Outside consultants fail to find solution for Broadway’s troubles

Figuring out how to fix West Broadway is like treating a festering sore that just won’t heal.
We all know the patient needs attention. But the city seems to be listening primarily to vocal homeowners along Broadway who say the street must be kept to two lanes to thrive as a quaint, historic byway, instead of the many downtown merchants and residents from the far west who want a wide artery to maintain the commercial lifeline.

After all, other city streets have been widened to handle additional traffic, including College Avenue, which wisely was expanded to four lanes in 1971.

The latest attempt to “heal” West Broadway is really a collaborative effort involving the Columbia City Council and executive staff advised by Crawford, Bunte and Brammeier (CBB), a firm billing itself as traffic and transportation engineers with offices in St. Louis and two Illinois communities. CBB’s June 6 “technical memorandum” comes will all the pretty pictures and diagrams befitting this $60,000 study—Job No. 55-07—while I still hang on the understanding that the outside examination almost didn’t come to pass.

Going back a year, a group that might best be described as a sort of “Friends of West Broadway Committee” had it all figured as to how the city should fix up their stretch of that fabled, so-called historic boulevard between Aldeah and West Boulevard. It was a plan selfishly tailored to their interests, and the council was all ready to buy into it and vote on it when one citizen, who in fact was delaying a vacation, stood up at that late Monday evening hour and said “Whoa!”

That’s when the council decided to hire an outside consultant to review the situation. Into town earlier this year came CBB armed with traffic counters and contact tapes stretched across Broadway and several nearby streets. Maybe their methodology is sound, but I’m already off on the wrong foot with these folks because there’s scarcely any reference in their report to rush-hour driving conditions on Broadway and how to ameliorate them. Ditto the absence of any analysis of emergency vehicle usage tied to the narrowed road, especially with the proposed traffic median.

CBB suggests that this section of West Broadway should remain a two-way thoroughfare with a 10-foot median, and a 12-foot-wide driving lane in each direction, flanked by a six-foot bike lane and a six-foot raised sidewalk. My cynical instinct has me wondering just how objective these traffic and transportation engineers really are and whether their conclusion isn’t just another whitewash of what the municipality and the selfish denizens of West Broadway have wanted to do all along with their street.

Here I’m reminded of Indianapolis. Maybe it’s because Columbia is connected to that great Indiana metropolis by the Old Trails Road, which, in its revised condition, is now called Interstate 70. Many highways in the Hoosier State converge on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis. Following four major compass points, the two big passages in and out of downtown Indianapolis are Meridian Street (U.S. 31) running north and south, while just south of the square coursing east and west is another great boulevard called Washington Street (U.S. 40). Both are at least four lanes wide.

Even though Columbia is only a smidgen of the size of Indianapolis, the comparison between the broad boulevards leading in and out of the Indiana capital against what CBB is recommending for West Broadway is deleterious and especially harmful to our central business district. While a two-lane Washington Street would be rejected there as totally absurd, Columbia looks like it’s poised to actually impede western gateway traffic flows to further isolate its downtown core from the burgeoning retail and residential growth that’s a fact on the city’s west side.

I believe in unintended consequences. Downtown Columbia will be harmed if West Broadway is not improved. That means Broadway really must be widened to a minimum of four lanes, two in each direction. The report absurdly suggests that two lanes separated by a 10-foot median mingled with a pastiche of bike lanes and so-called ped-ways will actually move more vehicles across town. In the rush hour? Ridiculous!

If this potentially hurtful scheme restricts downtown access from the west, another unintended consequence may be the appearance of a satellite city or two elsewhere, perhaps even outside the city. Downtown Columbia would eventually stagnate at the present critical point when there are great hopes for its renaissance, while the much-vaunted Sasaki Report still glows.

Still to be heard from are the public safety agencies, including police, fire, medical and public works. I hope that they are not muzzled because we need to hear from them. Broadway needs to be uniformly widened to four lanes because it is a basic cross-town transportation artery and these vital agencies need to move about the city easily and expeditiously. Broadway narrowed and divided doesn’t strike me as in the public interest when it comes to accommidating emergency vehicles with easy access to every side street.

Every time I turn around, it looks like the city is deliberately making it more difficult for emergency and other service vehicles to reach their destinations—increasingly tripped up by medians, traffic circles, speed bumps and other questionable or otherwise poorly-engineered “tools” of the modern transportation art.

Another point further marring the veracity of the CBB report is the almost total absence of projections of the city’s future transportation needs. Doesn’t this strike you as ironic while “visioning” is in full flower? While a two-lane “fix” may work for now as it placates the selfish few, mark it inevitable that Broadway will ultimately be torn up and widened to four lanes or more at some time sometime not too far from now.

As a bicyclist, I can’t go along with CBB’s findings, but that’s because I have no interest sharing a six-foot bike lane contiguous with a twelve-foot lane that’s busy with traffic. It’s simply not safe for bicycles, given the amount of traffic the re-engineered street will be expected to handle.

So what should happen? Let’s get it over with and carve out a 66-foot wide right of way that includes four 12-foot driving lanes—two in each direction—and two six-foot bicycle/pedestrian paths (“ped-ways”), each separated from the roadway by a three-foot strip. Bury the utilities, and landscape it. Then let’s have all of the voters in this city consider it. Broadway belongs to each and every one of us, and we all deserve to figure out how it should be rebuilt.