West Palm Beach's Tamarind Avenue is a dynamic corridor that serves as the western edge of Downtown West Palm Beach and provides regional transit connections via the tri-rail intermodal station. Alta led a team to re-imagine the existing car-oriented corridor by designing a transformative vision for the street.
Upon approaching this project, the West Palm Beach Tamarind Avenue corridor was car-oriented, under-developed, and dangerous for everyone using the corridor. Alta used a public charrette process to shape the vision and identify the appropriate “rebalancing” of facilities along the corridor. This led to the creation of a long-term vision for enhanced pedestrian crossing opportunities, a separated bikeway facility, expanded and enhanced bus bays, a public plaza, context-sensitive vehicular travel lanes to improve safety, and improved medians and landscaping.
Following the development of the long-term vision, Alta was contracted by the City to prepare a near-term design and traffic operations improvement plan for the corridor, aimed at incrementally achieving the long-term vision. The proposed design along Tamarind Avenue includes accommodating additional transit vehicles, adding pedestrian crossings at Evernia Street, installing a traffic signal at Datura Street, and adding channelization median islands to manage vehicular traffic along the corridor. Short-term improvements along Tamarind Avenue are currently under construction, with some portions already complete.