City plan drops cost to divert Second Avenue SE traffic

The city's traffic engineers have come up with a less-costly way to change the city's street system to cope with the closing of a two-block piece of Second Avenue SE for a new medical building.

The city's proposed change, though, would come sooner than one proposed in a draft traffic study conducted by Anderson-Bogert Engineers and Surveyors Inc. of Cedar Rapids, a study conducted for Physicians' Clinic of Iowa, which will own the new building, St. Luke's Hospital, which will own the land on which it sits, and Mercy Medical Center.

The Anderson-Bogert's draft study envisions the city doing little initially to make changes in the city's street grid to handle any disruptions that would come from the closing for PCI of Second Avenue SE from 10th to 12th streets SE.

However, Leslie Hart, the city of Cedar Rapids' associate traffic engineer, on Monday said the city believes that “undesirable” delays will result in and around the closed section of Second Avenue SE on the day the PCI development opens - which is now scheduled for 2013. As a result, the city has recommended that the city look to make changes on Third Avenue SE sooner rather than later to help handle traffic that now uses Second Avenue SE, Hart said.

At the same time, though, Hart said the city recommends that one-way Third Avenue SE not be widened to five lanes and turned into a two-way street from Fifth to 15th streets SE as had been the longer-term plan proposed in Anderson-Bogert's draft report.

Instead, the city recommends Third Avenue SE remain at its current width and that it be changed more quickly so there is one lane of traffic into the downtown, two lanes out of the downtown and a center turn lane. The city's recommended plan would affect Third Avenue SE only from 13th to Eighth streets SE, Hart said.

She added that about 90 on-street parking spaces would be lost in the city's plan, though parking would remain on the south side of Third Avenue SE between Eighth and 10th streets.

Hart put the cost of the idea for a four-lane, two-way Third Avenue SE at $700,000, while the Anderson-Bogert draft report put the cost at $4.5 million to widen a two-way Third Avenue to five lanes from 13th to Fifth streets SE.

The Anderson-Bogert draft report, with the input from city staff, also calls for converting Second Avenue SE to a two-way street from Seventh to 10th streets SE and from 12th to 13th streets SE and for converting one block of 13th Street SE from Second to Third avenues SE to two lanes to get traffic from Second to Third avenues SE.

The city's Hart said 10th Street SE from First to Third avenues SE also will need to include a center turn lane.

She put the estimated costs of the street changes needed on Second Avenue SE and 10th Street SE directly related to the PCI development at $2.4 million.

Hart and her office take no exception with the central premise of the Anderson-Bogert draft report, which is that the city's street system can handle the closing of a two-block stretch of Second Avenue SE for the PCI development.

Hart said Second Avenue SE “serves a very important function in our street network.”

“But the study says there are other ways to serve that function if the City Council so chooses,” she said.

In recent years, the City Council has talked about converting the one-way downtown avenues to two-ways, but the council's focus has really been on such a conversion in the core of the downtown. Little has come of those talks because of the expense related to changes that would be needed at downtown railroad crossings.

The current traffic study around the PCI development doesn't address the cost of extending two-way Second and Third avenues SE from the PCI project into the downtown core.

Hart said current traffic count on First Avenue East in and around the proposed PCI development is 22,700 vehicles a day. The city believes the street begins to get congested at 25,000 vehicles a day, while Anderson-Bogert puts that number at 30,000, Hart said.

Second Avenue East is now carrying 4,898 vehicles a day and Third Avenue East about 6,478 a day.

The numbers were 23,900, 5,293 and 7,628 for First through Third avenues SE in 2006.

A new PCI medical building is expected to add 8,780 trips to the area a day with related development at the hospitals and in the neighborhood adding another 6,720 trips to the area a day, Hart said.

Much of the new traffic is expected to use Interstate 380, Seventh and Eighth streets NE and SE and Second Avenue SE to and from the PCI building.