On Thursday, starting at 6 p.m. in city council chambers, some “starter ideas” for the redesign of College Avenue and Walnut Street—Bloomington’s main north-south corridor—will be presented by Toole Design, the city’s consultant on the project.
The “starter ideas” will be based on feedback from the public collected over the last few weeks, through in-person meetings and online surveys that have been advertised on the project webpage.
The initial collection of perspectives from the public culminated in a public meeting on Tuesday night.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the team from Toole got reports from five tables where groups of attendees had spent a half hour poring over a table-sized aerial print of the corridor stretching from the 45/46 bypass southward to Allen Street. Allen Street is south of the place where College and Walnut merge into a single street—it’s a bit north of Switchyard Park.
The groups were asked to consider three questions:
- What do you like and want to see retained?
- What do you dislike and want to see changed?
- What is missing that you would like to see created?
The existing conditions in the corridor were described at the start of Tuesday’s meeting by Cindy Zerger, Toole Design’s urban design director, based in California.
A highlight from Zerger’s slide deck was the average number of traffic crashes in the corridor each year. Zerger said each year the corridor logs about 150 crashes. Excessive speed was a factor in many of the crashes, and many of them occurred at recurring locations, Zerger said.
Zerger presented a summary for five years of crash data, from 2018 through 2022—40 serious injury crashes and 4 fatal crashes.
Here’s Zerger’s breakdown of the 40 serious-injury crashes,
12 people walking
1 person riding a bike
1 person riding a scooter
24 people driving a car
1 person driving a motorcycle
Here’s the breakdown of the 4 fatal crashes:
1 person walking
1 person riding a scooter
2 people driving a car
The corridor is up for further study because it is recommended in the city’s 2019 transportation plan to get a closer look.
Toole Design’s $170,000 contract for the corridor study was approved by Bloomington’s board of public works in October last year.
Here are some highlights from Thursday’s group table reports.
What do you like and want to see retained?
- Abundance, diversity of small businesses, grocery stores, and shops
- One-way pairs mean it’s easier to maneuver around delivery trucks
- One-way pairs mean you only have to look one way to cross as a pedestrian
- Historic character of older buildings
- Availability of green spaces and some seating, such as Miller-Showers Park
- Main thoroughfares handle heavy traffic efficiently
- Effective handling of delivery systems and student movement
- Locations of loading zones
- Bump outs with planters and outdoor dining areas
- Availability of street parking, especially for safety reasons at night.
What do you dislike and want to see changed?
- High-speed driving that reduces accessibility for pedestrians and cyclists
- Unsafe traffic conditions, including speeding and noise
- Speeding, running red lights, and noise from cars accelerating
- Concerns about safety while crossing the road, particularly for children
- Abandoned or underused land, especially south of 2nd Street
- Merging problems south of Kroger
- One-way pairs mean wrong-way driving, particularly during student turnover
- One-way pairs mean navigational difficulties, especially for bikes and pedestrians in a hurry
- Negative impact of the convention center “land bank deadzone”
- Lack of tree plots
- Narrow sidewalks hinder: bike parking and possibility outdoor seating
- Confusion and challenges of turning onto 7th Street with its protected bicycle lane
- Inefficient use of space due to angled parking
- Blocked lanes because of loading and unloading
What is missing that you would like to see created?
- Protected bike lanes and safer infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians
- Dedicated and protected bike lanes
- Wider sidewalks and utilization of street corners for performance spaces
- Increased seating areas and more intentional aesthetics, particularly south of Seminary Park
- Incorporation of public art and more trees/greenery to improve the visual appeal and address noise and heat issues
- Implementation of additional speed control measures such as speed limit signs, speed bumps, and enforcement
- Introduction of elements to break up the monotony of long concrete stretches, including visual diversions and interactive features like art and benches
- Calming measures and integration of design changes for cross streets, including on Kirkwood Avenue and 6th Street
- Better utilization of Fountain Square Mall and interaction with the outdoor public realm
- More businesses between 10th and 17th streets
- Narrower roadway designs to address speeding concerns
- Implementation of scramble crossings to improve pedestrian safety and convenience
- Climate resilience considerations in designs, including the integration of trees and measures to address urban heat island effects, extreme precipitation, and flooding
- Increased bus frequency and/or dedicated bus lanes.
On Wednesday (June 14), Toole Design will host what it calls an “Open Studio” in city council chambers at city hall, from 9 a.m. to noon, and from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. During those times, people can drop in and share their thoughts on the College-Walnut corridor.
Zerger said Thursday’s meeting (June 15), from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m in city council chambers will consist of a presentation of some “starter ideas” for designs that would incorporate the feedback that her team has collected. Background on the project, including a Zoom link for viewing Thursday’s meeting, is available on the project webpage.
At Thursday’s meeting, the public won’t break out into groups at separate tables, Zerger told The B Square. But the people who attend the meeting will be invited to respond to the starter ideas and critique them.
At the conclusion of Tuesday’s meeting, assistant director of planning and transportation Beth Rosenbarger invited the two dozen people who attended the meeting to come back on Thursday. She added, “When you come back on Thursday, please, as a challenge, bring three to five friends with you!”
Attending Tuesday’s meeting were four Bloomington city councilmembers—Kate Rosenbarger (Beth Rosenbarger’s sister), Matt Flaherty (husband of Beth Rosenbarger), Isabel Piedmont-Smith, and Sue Sgambelluri. Plan commissioner Jillian Kinzie also attended.
Next steps after Thursday’s meeting include meetings of a steering committee. Through May 4, residents were invited to apply for appointments to join that group.
A third public meeting is also supposed to be held.
A preferred concept design and assessment will be settled on and a final corridor study is expected by the end of the year.
Just leave it the hell alone. The city as al ready spent tens of millions of COVID funds to convert and build a bunch of new facilities to accommodate our homeless population.The new city administration now needs to concentrate on the repeat hardened criminal element that amounts to over a quarter of the public safety budget. This is the responsibility of Prosecutors Office. Let’s have the LEO to adopt a Three Strikes and make them leave town. If they return send them to prison where they belong.
Would love to know where all of these facilities are. The prosecutors office is not part of the city.
My point is the same group of double stupid liberal morons who keep electing people who either work at IU or the depend upon the student population who were allowed to vote in local elections. If they receive any type of public funding they should not be allowed to run for office.
Uhhh what?! You’re knowingly lying here and say as much when responding to Sue.
Why are you even here???
Because my family on both sides are born in raised in the Hoosier state. I personally was a member of the local builders association and we bought and paid for the first community kitchen and Martha’s house that was for Women and Children of Monroe and the city. My personal experience with the local liberal elected officials is you personally go to the public process you must use a lawyer to document your concerns. Because if their lips are moving they will flat out lie to you. I have helped add millions of properties and businesses to the tax rolls. If you a a greater think that the construction industry is bad. Then the local liberals morons that have elected our safe and civil community is even a greater harm to our city.
This is very exciting. I appreciate all of the fantastic ideas presented.
Leave it alone!
There seemed to be a general consensus that the two streets are too noisy and dangerous, which is why I was surprised that most of the groups wanted to leave them one-way. Seems like an easy way to slow the cars down is to have them be two-way streets,
yeah i was heartened to see everyone agreed about the safety problems. i personally don’t see how the consultants can fix the safety problems without significantly changing it away from prioritizing through traffic of cars. and once you make that decision, it’s a no-brainer to go 2-way.
and i don’t see doing nothing about the safety problems as an ethical option
I bicycle downtown in area of college-walnut much more than I car-drive, except winter time. But the suggested major changes below would be bad for this by forcing car/truck traffic onto more bike-friendly roads. I don’t think C-W should be changed in any major way unless there are more compelling reasons, which citizens agree on. The change reasons listed here are weak or inappropriate in my view.
What do you like and want to see retained?
One-way pairs mean it’s easier to maneuver around delivery trucks
One-way pairs mean you only have to look one way to cross as a pedestrian
Main thoroughfares handle heavy traffic efficiently
Yes, yes and yes.
Effective handling of delivery systems and student movement
Locations of loading zones
Bump outs with planters and outdoor dining areas
Availability of street parking, especially for safety reasons at night.
Yes, all valid points
Abundance, diversity of small businesses, grocery stores, and shops
Should say “Abundance of saloons, student dorms, and parents hotels. Dwindling number/diversity of interesting businesses, which changing roads won’t resolve”.
—–
What do you dislike and want to see changed?
High-speed driving that reduces accessibility for pedestrians and cyclists
Unsafe traffic conditions, including speeding and noise
Speeding, running red lights, and noise from cars accelerating
Concerns about safety while crossing the road, particularly for children
These all are concerns that only cutting out car/truck traffic would solve, but then where do all those cars/trucks move their traffic problems to?
One-way pairs mean wrong-way driving, particularly during student turnover
One-way pairs mean navigational difficulties, especially for bikes and peds..
No more problem here than other one-way streets in town; 2nd point is wrong
Lack of tree plots
Um, I too would like to rip out all the concrete/asphalt in town, eliminate all polluting vehicles, and plant plenty of trees to atone for our crimes against mother nature.
Narrow sidewalks hinder: bike parking and possibility outdoor seating
This is due to all those *saloon fences* on downtown sidewalks. Why the bloody-heck are these allowed on city sidewalks? Most of the daytime when I’m there no one is using these fenced off booze bins, but I and others have to squeeze thru too-narrow walk ways they leave.
Merging problems south of Kroger
Never noticed this.
Confusion and challenges of turning onto 7th Street with its protected bicycle lane
That is someone’s design problem to fix.
Inefficient use of space due to angled parking
Ban parking on C-W? Force us to use city garages to pay for those mistakes?
Blocked lanes because of loading and unloading
So ban loading/unloading by all those booze trucks, and ban saloons in the area also.
Abandoned or underused land, especially south of 2nd Street
Negative impact of the convention center “land bank deadzone”
Underused land in this town? deadzone? what can changing roads do for that?
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What is missing that you would like to see created?
Protected bike lanes and safer infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians
Dedicated and protected bike lanes
No, No: there already are good N-S bike lanes just one road east and west of C-W. Don’t turn every city car road into a bike road; keep Walnut/College as car-truck arteries so Ken Nunn doesn’t blow his top over this.
Implementation of additional speed control measures such as speed limit signs, speed bumps..
Narrower roadway designs to address speeding concerns
Calming measures and integration of design changes for cross streets, including Kirkwood..
No, don’t turn C-W into car-unfriendly roads, with other such already in place: Washington, B-Line/Morton; Kirkwood revisions are useful because it isn’t a thruway
Wider sidewalks and utilization of street corners for performance spaces
See above: remove the saloon fences. Performances on C-W??? already are plenty nearby spots: courthouse lawn, Kirkwood is semi-closed, side roads are closed for events like Lotus.
Implementation of scramble crossings to improve pedestrian safety and convenience
“scramble crossings”?? don’t we already have to do that?
Increased bus frequency and/or dedicated bus lanes.
Good idea along with planting trees in place of asphalt.. if you ban cars/trucks entirely.
Remainder points seem out of place in C-W discussion, unless we intend to replace car/truck roads with pleasant greenspaces.
In my experience biking downtown, crossing C-W one-way streets is reliably safer and easier than crossing C-W south where it is two-way, or nearby two-way Rogers. Ditto for 3rd/Atwater one-ways versus two-way east of that. The reason is simple: cars on the one ways ebb after they flow from stop lights, giving a reasonably clear one-way crossing. On the two-ways, often the other way flows with cars as first way ebbs, with more random spurts that make them less safe, needing frequent looks both ways, and scurries to cross between those spurts.
The other point missed by two-way street proponents is that changing C-W to that would lead car drivers to increasingly use the less busy nearby streets. These are the bike/ped friendly ones that are now fairly safe.
I can echo your observations. Another way to parse it is that a 2 or 3 lane road is easier to cross than a 4 or 5 lane road. The portions of Walnut and 3rd that are 2-way are all very very wide. They have all of the threats you associate with the 1-way portions of them — more than one lane going the same direction — with none of the benefits.
As for whether a 2-lane 2-way road is easy to cross, I ask you to examine the B-line crossing of Kirkwood, or 2nd street, or country club. These are all tolerable places to cross, with a lot of traffic. But because they are relatively narrow compared to, say, SR46 (E 3rd St), they are not too hard. There is a huge gap between our current experience of College/Walnut and achieving that kind of environment. But I want you to know: it is possible to achieve that result. SR46’s design is not the alternative that is being proposed for College-Walnut. We can demand better.
I should have anticipated it, because it’s the most obvious consequence of visiting this question. But nonetheless I was disappointed to see at least one business owner promising that she would close up her business if they made College and Walnut a tolerable experience for pedestrians.
I bring it up for two reasons. First, because it really is exactly what every business owner has said when confronted with a road diet. And they’re never right — road diets are fantastic for business. They have struggled to stay afloat in an environment that is repellant to pedestrians, and they don’t recognize the damages that this environment is doing to them, and at the same time they have become hyper-accustomed to the stresses that face drivers who are the only design users of College and Walnut. Doubt me? Read about how South Bend’s downtown has changed since their two-way conversion some years ago now.
Second, because I heard it before about parking meters downtown from owners of two beloved businesses, Caveat Emptor and Vance Music. And, I don’t want to get into anyone’s private affairs, but let me tell you, those owners were old people. As near as I can tell, they quit because they were ready to retire. I don’t think parking meters had anything to do with it. Something to think about, because these businesses really will be closing or changing dramatically as our business-owning class in this city has really got a bunch of gray hairs (at least, the businesses I love the most), and it will be sad to see. And also, come on, take it with a grain of salt. If you can tell by looking at them that they’re going to be retiring within the next decade, when they tell you they don’t see a future for their business, that’s a problem with their eyes.
Our city is strong, and the thing that helps businesses the most is when local streets prioritize local access, and the thousands of people living in apartments along this corridor will make *more* business opportunities when they aren’t encouraged to get on the highway directly outside their door.
I think what the average person does not understand is that the traffic design philosophy is to make it more difficult to own and operate a four wheel vehicle in Bloomington. Once you understand that, everything makes sense.
Yep, it’s like people don’t believe electric vehicles are a real thing and we don’t need to plan for them after we save the world by removing internal combustion vehicles from the streets of Bloomington. Which would be funny except it results in things like the 7th Street debacle.
I want to try to help clarify the sparation between goals and tactics, and explain each.
The main goal is safety and accessibility for all modes. Right now, drivers have poor safety and good accessibility (roads reach every destination). Everyone else has poor safety and poor accessibility (we are even missing sidewalks on key corridors like Walnut & College).
The strongest tactic is to slow drivers down. When drivers are going 20mph or lower, other traffic can safely mix in. Over 20mph, other traffic is excluded. When drivers are going 20mph or lower, they can react to other drivers to create a safe environment. When drivers are going faster, tiny mistakes become fatalities. Two drivers died in 2022, one on Country Club and one on Moores pike. They died because each made a tiny mistake, they lost lane control (probably from distraction) and were going so fast that this minor lapse led directly to death.
Drivers *do* perceive this as difficulty. Generally, drivers believe that the easiest thing is to go fast. Unfortunately, going fast is very difficult to do safely and we have the dead bodies to prove that. I did not know the two drivers killed on city streets last year but I’m willing to broadly generalize to say that, like most drivers, they probably would not have approved of efforts to slow traffic to inccrease safety. Sadly, today we don’t have to worry about what they think because they’re dead.
The irony is that instantaneous velocity kills but instantaneous velocity doesn’t always get you there any faster. People have died — and killed — racing to red lights.
All injuries and fatalities are very unfortunate! For perspective, it would be interesting to know how many pedestrians, bikes, scooters, cars, etc traveled in the areas of concern over 5 years? What is the rate of the problem(s)? How does that compare to other issues?
It would also be interesting to know the root cause of each of these? How many were negligence or even disobedience of safety practices and/or laws by either drivers or the injured/deceased? Perhaps our society needs to learn to be more careful.
What is the price tag for “fixing” this? Where is the funding coming from? Taxes, especially for property, are out of control. Are there other issues that might be a higher priority?
Seems like speeding is the major issue when it comes to fatalities and accidents generally. At a constituent meeting meeting the impunity with which drivers violate the speed limit in Bloomington was a topic. Police are stretched thin lately, of course, but better enforcement might be a better option than redesigning the corridor and pushing problems to other streets.
These are good questions. I don’t know how to answer about bike & ped usage of these corridors, but fatalities are easy to count:
Nate Stratton, 12th & Walnut, 2022 (drunk driver killed scooter rider in bike lane)
Margaret Miao-Keong, just south of 3rd & Walnut, 2019 (bus driver looking upstream did not see pedestrian who was downstream)
Christopher Mikolowski, near 19th & Walnut, 2016 (truck driver hit pedestrian crossing ?near? a crosswalk)
Michael Steinbach, 3rd & Walnut, 2005 (truck driver looking upstream did not see reckless counterflow cyclist who was downstream)
That’s the ones I’ve collected from various sources. I know there are more fatalities if you count drivers and motorcyclists but I don’t have them handy. I think of special note is that two of those fatalities are the direct result of having two lanes going the same direction right next to eachother. That configuration forces drivers at driveways, stop signs, and right-on-red scenarios to focus their attention upstream, and as a rule they do not look downstream at all until after they are already in motion. That pattern has caused other fatalities on other streets in our community as well, including on 2-way streets where there are 2 or more lanes in each direction.
As you can see, mistakes and misconduct play a major role in these fatalities. Our society *does* need to learn to be more careful. I agree with Mr. Coulter that speeding is a major cause. And I do endorse enforcement.
However, the most effective educational tool is infrastructure. For example, College Ave at 15th street is about 48 feet wide but it is only two lanes of traffic. The effective lane width is 24 feet. A car is only 6 feet wide. Even a cement truck or bus is only 8 feet wide. The excessive width educates drivers that this is a place designed for cars to go fast. If we fix the infrastructure so that it asks people to go slow, then enforcement can catch scofflaws. But as long as the infrastructure suggests high speed, everyone will speed and enforcement will just catch a random subset of our population. It will be a broad stochastic tax with little effect.
As for cost, that is a very hard question to answer. There are many possible funding sources, and some of them (such as federal grants) we could not really use for other projects. Like we can’t just take a DOT Surface Transportation Program grant and spend it on housing.
One balancing factor is that College and Walnut extract a huge cost in lost business downtown, so we will make up the cost very quickly. We spent $30 million building two new giant parking garages in 2020, but parking garages are very poor economic stimulus. They simply don’t work. The trades district garage is still almost empty today — Mayor Hamilton short-sightedly promised us that companies would line up to relocate to downtown and take advantage of our huge parking subsidy but that promise evaporated in the harsh light of day. By comparison, road diets are extremely effective economic stimulus. They work. Look at South Bend.
Another offset is that all these wrecks cost a lot of money. As a general rule, police collectively spend about a third of their time responding to wrecks. BPD responds to about 10 wrecks a day but when they used to publish traffic citation data, they only wrote wrote about 1 ticket a day. About 5% of Bloomington’s wrecks are on this part of the corridor, and about 10% are on College/Walnut over the whole length. Wrecks make up an even greater fraction of fire and ambulance calls. On top of that, even a “property damage only” wreck is a financial hardship, and many members of our community have become permanently disabled after wrecks. The cost of the status quo is enormous. We’re used to it, so we don’t see it. But it is enormous.
If there is consensus that the major issue is car speed on College and Walnut, then the obvious fix is simply to jigger the timing of the traffic lights so that every few blocks leading into the downtown center the cars have to stop for a red light. Presto! No more vehicular traffic going at high rates of speed in the center of the city.
Then, the city will only have to contend with motorized scooters traveling at high speeds on sidewalks and obstructing pedestrian travel wherever riders decide to leave the the scooters.
I doubt Madelyn Howard would have slowed down even a little bit for however many lights.