AURORA | Residents around a proposed parking garage for a light rail station say heavy traffic and bad pedestrian access is already built-in to the 600-space Iliff Avenue garage that will open next year.
“We have a highly susceptible population of elderly people,” said Albert Melcher, a resident of the independent and assisted living facility, St. Andrew’s Village, located half a mile south of the future station on East Yale Avenue.
Melcher said the main access road, South Anaheim Street would be over-capacity with cars, bicycles and buses.
“Anaheim is serving too many purposes … I think things can be done to induce traffic over to Blackhawk Street,” he said, adding that Anaheim serves an important route for emergency vehicles that come to St. Andrew’s Village.
Melcher added that accessing the station for elderly residents would be difficult.
“We would like some sort of shuttle bus from here to the station,” he said.
He said the city should create a bike and pedestrian path from Yale to the station, and improve walkways on the east as well as the west side of Abilene as a way to diffuse traffic in the area.
The city’s plans include building a new roundabout at Anaheim at East Harvard Avenue, and extending Anaheim farther north to the new parking garage. Aurora’s planning department wants to attract mixed-use development along the street to transform its scattered prairie spaces into urban infill.
Steve Clark, a senior engineer with the city’s public works department, said the roundabout would be well-designed.
“A lot of people have used roundabouts in the past that haven’t been designed well. This one will give people a little more notice before they enter the intersection and it will help move traffic through,” he said. According to planners, the work on the Harvard roundabout will start next January and be completed some time in the spring.
The city will operate the garage when it’s complete. The two-story structure can be expanded in the future to hold 1,200 cars. The garage will open in 2015, ahead of the light rail line’s 2016 opening.
Melcher and Clark agreed on one thing about the garage: it shouldn’t resemble the concrete mass that is Nine Mile Station just south of Iliff.
“We want an exterior form that looks nice and is friendly,” Clark said.
Nine Mile Station has 1,225 parking spots and is normally full by 8 a.m. That station has no room for more parking.