Omaha By Design: Omaha, Only Better

by Ken Mayer

This month, I offer a couple of odds and ends.

Odd Angles

In the busiest areas of our city, parking has become a crazy quilt. One block can be one-way traffic with parallel parking, the next two-way with diagonal, then back to parallel.  Many of us who have lived and worked in these districts have long hoped for a better way. The Old Market, for instance, works, in part, because the cobblestone two-way streets slow traffic down, and the diagonal parking provides a buffer zone for people on the sidewalks.

Mark Fenton, an advocate for pedestrian and bicycle safety, offered an interesting notion at Environment Omaha’s public meeting on community health last month that adds a new wrinkle to the parking problem.

He recommends reverse diagonal parking. It’s the familiar diagonal, but striped in the opposite direction. Instead of going in head first, you back in, like the way you would begin to parallel park.

This orientation has several advantages. You can get the kids out of the car with a much reduced probability that one of them will bolt into the street because the open car door blocks the way. Loading and unloading the trunk is done from the curb – not standing in traffic and you exit the parking spot with much better visibility. Cities that have tried this method report lower accident and injury rates.

Since flex time is now widespread among large employers and the big performance and sports venues are now situated to the north of the old central business district, it seems like the prospect of any real “rush” hour traffic jams in the heart of downtown is greatly reduced.

Maybe it’s time to think about returning to two-way streets and diagonal parking if only as a matter of economic development. Slower two-way traffic means better exposure and access to street level businesses. Reverse diagonal parking would increase the number of parking places and improve safety.

Seems like a small price to pay if even a single business is saved or injury to a child is avoided.

To a Good End

When I was a kid, we could tell the good guys from the bad guys (on TV and in the movies anyway) by the color of their hats. It wasn’t long before I knew enough to figure out how naïve and simplistic that view was.

So, with all the rancor over immigration and trying to tell who is wearing the white hats and who is wearing the black hats, I take a certain small pride in our city’s recent willingness to welcome immigrants.

That attitude is given tangible expression in the South 24^th streetscape and the recent completion of the gateway public art at L Street. The Tree of Life sculpture represents South Omaha’s rich history as a new home for immigrants from all over the planet.

I encourage you to visit South Omaha if you haven’t been there in a while.

The district has become every bit as lively and interesting as the Old Market and is a great place to dine, shop and brush up on that Spanish you took in high school.