Posts tagged Harbor Park
Downtown Progress
Sep 27th
For example, think about how you would go to Harbor Park. Water St., Park Ave., and Union St./E. Main St. are the main entry points. Now think about the surrounding area. Both Tidewater Drive and E. City Hall Ave. both point directly at the Park but the no longer connect, thanks to the Interstate. Also, there is a rarely used exit ramp from I-264 that exits onto Claiborne Ave. that has the potential to assist in getting people to the Park without further clogging E. Brambleton Ave. Unfortunately, Claiborne Ave. has to go through residential-sized roads only to have to merge back into Park Ave. The MMTC plan would fix these issues. Tidewater Drive and E. City Hall Ave. would connect directly to Park Ave. There would also be a new road built to connect Claiborne to additional parking on that side of the railroad tracks.
On the SPQ side, there are also a number of new connections. The roadways that go through the public housing were designed to not connect. This may be good for keeping poor people from getting out (which doesn’t actually help anybody) but it is bad for a pedestrian-friendly, mixed use development. The SPQ plan would fix this. It would restore a grid system of roads and reconnect the SPQ area to Brambleton Ave. and to Tidewater Drive.
These projects are big news for Norfolk. Both will feed off of each other and off of Downtown. These two projects will nearly double the size of Downtown. Now we just need to get them built. The MMTC has a good chance of getting started if Norfolk gets award the federal grant they applied for. The SPQ, however, appears to still be in limbo. When the project was released, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority decided they wanted to slow things down. Despite their successes in Broad Creek, they seem to still think that they can better serve their clients by containing them in poverty rather than allowing them to mingle with the middle class.
Regardless, since most people don’t read the studies and plans that the city releases, I wanted to make it easy. I have created a map below that shows the major points of both the SPQ and the MMTC combined. Let me know what you think. Click on something and it should tell you what it is.
If you want to read the actual plans from the City, you can view the MMTC plan here and the SPQ plan here.
Downtown’s Multi-Modal Transportation Center
Aug 30th
Multi-Modal Transportation Center Full Build Out Concept and Development Sites along Connecting Routes
Norfolk is moving forward with planning and financing a new multi-modal transportation center Downtown. Excellent idea. The plan is to have it ready to open once Amtrak rolls in in three years. It is very exciting. Combining the news of Virginia Beach’s move toward urbanism and I get the idea that our area is actually maturing as a metropolitan area. The one thing that scared me for a minute, though, was where it said,
“In addition, a new bus transfer facility would be developed, moving about two-thirds of buses from the current location at Cedar Grove north of downtown on Monticello Avenue.”
I was worried that might mean that Norfolk was going to keep 1/3 of the buses at Cedar Grove. Fear not. According to the full report by the City,
At present, 17 routes on the HRT network serve the Cedar Grove site, and be-tween 6,000 – 7,000 passengers board or alight daily at the facility. The general conditions of the Cedar Grove site combined with its lack of amenities, poor pedestrian link-ages and connections, and also its remoteness from downtown activity centers combine to make the restructuring of the primary bus transfer operation in Norfolk a high priority. Its lack of a direct connection to the light rail corridor is also another detriment of the current site. … It is planned that the new bus transfer operation at the Multi-Modal Transportation Center will serve 9 current HRT bus routes operating to the Downtown Norfolk area generally from areas to the south and east. Concurrent to this restructuring of the transit network, 6 other bus routes to the downtown area from the west and north would also be realigned to serve other light rail stations which will help to further deemphasize and limit congestion at the Cedar Grove site and thereby improving passenger service and convenience across the entire bus transit network.
That mean 15 out of 17 buses will no longer serve Cedar Grove. I hope the other two will only serve it by driving by. Thinking about it, this actually shows some intelligence on the part of Norfolk city officials. They publicly recognize that Cedar Grove is a terrible place for a bus transfer point. Ignoring the fact that the city is solely responsible for Cedar Grove, I have to give someone credit on this one. One problem. In the build-out image above, the nice, new bus transfer location has been built over with a parking garage. Check it out yourself:
Where did our bus transfer point go?
