| City of Boulder Planning, 1996 |
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To which I say "amen, sister." Boulder is showing
an impressive understanding of the importance of the design of the built
environment. The Historic Boulder society will be holding a forum on New
Urbanism, demonstrating their understanding of the need for historic preservationists
to join forces with the New Urbanists. 1- Designing for the pedestrian means promoting compactness, because a sprawled community is an isolating, auto-dependent atmosphere that makes downtowns less pleasant, less safe, and less convenient for pedestrians. 2- Compactness means lower public costs for sprawl subsidies and Band-Aids such as wider roads and inefficiently dispersed utility services, and, conversely, more public dollars available for improving the public realm -- not to mention such things as schools. 3- Promoting a pleasant pedestrian atmosphere allows us to enjoy the benefits of convenient distances between our homes, our work, our schools, our parks, and our shopping. We are able to enjoy the serendipitous discovery of friends and interesting places (hidden to us if we are speeding along in our cars, yet critical to an enjoyable and friendly community). 4- The serendipity of walking means that we interact with our friends and neighbors more often, thereby creating a sense of community that not only makes us feel good, but also helps motivate us to support schools, parks, and other public necessities and amenities. Without a sense of community, we retreat to our cocoons, and become less likely to unite against societal challenges. And our cocoons become breeding grounds for fear and suspicion. (Note also that a vibrant pedestrian atmosphere puts "eyes on the streets," which promotes the citizen surveillance so critical to effective community policing.) 5- Compact, convenient walking distances make travel by bus and bicycle more viable, thereby minimizing the high costs and environmental destructiveness of an auto-dependent community. Convenient walking distances also make life more pleasant for citizens (such as seniors, the poor, children, and the handicapped) who have less access to cars. Without a walkable community, such citizens suffer from high levels of isolation, boredom, and unemployment. 6- By reducing transportation costs, the compact pedestrian community maximizes the purchase of goods and services by local residents (long travel times and distances often discourage people from going to the trouble of traveling to the remote Wal-Mart to make purchases). 7- Less car travel means less air, noise, and water pollution, and less need for environmentally and financially unsustainable road widenings, large parking lots, and large amounts of gasoline consumption. 8- Designing for the pedestrian helps us see the value of strategies that make our community compact enough to be walkable: (a) Retaining compactness with an urban-defining greenbelt and urban service boundary; (b) Allowing only retail and office development that is pedestrian-scaled and centrally located (and, conversely, keeping out the big-box retailers); (c) Designing self-contained neighborhoods (or "urban villages") that provide a full compliment of parks, schools, shopping, and jobs within walking distance of homes; and (d) Designing roads that slow down and otherwise tame cars for the sake of a pleasant and safe pedestrian environment. Similarly, by not widening roads, we eliminate the primary inducement to sprawl and strip commercial development. 9- Streets designed primarily for pedestrians are by their nature streets not designed for high-speed, high-volume vehicle traffic. One result is that the community experiences much less pressure to allow their corridors and gateways to be blighted by loud billboards, glaring lights, bland architecture, huge setbacks, and other forms of obnoxious, screaming strip commercialization. Strip commercial signage, for example, takes advantage of the irresistible "sellscape" created by 40,000 vehicles per day. It is signage that is forced to scream because it must grab the attention of a motorist whizzing by at 45 miles per hour. 10- Designing for pedestrians is, by its nature, designing for a sense of "place." The subtle nooks and crannies of pedestrian-scaled streets and small local businesses is a necessary ingredient for making a place special or otherwise unique. Such uniqueness promotes community pride and a sense of protectiveness. Auto-dependent communities, on the other hand, are inevitably homogenized by gigantic, bland "icon" (or franchise) architecture, and the "Everywhere America" businesses such as K-Mart and Publix—places that care relatively little about the communities they reside in, and which funnel a large percentage of their revenue out of the community. 11- A place that is designed to be wonderful for pedestrians is inevitably a community with a high quality of life. As such, quality businesses flock to the community because their quality employees demand such a life. (Boulder and Raleigh are outstanding examples of this.) And of course, a healthy, 12- diverse local economy serves to reduce crime. 13- By creating an attractive place to live, a compact, pedestrian-friendly community reduces our desire to flee to remote suburbs—which is a primary cause of the astronomical loss of farmland and environmentally significant ecosystems surrounding our cities. (It is in part for this reason that environmentalists must unite with promoters of urbanism to restore, create, and protect livable cities.) Boulder, Colorado:
A Model for a Sustainable City (1) Boulder has installed and retrofitted several miles of striped bicycle lanes on major north-south and east west roads in the central areas of the city. In contrast, most college towns offer a miserable experience for bicyclists, providing few, if any, convenient, safe, and pleasant east-west and north-south routes. In addition, Boulder provides a number of in-street directional signs informing bicyclists which direction to head to find a good bicycle route, has installed one or two barrier-protected bicycle boulevards in the downtown area, connects bike lanes to off-street bike paths when the bike lane ends, and has signs at several intersections that inform you that a turn is prohibited if you are in a car but is allowed if you are on a bicycle. (2) For novice bicyclists afraid of bicycling in traffic (as well as bicycle commuters looking for a pleasant and sociable atmosphere), Boulder has constructed about 80 miles of off-street greenway trails. The trails are concrete, and range in width from 10 to 14 feet. (Even at these widths, though, they are so popular that they often feel crowded.) One big reason the trails are so popular for not only bicyclists, but also walkers, joggers, skateboarders, rollerbladers, wheelchair users, and picnickers of all age groups, skill levels, and economic classes, is the provision of underpasses and tunnels which completely separate the trails from vehicle traffic. These "grade separations" make the trails significantly safer, more convenient, and more pleasant (studies found that trail use quadrupled when an underpass was installed). As of 1989, there were 22 underpasses and tunnels for trails within city limits, and 15 more were planned. (In fact, I noticed at least a few that were built over the last few years, even though they were not connected to an existing trail. They had been built in anticipation of future trails.) By contrast, I know of only one such facility in Gainesville: The tunnel on SW 13 Street just north of Archer Road. Another important feature of Boulder's trails is that they are permeable. That is, there are several spurs that link the trails to neighborhoods, and when a trail passes under a major road, there is always a spur to get the trail user to and from the road. (3) Boulder has created a world-famous pedestrian mall downtown. Each day, even during cold and snowy winter days, it is alive with pedestrians enjoying a car-free commercial corridor filled with street vendors, street performers, and the smiling faces of Boulder citizens. Unlike a number of cities where pedestrian malls have failed, Boulder has one that works in large part because of the high concentration of offices, retail and residences in the area, the proximity of the university campus, and the absence of surface parking lots (which create gap-tooth dead zones). (4) The City has an aggressive program to install "traffic calming" devices on several neighborhood and downtown streets. In place now are a number of traffic circles, speed humps, narrowed streets, necked down intersections, brick crosswalks, and diverters. (5) The City has equipped all city buses with bike racks, which not only provides bicyclists with a convenient way to get a bicycle to a hard-to-reach location, but also significantly increases the service area for buses, since bicyclists can travel much further than pedestrians to get to a bus stop. (6) The City (and several other major employers) has instituted a "Way to Go" employee trip reduction program which includes the following: 1- Brochures to employees describing why excessive car travel is undesirable for the community, and how beneficial it is to carpool, bicycle, walk, or take the bus. 2- A monthly raffle drawing in which City employees who travel to work at least once a month by means other than single-occupant vehicle submit a raffle ticket making them eligible for gifts, including cash and round-trip plane tickets. 3- A monthly challenge in which one City department challenges another to see who can have the most employees travel to work at least once a month using an "alternative" travel method. This past month, the Planning Department beat the Law Department by having 100 percent participation. Not only did the director boast about it, but it won us a free pizza lunch. 4- An "eco-pass" program, in which all employees of a participating employer are given a bus pass that enables them to ride the city buses anywhere within the city, as well as to outlying towns, for free. In fact, I used the pass to take the bus to the Denver airport—a one-hour drive that ordinarily costs $8 by bus. 5- A guaranteed ride home program which provides "alternative travel" City employees with a free taxi ride home in case of an emergency of unplanned schedule change. 6- Free City employee parking for employees who carpool (and a $10 subsidy per month if the carpool includes 3 or more riders). 7- A pool car made available to City employees for work-related trips during the day. 8- A GIS-based program which gives City employees a map and office phone numbers of other employees who live near them and may be interested in ridesharing. 9- An informal policy that allows supervisors to let City employees work at home (telecommuting). 10- A policy that allows City employees to opt for a compressed work week, which enables an employee to work less than 5 days per week. 11- 19 City pool bikes located in 13 City departments, which employees can use for errands. 12- A bike reimbursement program, which allows City employees who use a bike for work-related activities to be reimbursed up to 30 cents per mile for such trips. 13- A City policy that encourages employees to dress casually on Friday, thereby making it easier to use an alternative travel method. 14- A free shuttle bus that continuously circles the downtown core of the city. 15- A once-a-year "bike week," when everyone is encouraged to bicycle to work for the entire week. A number of incentives are offered to enable the City to achieve a participation rate in the thousands. There is nothing mystical about why communities such as Boulder have much higher levels of bicyclists, pedestrians, and bus riders than other college towns, and why, therefore, Boulder's urban area is safer, more convenient, more sustainable, and more pleasant than similar cities. Providing a full range of facilities, programs, and incentives is an effective way to reduce excessive levels of auto travel, and ensures that the City will have a less costly, more sustainable future. From "Planning"
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