Downtown Boise is About To Get a Lot More Crowded

Right now there are four or five thousand people who live in Downtown Boise, and 33-thousand or so are there on a daily basis for work.  Have you heard how that's going to increase in the next few years?  Holy cow!  And here's how the city plans to handle it.

Boise Weekly says in 20 years they expect 55,000 people to be working downtown and about 20,000 people will be living there.  Can the current downtown setup handle that many people?

Growth will create an obvious crunch for parking spaces, so they're trying to figure out how to plan for that.  The city is really hoping that more people will use options like buses and bikes, or other things besides cars.  They might create a downtown circulator—a T-shaped loop that carries a street car, and runs east/west on Main and Idaho streets and north/south on Capitol and Ninth streets.  An extension might go to the Boise State student union.

They're also thinking of adding protected bike lanes on Main and Idaho streets, which means they'd move on-street parking away from the curb and create a new bike lane between parked cars and the sidewalk.  To make space, they'd have to take out a lane of traffic on Main and one on Idaho.

You can learn more about the bike lane project HERE, and they'll take comments on it through March 30th.