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15 years ago
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Photos: Market St. Reconstruction Preview
The Market St. ramp is long gone and the reconstruction of Market St. is nearly complete. I'll likely have a full spread of pictures once this project is complete, but for now, here's a taste of how things are turning out (photos taken during the SSC Tour on August 22).
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6 comments:
It appears that this Market Street project turned out nicer than originally thought. Perhaps I'm mistaken?
Look at the gawkers in that last shot.
:)
My preliminary take on Market is that it's pretty good. The primary flaw that most people didn't like about the plans was the two-way left turn only lane (which isn't striped yet). But that's not hard infrastructure, and as we've seen with Michigan and New York, you could pretty easily restripe it in the future.
As for the hard infrastructure itself, it looks good:
Curb bumps for crossings
Curb-side parking
Inlaid brick crosswalks (very nice touch)
Lamp posts are a missed opportunity for distinctive design but they'll be fine
More important than the lamp posts, I think the city missed a big opportunity with the traffic lights. At least we did get standard traffic light masts -- as opposed to the horrible wire-hung lights on Washington -- but I wish they had taken The Urbanophile's advice regarding implementing the Wholesale District posts on any traffic light replacement in the city. That would have been particularly appropriate on Market given that the city wants to present a distinctive streetscape.
Also: they managed to keep the lampposts, switchboxes, and traffic light mast bases out of the middle of the sidewalks. Sad, but for Indy that's progress.
I think the missed opportunity is the street trees...where are they? It would make the street much more appealing.
anon -- I don't have photo evidence but I'm pretty sure there are spaces for tree plantings in some of the curb bump-outs. Apologies, this is by no means a complete set and the project really isn't complete.
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