Better! Cities and Towns has just featured items from Charles Marohn’s new book, “Neighborhoods First.” He will be an SFU City Program speaker on October 24. (You can reserve here.)
Here’s an excerpt:
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We used Tactical Urbanism to determine where other neighborhood needs are being ignored. Mill Avenue is a major thoroughfare that bisects our study neighborhood. We spent a lot of time out on the street but didn’t see a lot of pedestrians crossing Mill. For a cost of $78, we installed some orange flags for people to use to raise their profile as they cross the dangerous street. The flags are constantly being moved yet have not been stolen after five months and we’ve received testimonials from people who say they use them. Again, we confirmed our hypothesis; people are crossing Mill Avenue and they don’t feel safe doing it.
The insights produced from low cost experimentation like this are within every city’s – or neighborhood group’s – grasp. When we take the time and effort to watch and discern how people go about their daily business in their neighborhoods, and when we introduce temporary experiments to see how people react, we’re using a time tested approach for improving complex systems: the scientific method.
I doubt that here is any scientific result to report based on the antics of the author. I expect that the observations are the result of the novelty of the experiments. No science here!
Mill Avenue is an arterial bisecting the NE neighbourhood and in the summer it is a very busy corridor connecting tourists from the south as far as Iowa to the Brainerd Lakes area which starts just north of town. On weekends it is a parade of vehicles pulling boats on trailers, or pulling travel trailers, or trucks with campers, or drivers behind the wheels of rented 40 foot Winnebagos. Folks aren’t fools and it would take a load of stupidity to venture on foot across the path of such a parade. It’s actually more interesting to set up a lawn chair and watch it all go buy. There never has been a lot of east west foot traffic across Mill Avenue anyway, expect perhaps down by the Mill outdoor Skating Rink which gets constructed as soon as the ice freezes in the fall. That is of course long after the tourists have gone south again and a certain kind of small town driving normalcy has returned.
My family home is on H Street right across from the author’s example of why we shouldn’t allow garage doors to face a street. Our picture window faces those garage doors and those doors have been an endless source of entertainment and fascination over the years as they open and close through the seasons to reveal all sorts of activities. Surely we should be the ones complaining but free entertainment is something to enjoy. By the way our garage door also faces the street but I suppose we are a poor example of bad planning, owing to the pink stucco on the house. I think the point is that the idea of the public realm doesn’t quite fit our neighbourhood, it is an idea more suitable to dense urban zones where a familiar face is hard to find and there is work a plenty for planners to help keep such places happy places. Our neighbourhood is a place of history, where people know each other and they know the history of families, we built the place ourselves it’s not a planned subdivision. That also explains why cars would slow down when some dam fool starts caulking out stripping lines on the pavement. My God we have never seen such a thing! As the stats indicate most cars travel below 35 mph, that being considered by the locals the max you can exceed the 30 mph limit without risking a ticket. Driving in winter is a different story with a sheet of ice down the street as far as you can see and snow piled sky high on both sides, no stripes here but plenty of fun trying to make forward motion with tires frozen flat on one side!
I don’t understand what your objection is to the test described in the excerpt above. You seem to have reached similar observations as Marohn.
Compare yours:
“it would take a load of stupidity to venture on foot across the path of such a parade”
“There never has been a lot of east west foot traffic across Mill Avenue anyway”
with his:
“people are crossing Mill Avenue and they don’t feel safe doing it”
It seems to me like you both agree that what few people do cross Mill Avenue on foot are doing it at significant risk.
Maybe you contend that this situation is just fine, whereas Marohn would like to change it?
I really have no clue what this person is trying to say, but I will argue with the one specific observation.
There never has been a lot of east west foot traffic across Mill Avenue anyway…
That’s simply not true. We used to walk across there all the time, especially to get some ice cream or go to the Tom Thumb that used to be there. We would also walk over to the greenhouse, which is also gone.
If the complaint is that we shouldn’t have central planners but should have a more natural and organic pattern of growth and development, then this person either didn’t read the report (or anything else I’ve written) or is just doing a poor job of agreeing with me.
This neighborhood does have a ton of history. It used to be one of the city’s most prosperous neighborhoods. I don’t think we should accept that it isn’t any more.
ignore the typos above pls