Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Transportation Options

I found a presentation on Transportation Options that was presented at a meeting of the Transportation Commission and DAPAC. The presentation suggested creating a transportation model which would create a way to assess how transportation in Berkeley functions today and in the future. This would provide decision makers with a method of testing the transportation consequences of their decisions. It would also allow the city to test how various development plans would impact transportation in downtown. The transportation model could also help disclose potential environmental impacts of policy decisions. The transportation model would test such things as the quantity and distributions of trips (origins and destinations), the mode split of trips (cars, transit, walking and bikes), travel patterns (direction and flow), traffic performance (intersections volume and capacity), and other performance issues, including those related to parking.

The presentation also mentioned some of the transportation options that the city is considering, including converting travel lanes to bike lanes, sidewalks, or landscape, creating Shattuck square, boulevard options for Shattuck, and moving BART from Shattuck to Oxford. The presentation discussed First Street in Livermore as an example of transportation remodeling. Here, the city converted 2 lanes into angled parking and paved former parking lanes to create a downtown street segment that was pedestrian-friendly.

Presentation by the Transportation Commission and DAPAC of January 31, 2007 re: Transportation and Land Use Options, available at http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=11718

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