Comprehensive Planning and Franklin Street
At the Franklin Street Redesign Committee’s first public meeting on December 4th, City Planner Bill Needelman gave a presentation on how Franklin Street fits into the city’s various transportation plans. The following is an adaptation of that presentation.
There are five planning documents that directly relate to Franklin Street and its surrounding neighborhoods:
- Portland’s Transportation Plan (1993)
- A New Vision for Bayside (2000)
- The Eastern Waterfront Master Plan (2002)
- The Peninsula Traffic Study (written in 2001 and tabled)
- The Peninsula Transit Study (in process, expected adoption in 2009)
Other applicable elements of the Comprehensive Plan include housing, recreation, and open space.
The 1993 Transportation Plan established policies for “Neighborhood Transportation Districts,” Multi-use, connected streets, increased transit, biking, walking, transportation demand management, land use, and neighborhood transportation centers. Franklin Arterial was treated as a divider between Transportation Districts, and a connector for new Transportation Centers at the Casco Bay Lines terminal and in Bayside.
Most elements of the Transportation Plan have never been implemented.
The New Vision for Bayside plan called for revitalizing the Bayside neighborhood “as a productive and connected urban neighborhood” with the “development of housing, commerce, and community resources.” Among the development principles, Bayside’s “vision statement” included:
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The Bayside Vision. Click to enlarge:
To date, the new development in Bayside consists of
- 250K sq ft office (950K in plan)
- 75K sq ft retail (230K in plan)
- As part of the upcoming MaineHealth development, a 1100 space structured parking garage (3000 sp in plan)
- 200 units housing -400 beds in student housing (940 units in plan)
- The extension of Chestnut Street to Marginal Way
The Eastern Waterfront Master Plan set these design principles for new development:
1. CHARACTER AND IMPACT OF DEVELOPMENT
2. MIXED USE
3. MARITIME RESOURCES
4. ECONOMICALLY RESPONSIBLE DEVELOPMENT
The plan, pictured at left (click to enlarge), envisioned 90 new units of housing, 2800 new parking spaces in garages, 107,000 square feet of new retail space, 100 new hotel rooms, and 298,000 square feet of new office space. It also suggested expanding the historic street grid, with extensions of Hancock, Mountfort, and Commercial (Thames) Streets.
To date, large residential developments (350 units) have been proposed and permitted for the neighborhood, but most seem unlikely to be built in the foreseeable future. New development has been limited to a 700-space parking garage with 5000 SF of retail space, 7 townhomes, and a 20,000 square foot ferry terminal. A 180 room hotel is also under construction.
The proposed Maine State Pier development will also add use and importance to Franklin Arterial as a transportation corridor (Ocean Properties, a prospective developer, has proposed 417 car parking spaces on the waterfront at the end of Franklin Street) [edit: as of January 20th 2009, the Maine State Pier project is also indefinitely defunct].
The Peninsula Traffic Study calculatedpossible future traffic volumes in Portland using a rigid and dated traffic-engineering model and some questionable assumptions, which together led to its failure as a planning document. In particular, city residents’ reaction to proposals for a nine-lane Franklin Arterial (pictured below) and other road-widening proposals led to this study’s rejection from the Comprehensive Plan, although some policy principles (listed below) may survive.
Public reaction to the Franklin Street widening proposals also galvanized the creation of the Franklin Reclamation Authority to create more humane alternatives.
The study was conducted in 2000. Among its assumptions:
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Traffic Study Goals:
- Minimize impact of traffic on residential neighborhoods, both on- and off-peninsula.
- Maintain efficient traffic flow, acceptable levels of service, and minimize air pollution.
- Serve Downtown, Bayside, Amtrak train station, Ocean Gateway and other on-peninsula projects that are traffic generators and employment centers.
- Reduce traffic volumes and, thus, air pollution resulting from traffic volumes.
- Reduce the presence and impact of highway arterials on the peninsula.
- Strengthen and enhance connectivity between peninsula neighborhoods, open space integrity, and pedestrian access to open space.
- Facilitate access to designated destinations by appropriate signage.
- Address the I-295 corridor and interchanges, future volumes, and safety issues in a manner consistent with the New Vision for Bayside Plan.
Traffic study infrastructure recommendations in Bayside (click to enlarge; note the new street connectivity, except at Franklin):
The dashed orange line next to I-295 is the extended AMTRAK corridor, which is no longer planned for this route. According to the traffic engineers, the AMTRAK line, and its potential to tie up traffic, is what justified the nine-lane widening of Franklin Arterial: allegedly, cars would have to have someplace to wait for the trains to pass, or hours of gridlock would result (the model failed to consider the possibility that drivers might choose another route, or another mode of travel, due to train crossings).
Traffic study infrastructure recommendations in the Eastern Waterfront (click to enlarge):
The Traffic Study also counted cars entering and leaving the peninsula, and found that almost 3,000 motor vehicles use Franklin during the afternoon peak hour (by contrast, 3,900 vehicles use Forest Ave. near Deering Oaks, and over 3600 vehicles use the Congress Street/Park Street couplet).
To its credit, the Traffic Study did include some well-received policy recommendations, which are likely to be salvaged and incorporated into the Comprehensive Plan. To wit:
- Traffic Policy should no longer accommodate the car over all other considerations.
- Shift from an auto-oriented infrastructure to promotion of other modes.
- Shift investment strategy from support for new lanes of asphalt to transit.
- Roadways should be built to targeted speeds – reduce rather than promote speed.
- No longer base traffic planning on accommodating peak hour volumes.
- Traffic delays should be considered normal during “rush hour” in an urban environment.
Finally, the 2007-2008 Peninsula Transit Study (still awaiting final draft and approval) had these goals:
- Minimize Single Occupant Vehicle (SOV) use
- Foster transit use and non-SOV travel patterns.
- Implement Travel Demand Management (TDM)
- Plan for transit to achieve an offset in traffic planning.
- Minimize future parking and traffic infrastructure.
- Balance investments in infrastructure and services, focus on “feasible” investments in transit.
- Reduce existing or proposed changes in traffic capacity, based on reduced SOV use.
The study’s approach to these goals included public transportation improvements, bicycle and pedestrian facilities improvements, transportation demand management strategies, transportation pricing strategies – especially with respect to parking, and changes to land use and development requirements.
The study included a pair of well-attended public forums, at which participants marked up maps of the peninsula with areas for improvement to the walking, cycling, transit, and driving environments. The marked-up maps (one is shown at left) featured lots of ink around Franklin Street, which was frequently criticized for its lack of connections and failure to accommodate most modes of travel. The Study recommends a full suite of bike and pedestrian improvements to Franklin Street to make it safe and comfortable along and across the street.
The Transit Study also recommended several “priority transit routes” through the peninsula, including Washington Ave., Congress St., and Elm/Preble Streets to Forest Ave. (see map below). Franklin was not identified as a short-term priority transit corridor through Bayside, but it was identified as a possible route for regional light rail service in the longer term:
CONCLUSIONS
How Comprehensive Planning Relates to Franklin Arterial:
- Franklin is a car mover for now, needs to be more of a people mover in the future
- Franklin has been seen as the definable boundary between neighborhoods (by design in the 1960’s, and by default hereafter)
- Policies support changing Franklin to a better connected, multi-modal corridor
