Cortez is not a pedestrian-friendly town, and that’s a deficiency worth tackling. The best way to help pedestrians is to make sure drivers stop for them. Even locals have not developed the habit of checking the crosswalks. The heart of the problem, though, is the fact that Main Street is also U.S. 160, one of the main east-west highways across this part of the United States.
That is not likely to change any time soon. Little support exists for a bypass. There is no logical, cost-effective route, and Cortez merchants do not want to give up on the possibility that drivers will park and shop. Some do; most do not, and many drivers blast right on through, alarming and sometimes endangering not only pedestrians but other drivers.
Even though heavy traffic and a friendlier pedestrian experience are not entirely compatible, the Cortez City Council is right to seek ways of improving safety. The city staff has carefully researched the benefits of calming traffic by adding medians to Main Street.
Medians make a certain amount of sense. They will prevent mid-block U-turns, and overall, they should make traffic less of a free-for-all than it sometimes is. They will give pedestrians a safer place to perch as vehicles zoom by. They will make downtown appear friendlier.
But the space taken up by the medians proposed for downtown Cortez will come from the width of the traffic lanes, which already feel uncomfortably tight on a highway carrying so many large vehicles driven by people whose goal is to get from one faraway place to another.
When someone opens the door of a parked car – probably to become a pedestrian and patronize a downtown business – the current 12-foot lane does not feel wide enough for a driver faced with a split-second decision. During the summer, Cortez sees a swarm of, wide RVs – some of them unfamiliar rentals driven by inexperienced drivers – and trailers pulled by pickups with extended mirrors. In the winter, when the road is slippery, staying in a lane is tough. (And how difficult will it be for a front-end loader to remove snow pushed to the middle of Main Street if there’s a median underneath the pile?)
If lane width is reduced, every traffic lane will feel like the turn lanes where yellow pop-up signs encroach, and turning drivers are slowing down, not speeding through. Imagine that squeeze at 25 mph – or worse, at the prevailing speed.
An example of an extremely good idea in a space that is technically, but not practically, big enough is the recent striping of streets that intersect with Main at downtown lights. Traffic approaching Main is divided into a left-turn lane and a lane for vehicles continuing straight or turning right. When long vehicles – for example, king cab long-bed pickups, hardly a rarity here – are parked diagonally near the intersection, though, fitting through is a squeeze, and a distraction.
Even though the engineering aspect of the plan works, the psychological aspect – implied in the phrase “traffic calming” – also must be considered. The reality is that the more difficulty drivers face maneuvering through town, the less attention they will have for pedestrians.
Perhaps it is a good idea to find a way test the solutions on actual drivers at peak traffic times before committing to construction. If the plan functions as intended, which we hope it will, build the medians. Until then, let us not forget that Cortez is not a community of subcompact cars. Pedestrians matter. Trucks, RVs and horse trailers matter too.