Advertisement

City Considers Making Broadway, Jefferson Two-Way

City Considers Making Broadway, Jefferson Two-Way
Advertisement
By Bill Hughes
Sep. 16, 2014 | PADUCAH, KY
By Bill Hughes Sep. 16, 2014 | 11:53 PM | PADUCAH, KY
At Tuesday night's Paducah City Commission meeting, the Mayor and Commissioners heard recommendations for making the city more pedestrian friendly, and some of them would radically change traffic downtown.

Planning Director Steve Ervin gave a summary of the recommendations for Paducah by Jeff Speck, the author of Walkable City, How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at A Time. Speck visited Paducah August 6 and 7 and toured the city, spoke at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and gave a presentation at Maidey Alley Cinema. He also met with city staff and provided a summary of recommendations on Paducah’s walkability, pedestrian and street connectivity, and appearance.

Ervin began with a summary of Speck’s ten considerations for a walkable city. He says a city should include a network of many small blocks, the proper number of driving lanes and proper lane width (the more lanes a street has and the wider the lanes, the faster the traffic moves), a lack of one-way streets (one-way streets also promote a faster flow of traffic), the avoidance of using turn lanes and swooping geometries, the addition of bike lanes, continuous on-street parking, shade trees, and the replacement of unwarranted traffic signals with stop signs.

After reviewing Paducah’s downtown area, Speck recommends that the city:  

Convert Broadway, Jefferson and Water Street to two-way streets and incorporate bike lanes on Broadway and Jefferson. Modify Jefferson by adding a signal at 3rd Street, adjusting the signal at 4th Street, and adding stop signs instead of signals at 6th Street, 9th Street, and 17th Street.

Modify Broadway by replacing traffic signals with stop signs at 5th, 6th, 7th, and 9th Streets. Work with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet to re-stripe Kentucky Avenue as a three-lane with parking on one side.     

Work to return more trees to downtown streets to provide canopies and to beautify parking lots with landscaping and tree canopies.

Several of Speck’s recommendations, including bike lanes and street and sidewalk improvements, correlate with the recommendations of the Neighborhood Revitalization Committee which was re-created in response to the National Citizen Survey conducted by Paducah in 2013. Ervin said, “These are achievable goals.”

The next step will be to gather more information about the process of conducting a warrant traffic analysis.

City Engineer-Public Works Director Rick Murphy says that there are 11 warrants to be met for a traffic signal with four warrants necessary for a stop sign. Each intersection will need to be reviewed to make sure that it is acceptable to remove a signal and instead install stop signs.

Murphy and Ervin noted that Broadway and Jefferson have been one-way for 70 years, so if the city moves forward, there will be a significant amount of public education neeeded, and City Manager Jeff Pederson agreed. He added that some proposed changes may seem to be a step backward, but information he's seen shows it makes sense. "The first time you hear it, it doesn't make sense - when you hear 'narrower,' you think 'less safe,' but the assertion really is, by Mr. Speck and others, that narrower is 'more safe,' because motorists will adjust their driving to the conditions that they're driving under. Hopefully that's not too much of a leap of faith to believe that that's the case, but I think it's something that people can ponder," Pederson said.

Meetings are already scheduled to discuss types of trees and their placement in existing locations downtown, taking in to account what current plants have the desired look and effect on their surroundings. 

ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement


Latest McCracken County
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Latest McCracken County

Advertisement
ADVERTISEMENT