Connector provides safe passage to park
The project also made travel safer for vehicles. Hendon explained that two formerly skewed side streets on the south end of Holliday Park were realigned to form 90-degree angles where they intersect with Nationway, improving driver visibility.
Ayres coordinated with the Wyoming Department of Transportation to shut down the highly traveled Lincolnway for two-and-a-half days during installation of the underpass.
A round the same time the
conceptual study for Lake
Minnehaha’ s ecological mitigation was under development, additional Ayres staff were hired to design a pedestrian underpass at the south end of Holliday Park.
Now complete, the underpass is making for safer travel across a busy, four-lane state highway and nonstop travel from Holliday Park to the Greater Cheyenne Greenway.
“ It’ s sort of the big draw, the big greenspace in the heart of the community,” said Jeff Wiggins, senior planner for the City of Cheyenne Parks and Recreation Department, referring to Holliday Park.“ We have a quarter to a third of our population working in the downtown area, and the park is a gathering point for the entire community – so it was an important destination for us to be able to get to with our greenway system.”
Cheyenne’ s greenway system weaves its way throughout the City. Before the underpass’ installation, though, trail users looking to enter the park were stopped in their tracks when they came to Lincolnway, said Darci Hendon, a design engineer in Ayres
Associates’ Cheyenne office, noting that an estimated 27,000 vehicles travel along this section of the highway.
“ The Greenway just stopped on the south side of Lincolnway, and then all of the sudden you got on a regular 3-foot sidewalk and had to go to the light and push the button and wait to go across the highway to get into the park,” Hendon said.
“ It was inaccessible, and it felt like it was orphaned,” Wiggins added.
Installing the underpass connected the Greenway system inside and outside of the park, making a complete trail and giving people a safer means of crossing the busy highway.
“ Getting people into the park is my first priority, and we did,” Wiggins said.“ Before, you had parents of kids in strollers, folks on bike and foot, elderly, young, and everything in between, and they were sitting there going‘ Geez, how do I get across here? This is really nasty.’ It was a flat out dangerous place to try and cross the road, so this made an immense improvement.”
“ There’ s a lot of traffic on Lincolnway, and they allowed us to shut the whole thing down so that we could put the underpass in all in one shot. Otherwise, it would’ ve been a lot longer construction,” said Hendon, mentioning that work on the major east-west downtown connector occurred from a Friday afternoon to early Monday morning to decrease impacts to the traveling public as much as possible.
Wiggins said he appreciated Hendon’ s efforts during the construction phase, saying she was“ invaluable as a liaison.”
“ Darci, in particular, was the point person for all of that,” he said.“ She was very thorough, very thoughtful, and made sure that things didn’ t get swept under the rug. She brought issues that arose in the field immediately to us and consulted with us to find a reasonable solution.”
Many times, Wiggins said she’ d come back with three or four possible solutions – within hours.“ She was a great ally and assisted us through this whole process,” he said.
– Jennifer Schmidt
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