The Capital Crossroads SID (Special Improvement Distrcit), an organization of property owners downtown, is soliciting ideas & solutions for improving the quality of life in our downtown. There’s a meeting at 6:00 PM on 7/11 at the statehouse atrium for downtown residents and stakeholders, so if you have an interest in our downtown and have some good ideas for what would make it better try to make it. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make and will instead email them a list of things that could be improved and as you can imagine it’s a bit lengthy;
1. On streets that are residential and are two-way, 35 MPH is much too fast. This is not pedestrian friendly at all and puts cars before people, which this city has done for far too long.
2. There’s a dearth of places within walking distance in much of downtown. There’s no urban grocery store of any size one can walk to and other necessities are too far away.
3. We need more people. A very general observation but for a city our size to start becoming a 24/7 city we need around 10% of the total urban population downtown, which would be 30,000 people. Streetcars have proven themselves in spurring such development.
4. There is no cohesive, concrete vision for what we want the city to look like. There are no plans for developers to take an interest in.
5. COTA, if it is to be useful at all, needs to stop serving sprawling suburbs which were built with total disregard for mass-transit. They aren’t wanted there and they cannot serve these areas well anyway. COTA needs to focus on proving good serve in urban areas, where they improve service like shortening waiting intervals. Streetcars would still be preferred since they don’t have the stigma that buses do, it’s hard to get lost on them, and they attract economic development which buses don’t since those routes could just disappear, negating any investment related to there being mass-transit.
6. I don’t know how this would work out, but why not convert some alleys into bike-only lanes? This could make drivers even more peeved that cyclists are on their roads, but I wonder if this has been done elsewhere successfully. Just something to look into.
7. There is a lack of place in Columbus with a shortage of good signage downtown pointing visitors in dirrent direction to the neighborhoods all around downtown. Also absent are signs in interesting areas pointing visitors to adjacent places of interest. There’s nothing around OSU letting anyone know that the Short North is just to the south and vice versa.
8. There’s way too many parking lots, not enough city. If the city would set some kind of goal to reduce parking annually that would be great. The tough part is figuring out how to make that transition without alienating downtown businesses that need parking for employees.
9. A small complaint, but we need traffic lights with censors all over downtown, there’s many a time when I’m wasting gas sitting at a light that no one else needs.
Well, that’s all I came up with, but I’m sure there’s more that could be added.
July 10, 2007 at 10:04 pm
[...] other post is from Columbusite, whose point #5 on improving downtown is: COTA, if it is to be useful at all, needs to stop serving sprawling suburbs which were built [...]
July 17, 2007 at 8:41 pm
All good points in your post. I’d add that IMHO Columbus has a disadvantage in comparison to other nearby cities (for example Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Pittsburgh) that it sits on a flat plain, so there are no attractive landscape features like lakes, hills, or rivers suitable for navigation that can add a unique character to the city. However, like a blank canvas Columbus can potentially develop into something unique, given that our city elders are up to the task. What I’d like to see in the central part of the city:
1. trams, light rail or trolleys – everyone agrees that COTA just doesn’t do it. We need a convenient and easy flow of people between campus, OSU medical center, Short North, Arena, Cap Square, German Village, Brewery district, Bexley, etc. Good for toursim too.
2. More public art dowtown – even Toledo has frogs, and Dayton has got those real size movie stars of the past.
3. Hopefully Ohio Hub project will get approved, so why not put in downtown a train station and connect a future tram/light rail line(s) to it? Plus, by spending more on design it can be an attraction of its own.
4. More parks in the heart of downtown. They don’t have to be big, but even a patch of green space is better that all that surface parking. Plus, dedicate a statue or two for someone famous Columbusite. I’d love to see a Rickenbacker park with a statue of Eddie Rickenbaker (it’s so European too).
5. Columbus doesn’t have much military history to it (even Toledo beats us in this regard), but since it’s a state capital, why not build something like War Memorial Plaza in Indianapolis? Something open, grandeur, inspiring. One suggestion – memorial dedicated to all Ohio servicemen killed in Iraq. I think we have something like this around the Capitol Square, but it’s too concentrated and the scale is too small.
6. Bigger and better Art Museum!
Those are my 2 cents…