Pedestrians, parking take priority in Regent Street redesign



S01: Right now, you're making your way through a series of committees and boards to get approval for the roadway geometry of the Regent Street redesign. So what exactly does that mean? Where is the geometry in the process?

S00: The basic thing is where the curb is going to be and what the lane configuration is going to be. We've got a pretty good idea of that. So this is kind of the preliminary design. Once this is approved, we'll really get going on the final design. Things might get tweaked at the street level in minor ways, but really the final design is a lot of it's the underground utilities. So sometimes conflicts come up during that process where we have to adjust things in the curb, water drainage issues just with the grades. But this is really setting in place what the lane configuration is going to be and where the curbs are going to be and how wide the sidewalk is, how wide the street is, things like that.

S01: So my understanding is that you're essentially setting the broad overview of your priorities for this redesign. You mentioned at the Board of Public Works meeting yesterday that this is actually the most complicated project you've worked on due to competing interests. Expand on that for us.

S00: Yeah, there's just a lot going on on Regent Street. It serves a lot of different purposes. It's a main commuter route. It's an event area. It's a main emergency route to the hospitals. It's just a business area, you know, like the community main street type of street with a lot of pedestrians. There's a lot of pedestrians along the street, a lot of pedestrians crossing the street. There's a desire for bike facilities on the street, but that's part of the process where we went through with the competing interests that we just can't fit everything into that corridor. The building to building width is 66 feet. It's a 66 foot right away. So you just can't fit everything that we're trying to do there. So right now it's kind of, it kind of serves all those purposes, but it kind of serves them all pretty poorly. Nothing's really working great. But the biggest thing we heard that it really needs improvements for pedestrians, both along the street and crossing the street.

S01: Yeah, so I'd like to dig into the bikeway a little bit later, but I'm curious, what is the benefit of having wider sidewalks, which you've prioritized in this geometry?

S00: Yeah, just pedestrian comfort, ability to hold more pedestrians. So the obvious example is on football game days or the concerts or any big event, the existing sidewalk and Paris area just literally cannot hold that amount of pedestrians where it's to the point where pedestrians are walking in the street. And again, for comfort level, having a wider sidewalk with a distance, it just increases the distance to the moving traffic, provides more of a buffer. When you exit a building, you're not right on the sidewalk where those conflicts take place. We're going from a five foot sidewalk, which is kind of the typical sidewalk that is throughout the city and neighborhoods, a five to six foot sidewalk to more like a nine foot sidewalk. So that's going from two people walking side by side being a little bit squeezed to a comfortable sidewalk where multiple people can be walking together in groups. And we see that a lot on Regent Street groups of people walking, but they're almost, you know, need to walk in a single file line because it's so narrow with the two-way pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks.

S01: And you're envisioning Regent as a community Main Street. Part of that factors in the need for parking for small businesses. So tell us more about why that's a service to the community, having room for parking.

S00: Yeah. So the big issue on the street is whether or how much parking needs to be provided. So right with the community Main Street, like that typical Main Street feel where there's businesses that are fronting the street. The big thing we heard from those businesses is that they really rely on that space, not only for parking for patrons, but also for deliveries and loading, unloading. During different times of the day, it's used for different things. But one of the aspects of Regent Street is that unlike some other Main Streets, like if you think of different towns where you're able to park off on the side streets or in lots behind the businesses, Regent Street really doesn't have that. There isn't surface lots or structured parking in the area available to the public to park that they could then walk back over to Regent Street. It's kind of, they really do rely on the turnover, high turnover of parking on the street itself. And the businesses rely on that, most of them for deliveries. There are some existing private lots for deliveries, but a lot of the trucks just are too big to make the turns in and out of that. And they rely on pulling up on the street and loading as close to the business as they can. We see that throughout the city that kind of regardless of where designated delivery zones are placed, delivery truck drivers really want to get as close as possible to make it as easy as possible to get things into the building.

S01: Now, a fair bit of public comment has focused on the decision not to add a bikeway through this four or five block section of Regent Street, with folks saying that perhaps the plan has sort of positioned pedestrians and the bikeway as opposed to each other. You can have one or the other, but you need parking. Would it be feasible at all to instead prioritize parking on side streets? How did you reach the decision that you've reached?

S00: Kind of like what I just mentioned with the deliveries and the parking, there isn't much of an option. We are going to designate side street loading as much as possible, but there are places where it's just not possible. So I would say on the street, we could have everything. We could have parking bikes and sidewalks, but the street would look basically as it does today. We wouldn't have much of an improvement for pedestrians, which is what we heard throughout the process was the biggest thing. We did draw up the plan that had bike lanes. We showed that last night. So that was an option. But I think the desire for better pedestrian facilities was just more than the desire to mark out bike lanes. As far as just removing the parking and to fit in wider sidewalks and bike lanes, we could do that. There are several issues with that. One is the bus stops. It makes bus loading, unloading at those stops very difficult to try to fit in a bus stop within that bike facility. We did draw up an option that showed what that would look like. So that was an issue. And then it still comes back to a main issue of loading for businesses and getting deliveries. What we see is that there's a lot of illegal parking and delivering in those bike areas. If there isn't a space designated for them, that's reasonably close because, again, delivery truck drivers, you know, their mindset is I'm only going to be there for five minutes. I'll get in, get out, and I'll be able to do it from the spot, even though it's, you know, a no parking area.

S01: And can you briefly walk us through how you'll be improving connections to the bikeway just to the north? What is that going to look like?

S00: Yeah, so the southwest commuter path is about 500 feet north. There is one connection on Charter Street that's marked out right now for bike lanes. The rest of the streets don't have that. So we are going to continue the bike lanes on Randall Avenue, connect those to Regent Street. We'll modify the parking on Orchard Street, connect those. And then Mill Street is a big north-south bike route that we will be removing the existing on-street parking and marking out bike lanes to make that connection. So those are the three big ones. And then we will extend south a little bit. And we're hoping to look into a plan to extend the Mill Street bike lanes further south. That won't be part of this project, but that would be a separate project that we're working on.

S01: So I'd like to hear more about your next steps here. So presumably, once the plan is finished, construction will start. That could be in the next year or so. How can the public stay involved?

S00: The project website will be continually updated whenever there are updates. Once the geometrics are approved, we'll really get into the final design. And that's just a lot of details, mostly with the underground stuff. So it'll probably be quiet for most of the rest of this year. But then we'll bring forward final plans, hopefully at the end of the year, and then ideally bid out for contractors over the winter so they're ready to go early in 2027 to try to get done as soon as possible. But yeah, that's kind of yet to be determined based on how much work and how fast we think they can do it. A big part of the construction is that underground storm box. It is, I want to say, from the width-wise, it's almost 20 feet wide concrete. It's going to be brought in in sections. So it's going to be a pretty slow process just to get that portion of the underground utilities installed by itself. And then there's other things, you know, water, sanitary. There's a Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District sanitary line that runs east-west. We do plan to underground the overhead lines. So there's a lot of things going on. And just like at the surface level of the street, there's limited space underground as well. So it's going to be a tight constraint during construction.

S01: I believe that covers all of my questions. But is there anything else you'd like to add before I let you go?

S00: No, I would just say overall, based on everything that's needed for the street, we think this is a really good design and we're really excited about it. You know, sometimes you're just trying to get a design that's approvable, but we do think this is the best design. So we're happy with it. We think it's going to be a great street once it's completed.

S01: I've been speaking with Tom Moore, the City of Madison's Assistant Director of Traffic Engineering. Thank you.