Drivers may be squeezed but all else should be pleased — from pedestrians and cyclists to shoppers, diners and business owners.

Maybe even pint-sized kids who like pint-sized parks.

That's the goal in Oak Park for 9 Mile Road. It's going on a "road diet," the urban planner's term for converting lanes of traffic into bike lanes, on-street parking, expanded walkways, linear parks and more.

In Oak Park, 9 Mile has long had five lanes of traffic, including two lanes each way and a center turn lane. Now, two of those traffic lanes are going away over the next several years in a three-phase project.

The first phase is to be celebrated at 6 p.m. Tuesday. City officials, together with Oakland County Executive Dave Coulter, plan to cut a ribbon to mark the addition of a tiny park along the route, a spin-off of the new emphasis on pedestrians and cyclists.

Road diets used to be controversial, especially in metro Detroit's auto-centric culture. In the late 1990s, when road diets were unheard of, Ferndale debated squeezing traffic lanes out of its stretch of West 9 Mile, just west of Woodward Avenue.

At that time, the city's commercial corridor had two lanes of vehicles racing each way through a half-mile strip of largely shuttered storefronts, nail salons and hardly any sit-down restaurants. Most businesses had adjusted by constructing entrances for patrons in the rear of their buildings, adjacent to parking lots, while their actual front doors faced a mini-highway of vehicles and not a parking place in sight.

Ferndale's police chief at the time opposed the road diet, saying it would cause car and pedestrian accidents. But the city, urged by board members of its Downtown Development Authority, plowed ahead to replace one lane each way with on-street parking, The rest, as they say, is history. Ferndale won numerous awards for the move, although the biggest payback for civic and business leaders was simply watching the astounding commercial turnaround of its West 9 Mile Road shopping and dining district.

Since then, road diets have begun to dot metro Detroit's streetscape. The most prominent is on East Jefferson in Detroit, implemented recently.

Now Oak Park will try the same tactic on a timeworn stretch of 9 Mile that goes west from Pinecrest Avenue in Ferndale, so Ferndale is a partner in the project. The goal, says city spokesman Colton Dale, is to "spruce up the whole corridor" and "hopefully kick-start some new investment and development in the area."

In addition, by adding two "pocket parks" — created by closing off two residential streets at 9 Mile and installing pedestrian- and bike-friendly amenities — the city hopes "to foster a sense of place for residents and visitors that wasn't there before," Dale said. The sheer addition of humanity to street scenes, coupled with slower traffic — a concept that planners call "traffic calming" — becomes an attraction to shoppers and diners because it signals that a location is both safe and popular, according to the theory called New Urbanism.

The amenities will include bike lanes and a walking path, dense angle parking in some areas while other spots get conventional parallel parking, bike racks and bike lockers, drinking fountains, ornamental landscaping, an all-weather map under a roofed kiosk with a bike-repair station, decorative pavement, an upgraded bus stop, and enhanced bike and pedestrian crossings.

Although safety advocates criticize angle parking for creating hazards when a parked car backs out into the traffic lane, Oak Park has an answer: Drivers will back into these spaces.

The city's road diet has been in the works for five years, as city leaders eyed vacant storefronts, and as online shopping increasingly drained vitality from Oak Park and similarly aged business corridors around metro Detroit.

Funding for the project includes a joint grant of $1.8 million from the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) and SEMCOG, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, according to the city.

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Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com