planning – Alex KG Ellis

April 21, 2015

Westminster Street facade inventory

I live in the Armory neighborhood of Providence, and mostly use the Westminster Street corridor to get from my house to downtown. It’s an up-and-coming commercial district, with the “hottest new bar” in Providence and many new businesses interested in opening on it.

But, as with even the best, most vibrant commercial strips in any city, there are some lulls in Westminster’s streetscape. Long, blank walls abut the sidewalk on buildings clearly not interested in people walking. Fences impart a “keep out” message. And the most street-deadening feature of all, parking lots either between a building and the sidewalk or worse, taking up a whole lot. When these subconscious barriers are present in a streetscape, they make the neighborhood less walkable, both by making it feel less safe and like it’s a longer walk than it is.

What features would be more welcoming; what could property owners do to encourage potential customers to stop by and spend money? Commercial buildings can have large unobstructed windows to encourage window-shopping (it works for services as well as products). Parking lots can be tucked behind buildings so they don’t create a vacant feeling on the street. And if a property must have a fence for security reasons, they can steer clear of chain link fences and fences that obstruct pedestrians’ view, instead preferring shorter, black ornamental iron fences. And the best thing of all for the streetscape is the presence of lively businesses that have a lot of people coming and going.

I made a map of the bright spots and dull spots on Westminster Street on the West Side, from highway to highway. These assessments are subjective and perhaps incomplete, but are based on the principles above.

A few zones of note along the street:

On the east end of the street is Canonicus Square, at the Dean/Cahir crossing. This is the most vibrant part of the streetscape, despite the south side of the street being not especially welcoming to walk on due to the blank facade of the housing tower and the street-adjacent parking lots by the high schools. Why? Because it has a vibrant commercial strip along the north side. Many of these businesses have big windows that invite passers-by to peek and see what’s going on.
The first zone in the middle of the corridor that makes walking less desirable are the one-two punch of the Citizen’s Bank and John Hope House parking lots. These two massive asphalt canyons on the south side of the street make the walk from Winter Street to Bridgham Street seem extremely long. There’s not much across the street from them to invite pedestrians, and John Hope even has an opaque hedge blocking your view. This section of the street sends the message that is for cars to get through as fast as possible and not for people to spend any time.
The second zone in the middle of corridor that could use improvement is the north-side block between Courtland Street and Bridgham Street. There’s one massive vacant parking lot for sale with a big chain link fence around it, Paper & Provision Warehouse that is an active business but features a street-adjacent parking lot and a blank brick facade with no windows, and then another brick building whose facade is essentially blank. The primary two things I can conceive of making this better would be the sale of that vacant parking lot and its development as something people want to walk by, or the renovation of one or both brick building to add bigger windows.
There is a welcoming zone on the western half of the street as well. Between Dexter Street and Parade Street, there are a number of welcoming facades, including the West Side Diner, Community MusicWorks, Loie Fuller’s, and Healing Paws. These good street frontages combined with other facades I classified as neutral (Mi Ranchito with tinted windows, La Perla Fruit Market with covered windows, WBNA set back from the street with hedges obstructing view) make the walk from Parade Street to Fertile Underground seem not very far at all.

Other factors that would make Westminster a more lively commercial corridor would be the addition of bike lanes and sidewalk bump-outs at crosswalks (especially at the wide cross streets Parade & Dexter). Also, it doesn’t take much to fill a dead space on a streetscape. If a really awesome business moved in to either of these dead zones, even across the street from the biggest problem area (e.g. Julian’s Pizza) it would do a lot to enliven the streetscape for the benefit of all businesses and residents of the neighborhood.

February 13, 2015

Where do people actually bike in Providence?

I have been excited recently by the heatmap published by the Strava app showing where its users go when tracking their trips. It’s beautiful, and it seems like great data for planning bike infrastructure. However, after a tip from a friend, I did some research and found that Strava users are not necessarily very representative of the cycling demographics or travel patterns of the general public.

Strava users are, in the words of another friend who is an avid user, “a group that is heavily skewed toward recreational, performance-oriented cyclists, although it should be noted that there is often a lot of overlap between commuter cyclists and recreational cyclists”
There are reports suggesting that Strava’s user base is approximately 90% men, which is substantially higher than the 65-75% of cyclists nationally who are men. Strava does not relase information about the age, nationality, or location of its user-base.
Most suggestively, when Oregon DOT bought Strava’s detailed data in the spring of 2014, they compared the Strava count of cyclists crossing Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge, a prominent commuter cyclist connection, to a physical counter’s tally. They found that only 2.5% of the actual trips across the bridge were reflected in the Strava data.

While these are important limitation to keep in mind, the data is still useful. In Providence, according to a Strava rep I contacted, the data is based on 1440 users making 10,835 trips, 30% of which were commuting. In Rhode Island as a whole, there are 5996 Strava users and 61,625 trips.

For comparison, the data generated by VHB for the 2013 Bike Providence plan used an app which has between 100 and 500 downloads on the Android store, suggesting a user base roughly between 250 and 1250 (iPhone’s market share in RI is 58% compared to Android’s 41%). The users of the VHB app, because of its singular purpose, were also an unbalanced sample of all users.

To increase the sample size of the data, I have used GIS to combine the Strava data (created May 2014) and the VHB data (March-May 2013) into one composite bike traffic metric for all Providence streets:

I would note that, though existing traffic patterns are an excellent aid in determining where new bike infrastructure should be created, providing reasonable access to the whole city is also an important consideration. For example, Smith Street only shows moderate existing bike traffic in these data sources, but installing a protected bike lane along that corridor would provide better access to a whole swath of north Providence that would otherwise be underserved by bike infrastructure. Similarly, Plainfield St and Hartford Ave in the Silver Lake & Hartford neighborhoods would provide important access to residents who are not currently along well-trafficked corridors.

One of my favorite aphorisms with regard to bike infrastructure is that it would be ridiculous to reject a proposal for a bridge because too few people swim across the river. Approach this existing traffic data with that in mind.

April 17, 2014

Waiting for the urban mechanic, or someone like her

Yesterday I wrote about how to cross the street boldly but still safely. But having confidence as a pedestrian doesn’t solve the problems making the streets unsafe. This is a post about that.

Cars are dangerous things. Unfortunately, American development patterns have forced us into dependence on them. The Project for Public Spaces had an article up today critiquing a Vox article about declining traffic deaths in the US. Basically, every other peer country has seen traffic deaths decline significantly more than here, using creative techniques that our archaic street engineering for auto dependence hasn’t figured out yet:

In the UK, 20 mph zones have been steadily growing since the turn of the century, and automated traffic enforcement is saving lives. The Dutch abandoned a street design philosophy based on “forgiving” errant drivers (which America embraced), shifting to an emphasis on walkable, bikeable streets. Japan has perhaps the world’s best transit networks, making driving less necessary. Germany is a pioneer in traffic-calming street design. Sweden, as the Economist recently reported, cut pedestrian fatalities in half over the last five years with a strategy that included low speed limits in urban areas and building 12,600 safer street crossings.

It would be great to see some of these innovations gain more traction in the US. They already are in some places, but the culture of street engineering and transportation funding needs to change.

There are lots of other tools for making streets safer for everyone that urban planners try to get our communities to adopt. Here are a few of them:

In dense areas, narrow roads, widen sidewalks, and cater the fronts of buildings to pedestrians.
Make pedestrian crossings shorter by creating bump-outs and pedestrian islands.
Adjust the balance of transportation funding to provide more for transit.
Instead of depriving transit of that funding, raise the gas tax and highway tolls to pay for road repairs.
Change zoning to create much greater density of development. This is what transit needs to work, especially outside of urban centers.

These are just a few fundamental ways to make the world a safer place for human beings in a car-dominated culture. What others can you think of?