MUSKEGON, Mich. — ‘Watch Muskegon’ or ‘Watch Us Go’ have become a call to action in the Shoreline City, phrases employed to celebrate the major strides even now underway.
Among the city’s most impactful plans is a project still in the pipeline: a plan to put Shoreline Drive on a road diet, that is, narrow the road with the intention of linking downtown Muskegon to the lakeshore.
But if you pick up the debate on Facebook, many commenters seemed to believe they were watching Muskegon go in the wrong direction.
“I feel like you're going to watch people go, going to watch people leave the downtown because of something like this,” Michelle Ball said via Zoom Monday.
Like Michelle, one of the dozens to come out against the project in the comments section.
“This is anti-progress to pinch this traffic this way,” she asserted. “I just think we're going to see the wild west out there if we're not careful with this.”
The project, already dogged by controversy, calls for the replacement of a partial more than a mile-long section of one of the city’s busiest arteries: Shoreline Drive.
“Something that the city has been looking at doing a lot longer… to try to reconnect our community to the waterfront… for all of the people that live and visit downtown,” Leo Evans, director of the Muskegon Department of Public Work said.
Before the heavy equipment gets the green light, however, the work was expected to begin with a pilot program, during which crews would shut down one lane of traffic in each direction between Terrace Street and Southern Drive to show city engineers how the switch would look in real life.
Traffic data collected in 2019 showed approximately 20,000 cars pass through the stretch of Shoreline Drive in question on a daily basis.
How would cutting the two lanes in place now down to one affect the road’s usability and what will that mean for the average daily drive?
Not much, according to city officials.
After crunching the numbers, early modeling data suggested the change would mean an additional 50-90 seconds to navigate the affected area than was typical at present.
That figure, per the Department of Public Works, also accounted for the planned speed shift down to 35/MPH.
Regardless of the early numbers’ portrayal of a limited impact, Evans vowed the city intended to dig deeper prior to committing to the project.
“We've done some real preliminary modeling of it… but it’s one of those things. The best laid predictions sometimes get thrown out the window with reality,” he said. “So, it’s both of those pieces of information.”
Whatever the data tells them, Michelle would prefer locals had a say down the road.
“It's an experiment. But the problem is that so many times, it seems like what happens is these experiments just kind of end up being the way things are,” she said. “I can think of any number of just more intuitive, intelligent, worthwhile projects.”
The city said the pilot program would likely get underway around August and extend into the fall.
At the time of publication, Muskegon still required a permit from the state, given that Shoreline Drive or M-31 is also a state highway.
It also had yet to secure the engineering firm it said it would hire to assist with both the pilot program and the assessment of its impacts.
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