Are there renderings newer than the ones posted above? If so, where might I find them?
None that I can share right now - I haven't seen the newer ones floating around anywhere else yet. It looks nice though, more brick and has more of a loft style look. It looks a lot like this project in Dallas:
https://www.noveldeepellum.com/galleryThere is a big difference between slowing traffic down and traffic congestion which increases pollution and drives people away from an area. And that being said what 11th is now is people speeding from one backup at an intersection to another - I see that all day until rush hour hits where it then turns into silly backups at most intersections. 11th is used by a lot of downtown workers to get to 244 I assume to avoid the IDL downtown so when they all head home the Yale intersection turns into a cluster. We're three blocks down from 11th and Yale and every weekday the traffic will backup sometimes six blocks down from the intersection. Because of there not being a right-hand turning lane at the intersection any longer people have a choice of waiting and waiting and waiting or avoiding the light by turning down Winston and hitting Yale from 12th. This is causing undue traffic in the neighborhoods where there are a lot of people who like to walk, and since there are no sidewalks they now get to avoid an increase of cars in the street.
I'm all for the road diet on 11th but just painting some lines and saying "ta-da - we have bike lanes" is not the right way to do it and other cities, like Portland and New York have figured this out. You are not going to make Tulsa into a bicycling Mecca unless you make the bike lanes safe and what the city has wasted money on so far is the exact opposite - it's almost designed to fail. I mean, I really don't expect any less from the city but it just seems like the bike lanes they put in were nothing more than lip-service to the road diet crowd to shut them up.
As far as cars slowing down being beneficial to business - I totally agree BUT without easy access to a business (ie - a turning lane) you aren't going to get great results. And why not lower the speed limit on the street? Seems like a no-brainer and one they did on 15th.
Again, I'm on your side on this but I don't think it was done right, isn't going to get the desired results because of that, and has created new problems that aren't being addressed.
Frankly I've never seen a single example of where congestion drives people away. If that was the case Austin (especially areas like SoCo, Rainey Street, 6th, etc.) NYC, DC, LA, etc. would be vast wastelands by now. Every successful commercial corridor has congestion, it's just the reality of it. When a commercial area has no traffic congestion, it's usually a very bad sign. I'm also not sure why anyone would use 11th street to get out of downtown to avoid I-244, there is zero congestion on 244 out of downtown or on the streets downtown to get to 244 via Cincinnati or Detroit. Maybe you are seeing the effects of people leaving Hillcrest and other businesses?
Now, I agree the road diets completed need to be upgraded eventually. Something as simple as planter boxes that help separate the bike lanes and make them safer could be easy fixes but would likely have to be done by the businesses along the corridor themselves at the moment. The city doesn't have a lot of money to play with right now for upgrading the bike lanes to full separation yet. It will likely have to wait for the next bond issue for them to set aside money to make some of these road diets more permanent and safer. What they've done so far is still 100x better than having it stay as a 4 lane road that was unnecessary for the amount of traffic 11th and others handle. We can't design cities around the fact that someone might have to wait 1 or 2 cycles of a light at a particular intersection during rush hour. That's what we've done before and that's one of the reasons why many of these urban corridors died, we made it too easy for people to blow right past businesses which in turn creates an unpleasant environment for people. The unnecessary fear of 'congestion' and building roads in the urban core to 'fix' that problems ends up resulting in businesses moving to the suburbs anyways because when you design the urban core to make it easy to escape everyone eventually will and has. Adding turn lanes at specific intersections might be needed at some point but in general they are a complete waste of space outside of being on signaled intersections. That space would be better used for on street parking or expanded sidewalks.
The problem with speed limit reductions is people don't pay attention to them and they drive as fast as the road allows them to feel safe - Cherry Street tried that too and failed a long time ago. Narrower roads make people drive slower, bigger lanes make people think it's a freeway - Cherry Street really started to change when they added more parking and narrowed the lanes just with paint years ago and that was when traffic began to slow down and it became less dangerous. Then finally years and years later it moved along to the recent improvements which are more permeant. Brookside is another good example, traffic moves much slower between 33rd to 35th than between 41st and 36th - has nothing to do with anything other than the width of the lanes - they shrink dramatically and people don't feel like they can drive 40 mph anymore and that's a good thing for that particular area.
Just keep in mind that the road diets being done are mostly in a temporary format, most of the planning documents state for various improvements to be made but it's better to start doing it then just leave it however it was, and then work to make incremental improvements with better barriers, landscaping, etc. down the line as funding is available. Portland and NYC started much of their bike infrastructure the same way Tulsa is doing now, with just some paint. They are decades ahead of us and now in general when they expand biking infrastructure it's usually not just paint it's full on separated lanes, etc. and they have gone back and improved corridors that were temporary to begin with to improve them. Someday Tulsa will get there (hopefully) but everyone has to start somewhere. It is much easier to make a 'temporary' solution like repainting the street permanent than it is to take say the old format and go from it directly into permanent (this is well documented in planning circles too and why the city is taking this route - it creates far less NIMBY issues). This does actually allow the planning department to observe too what works and what might not before you invest the money into full upgrades to the corridors.