The Central City Village Planning Committee voted to support the Complete Streets Policy Initiative at its first meeting of the year Monday.
The overall goal of the policy initiative is to create streets that are equally friendly to cyclists, pedestrians and public transit users as they are to drivers, according to Kerry Wilcoxon, city traffic engineer with the Phoenix Street Transportation Department.
Wilcoxon presented the initiative at the meeting with Jeremy Stapleton, chairman of the city’s Environmental Quality Commission.
“If you had to think about complete streets, what I keep coming up with is the word equitable,” Wilcoxon said. “If you think about Phoenix and how we’ve developed in the past 50 years, we’ve developed around the concept of the single family vehicle. What complete streets does is try and shift the balance toward other modes of transportation.”
Wilcoxon said one problem the policy would attempt to address is roads being built to accommodate more cars than drive on them.
“This causes a lot of things that aren’t desirable,” Wilcoxon said. “Things like high speeds, bad behavior and lots of tense drivers.”
This policy would apply to all new streets, but would also include modifications to existing roads. It would also recommend the creation of a new citizen advisory committee that would help the city of Phoenix staff prioritize street redesign projects, Stapleton said.
“Hopefully this will eliminate my subcommittee and allow us to be a little more effective,” he said.
Stapleton said the policy will be enforced by new performance metrics that will help the city track statistics, such as the number of children walking and biking to school. Knowing these figures will allow them to work toward improving those areas.
Wilcoxon said that last year’s changes to Grand Avenue and First Street are examples of what the city hopes to accomplish with the new policy. These changes included adding bicycle lanes to Grand Avenue and narrowing First Street.
The policy is expected to come to the Phoenix City Council for a vote by the end of April, according to Wilcoxon.
Bob Graham, chairman of the Central City Village Planning Committee, said the Complete Streets Policy is a large change for the city.
“The Complete Streets thing is a complete change for the Street Department,” Graham said. “If you looked at what the Street Department was doing ten years ago and what they’re doing now, it’s diametrically opposite. The fact that they’ve gone out and created this policy is really important and they haven’t done it before.”
Graham said the committee is looking for new issues to make recommendations on in the new year.
“Things have been very quiet in the last couple of years because there hasn’t been a lot of development going on, so we spent a lot of time on general issues,” Graham said. “There seem to be more action items coming forward now, so I hope that means the economy’s coming forward. We’re searching for issues that this committee should be independently taking up without being asked.”
The committee also voted to recommend an amendment to downtown Phoenix zoning ordinances that would allow entertainment and sporting venues with more than 4,000 seats to display more signage.
Current requirements allow for one square foot of signs for every foot of building height. The amendment would allow a percentage of each side of a building to be allocated for signs. The changes would affect venues like the Comerica Theatre, Chase Field and US Airways Center.
Contact the reporter at travis.arbon@asu.edu
