This is the third of three posts on the experience and design of the Goose Creek Connector, following up on the good and the bad of the implementation of the design. Today I want to talk about the elements of the Goose Creek Connector design that aren't misimplemented in terms of what they decided to do, but rather that to me fall short of a good idea in the actual design or planning.
To be clear, all of these would be fixable in the future! But these are missed opportunities or strange choices that were made. I expect a number of them were made in order to deliver the project faster, cheaper, or at all; I'm not, in this, trying to criticize the designers of this project. They had to actually cost, plan, implement, and negotiate the details of this route, and I'm very glad that they did.
But there are, nevertheless, some points where I think the design could have used some improvement, and could be improved in the future.
1. What The Heck Is Going On Around Kimberly?
So far I've been burying a key part of the design here: the Goose Creek Connector doesn't actually fully connect.
What is going on here, folks? Suddenly we're in Sharrowland, with a vehicle parked across the sidewalk for those who might be using the path as pedestrians.
And then, as noted last time, it becomes hard to find where you reconnect to the trail proper if you're on a bike (not, admittedly, if you're on foot). Was I supposed to be on the path already? Should I be sharrowsing the road? Who knows!
That's not even getting into the tight turns around Kimberly:
The route takes a 180 here to get to street level.
That, I'm not necessarily critiquing: land is very tight on a major corridor like the Eastern/Kimberly intersection, and the creek itself and the railroad have clearly taken most of the best ways through that aren't the road. The tight turns are necessary, unless you had complete eminent domain power to just bulldoze people's buildings (which would have created massive costs and resistance to the project, so don't do that!).
But the road/sidewalk section sucks. If it were a protected bike lane on the street, that would be one thing. Mississippi Ave is wide enough there: it has parking on one side even though the businesses all have giant parking lots, so if you could take that and make it instead a protected lane you could make this actually connect. Would it cost more? Yes, and I expect that (plus the kneejerk resistance to losing even minimally valuable parking) is why it wasn't done. But it would be a great way to futureproof this route, which right now has a glaring hole.
2. Lack of Intersections
I don't literally mean intersections here, in that I like the fact that you can do an uninterrupted ride from about 33rd to 59th. I mean that there are a lot of missed opportunities to make what is currently a great recreational trail into a great bike connector more generally. I'm not suggesting we should be at Houten, Netherlands-level bike functionality, where houses front on bike paths without a street in sight. But I am suggesting that it would be a great step forward if the new north-south trail had more access points for people to actually get on and off it, particularly from the housing and businesses that are so close to connecting.
Here, the trail splits to go under Kimberly and to intersect with the Kimberly sidewalk (which is its own issue, see below). But there's also a Walgreens literally right next to me as I take the shot: why can't that Walgreens have a connection directly to the trail, instead of looping around?
More broadly, there's a lot of stuff at that intersection, but to get to the Hy-Vee across the street you need to bike about a mile and a half around to the Duck Creek Trail, across Eastern Ave, and back up Spring St. instead of just...across the street.
Not designed with bikes (or pedestrians) in mind. I also used the beg button here but had it skip 2 straight cycles, so I don't think it works...
Why couldn't these connections be improved?
Likewise, these apartments back onto the trail--why not have a connection?
Now, some of this was outside of the designers' hands (they don't own that apartment complex!) and some would be challenging for political planning reasons (messing with lights/bike lanes around or on Eastern and Kimberly). But that doesn't make them not missed opportunities; it just means that I can see why they are currently missed. I hope they improve; it would be cool to see a path with a gate instead of just a fence at the apartment complexes, for instance.
3. The Sidewalk Problem
Look, I know I harp on sidewalks a lot. But seriously: make up your mind if you're designing a big sidewalk or an actual mixed-use trail that you expect non-pedestrians to use. And then remember that you're definitely doing the latter, since you literally put bike signage on the trail.
And then stop terminating the exits from the trail onto pure sidewalks--both in terms of the legality of biking on the sidewalk and terms of sheer width. The path itself is a nice width for bikes and pedestrians to coexist. The sidewalks they deliver you to are not.
And sometimes those sidewalks just end themselves: Kimberly doesn't really have any, for instance, except the bit used for the trail itself.
Again, I see why this happens: dumping pedestrians into the street is bad, and the cost would skyrocket to redo all the sidewalks into full paths as well (though Bettendorf has a lot of those, so there's local precedent at least).
But dang if it doesn't meant that you can't really use the connector for anything much besides driving from end to end: the places it delivers you in the middle are either not well connected to the path (see #2) or only accessible on foot.
It's great for recreation, in other words, if all you're doing is biking a long distance along the path. But as soon as you want to use it mid-path or to actually get somewhere, it doesn't work nearly as well. Short-sighted, in other words, though not necessarily bad.
And all of this is definitely improvable--if and only if we actually decide to do it.
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