Friends of Eugene Forum

Message - Riverfront access plan flawed - Jerry Diethelm letter in RG

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Posted by  Kevin Matthews on March 08, 2005 at 16:34:48:

Dear Mayor Piercy and City Council,

I hope Jerry Diethelm's counsel for you to see the currently rushed plans for Eugene's downtown riverfront accurately in three dimensions, before pushing ahead without such visualization, will be well-taken.

I know that many of those of us who are expert in such visualization stand in dismay. Jerry's senario may actually be optimistic.

Sincerely,

Kevin Matthews
Friends of Eugene
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Riverfront access plan flawed

Letter to the Editor - Eugene Register Guard, 2005.0306
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/03/06/ed.letters.0306.html

The plan for the federal courthouse neighborhood is to "Return to the River" in a series of trenches. Make an effort to visualize the proposal three dimensionally and I think you will see what I mean.

Imagine yourself standing alongside the road at the proposed railroad underpass, which would put you about 16 feet down below grade, and walk through the underpass. Where do you end up? What do you see?

You end up looking at a 16-foot wall and find yourself at the bottom of a two-block-long ramped trench that climbs up along the tracks to the downtown riverfront. This is not a pleasant downtown-to-river connecting experience.

But it gets worse, because in order to get to the place we started under the tracks, it is necessary to start ramping down Eighth Avenue at the courthouse intersection until it dead ends into the new Patterson Street extension to the underpass. Eighth will need to have sunken at least 10 feet at the Eighth and Patterson intersection in order to be able to duck under the new Sixth Avenue state highway extension from Broadway and Hilyard streets. In order to get down fast enough, the Patterson extension itself has to start sloping down toward the tracks just north of Broadway.

OK, I dissent. I don't really think anyone will want to return to the downtown riverfront this way, hospital or not. Oh, Eugene! If folly were cake, we'd all be fat.

JERRY DIETHELM

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