Four years of planning and meetings is finally paying off for some business owners in Davenport. Today city crews are taking one of the four traffic lanes on Harrison Street, and converting it to parking - from 5th Street to 18th Street.
Scott Tunnicliff, director of the Hilltop Campus Village, says when the village first organized in 2009, business owners identified two major problems for customers.
"One of the barriers was safety of pedestrians and others. And another was the volume of traffic that moved at the speed that it did."
Then a few years ago, the city closed two of the four lanes on Harrison for a sewer project and re-surfacing.
"Some of the property owners along Harrison, and some of the folks in our group noticed that while that impeded traffic for the rush 20 minutes, say from 7:45 to 8:05, otherwise traffic flowed pretty smoothly."
By Thursday this stretch of Harrison Street will have parking on the west side and three lanes for traffic. And Tunnicliff hopes this will make the Hilltop Campus Village look more like a "village" and less like an "interstate highway." If all goes well, he thinks sometime in the future a similar change might be considered for the nearby, and comparable section, of Brady Street.