Downtown design is a two-way street

MIG Consultant Jay Renkens, left, helps Trace Larson, right, navigate the conceptual design for Alamosa’s downtown during a community meeting on Wednesday at city hall. Larson and other attendees selected choices reflecting their preferences for downtown design. At the end of the table are business owners Ruthie Brown and Kyle Woodward, and in the background, longtime business owners Tom and Charlotte Bobicki visit with transportation planner Carlos Hernandez./Courier photo by Ruth Heide

ALAMOSA — If Alamosa follows through with downtown design consultant and community recommendations, Main Street will revert to a two-way city street with Sixth Street handling Highway 160 traffic, the Highway 160 East bridge across the Rio Grande will be relocated to better align with Main Street, bicycle lanes will move off Main Street to parallel streets, alleys will be improved, San Juan Avenue will have a traffic signal again, San Juan Avenue will embrace a festival status and Hunt Avenue will serve as a cultural pathway.

Consultants with MIG, contracted by the City of Alamosa to perform a downtown design plan, shared ideas and collected comments during community meetings in Alamosa this week. They will continue to accept community input on proposed design concepts in coming months, with a final design anticipated next spring.

The design concepts presented this week resulted from previous community meetings and online surveys.

MIG Project Manager Andy Rutz said 210 people responded to the online survey, providing more than 1,800 individual comments.

Rutz said one of the suggestions coming from the community was to return Sixth and Main Street (Highway 160) to two-way traffic. Designers have created three concepts related to Main and Sixth:

A) Make Main Street a two-way city street and Sixth Street a two-way state highway for Hwy 160 (the City of Alamosa would maintain Main and the Colorado Department of Transportation would maintain Sixth Street) and create a new bridge from East Alamosa across the Rio Grande that would better connect to Main Street;

B) Keep the bridge where it is but return Main and Sixth to two-way traffic.

C) Retain one-way traffic on Main and Sixth but reduce the number of lanes on Main Street from three to two, and leave the bridge in the same place.

Other downtown design components include: designating San Juan Avenue as a festival street that could be closed off for events, designating Hunt Avenue as a cultural trail connecting the railroad area to Cole Park; activating alleys between Fourth and Main and Main and Sixth, especially since many people use the back doors to enter businesses along the alley.

Improvement could also include enhanced crossings that could be painted or comprised of different materials, mid-block crossings and/or another traffic signal and additional pedestrian amenities like seating and planters.

Parking could also be altered, Rutz said. If Main Street remains a state highway, it could not have front angled parking, but if it returned to a city street, that might be an option, he said.

MIG Director of Planning and Design Services Jay Renkens told attendees of a community meeting Wednesday night at the Alamosa city hall that improvements could be made in phases. For example, during the first phase Main Street could reduce lanes from three to two and alleys could be improved with different paving, lighting, vegetation and artwork.

Renkens spoke about Alamosa’s demographics. He referred to the more than 500,000 people who visited the Great Sand Dunes National Park in 2017. Business owners involved in the downtown design process want to see more of those visitors, Renkens said. Another population that could be tapped into further would be the students attending the college and university, he added.

Renkens said although food and beverage businesses are flourishing in the downtown area, retail is not growing. “How do we create more shopping?” he asked. Another challenge is making it easier for people who are driving through town to stop, he said.

Transportation planner Carlos Hernandez compared parking in Alamosa to Gunnison and Durango. In the 12 blocks of Alamosa’s downtown area, there are 1,589 parking spaces including on and off street parking, public and private lots. This compares to about 1,400 spaces in comparable blocks in Durango and 1,000 in Gunnison.

Hernandez said Alamosa has twice the space allocated to cars than people when the total space is considered, and “cars don’t spend money; people spend money.”

He said from the numbers Alamosa has enough parking, but it could be managed more efficiently. For example, Alamosa could draw more of the RV traffic if it had parking that could accommodate those vehicles, he said.

Hernandez spoke further about the one-way and two-way configuration, which would not occur immediately because of planning and funding. Changing the number of lanes and removing bike lanes would add 19 feet to Main Street, Hernandez said. The community could decide what it wanted to do with that space. That might mean more areas for outdoor seating, for example.

He also talked about the possibility of putting in a roundabout at the west edge of Main Street where Main and Sixth currently begin one-way traffic.

Consultants took feedback on Wednesday, with some of the public comments including:

• Keep in mind this is still an agricultural community with many trucks and other farm equipment on the roads; the bridge creates a bottleneck for this traffic and will continue doing so until the road is four lanes.

• Although the sand dunes may have had 500,000 visitors, they do not come on into Alamosa; downtown maintenance has been a problem for a long time and continues to be a problem, with ice and other debris building up in the gutters.

• Wayfinding and marketing are key; offering packages to visitors will help draw them here.

• Having a beautiful downtown is not going to do any good if people don’t shop there; drainage problems at certain parts of Main Street create ice build up, and no one seems to take responsibility for clearing the ice.

• When bike lanes are moved to Fourth and Sixth, parking may need to be changed on Fourth from angled parking to parallel parking so it will be safer for cyclists.

• Improving and using the alleys is a good idea, but ice builds up in the alleys and causes problems, so that would have to be addressed.

• A festival street is a great idea, but the city’s regulations on food vending sales like food trucks would not accommodate food trucks downtown. Regulations need to be changed.

• All improvements need to consider ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) accommodations.