Midway-Pacific Highway community planners continued their evaluation of urban-design options for changing the texture of their community during the ongoing update of the group’s community plan.
The community plan for the Midway-Pacific Highway Corridor, which provided land-use designations and policies guiding future development, hasn’t been updated since 1991.
The Midway-Pacific Highway Corridor is a hodgepodge of commercial, industrial, office and warehouse land uses, plus limited residential. The district is in a transitional area that borders Old Town, Point Loma, Pacific Beach and downtown San Diego.
Community and city planners are collaborating on reworking the plan, viewed as the blueprint for commercial and residential development in the congested corridor.
City planner Tait Galloway, who has been guiding local planners through the community plan update, has said the plan update’s objective is to “redefine the community’s character while providing for alternative modes of travel moving forward.”
Galloway and other traffic engineers have been introducing planners to the latest urban-design concepts geared toward making streets “look and feel more pedestrian oriented.”
Midway-Pacific Highway planners have been examining each of the planning area’s subdistricts, which include the sports arena, Kemper, Dutch Flats, Camino Del Rio, Channel, Lytton, Kurtz and Hancock transportation-corridor areas.
Group chairwoman Melanie Nickel said one of the ideas behind the community plan is to “mix the uses in the community so that people are walking through.”
Nickel said she’d also like to see “something a little more realistic” in terms of what can be done to improve streetscape in the congested Midway District.
She said it also would be nice to find a way to change Midway street circulation so that “everybody wouldn’t have to use Rosecrans to get anywhere.”
Galloway pointed out that possible changes in the community plan update now under discussion “are all conceptual at this point.”