The Cottonwood Public Works Department has put out bids for a plan to re-stripe Main Street from Mingus Avenue into Old Town, changing the lane and parking marking for a significant section of the city’s main thoroughfare.
Under the plan designed by Public Works, there will be diagonal parking on the section of road between Pima Street and Balboa Street at the entrance to Old Town. Diagonal parking allows for more spaces along the same stretch of road than the parallel parking that lines most of the street. The rest of Old Town will stick with the parallel parking that it has had until now, though additions of bike lanes through Old Town could lead to those spots becoming slightly narrower.
“We do get complaints,” Cottonwood City Manager Ron Corbin said of the parking situation in Old Town. “One of the biggest issues is for our employees, given all the restaurants and wineries and stuff. Even employees have a hard time finding parking spots, and we try to keep Main Street open for visitors. If you come down to the jail trail on some weekends, you can’t find parking. You have to be creative.”
Corbin said he nixed a plan to have the parking spots set up for back-in parking, which had been originally considered, even though they statistically lead to fewer accidents. Corbin said that since Main Street has so many visitors from out of town, he did not want to see motorists confused about how to park and cause problems.
In addition to the parking changes in Old Town, a major shift will be adjusting Main Street from Mingus Avenue through 7th Street to be a one-lane road with a center turning lane, instead of the two-lane road it currently is. The part of Main Street where it condenses from two lanes down to just one has seen frequent speeding by motorists, and city officials hope that having just one lane will lead to motorists driving slower.
“We’re hoping that this constriction will actually help slow traffic down,” Public Works Director Robert Winiecke said. The additional parking spaces between Balboa and Pima are aimed to do the same. “Right now you’ve got 12- or 13-foot wide lanes. People feel like there’s a lot of room for them in there so they feel like can go faster. But when you start to choke those lanes down a little bit, then there’s this perception that you’re closer to the other vehicle coming towards you, and that causes a little more hesitation to help people slow down a little bit.”
The central turning lane will phase out close to 7th Street, just like the second lane transitions to one currently. The transition will not happen immediately past Mingus Avenue but will instead give drivers a few hundred feet to merge before the road is just one lane by Cochise Street.
There will also be a dedicated left turn lane by Willard Street, allowing drivers to go past people stopped at that intersection in order to turn left without having to fit two cars into a single lane.
In addition to changing the road for drivers, the re-striping will include new additions to make Main Street more bike- friendly, part of the ongoing work by the city to achieve silver status as a bike- friendly community from the League of American Cyclists.
“This is to try and get a connective path for an alternate mode of transportation to try to tie Old Town to that whole corridor of Main Street,” Winiecke said. “It’s trying to complete that connection from Main to Mingus.”
In addition to the re-striping, the project will include some touch-ups on the pavement along Main Street, including grinding down some of the edges of the pavement by the gutter in order to make it more smooth for cyclists, and fixing spots that need to be repaired.
The project is currently out to bid, and the city is in negotiations with Fann Construction for a contract on the project. Once negotiations are complete, Winiecke hopes to bring the contract before the Cottonwood City Council for approval. He hopes to have the project completed by the end of the fall, or in the spring if it has to be postponed due to cold weather.
