Nevada Appeal poll: Should Carson Street downtown be reduced to two lanes after the freeway is completed? 75% said no, only 25% said yes. I was hearing a lot of the same things at the downtown presentation tonight. Everyone loves the designs, but reducing the street down to two lanes is going to cause too much traffic to back up. Especially because there will still be folks travelling from one end of town to the other that won’t use the freeway, or that are coming from the west side, and will still have to use Carson Street. Factor in that at some point the road is going to have to merge from four lanes down to two, and you’ve got a choke point at each end of town. Then you’ve got people slowing down or stopping along the street, and others trying to parallel park, and all of that is going to bring traffic to a halt.
The city’s response is that Roop and Stewart Streets are going to be fixed up at the same time as Carson Street, and their capacities will be raised so there will be ways to get around downtown. I think their goal is for the only traffic downtown to be people who have some kind of business there. There will be no such thing as somebody “just passing through” downtown on their way to somewhere else, so traffic will be light and the few cars that are there will be looking for a place to park. I’m not so sure that will be the case, but I guess we’ll see what happens after the freeway opens. The city seems pretty optimistic.
Haven’t they been promising to fix up Roop and Stewart for years (sort of like the freeway)?
Seems like there’s some domain issues that would have to be resolved before Roop could be changed, don’t you think?
Yeah, but this time they have blueprints for Stewart Street! And they’ve identified which houses they need to tear down! Of course they haven’t bought the houses yet, but that’s just a small detail.
Interesting discussion! We have been considering moving to Carson. We have looked at several similar sized towns in NV, CO, AZ, and NM. We are especially looking for a place with a real downtown with walkable and crossable streets. Many, many towns, although still pretty small have multi-lane, heavily traffiicked streets that eliminate any comfortable use.
Carson is, so far, very user friendly. The traffic will come. If it can be creatively controlled by reducing lanes in conjunction with re-routing methods, the downtown can remain a great place to be. Don’t sell the idea short. Your downtown is a great resource that should be jealously gaurded.