The city of Phoenix is asking the public for its feedback on the types of improvements it would like to see made on 3rd Avenue.
City employees recorded a virtual/online public meeting, where city of Phoenix principal planner for the Street Transportation Department Brian Fellows, Street Transportation Department director Kini Knudson and Heather Murphy, spokesperson for the Street Transportation Department, talked about proposals for enhancements on 3rd Avenue between Camelback Road and Missouri Avenue. They are asking residents to answer questions in a survey related to the proposed upgrades by visiting phoenix.gov/streets/projects/3rdAvenuePed.
Fellows in the recent online meeting talked about three possibilities for enhancing 3rd Avenue in the proposed project area. The first alternative would involve creating traffic mini-circles, chicanes and a wide sidewalk, he said. Traffic mini-circles are facilities in intersections that slow down vehicles by making the lane narrower, Fellows said. Chicanes are another “type of feature at the edge of a street” that slows vehicles down by “creating a curving condition” that can be made out of curbing or another vertical element, he added. Fellows said the goal with the wide sidewalk would be to create more continuous sidewalks in the area as sidewalks do not exist in some spots of the road.
He said the second alternative would be to add a street walkway and chicanes. The street walkway would be a “walking area” with “vertical protection between that and travel lanes,” Fellows said. He said with the third alternative there would be a wide sidewalk, traffic mini-circles and center islands in the project area on 3rd Avenue. He explained that center islands are elongated facilities in the middle of streets that slow down vehicles “by narrowing the lane” and they can be made out of paint or curbing. Fellows said there would be no landscaping but rather concrete or another material in the center islands as the city does not plant or maintain trees in the right-of-way.
None of the ideas for 3rd Avenue have been selected and the city is examining residents’ preferences. Postcards have been sent to neighbors directing them to the online survey.
Rick Mountjoy, chairman of the Medlock Place Traffic Committee, said several months ago that traffic studies suggested some streets in the Medlock Place Historic District, especially 3rd Avenue, become congested with vehicles cutting through the neighborhood. Medlock Place is in North Central between North Central Avenue and North 7th Avenue, south of Missouri Avenue.
The city plans to hold another public meeting to discuss the 3rd Avenue possibilities early next year, Fellows said. After that, the city will complete an initial design for the work, and then it will identify funding for the design. Later the city will need to identify construction money for the project.
