SPRINGDALE -- The City Council approved putting new stop signs at three intersections along Emma Avenue to make the downtown more inviting to pedestrians, reducing the city's administration's recommendation for four.
The stop signs will go up at the avenue's intersections with Holcomb, Main and Shiloh streets. A city staff recommendation including a fourth at Commercial Street was rejected. The compromise was reached after about 40 minutes of discussion Monday. Proposals for new stop signs on as few as one and as many as four of the intersections were considered and rejected before the council reached a consensus in a 5-3 vote.
The stop signs will make four-way stops at the Main and Shiloh intersections. Holcomb, which comes to a "T" at Emma, will have a three-way stop.
The city's downtown plan calls for stop signs to slow traffic and allow safer transit of crosswalks for pedestrians at intersections there. The plan didn't specify which intersections would receive those stop signs or how many there should be. The city's Street Committee, made of representatives of city agencies that oversee traffic and public safety, recommended the four-intersection plan, which Mayor Doug Sprouse also favored.
"When downtown Springdale was thriving, it was when pedestrians knew they could walk safely," Sprouse told the council early in the debate.
When downtown was thriving, businesses in the area didn't have competition from shopping malls, replied Ray Dotson, a downtown business owner who objected to the plan for four signs. "If you put stop signs all along downtown Emma you're going to kill business," he said, because traffic would avoid the area.
Much of Emma Avenue's traffic consists of people driving through as quickly as they can on its way to other parts of the city, downtown businesswoman Debbie Eden told the council. Customers taking advantage of available parking on one side of Emma Avenue have difficulty walking to the other side to reach any downtown business with limited parking, she said.
"I cross that crosswalk with my grandkids, and I have to step into the street and hold my hands up to get across," she said of the Shiloh intersection. "Cars flying through there are really a problem."
NW News on 09/14/2016