W. Park Street Magical Mystery People Mover

Slow it down on W. Park Street?

It's apparently summer 12 months of the year here in Butte, MT!

I did not know that Park Street was located south of the Mason-Dixon Line in a slow paced southern clime where it does not snow and you relax on a "Parklet" bench to the sounds of the steady clip-clop of a horse pulling a surrey with fringe on top.

Come on everyone! The 4 lanes of Park Street are a vital and efficient corridor that moves our community safely to and from the West Side and Montana Tech. Going to 2 lanes with bike lanes is simply asking for a student late for class to zip around a slower car using the bike lane. The assumption that bike lanes should be placed on a primary automobile route is another misguided makeover.  

Let us not forget that it snows in Butte MT. Yes it snows and this is a primary route for motorists. It is being proposed that a landscaped median be introduced. This misguided make-over interferes with snow removal. During the winter snows this central area is allocated to windrows of snow for pick-up, which effectively turns Park Street into 2 lanes anyway. Piling snow on the median with planted shrubs will certainly kill the landscaping. During our short months of summer the landscaping will be baked dry by the asphalt and require significant water.

Left turning lanes with "Bike Boxes" are proposed. We already have left turn lanes: they are called the left lane of a 4 lane road. Arrows and signage work for this in conjunction with other improvements providing the turning lanes. Again, placing bikes on a major road artery is misguided and dangerous. The proper location for bikes is to share the road on the 2 adjacent residential streets of Broadway and Galena.  These are residential streets where the inhabitants want traffic to travel slowly. Grades are appropriate and speed limits and signage and road markers work to share the road.

There is all this talk of slowing down and enjoying the drive. I don't know about you but my life is limited on time and having a clear efficient route is important in my day to day rounds. If people are speeding, is this not an enforcement issue? At tech there is a radar sign that indicates your speed, lots of ways to control speed instead of blocking an effective 4 lane primary route.

A computer generated town was presented in the paper. It is obviously somewhere in the Southern United States and is given as an idealized example. The town has no hills and obviously no snow. This computer-aided BS (yes, bullshit) shows an imagined business district - what is significantly wrong with this depiction is that West Park Street is in actuality a street lined with residences. Only a small scattering of businesses exist and imposing additional business only reduces the impressive quality of historic homes.

There is a convenience store (our neighborhood grocery store), a pasty shop, Laundromat, a restaurant, pizza parlor/bar, and a doctor's office. These current businesses serve the corridor well and introducing additional competition will not assist in their survival.  

The closest real business area is east of Idaho Street on Park Street. That is where improvement efforts for business should be made and should have been being made for decades. The core of the Uptown is effectively only 8 blocks away. Let's not make a residential area with historic homes into something that it is not!

There is a place for the concept of traffic slowing with a reduction of two lanes and bump-out landscaping. In fact, I worked extensively with Bob Poor's efforts to place the Tech Arch and make the trail crossing safer for pedestrians. The bottom of the hill up to tech is the logical place to slow things down, but not before that.

So where is the ideal place for all the proposed improvements? Those visionary improvements should be concentrated at Montana Tech; from Marcus Daily statue to the west through campus. Reduce the width of asphalt, widen sidewalks, provide seating, install bike lanes and bike racks, and insert little landscaped "parklets". On street loading/unloading zones for delivery of goods as well as pick-up and drop-off of students. These type of improvements work well within the reduced speed limits of Montana Tech. The central landscaped median would work well here in slowing down traffic and as a central protected area for pedestrians. With minimum modifications a turn-a-round Marcus' statue can serve as a drop-off that would limit a drive through of campus when classes change.

So what about the remainder of Park Street? There is MDOT funding available! Where I believe the effort should be made is to enhance pedestrian safety in conjunction with repaving the street. The concept of handicap accessible bump-outs is valid at all intersections along Park Street. Instead of a lot of landscaping in the bump-outs some hard-scape such as historic cobble stones, iron work and some (pedestrian protective) flower-planters would enhance the corridor. Historically appropriate lighting at the intersections with cross walk use signals would also be appropriate. Existing street lighting can be enhanced, with historic inspired light heads with light cut-off to limit glare into homes. Historically detailed decorative banner mounts can be added to light poles for the mounting of semi-permanent tech banners that can also be lighted to indicate the desired Tech corridor.

So I have called out recommendation in words, but these out of town consultants know what they are doing - right? Remember the $280/hour concept of reverse angle parking? The professional who didn’t even know it snowed here?

 Who do you think you are some sort of professional designer? Well I have 35 years of experience in understanding of the Historic District and yes I am a profession designer, a licensed Architect in the State of Montana.

 So I will be doing what Architects do - which is putting my concepts and recommendation on paper and sharing them with others and participating in the upcoming public meetings.