College Ave.'s going to be a little difficult without banning a few blocks of metered parking in a neighborhood that has kinda too little metered parking to begin with. It's presently not even wide enough to stripe a "Share The Road" bike lane. But they may well have to do that, because way more bus revamping is coming to the area post-GLX and the RL-Davis + GL-College Ave. 'superloop' is ground-zero for all that sweeping change...as it's not hard to envision pingbacks from both stations becoming a feature on many, many future revamped routes (including newly -minted or -reprioritized crosstown routes out of that Greater Davis nerve center that potentially swing substantial ridership heft). Might be a case where turning the bolts on every micro-improvement available within current layout does the job more than bold new stripeage or prominent BRT branding. Signal coordination, some troubleshooting of the traffic pattern chaos at Powder House Rotary (some real timed signals, please, instead of the confusing blinking reds that induce all kinds of stutter-step flow kinks), or some time-of-day left-turn prohibition from side streets if that doesn't raise too huge a stink with the neighborhood. Maybe even just a thorough resurfacing of College Ave. where the pavement's gotten thoroughly chewed by 20 years of potholes and Dig Safe residue such that the surface quality no longer even holds non-faded lane markings year-round; at this point the road is holey enough for that to be an actual performance rather than cosmetic improvement.
Unfortunately Davis busway doesn't have real estate footprint for refashioning into a true in/out loop; it's hemmed in enough to always require a side-street sojurn on one leg. And the metered parking scarcity is legit, since residential permitting is already tapped out on every side street; taking street real estate for quasi-true bus lanes probably isn't practical if it removes that many meters. It may just be casting the widest possible for microscopic tighten-the-bolts touches that accomplish similar streamlining in the aggregate from throwing lots of tiny performance enhancement confetti at the board. The need for that is certainly going to grow uncomfortably real when GLX opens and it becomes clear what kind of Yellow Line spider map reboot is being considered for the North region as direct outflow.
