The Municipal Services Committee met 11/11/2024. The item that took up most of the meeting was the status update on the College Avenue Lange Reconfiguration pilot, which the committee voted to accept and file.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
The update was fairly straightforward. Traffic counts on College Avenue seem to have been negligibly impacted by the lane reconfiguration, but crashes have gone down by 29%. City staff also conducted bike and pedestrian counts, but those were based on single 24-hour counts so the results are not necessarily indicative of any overall change. For what they were worth, bike usage increased year over year by 33 bicyclists but the pedestrian count decreased by 11%. There were two police roadway closures during the reporting period, and the Police Department indicated that these were easier to manage with the new lane configuration. Public Works Director Laura Jungwirth was going to be meeting with business owners, stakeholders, and Appleton Downtown Inc to get their feedback on the changes for the final end of pilot report.
Westbound traffic flow was generally positively impacted by the lane change and saw a decreased length of time to get through downtown during off-peak traffic hours.
Eastbound traffic flow was marginally negatively impacted during afternoon peak hours with the length of time to get through downtown increasing by up to 35 seconds. This was, however, well below the two-minute increase staff had thought might be possible when initially planning the lane changes.
Traffic on Franklin Street had increased by 12% during the reporting period. It was not clear whether that was due to the lane changes on College Avenue or a result of other facts such as construction or different businesses being open.
The feedback from the public had been generally positive with people saying they feel safer getting in and out of their vehicles when they park downtown, although people do have problems merging down to one lane when going eastbound. The public perceived a safety issue with that eastbound lane merge, but the data did not bear out that there actually was a safety issue. Since the project started, around 2.6 million cars came eastbound into the intersection and there were zero reportable crashes related to that. Having said that, city staff was still considering ways to signal the lane change to eastbound traffic while making sure that they did not draw their attention away from other things such as the railroad crossing.
There was some discussion about whether to have a third update on the pilot and, if so, what sort of data would be included in it. Traffic counts were labor intensive and it was felt staff time might be better spent elsewhere. Additionally, the final traffic counts would be conducted during the winter, not during the summer so they might be markedly different simply because of that and it wasn’t clear what overall value they would have. Other data like crash reports were easy to pull.
It wasn’t really clearly stated in the meeting, but it sounded like there would be a final report on the lane reconfiguration after the end of the 18-month trial period which concludes in February at which point the committee and Council would potentially vote on whether or not to maintain the changes. [Spoiler alert, it’s pretty obvious the changes will approved and the city is not going to go back any time soon to four lane traffic on downtown College Avenue.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1244084&GUID=F5406E9E-A732-48D3-B258-9C1BB3F81F3D
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