Midway Community Planning Group (MCPG) in January voiced concern that area property owners could come out on the short end of traffic and parking changes and improvements proposed in a draft mobility report presented by city officials.
Those changes, as outlined at MCPG’s Jan. 20 meeting, could include creation of small road segments interconnecting side streets. The idea is to siphon some of the congested traffic off Rosecrans Street, one of the city’s most heavily trafficked thoroughfares.
The Midway District is in the throes of a community plan update that could significantly alter traffic and parking patterns throughout the largely industrial-commercial and warehousing district.
MCPG board member Cathy Denton warned that adding road segments and making other changes to encourage bicycle and pedestrian uses could curtail on-street parking, which might have unintended, negative consequences for merchants.
“We’re light and heavy industrial and warehouse and delivery, and I wonder if you’re (city’s) taking that into consideration in your vision of our draft community plan,” Denton noted. “You’re talking about removing parking, putting in bike lanes and putting in physical barriers. There are a lot of property owners in this area that have their blood, sweat, tears and their lives invested in these properties, which are small parcels, some not even 50 feet wide. I don’t think this is what we should be doing as part of the community plan update.”
“In the future, we need to have some very sensible things done, but some of the byproducts of those (proposed changes) could amount to de facto eminent domain and impact property owners,” agreed MCPG planner Kurt Sullivan. “It says to them, ‘You’re stuck with what you have in an undervalued position against what happens in the rest of the area. And you’re the ones who are going to pay the price personally for the benefit of this entire community.’ It’s a large issue.”
“Part of the analysis for your community plan update is a traffic and mobility study evaluating the needs of the community and its land uses,” city planner Vickie White told the group, adding the mobility study amounts only to suggestions at this stage of the planning process.
White has noted the Midway Community Plan update is intended to be “viable for the next 20 to 30 years.” She added it was adopted in 1991 and “significantly amended” in 1999.
Stephen Cook of Chen Ryan Associates said the objective is to attempt to make the Midway District less “autocentric.”
“We’re trying to make biking, walking and taking mass transit more safe,” Cook said. “We want to increase the… connectivity into the community, developing a transportation network.”
Associate city engineer Tanner French said another objective of the community plan update is to establish a design manual. “We can identify places where sidewalks aren’t there that we think are needed,” he said. “We want to improve safety and public access points.”
“It’s a trade-off,” acknowledged Cook. “The community has to weigh where they want to have parking and where they want to have sidewalks. Our job is to find out where those trade-offs lie.”
French said previously that the community plan update is “going to look at improving bicycle and transit access trying to balance all those modes.” He noted that “the whole Peninsula is constrained, with not a lot of regional access,” adding there are several “chokepoints with a lot of high-volume traffic” along Rosecrans. He added the area is also difficult for pedestrians and bicyclists to get around in while pointing out there “is a lack of transit connections to the airport.”