Could the New Downtown Plan Lead to Changes with Downtown Streets?

In recent months, former Mayor Michael Coleman, along with current Mayor Andrew Ginther and other local leaders, have been promoting the new Downtown Columbus Strategic Plan. They’ve been encouraging anyone who lives, works, or visits Downtown to take a survey, attend a meeting and/or submit ideas online as part of the effort.

Coleman has emphasized the city’s track record of success when it comes to implementing the ideas that came out of the last Downtown Plan in 2010, including a suggestion to demolish the Main Street Dam and create an additional 33 acres of urban parkland along the Scioto River.

That project did indeed end up happening, and another big idea from that 2010 plan — a call to build a dense mixed-use development on the Scioto Peninsula — is now in the process of happening.

But there’s one category of improvements recommended by the previous plan that never really made it off the drawing board — changes to Downtown streets.

The 2010 plan recommended a dramatic redesign of Broad Street, with two bike lanes buffered from traffic by trees and landscaping. Apart from some painted bike lanes in front of City Hall and on the Scioto Peninsula, no significant changes have been made to Broad Street, which still offers drivers four dedicated lanes in each direction on which to travel through the heart of Downtown.

The plan also recommended that the city “study the conversion of all but essential one-way street pairs to two-way traffic flow,” although it didn’t specify which streets should be maintained as one-way thoroughfares.

The city did indeed convert a number of Downtown streets from one-way to two-way, including Gay Street, Town Street, Civic Center Drive and parts of Front Street, Main Street and Rich Street. However many of those conversions had already happened at the time of the 2010 plan (State Street happened in 2005, Gay Street in 2007, and Front Street in 2008), and the rest of them happened soon after.

“We took out lots of one-way streets… that was a controversial thing,” Coleman told CU earlier this year, when discussing the new Downtown Plan. “Historically, the traffic engineers controlled development… so their version of Downtown was only to speed in as fast as you can, get to work, find the closest parking space, and then jump back in the car at five o’clock and speed back out of downtown… and leave these giant vast, undeveloped parking lots throughout the city. That’s all changing, but we’ve still got more work to do.”

Some of those vacant lots have since been filled in with new apartments – over 11,200 residents now call Downtown home, up from around 3,600 in 2002 and 6,300 in 2012 — but the streets remain largely the same.

This 2012 CU article discusses the pros and cons of converting one-way streets, and highlights some of the potential benefits of streets that are designed for more than just moving rush-hour commuters in and out of Downtown. In the decade since that article was written, no significant changes have been made to the Downtown street network.

High-speed, one-way arterials like Third and Fourth Street remain as they were (although a pair of non-protected bike lanes were added in 2015), and Downtown is still mostly characterized by wide, car-centric streets.

Jeffrey Tumlin, who at the time was working for the planning firm Nelson Nygaard, pointed out back in 2015 that these wide streets actually represent an incredible opportunity.

“On pretty much all of your streets, you could eliminate a traffic lane, and nobody is even going to notice,” he said. “The level of service will still be high – you might have four cars in front of you at the light instead of one, but there will not really be more congestion. That’s a luxury that not many economically-strong cities have.”

Tumlin later went on to put that theory into practice in San Francisco, where in 2019 he became the Director of Transportation of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and has since overseen the expansion of the city’s transit-only and protected bike lane network.

But it’s not just large cities with sterling bike-friendly credentials like San Francisco (or Portland, Oregon) that have had success making streets safer and more pleasant for non-motorists. Local advocates have recently been pointing to smaller cities closer to home that have added protected bike lanes to their central core – cities like Dayton, Toledo, Akron, Ann Arbor, and Carmel, Indiana.

Lots of people participating in the input-gathering phase of the new Downtown plan seem to believe that that plan offers an opportunity for Columbus to catch up to some of its peers. Of the 300-plus comments submitted so far to the “ideas wall” on the plan website, more than 60 mention bike lanes or slowing car traffic, and lots of the place-based suggestions on the site’s interactive map also advocate for better bike and pedestrian facilities.

Inspiration on that front could come from an unexpected place — a city that offers a surprisingly relevant template for establishing a complete protected lane network across a large central business district in a short period of time.

The Calgary Approach

Studies have shown that protected lanes are safer than unprotected ones and that they boost ridership, encouraging people to ride who previously had not considered it. There is also a broad consensus that the positive benefits of a single lane are increased exponentially when that lane is part of a larger network of protected bike lanes or other “low-stress” routes.

Columbus built its first protected bike lane in 2015 on Summit Street, in the University District. That lane has seen plenty of use, but the city has not built another protected lane since (new non-protected bike lanes are planned, although not without controversy).

2015 was also the beginning of an 18-month pilot project in Calgary, Alberta that used temporary barriers to create protected lanes on five Downtown streets. The lanes were tweaked as more and more people used them, ensuring that the design that eventually was made permanent at the end of the pilot was one that worked the best for the largest number of people (and the project also became more popular politically, receiving more council votes to make it permanent at the end of the pilot than it did at the beginning).

The impetus for the project, according to this Mobility Lab article, was to connect the city’s popular, river-adjacent trail network to different destinations within the Downtown’s large footprint (about 2.3 square miles, similar to Columbus, which clocks in at 2.4-square miles).

According to the City of Calgary, the pilot led to a 40 percent increase in ridership overall and a decrease in sidewalk-riding by cyclists (from 16 percent to 2 percent). The city’s analysis also found that for drivers, the new lanes caused delays of just 90 seconds or less.

In 2019, the Calgary Downtown network was expanded to add another 1.5 miles of protected lanes.

Michael Andersen, a senior fellow at Sightline Institute who has written extensively about bike lanes, called Calgary “the continent’s clearest example of an auto-oriented city that got immediate results by quickly building a simple low-stress biking network in an area where many people want to go.”

Calgary-based writer Tom Babin summarized the project and its ultimate success in a way that may ring true for some Columbus residents:

“In a city known for suburban sprawl, a love of the automobile, and public works timidity… installing an entire network of separated bike lanes all at once was a bold step [that] worked because it offered up the big picture. It might have been easier politically to build the network one lane at a time, as most cities do, but the uptake on a lane with few connections would have been slow. In this case, dropping down a well-thought out network gave cyclists and would-be cyclists a broader peek at what a cycle-track network can do, and, more importantly, gave them somewhere to go. The network didn’t succeed because of its boldness. It succeeded because it was practical. But in the politically charged climate around cycling, boldness was needed to ensure it was functional.”

Could it work here? At least one local expert thinks that it could.

“I think the Calgary approach is a great idea,” said Harvey Miller, Director of OSU’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis. “Studies have shown that the big benefits from bike lanes result from the network effects. People ride a lot more when separate bike lanes are interconnected into a network since it makes the system…