Reducing the galaxy of lights on the Port’s airportlike Spring Street is a good idea; so are higher speed limits elsewhere and a new pedestrian way

It’s no mystery why Port Washington’s South Spring Street is frequently compared to an airport runway: It looks like one.

A dazzling example of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s urban road-building philosophy—“There is no such thing as too much concrete”—this pavement extravaganza looks wide enough for a jumbo jet and is in fact wide enough for four lanes of terrestrial traffic.

The peculiar fact that in spite of its excessive width only two lanes of traffic can use the street—driving in the outer two lanes is forbidden—might lead to the assumption that the DOT paved the earth along the Spring Street right of way (and parts of the front yards of some homeowners) just because it was there.

In any case, South Spring Street as reconstructed earlier in this decade is about as appropriate as an entrance way to a pretty small town as a Boeing 747 would be landing on a rural airstrip.

To their credit, Port Washington officials didn’t let that sort of mistake be inflicted on the city again when North Wisconsin Street was rebuilt two years ago. That street was narrowed, rather than widened like Spring Street, and with its abundant newly planted trees and decorative lighting is every bit the welcoming northern gateway to the city it was intended to be.

The city is stuck with South Sprint Street, of course, and there is little it can do to soften an image as cold as concrete in January, but it is working on one good idea that promises to be at least a small aesthetic improvement—turning off half of the street lights.

One of the reasons South Spring Street inspires airport metaphors is that it’s lighted like a runway, with many more street lights than are needed. The ranks of closely spaced lights not only provide garish illumination of the street’s flaws, but must be an annoyance to residents forced to live in a synthetic version of the land of the midnight sun.

Unplugging 16 of the 32 lights between the Oakland Avenue and Portview Road intersections is proposed as a trial. If it’s deemed an improvement, the lights could, as Public Works Director Rob Vanden Noven has proposed, be removed and installed at the coal dock, where lights will be needed when the property is improved as public lakefront space.

Let it be done. Spring Street and its residents, the coal dock development and the taxpayers will all benefit.

South Spring Street, it must be said, does have one positive feature—a reasonable speed limit of 35 miles per hour for much of its length. This street/highway is built to safely accommodate speeds faster than that, but the 35 zone at least acknowledges that traffic should move faster on some streets.

Other streets taking traffic to and from the city are burdened by a 25 mile-per-hour limit. The slow zone seems endless on the outer reaches of Highway 33 at the west city limits. When that road is rebuilt in the near future a more realistic speed restriction should be applied.

The 25 limit on almost all Port Washington streets is conservative. City police take an enlightened view of enforcement, and it’s safe to say that while serious speeders are arrested, no one gets a ticket for driving 26 miles per hour. But there seem to be two schools of thought among drivers about speed limits. One is that 25 is a guideline, meaning drive slowly and carefully but not necessarily at exactly 25. The other is that 25 means 25, or maybe 23 or 20. The latter group of drivers get to control the speed of the traffic flow, which makes for unnecessarily slow going on many streets.

The 25 limit is right for downtown and residential neighborhoods. Elsewhere a somewhat higher limit would make sense.

The speed limit will not be an issue for Harborview Lane if the plan to turn the little lakefront street into a pedestrian way goes forward. Only two blocks long, Harborview doesn’t carry much traffic and really isn’t needed as a conventional street. And because it’s in bad repair and needs improvement of some kind, the city’s idea of turning it into a landscaped walkway and bike path (a short leg of the Interurban Trail) makes sense.

It would add to the beauty of the downtown by providing a landscaped, motor-vehicle-free connection between the historic Light Station and the marina complex with places for people to rest and take in the harborside ambience.

The project will have to wait until a new TIF district is created next Jan. 1, but planning should proceed now so it can be finished by summer of 2011.