d done it from the 16th to 19th of this month
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Wondering if I may have missed something, I drove the soon-to-be restriped stretch of Douglas on Friday morning
I can report it’s not especially pretty. The decorative medians painted by volunteers in 2018 are practically gone, from being run over so many times
But the pavement’s OK and the street itself is serviceable, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of other streets I know
As I said at the top of this column, it’s all about priorities. And Wichita City Hall’s are misplaced, again
