Would you make Michigan Avenue pedestiran only? (Chicago, Lincoln: university, taxi)

[Bird4Prez]

I like pedestrian areas........in college towns. Believe it or not, Michigan Ave. has more purposes than just high end shopping (businesses, apartments, a major thoroughfare, tourism, multiple bus routes etc.) It can't be closed to automobile traffic without making traffic unbearable on other nearby streets.

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by Attrill

Did you ever see State St. when that was pedestrian only? If making Michigan Ave. is a pipe dream, it's a crack pipe dream - absolutely wrong.

This.

Terrible idea.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by It'sAutomatic

They tried this with State Street and failed misrably.

Originally Posted by chet everett

Not only is the lesson of the State Street Mall apparently lost on anyone that would suggest the same hideous fate for Michicigan Ave, but the same idiotic scheme nearly killed off downtowns like Oak Park and other towns as well.

The synergy between pedestrian access and vehicular use are necessary component of any vibrant urban style shopping district!

It's reductionist to say that State Street didn't work as a pedestrian mall for several reasons - first and foremost because it wasn't a true pedestrian mall - it was a bus mall in a time when pretty much all buses were really, really nasty-smelling diesel exhaust factories. It really didn't help that crime in the city was pretty much on the upswing during the entire time of the bus mall experiment, and that when they started it, people were still exiting the city in droves. They ended the experiment pretty much right when people started to return to the city.

All that said, despite the fact I think comparisons to State Street are inappropriate, turning Michigan Ave into a pedestrian mall is a bad idea. State Street at least had a subway directly beneath it and wasn't too bad of a walk from the main commuter-rail stations. Michigan Ave doesn't have those advantages.

Also, in your proposal, grade-separating it from the cross-streets is a terrible idea because that sort of thing discourages pedestrian traffic and confuses drivers.

Personally, if you wanted to do something to make Michigan Avenue a better overall experience, and at the same time improve transit access to it, what I'd do is three things:

1) extend Lower Michigan Ave north from it's current terminus at Grand Ave all the way to LSD. Make that stretch bus-only. At the same time, create a bus tunnel under Chicago Ave from just west of Orleans to Fairbanks, coming above ground just after Ohio Street. Together these would VASTLY reduce travel times for bus riders and probably help car circulation, too.
2) remove one lane in each direction and expand sidewalks by 1/2 lane width on each side and expand the median by a full lane width with benches in the middle much like Broadway on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. With the buses moved below, traffic will pretty much be the same and it will be a better pedestrian experience.
3) Most of that extra sidewalk space would be used for access to the new "bus subway", but use some of the extra sidewalk space for sidewalk vendors. Not too many, but having a few in designated areas would liven things up.

Part one would likely cost something on the order of $400 million. Parts two and three would be a relative bargain, probably on the order of $50 million.

Still, for $450 million you'd end up with a bus system that was far more efficient in the North Michigan Ave area, competitive with subway service and far more flexible. If you had two lanes each way, you could easily make express buses run express not just on LSD, but all the way to the Loop. And although bus fumes have been greatly reduced in the past 10 years or so with better fuel and better buses, being able to further isolate the exhaust and potentially pipe it far above the pedestrian level would enhance the experience on Mich Ave. Finally, if the RTA forced Metra to allow the CTA to run regular bus service in the trench next to the Metra Electric tracks, you could improve express bus access not just from the North, but from the South, too, better trying together the entire city. And, finally, at that point, putting a bus subway under Monroe would finally make sense, since it would have things to tie into and allow a BRT implementation of the 1968 Central Area Transit Plan.

[chet everett]

e: Price is off by orders of magnitude! The "rebuild" of Wacker was more than that the ramps were already in place, the city did not have to cut into existing utilities / rebuild loading docks, exposed section to the river is not a true tunnel. I could see the proposed modifications costing BILLIONs especially with politically connected road builders having no restraint...

Aesthically I like the idea of buses under Michigan Ace but from a practical standpoint the necessary ADA accomodations would make this an operation nighmare -- the infrastructure would need near constant attention to be serviceable! Michigan Ave has far more shoppers than Stste St and the loss of landscaped space to more entries to a lower level busway would be a waste...

I agre that State St was hardly at its peak of desirability when it was a bus mall but the biggest issue of whether eliminating vehicular access is good thing or another thing I do not think is really debatable. It was a bad idea and and similar efforts to say "cars bad" are equally foolish.
I liken it to those that would "ban bicylces" -- that really is foolish in the same way -- while there are some wacky bicycle riding rebels that'll argue about why they should roll through traffic control devices and be allowed to weave between pedestrians and motor vehicles the sane response is that appropriate rules and enforcement can have postive effects for overall traffic flows of all kinds. Similarly the regulations that attempt to limit the types of vehicle uses that are most troublesome are smarter than outright bans -- you don't see delivery trucks or contractor's pickups on Michigan Ave and I don't hear any group that bemoans these rules...

Smart rules acknowledge the fact that given the limits if what is financially possible the trade offs that have to be made around such decisions are best made with an acknowledgement to present and past reality instead of a fixation on some imagined future utopia.

[gomexico]

Originally Posted by Chicagoist123

Would you be for it?

Doing so would 'kill' that business district. Horrible idea ... to make Michigan Avenue pedestrian only.

[JacksonPanther]

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...

Hopefully no one in city planning is listening to this foolhardy idea. I can't find a single example where blocking off a vibrant street was later deemed a success. To the OP, find us some links with successfully examples of street blocking, if you wan't to counter the arguments against your idea (State Street, downtown Oak Park, etc).

[Chicagoist123]

Ok consensus is no, haha.

It was just food for thought.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by chet everett

e: Price is off by orders of magnitude! The "rebuild" of Wacker was more than that the ramps were already in place, the city did not have to cut into existing utilities / rebuild loading docks, exposed section to the river is not a true tunnel. I could see the proposed modifications costing BILLIONs especially with politically connected road builders having no restraint...

Rebuilding Wacker was a very complicated endeavor and very different.

First, an extended lower Michigan would not involve any loading docks because none currently exist because there is no current lower Michigan in that stretch. Buses already do run along portions of lower Michigan that exist. Nothing in that area would need to change and I don't think it's due for a rebuild. For all practical purposes, none of the ramps on Wacker existed, since everything was demoed down to earth. I'd say that, if anything, the interchange between Congress and Wacker is more complicated than the LSD/Michigan ramps would need to be.

Second, there would only be three new ramps (at LSD, which would probably blow the budget, I did probably underestimate the cost of that, at Chicago/Orleans-Sedgewick, and at Fairbanks/Ohio-Grand), and they'd be bus-only, and not merging ramps - they'd only be enter/exit ramps, which are less complicated than merging ramps. They'd merge with surface traffic, but not with underground traffic.

Third, the North/South section of Wacker, which doesn't have river exhaust, cost $300 million and is almost exactly the same length as Grand to LSD, and was more complicated due to there being existing needs to maintain access to docs and parking in buildings along the way. That complication doesn't exist for Michigan north of Grand.

Originally Posted by chet everett

Aesthically I like the idea of buses under Michigan Ace but from a practical standpoint the necessary ADA accomodations would make this an operation nighmare -- the infrastructure would need near constant attention to be serviceable! Michigan Ave has far more shoppers than Stste St and the loss of landscaped space to more entries to a lower level busway would be a waste...
...

The CTA manages ADA compliance across the vast majority of it's system currently. If the bus areas were built out in a BRT manner, more like subway stations, it could easily be justified to minimize the number of access points, which would not only speed up travel times, but speed up load times and easily offset the "cost" of extra walking times. It can easily take 10 minutes for a bus to travel less than 1 mile from the River to LSD currently on just a normal day. Imagine if that could be cut in half, even in times of bad weather. If you only had 4 stops along Michigan (Pioneer Court, Ohio/Ontario, Chicago and Delaware), and everyone had pre-paid with fare control, that'd be totally possible.

[marothisu]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

To the OP, find us some links with successfully examples of street blocking, if you wan't to counter the arguments against your idea (State Street, downtown Oak Park, etc).

I'm not the OP, but I know of a street in another city in another country which is much busier than Michigan Avenue, longer than it, and is all pedestrian. However, emergency and city vehicles can still go through it and there's a trolley car going through the middle of it so it's not entirely like that, and cabs cross it on the cross streets (don't go down it, but through it).

[emathias]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

...
To the OP, find us some links with successfully examples of street blocking, if you wan't to counter the arguments against your idea (State Street, downtown Oak Park, etc).

There are examples just among places I've been. There are several streets near Plaza del Sol in Madrid. There's the Graben in Vienna. The Biblioteksgatan and Drottninggatan streets in Stockholm. Karls Johan Gate in Oslo is not strictly car-free, but has stretches that really aren't treated as through streets. Downtown Crossing Boston has a similar treatment and is, at times, totally car-free. Nicolette Mall in Minneapolis, which likely inspired State Street, still functions similarly. A key difference between Nicolette and State or Michigan is width - Nicolette is quite narrow compared to those two, which makes a big difference in "feel" for pedestrians. Most people don't want to feel like they're in a deserted plaza the full length of a street, so good streetscaping makes a big difference. In China there's Nanjing Road East in Shanghai, Wangfujing in Beijing.

If you wanted an example of what a nearly-car-free Michigan Ave might be capable of being, La Rambla in Barcelona is probably the best example. It's pretty wide and, although billed as a "pedestrian mall," it's not strictly car-free, it's just "car throttled" to one, sometimes two, driving lane(s) and in some parts one parking lane for either cars or motorbikes. It has reduced crossing streets, but there are still some, at grade. It also has a subway under it. In fact, what I proposed by putting the buses under Michigan Avenue and cutting lanes down to two in each direction with a wide median would result in something about halfway between current Michigan Ave and La Rambla.