Our long experiment of running a freeway through Onondaga Lake Park has failed. The Parkway doesn’t even function properly as a high-speed arterial, and it blights the County’s premier public park. The I-81 project presents an opportunity to shift traffic to a safer corridor and restore public access to Onondaga Lake Park itself.

Right now, the Parkway functions as a limited access highway—like 690 or 81. Car drivers use it to get between 81 and the heavily populated northern suburbs in Salina and Clay.

But the Parkway was never designed to serve that purpose. There is no center median, so fast-moving cars hit each other head-on. Instead of exits, the Parkway has unsignalized intersections, so traffic backs up behind cars trying to turn left into and out of popular destinations like the Butterfly Garden, Ska-Nonh Center, and the Onondaga Lake Park’s main entrance. The rail bridge was built to accommodate canal boats rather than commercial vehicles, so trucks and buses crash into it, and people die.

The I-81 project will make the Parkway redundant as a highway. Removing the Downtown viaduct will free up room  shift through-traffic away from the part of 81 between Salina and Downtown, and NYSDOT also intends to increase car-capacity on that stretch. The upshot is that Onondaga County is about to get a lot more highway capacity between the northern suburbs and Downtown Syracuse, so the Parkway won’t be necessary to handle commuter traffic anymore.

(drivers unwilling to use the Thruway to reach 81 can just take Old Liverpool Road, another underused route with a comparable travel time).

This is a perfect opportunity for City Hall, the Town of Salina, Onondaga County, and New York State to solve the Parkway’s problems by redesigning it to function more like a park-road and less like a high-way. The first step is to reduce (and enforce) the speed limit on the Parkway. Car drivers looking for high-speed through-routes will use 690 or 81 instead, and far fewer cars will travel the Parkway.

Then, the Parkway needs to be rebuilt more in line with those low traffic volumes and low speeds. The lanes can be a little narrower, and there can be fewer of them. County Parks can use the left over right-of-way to bring the Loop the Lake Trail down this side of the Lake where it will be a stone’s throw from the Creekwalk (the County should also extend the Beartrap Creek trail to connect with Loop the Lake here).

NYSDOT should also implement Salina Town Supervisor Nick Paro’s idea to replace the asphalt squid at the Parkway’s southern end with a roundabout connecting it with Buckley Road, Old Liverpool Road, and Park Street. This would protect the Parkway from highway traffic, and the Parkway off of this roundabout should be landscaped to create a formal entrance to Onondaga Lake Park. Another roundabout at Griffin Drive will allow drivers to make left-hand turns into and out of the main park without backing up traffic. At the Parkway’s northern end, the intersection with Oswego Street should be simplified, shrunk, and landscaped to make it easier to walk to Heid’s and to create a decent-looking entrance to the Village of Liverpool.

These changes are a long time coming. Onondaga Lake Parkway has long been one of the least reliable, most dangerous freeways in Central New York, and it ruins a huge section of the County’s most popular public park. The Community Grid will make this freeway totally unnecessary, and we should seize the opportunity to tear it out and build vision of the Parkway.