There’s been some momentum on Eau Claire’s Hastings Way redesign project. SEH Inc., the company doing the redesign and eventual reconstruction, has assembled the comments and ideas from last June’s public input meeting and magically boiled it all down into the glorious PowerPoint presentation you can download here.

They also scheduled the next public meeting for Thursday, September 9 (5-7pm), again at Regis High School. Details. At the meeting, SEH is to present a range of design alternatives covering lane width, general safety, aesthetics, multimodal use (bike and pedestrian paths), as well as “long-term land use and redevelopment options.” And, of course, they’ll be asking for public input on the ideas, so it’s important to show up and say what you think.

In case you don’t know, the Hastings Way redesign will cover the stretch of “Old 53” that runs from Clairemont Avenue to the Eau Claire River. Since the rerouting of Highway 53 a few years ago, traffic on that road has been reduced by about 50 percent. Yet the size of the roadway and the remaining car traffic – when coupled with a lack of bike and pedestrian pathways – place it in dischord with the surrounding neighborhoods and businesses.

In the May 20th issue of Volume One Magazine – the “Reinventing Our Streets” issue – we proposed a number of street design elements that could possibly work for Hastings Way. Obviously, it’s an “all in” vision for the street, but any one of those elements could be incorporated into the final redesign. You can see it here.