Just down the street from my house is an intersection with Saginaw Avenue, a one-way street that varies from four to five lanes and takes traffic from the west side of Lansing to the city’s border with East Lansing. The entire stretch of road is blighted as it is unpleasant to live by a giant road full of speeding cars.
This year, the city of Lansing has been investigating ways to make the corridor more livable by scaling down the size of Saginaw and Oakland Avenues. The roads used to be packed with traffic when hundreds of workers drove to the now-defunct GM factories. Today, it is a mostly empty stretch of deteriorating road. Many of the houses along the road lost major chunks of their yards and narrow, buckled sidewalks precariously line the streets. It’s quite depressing and it’s something I’ve wanted to have fixed since my wife and I moved here a year ago.
This spring, I got a newsletter announcing planning meetings to discuss the possibility of a “road diet” that would shrink the roads and provide space for bike lanes and greenery. I was stoked! Unfortunately, I had to miss the first two meetings (it’s difficult when I work an hour away). I was able to make the final meeting this week. It was very informative, but a little frustrating at the same time.
Overall, most of the people involved and the contractors in charge of investigating the road use options favor development along the corridor that focuses on friendly, walkable streets and medium density infill. To me, this was a very good sign. Lansing’s urban fabric has evolved from a turn-of-the-20th-century city into a quasi-suburban wasteland as streets have been widened, light rail lines torn up or paved over, depressingly bland buildings built, and neighborhoods abandoned for the suburbs. Today, people are figuring out how bad of a living arrangement that makes and there is a desire to refurbish downtown Lansing.
There were many people who came to the meeting simply to express their opposition to any downsizing of the roads. Residents from surrounding communities feared longer commutes across town. Business owners feared lost business due to customers’ fear of traffic.
The agenda focused on the draft land use recommendation put together by past meetings. The draft recommended medium-density infill along many parts of the Oakland-Saginaw corridor and a commercial and transitional neighborhood at the site of the former Verlinden plant.
Five options for transforming the roads were reviewed and traffic comparative analysis was presented. The five options are:
- Do nothing
- Leave roads one-way, reduce by one or more lane
- Make the roads two-way with one lane in each direction, a center turn lane, bike paths, and enhanced greenery.
- Make the roads two-way with two Saginaw given two-lanes going East, one lane west, and a center turn lane.
- Make the roads two-way as above, but with added bike lanes and green space.
