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The city’s Bridging the Gap Oversight Committee recently completed a review of 38 potential Neighborhood Street Fund projects. They’re passing 12 to Mayor McGinn and City Council for final approval, including two in the Central District.
The projects include $115,000 of multi-modal safety improvements at Dearborn & Rainier and $235,000 of pedestrian improvements at 19th Avenue at E Union Street and 19th Avenue at E Pike Street. Once approved, these projects will undergo a design phase in 2014 for construction in 2015.
According to project plans, “The proposed project will construct a pedestrian refuge island in the two-way left turn lane for the east crossing of E Union Street at 19th Avenue and provide striped crosswalk markings across E Union Street. Existing curb ramps will be upgraded at all four corners of this intersection.”
19th and Union plans
Further, “At the crossing location at 19th Avenue and the E Pike Street stairs curb bulbs will be constructed on both sides of 19th Avenue. At this time there are not sufficient existing pedestrian crossing volumes at this location to install crosswalk pavement markings at the crossing. To increase pedestrian visibility with the dense tree cover at the E Pike Street stairs, one pedestrian scale luminaire will be installed on the west curb bulb. This project will be required to implement Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) to the maximum extent feasible. GSI features will likely consist of tree retention and potentially a raingarden at the new curb bulbs adjacent to the E Pike Street Stairs.”
At Dearborn and Rainier, pedestrian improvements are slated for the northeast crosswalk and sidewalk area, including “widening the sidewalk on the east side of Rainier at the south end to at least the standard width at the north end, signage explaining how to trigger the westbound light as a bicyclist, and re-aligning the Rainier crossing.”
You can find more detailed plans for these sites on the Neighborhood Street Fund website.
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That’s great news for 19th. I saw the headline and was hoping it referred to SDOT’s proposed pedestrian improvements on the 23rd Ave. Corridor. Still waiting to hear what they’re up to over there.
I hope “tree retention” means that they’ll retain the giant beautiful maples there. The last post about this project indicated that the trees would be cut down because of the collapsing retaining wall, which made me very sad.
One of the most bolloxed-up group of intersections in our area is the Jackson-Yesler-12th Ave-14th Ave- Boren mess. It has been in need of timing improvements for years. The new striping for bikes has everyone confused. Going west on Yesler, we really need two lanes at Boren, one to go straight and one to turn right on Boren. But these bike lanes make people reluctant to get in the right turn lane, as required by law, leading to hasty lane changes and miscommunication. What is expected here?