Challenge
The City of Tigard identified Tiedeman Avenue as a high-priority corridor for walking and biking improvements. The area is near a school and surrounded by residential neighborhoods, trails, and local businesses, and many residents reported concerns about high-speed driving. The City needed a clear path forward to improve safety for vulnerable road users while minimizing property impacts and preserving neighborhood character.
Solution
Our team partnered with the City to complete a feasibility study. This involved analyzing traffic conditions, identifying key issues and community priorities for the corridor, developing cross section and sketch-level alternatives, and preparing concept plans.
We explored a range of design alternatives and ultimately proposed a multi-use path with landscape buffers on both sides of the corridor to provide safety and comfort for people walking and biking. In tighter areas where the road narrows near existing homes, we tailored the cross sections to reduce or remove buffers while maintaining safe travel space. We also proposed a mini roundabout at Tigard Street to improve safety and operations at a key intersection, based on traffic analysis and design visualization. Once a preferred cross-section and intersection control types were selected, Kittelson prepared 30% design plans, cost estimates, a project visualization, and a stormwater plan for the corridor.
Our civil design team developed detailed corridor models in Civil 3D, including proposed surfaces, curb lines, and grading. This allowed for accurate cost estimates and a better understanding of how road widening would impact the surrounding area. A rendering process was layered into the workflow to create an animated scene complete with vegetation, school bus operations, and people walking and biking through the future corridor.
To clearly show the project’s potential, we also created an existing conditions model that could be swiped against the future design in the video, helping stakeholders and the public visualize the transformation. Watch the visualization below!
The Outcome
Turning Tigard Community Priorities into a Safer Street Design
The design process laid the groundwork for a complete multimodal corridor that reflects community priorities. The proposed design addresses safety concerns near a school, improves access to trails and nearby destinations, and supports lower vehicle speeds through context-sensitive design. The visual tools created throughout the process have already played a major role in building support by communicating tradeoffs and helping the public understand how the street could better serve people of all ages and abilities.
