A vision for a revamped downtown Denton with tree-lined streets, wider sidewalks, bicycle lanes and new retail and housing development was laid out at a public meeting Thursday night.

Consultants for the city spent about two-and-a-half hours presenting draft recommendations for new downtown codes and gathering feedback on the plans at the Denton Civic Center. The meeting was the latest step in the city’s ongoing push to implement a 2002 downtown master plan this year.

The meeting offered another chance for the public to influence the area’s future before consulting firm Jacobs releases its final recommendations in late April or early May.

Any new codes would face public hearings and votes before the Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council, and some envisioned improvements such as more trees and wider sidewalks would likely count on public funding sources that haven’t been identified.

Still, downtown is poised to flourish with the completion of the plan and the arrival of a commuter rail station as early as next year, said Rick Leisner, planning director for Jacobs.

“Clearly, downtown Denton’s time is now,” he said.

Jacobs has worked since last fall to study the downtown area and recommend new standards for land use, architectural design, bicycle and pedestrian mobility, parking, trash bins, parks and open space, and related issues.

The study area includes roughly 160 acres bordered by Carroll Boulevard to the west, Parkway and McKinney streets to the north, Bell Avenue to the east and Sycamore Street to the south. Some of the same codes would apply farther east to Exposition Street to include the site of a planned downtown bus and rail center.

Recommendations floated Thursday include:

• Approving more-flexible development codes

• Adding bicycle lanes on Sycamore Street and shared lanes for cyclists and vehicles on Elm and Locust streets

• Removing many Dumpsters — either by having property owners share them or by offering daily collection of plastic trash bags

• Narrowing streets such as Hickory and Oak, and adding angled or parallel parking spaces to reduce the speed of traffic

• Limiting the requirements for new parking spaces by encouraging the shared use of existing lots

Attendees generally agreed on the broad ideas behind most of the proposals, according to an informal survey taken during the meeting. They offered mixed feedback on other proposals, such as limiting buildings to four stories near the Square and seven stories near the transit center.

Kati Trice, a representative of the Bike Denton group, said she liked some elements of the plan, including a requirement that developments provide some parking spaces for bicycles along with vehicles. But she was disappointed that the major east-west bicycle lanes were proposed for Sycamore Street, rather than Hickory Street. Hickory would be a more direct route between the University of North Texas and the planned downtown transit center east of the Square, she said.

Bud Melton of Bowman-Melton Associates, which is working with Jacobs on the plans, said Sycamore was chosen because it has less vehicle traffic.

Jacqueline Foertsch, who lives downtown, said she liked many of the consultants’ ideas. But she’s not convinced a downtown renaissance is in store.

“I don’t quite understand what has happened at this time that the town is now going to be able to bring businesses downtown, when we’ve been struggling against the Loop [288] for decades,” she said.

Denton banker Marty Rivers, chairman of the Denton Economic Development Partnership Board, said a new downtown development code would be a major step forward.

“One of the biggest problems developers have in trying to either rebuild or build something new downtown is we don’t have any codes in place to deal with that,” he said. “All the codes are designed for green-field development, and they don’t fit downtown.”

LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com .