Any idea of how to improve the bottleneck of crossing the street at Market and San Carlos St? (The Marriott corner)
I was going to suggest shutting down a portion of the street to cars to make it like a farmers market setting, but that would take away bus and light rail. Or narrow San Carlos St into 1 lane and use the closed lane into a spill-over pedestrian walking lane.
Just one of those quirks of that part of downtown any time there is a big event, to be honest. Way easier to use the lightrail platform crosswalk directly in front of the convention center to get to the other side of San Carlos. I can only imagine the mess that will be down there when they begin the Parkside Hall redevelopment project.
Maybe just have about 20-25 seconds of pedestrian scramble during events, a lot of it probably has to do with so many people wanting to cross diagonally and using the two other corners, adding to traffic there.
Fanime, Comic-con, WWDC? events, maybe I'll ask to see if someone can bring it up with the mayor.
Dropping to one lane will really affect vehicle traffic. It gets backed up all the way along the next block past the Hilton corner due to attendees being dropped off and/or picked up in the bus stop area. I was on the bus headed to the convention center on Saturday morning, and we waited a good 15 minutes to get from the corner to the bus stop. The bus can't legally let us off between bus stops but it would have been quicker to get off at the stop before and walk to the center.