Magnolia Complete Streets Re-Striping Approved By TIF
February 10, 2009 at 10:50 am | General | Tags: Bicycling, complete streets, Magnolia Village
The re-striping of Magnolia Avenue in the Near Southside, which would transform the street from a four-lane design to a two-lane/turn lane/bike lane design, has cleared its last hurdle: on January 29th, Tax Increment Finance (TIF) District #4 approved the funding of the project. Now, it’s just a matter of getting the paint on the pavement.
The Magnolia “Complete Streets” project is expected to have several benefits – slowing automobile traffic on Magnolia and eliminating “slaloming” around cars waiting to turn left, creating a safer environment for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians; encouraging more bicycle traffic along the street thanks to the dedicated bicycle-only lanes, enticing more people to use bikes to get around; and creating a more pleasant environment for pedestrians by further buffering car traffic from the sidewalks and reducing the number of car lanes that must be crossed to get from one side of the street to the other.
In public meetings before the plan was approved, strong support was voiced by both neighborhood residents and a majority of business owners along the street. Bicycle traffic at several Magnolia destinations has been increasing – the owners of Spiral Diner actually installed their own larger bike racks on the sidewalk as the city’s standard “Texas star” racks were woefully inadequate to handle the amount of bikes parking there – and the dedicated bike lanes should provide an incentive for even more cycle usage, especially among non-hardcore riders who have previously been turned off by the current Magnolia configuration’s relatively high traffic speeds, something of a relic of older “cars first” thinking before the district was revitalized by New Urban planning.
The Magnolia re-striping is the first of what I expect will be many “Complete Streets” makeovers in the Near Southside. Narrower, more pedestrian-friendly streets are a key part of the Near Southside’s urban design standards, and bike lanes are as well – for those of you wondering if this was part of any sort of plan (Jonathan, you there? 
), striped bike lanes are recommended in the design standards for most/all portions of:
Magnolia Rosedale Pennsylvania Vickery Terrell Cannon Broadway Cooper 12th/13th Avenue Summit 7th Avenue Henderson Adams College Jennings Mistletoe Allen South Main
That’s not a guarantee that they’ll all happen, but they are all in the design standards. It’s a real Complete Streets network. Magnolia can be thought of as a great place to introduce the bike lane standard to the public in preparation for a greater network moving forward.
The hope is to have the re-striping complete by Arts Goggle on Friday, March 27th.