Wider sidewalks or wider median?

Right now, our:

• sidewalks are (at most) 9 feet wide
• parking lanes are 9 feet wide
• bicycle lane are 6 feet wide
• median is 12 feet wide--four feet of concrete and eight feet striped with paint.

Wider sidewalks: better neighborhood

Instead, we could widen the sidewalks by:

• narrowing the parking and bicycle lanes (which are generous by city standards)
• narrowing the median

Wider sidewalks enhance the neighborliness of the streets, encourage walking, and provide room for landscaping the sidewalks, but are expensive and will take longer to get.

Try it out at Duncan

You can see how a 9-foot sidewalk feels compared to 12 feet by standing on the corner of Guerrero and Duncan--Duncan has 12 foot sidewalks.

Landscaping; no change to parking

In either case, we will landscape the entire median.

None of these changes removes any parking.

Three options

The first diagram (based on a similar diagram by John Thomas) shows the current configuration--with a landscaped median replacing the paint.

The second diagram shows a 10-foot median and 12-foot sidewalk:

The third diagram shows a 6-foot median and 14-foot sidewalk: