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Prince Preferences
COMMISSION WILL VOTE SOON ON DIVISIVE PILOT PROJECT
By Blake Aued news@flagpole.com
L ove it or hate it, you probably have
an opinion on what Athens-Clarke
County has done to Prince Avenue.
The 60-day pilot project temporarily add
ing a center turn lane and protected bike
lanes to the locally owned stretch of Prince
between Milledge Avenue and Pulaski
Street in place of two car lanes is coming to
an end, and the ACC Commission is sched
uled to vote Tuesday, Dec. 13 on whether to
make the changes permanent.
The ACC government received mixed
reviews among the 1,300 public comments
on the project. It was popular among those
who bike and walk along the corridor but,
predictably, less so among drivers, even
though traffic data collected during the proj
ect showed that it didn’t cause long delays.
In summarizing the public comments,
consultants and county officials told
commissioners in a Dec. 6 work session
presentation that respondents perceived
traffic as calmer, which some considered a
positive and some a negative, mainly due
to disagreement over whether Prince is a
neighborhood street or a highway intended
to bring motorists downtown.
“Cycling and walking around here
feels much safer than previously,” wrote
one commenter. “I would always worry
about getting hit or doored by a parked
car. Basically I would almost never ride on
Prince. Now I ride almost every day.”
Another wrote: “It has always
felt like a free-for-all crazy zone, g
Never felt safe there crossing the £
street, sitting outside at The Grit £
or even at Hendershot’s. The pilot g
layout seems to have created a “
buffer zone between sidewalk and
the traffic, which makes me more
comfortable walking. More com
fortable as a driver now, there, as
well.”
Others favored the view from
behind a windshield. “This isn’t
some quaint little New England
street,” one person wrote. “It’s
a major thoroughfare servicing
downtown Athens.” Another
concluded that, “Athens is not Amsterdam,
Netherlands.”
One like-minded commenter wrote
that the person who came up with the idea
should be demoted to custodian. “Traffic is
horrible,” they wrote. “Why would anyone
make one of the busiest streets in Athens
one lane?”
Asked to rate the project from 0-5, with
0 being “makes the neighborhood much
worse” and 5 being “makes the neighbor
hood much better,” 15% of respondents
rated it a 0, about 25% rated it a 1, and
about 35% rated it a 5.
The percentage of people who thought
Prince was a safe place to drive before the
pilot project fell from about 75% to 40%
after the project. But only about 25%
thought it was safe to bike before, com
pared to 55% after. Those who felt it was
safe to walk fell slightly but stayed around
50%.
The way people traveled on Prince made
a difference in their responses. Those who
walk felt the pilot made it safer for pedes
trians, compared to those who didn’t walk.
The difference was even more stark between
cyclists and non-cyclists: Almost 90% of
respondents who’d actually hiked the street
felt the pilot project made it safer. The
project also became more popular as users
got used to it, with more rating it as safer
during the last three weeks than the first
three weeks.
Traffic data collected before and during
the pilot project showed that drivers’ con
cerns were largely unfounded. Morning
commute times actually fell slightly, while
the project delayed drivers for less than 30
seconds during lunchtime and afternoon
peaks. The data showed a slight decrease in
speeds along most of the corridor and only
a slight increase in cut-through traffic on
surrounding side streets.
“One of the things that stood
out to me is that [the] level of
service remains largely unaffected
or improved at certain points,”
Shirelle Hallum, ACC’s newly
hired Vision Zero safety specialist
charged with reducing deadly
crashes, said at a meeting of the
transportation advisory commit
tee Athens in Motion last week.
“On average, there was really no
impact on how quickly cars were
able to move through that section
of the corridor.”
Some specific concerns
included gameday traffic, the
sharpness of the turn from
Pulaski onto Prince and difficulty getting
out of the 100 Prince development in a car.
Commenters also asked for a left-turn sig
nal onto Milledge and for the bike lanes to
extend further west. However, that’s up to
the Georgia Department of Transportation,
which owns Prince (aka Highway 129) west
of Milledge. ©
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Historic Downtown Commerce Georgia
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Apply by February 17th
TO APPLY VISIT
WWW.HARn0NYARTFEST.C0n
Commerce Civic Center 110 State Street
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