Businesses along Douglas welcome streetscape changes

After nearly two months the orange posts along downtown’s primary thoroughfare — making most of a 10-block stretch of Douglas Avenue resemble an auto slalom course —are all but gone.

Downtown officials said nearly all of the work to make walking or riding public transit downtown easier, has been completed.

The biggest part of the project, which for much of the time narrowed parts of Douglas to one lane east and west between Main and Washington, wrapped up Thursday.

Officials said there’s still some work to be done to finish a signal-controlled crosswalk at Rock Island and Douglas as well as the installation of eight bus shelters along the route.

Jeff Fluhr, president and CEO of Wichita Downtown Development Corp., called the project “a continued progression of increasing the connectivity” of Old Town with downtown and the river.

Owners of businesses along Douglas generally agreed that the work, while sometimes making it inconvenient for customers and employees, was manageable.

The scope of the work involved extending curbs at intersections along the route out to the traffic lanes of Douglas.

There were two goals to extending those curbs. One was to shorten the distance pedestrians have to cross when walking from one side of Douglas to the other, said Scott Knebel, downtown revitalization manager for the Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning Department.

“One of the priorities of the Project Downtown plan was to focus … on those corridors downtown that are already the most walkable,” he said. “Of course, Douglas was the most prime corridor.”

The second goal, Knebel said, was to make room for the placement of covered bus stops that will have electronic signage displaying when the next bus will arrive and accommodate two park-style benches.

“The bus shelters are large enough that they really wouldn’t fit in the existing sidewalk,” Knebel said.

He said the shelters were part of the original project but were eliminated because the bid results were too high. “We’re re-bidding them here in the next couple of weeks,” he said, adding that their design will be customized to fit the other sidewalk “furniture” downtown. “Hopefully before winter they’ll be coming in and placing those over the benches.”

Another added amenity of the project was the installation of bicycle racks along the project area.

The overall cost of the Douglas Avenue Corridor Transit Oriented Development project — which included design and construction — is $1.35 million, Knebel said. Of that, $1.08 million was provided by a federal transit grant and $270,000 was from the city. The project was originally approved by the Wichita City Council in August 2012, following several public workshops and citizen input.

Angled parking gone

Knebel said the angled parking slots in front of Eaton Place — along the south side of Douglas between Emporia and St. Francis — were eliminated as part of the project’s design plan.

Parallel parking was restored there, and new angled parking slots were created along the west side of St. Francis between Douglas and William, and on the east side of Emporia between Douglas and William. The change, Knebel said, resulted in the loss of nine parking spaces in front of Eaton Place. But with the addition of angled parking slots on St. Francis and Emporia, the net gain of parking spaces around that block was five, he said.

Some parallel parking slots also were lost to the creation of the extended sidewalks and curbs, up and down Douglas.

Fluhr, whose offices are at Eaton Place, said the elimination of angled parking there initially created some confusion among people trying to park there. He said in the days immediately following the elimination of angled parking, drivers were still trying to park there at an angle.

“One (car) would do it and then start a ripple effect,” he said.

Now, visitors to Eaton Place have figured out the angled parking is gone.

“It was a transition,” Fluhr added.

‘Price of progress’

While there was some inconvenience and confusion, business owners along Douglas said since the project was relatively short, so was the period of pain.

“We were kind of right in middle of it,” said Warren Tandoc, owner of Espresso To Go Go coffee shop on the northeast corner of Douglas and St. Francis. “It seemed like initially, it didn’t really affect our business that much in the first two or three weeks. Then, it seemed like in the last couple of weeks, parking and people’s accessibility on foot were affected.”

Farther east on Douglas, Social Manor co-owner Lauren Johnson said she doesn’t think her home design and decor shop at 920 E. Douglas was affected much by the work.

That’s because customers who shop at her business typically come there specifically for that reason, versus customers who come in because they are just walking by.

“For us, most of our traffic intentionally comes to see us,” Johnson said. She added that most of her customers use a parking lot in the back of the store to visit Social Manor.

At Sandbar Trading next door, co-owner Julie Gottsponer said “it was pretty hard to get here” through much of the summer, which she attributed to work she said that was being done on the roof as well as the Douglas project. She said she and her husband, Rick, had closed the shop during some of that time to focus on selling the shop’s native American arts and gifts at shows outside Wichita. That was partly because of the construction work as well as the local economy, she said.

She said she couldn’t attribute a slow down in business entirely to the Douglas project.

“I don’t think it was just the street (work),” she said.

None of the shop owners along Douglas said they viewed work on the project as a bad thing.

“I think any improvements they make will help us,” Gottsponer said.

Social Manor’s Johnson said she views the project and any temporary inconvenience as ultimately “good.”

“Anything to improve downtown is always welcome,” Johnson said.

Tandoc said he remembers on several occassions looking out Espresso To Go Go’s window and watching potential near misses between pedestrians and cars before the curbs were extended at the St. Francis and Douglas intersection.

“I’m really hoping the modifications makes that safer for people on foot down there.

As for the street project affecting business, Tandoc added, “I don’t think it was a negative thing.”

“It’s the price of progress,” he said. “In the long run, I think it’s going to do nothing but benefit all the businesses down here.”

This story was originally published September 26, 2014 at 5:05 PM with the headline "Businesses along Douglas welcome streetscape changes."