Category Archives: parking

How shoppers get to Preston Street

A few days ago, I posted some info from the Wellington West BIA about how people get to their shops. The results were interesting to readers, including some city planners who contacted me on how to get the source info.

A reader sends me this quote: [and note that at this point the street had undergone but not totally finished three years of muck and mud and noise of reconstruction, including reconstructing the sidewalks][and note also that this is a survey of local area residents, not of all the people found on the street, as was the WWBIA survey, which will account for the very high walking modal split]
“The Preston Street BIA administered a survey during
the summer of 2010 in order to determine the role
of Preston Street in terms of meeting the needs of
the local community. The questions in the survey
probe several areas including: the transportation
mode used to access Preston Street, the reasons
people visit Preston Street, the visit frequency and
the level of adequateness for which Preston Street
merchants provide basic amenities. The survey also
includes a few open-ended questions that prompt
the survey participant to make suggestions for the
area as well as list reasons they frequent (or do not
frequent) Preston Street. A total of 234 participants
completed the survey.

The results from the transportation-related
questions lead to some clear conclusions. Most
users of Preston Street – 81% of the survey
participants – get there by foot. Furthermore, 82%
of participants thought that walking serves them
“very well” on Preston Street. Cycling results were
also quite positive; 58% of respondents for whom
the question applies feel that cycling serves them
“very well”. Users who access Preston Street by car
are less satisfied. Many participants expressed that
parking provision is insufficient. Although 77% of
the survey participants own a car, only 37% ever
drive to Preston Street.”

http://www.acaciaconsulting.ca/creativeneighbourhoods/reports/Groundwork%20Progress%20Report%20FINAL.pdf (page 12)

A new-look turfstone

Back in the 80′s a hot landscaping approach was turfstone. Originated in Germany, it used perforated concrete paver blocks, rather like egg cartons, to provide both a driveable surface and one that would be green with grass growing up through it.

turfstone laid last year after the road was dug up on walnut court. Unable to get red concrete turfstone, white pieces were mixed in and spray painted red on the top surface

The experiment had mixed results. The City insisted that since these were drivable surfaces, they had to go on gravel road bed and the spaces in the grid filled with gravel. Grass was then supposed to grow on this road base. The concrete pavers exposed a lot of top surface to the sun and air, which wicked the moisture up out of the “soil”. And it simply doesn’t rain enough in the summer here, compared to Germany, to keep the stones wet enough to support growth.

Installations on LeBreton Flats were often disappointing. Only one actually took on a lawn-green hue, and that was on the northeast face of Tom Brown arena where lawn was not permitted so as to allow fire trucks to drive around the building.

1980′s original red turfstone in Walnut Court has some green sections

So I was intrigued to find this new plastic version being tried out on a front yard in centretown. The thin plastic vanes allow a lot more dirt into the grid, to support grass, and the plastic bits won’t soak up or wick moisture like concrete does.

Still, it is a too-often a devious means of converting green space into parking space, rather than greening up a vehicle zone. And if the area is snow plowed, will the top edges of the plastic chip and become sharp?

(Note, turfstone is not for high traffic areas. An installation of the plastic version was tried in front of the convenience store on Gladstone/Bell and it now looks awful. )

Major changes coming to downtown streets

The current downtown Ottawa is rather blah. Some might even call it bleh. Over the decades, it has become a motor-vehicle-oriented environment, with the fast movement of vehicles the main only priority. We all know about the walls of buses. And the priority given to automobile commuters over pedestrians. Trees: rare as hen’s teeth. It has become a downtown one goes to because you have to. It is not a shopping, or even much of a recreation destination. All rather sad.

When the LRT is opened, there will be major changes. Most OC Transpo buses will be off the Albert and Slater bus lanes. What do we do with the freed-up space? Recall too that the current bus stops disgorge pedestrians at many locations; the LRT will deliver huge crowds, all at once, at limited locations.

So Council directed that the Downtown Moves study be conducted, to integrate urban design and transportation strategy, and to restore the balance among street users [in council's actual words]. Most people can understand that a vibrant downtown doesn’t  come from wider roads, faster traffic, or “getting everyone out” as quickly as possible ( I exclude from this understanding some select minority voices).

The Downtown Moves study isn’t about just tinkering with the core. It’s a major rewrite opportunity, to reallocate space, to refresh the downtown sidewalks and streets for the next 50 to 100 years. Thus far, the working teams have not been timid. So it is time to look at some of the suggested streetscapes.

Note: these are working documents only, in progress sketches, and may not be the final designs. They will evolve under pressure from various factions. So how well are we moving towards the grand statement:

“Our downtown is about to undergo a transformation that will define a new identity and be the foundation for its prosperity for coming generations. The investment in Light Rail Transit will open and sustain a new pursuit of civic and national pride in the urban quality of our capital City. Our downtown streets will be reoriented to favour and comfort pedestrians, cyclists and transit users, recognizing that all travellers end and start their trip on foot. With this healthy and active orientation, our streets themselves will begin to be praised as among our city’s most coveted public spaces that in turn spark investment and that are befitting of the highest quality of buildings and open spaces along them”.

Queen Street will be a key street to the future. Currently the only two-way street downtown, it is a fairly claustrophobic, narrow canyon. It is a minor street destined to become the main pedestrian experience. The north sidewalks are very narrow east of Bank Street. The exit stairways and elevators to the underground stations will come up in what is now the parking lane on the south side of Queen (pic below).  There will be loss of some on street parking and planners have to figure out how to disperse crowds of 5000 people per hour. The sunny side of the street is the north side.

The sketch below has been marked up in a workshop focus group. The north parking lane is gone, replaced by wider sidewalks and pedestrian amenities. The south side parking lane is now paved in the same material as the sidewalks, and may even be at the same level as the sidewalk, separated from it by removable bollards, so that the parking lane can be incorporated into extra-wide sidewalks for events like Canada Day. Cyclists mix with traffic; and in the distance you can see a typical stairway entry to the LRT just beyond the two parked cars. Street furniture (ie mail boxes, benches, light posts, signs) will be all aligned with the trees to maintain the clearest possible sidewalks.

 

Two blocks north is Wellington. In the working sketch below (and remember, no decisions have been made…) there is a two-way bike lane suggested on the north side of Wellington. This helps make a more complete network of bike-friendly streets in the downtown connecting the major tourist points (bixi-bike tourism) and the major paths that approach the downtown but seldom connect with each other (this bidirectional bike lane would connect the Confederation Boulevard bike circuit, to the Alexandra and Portage Bridge bike lanes, etc). The two way path alignment was selected to minimize conflict with turning vehicles (the north side has few turn opportunities, and will apparently have fewer in the future as the Parliament Hill security perimeter expands) and to preserve sight lines to the Hill. Eastbound buses (and the whole STO route problem/scenario remains unsolved as yet) will stop at the curb; but what about westbound STO buses and tour buses? Tour buses in particular want to deliver passengers as close as possible to the destination. Bus riders may be let off onto islands between the bike lanes and bus lanes, but total available road width is a constraint. Double left turn lanes may be a thing of the past. The suggested public space configuration in the sketch will help remove the sense that Wellington is a huge barrier separating the downtown and Parliament:

Albert and Slater will be changed drastically once the main bus routes are removed. It seems uncertain just how many fewer buses will be there.  Some objectives along these streets are to integrate the public sidewalk space with the building setbacks and available private spaces along the street. Intersections will get much wider crosswalks. The parking lane is on the right side of the street, paved to match the sidewalks. It would not be a rush hour traffic lane. There would be bulb-outs at the intersections and midblock locations for trees. The bike lane is on the left side of the street, placing the cyclist close to the vehicle driver’s field of view and not hidden on the “far side” of the vehicle. There may be opportunities to squeeze in delivery bays between the bike lane and traffic lane. But essentially, the bus lane space has been given over to non-vehicular uses. Remember, though, that bike lanes have a higher capacity than car lanes.

The only north-south street that has been sketched out thus far is Metcalfe, and only north of Sparks. No analysis has yet been done for O’Connor, Kent, Lyon, etc. And as far as I could tell, they hadn’t yet addressed what to do south of Sparks. Frequently suggested is returning the streets to two-way status, the traffic planning fad of one way streets being largely past its acceptable date. Such a major change is beyond the mandate of the Downtown Moves plan. When examining the N/S streets, several new factors come into play. First, most of the parking spaces north of Queen are closed much of the time for security reasons. They can be repurposed a bus loading zones or para-transpo zones. Tourists walk slower and in wider groups than office workers, so the sidewalks connecting Sparks to the Parliamentary precinct should be wider. Then we might as well continue the wider sidewalks down to at least Albert to help disperse the commuter hordes arriving from the LRT stations. These north-south streets are also major locations for street vendors, so might as well plan for them now.

What’s next?

The Downtown Moves teams will be refining the sketches/scenarios for public space downtown. They have to run them by the traffic people to assess what it does for vehicular movements, goods movement, safety, special access needs, security, taxis, etc. They have to run them by the various downtown private sector groups, such as hotel owners, office building managers and owners, etc. They do have numerous photo examples of similar changes done successfully in other cities.

Hopefully, with continued leadership from the politicians (ie, no wavering in face of NIMBY’s who might lose a parking space or who believe cars rule) there can be a balanced discussion and evaluation of the transportation and urban design possibilities.

The Downtown Moves team will read the comments you make to this post, so fire away. And tell your councillor if you like the direction the study is moving, but save him or her the nit picky details as the study is still early on. We need to encourage the process towards a better downtown and not bog it down.

Museum of Strife

The (Federal government’s) Museum of Nature is embroiled in a dispute with some locals on the value and location of its parking lot. The nub of the problem is the Museum wishes to convert some of its parkland on its west side into a surface parking lot.

The west side lawn had been converted to a “temporary” construction staging site during lengthy Museum renovations. Alas, in Ottawa “temporary” is usually a euphemism for never-ending. The thin end of the wedge to sneak in unpleasant changes under the guise of reasonably-sounding “it’s only for a while” arguments. The problem with these “temporary” agreements is that they don’t include penalty clauses, so the offending party (in this case the Feds, but in many cases, it’s the City) has no  disincentive to break the deal.

There are a number of aspects of this imbroglio that bother me, and they don’t reflect well on either the City or the Museum (aka The Feds).

  • it bugs me that a compromise reached on the basis of being temporary (the surface staging site for equipment and crew parking) becomes the foot in the door for a permanent parking lot. This teaches us not to be ”reasonable” or reach “compromises” if we are just being set up to be screwed, even if excused away as being attributable to “changing circumstances”.
  • it bugs me that the Museum claims it is required for “peak parking”, which generally means that 80% of the parking needs are met by the existing lot, but the new lot is required for the peak 20% of the time. Generally, it is inefficient to provide parking for the peak, same as we shouldn’t provide roads for the peak that would remain underused the remaining 20 hours of the day.
  • If the lot goes in for this peak load, will it have “peak pricing”?
  • Or will the Museum discount parking to better earn revenues off an underused lot? (remember, it isn’t needed for visitors 80% of the time…). I suspect the new lot will simply permit more employees to drive to work where they will have convenient parking.
  • according to some media reports I have seen, the Museum makes a “profit” off the parking which is used to subsidize programming. If they put in an underground garage, this profit will be needed to cover the cost of the garage. I fully agree that parking users should cover their cost of parking and the garage structure. I am not sure why they should subsidize programming. And if parking fees cover the cost of the garage, it’s a bit rich to kill the garage because surface lots are more profitable.
  • when comparing the cost of the new garage to surface parking, does either calculation consider the value of the parkland itself or is it just “free” land? *
  • should the garage on the west side be large enough to replace all the surface parking on the east side too?

The City is no saint when it comes to this matter either. Doesn’t it strike you as hypocritical ironic that city folks complain about the Museum’s lot on Museum land while the City runs a commuter arterial through the east lawn? Why are motorists priority users of space on the east side if they aren’t going to the museum but inferior users of space on the west side even though they are the museum’s customers?

If I was John Baird, I’d be asking the City to flash some money. If the City wants all that Fed land for parkland, much of which is for the benefit of city residents, why can’t the city put its wallet where its mouth is?

To purchase a chunk of land of similar size for a park would cost 2 – 3 million dollars. Will the City put that up for a public parking garage that offers both some short-term alleviation of some neighborhood parking issues, and purchases long-term park space?** Of course, I would expect the City to get some legal rights/guarantees for its money. And for this discussion, we’ll ignore the long-term opportunity cost of taking out urban land to make a park whilst simultaneously using existing park land for roads.

And a bigger issue relates to the way Metcalfe curves through the park. It’s a terrible road link, traffic really zooms through the space, and makes the remaining park space feel like a little island sandwiched between busy roads. The City is ruminating on the possibility of converting downtown roads back to two-way streets. This would be an excellent opportunity to end the misuse of the Museum park (although it wouldn’t surprise me if the City wanted to add another road, southbound, through the west side park…).

Maybe Mr Baird should offer a garage … in return for the east side lawn.

And my last thought on this goes to the cynical nature of the political game. Maybe it’s not about the parkland at all. Maybe it’s all political posturing, a chance to blame someone else, to control / shape the political narrative. You know, the best defence is offence. And it’s all about talking of  parkland and green space and motherhood, and looks good, and doesn’t cost the City anything.

 

_____________________________________________
*The City has strange values when it comes to its own parkland. A mature planting of trees and kids playground was removed from the Plant Rec Complex to make way for a large surface parking lot. That’s right, while simultaneously complaining about under-parked neighborhoods, the priority use of City parkland is parking. The suggestion of putting a garage under the new building during construction … too expensive! The value of the parkland removed: “Nothing!” the City cheerful proclaimed.

As for neighborhood suggestions that the parking-lot-that-replaced-the-playground be metered, absolutely not, the City replies, it’s for our patrons. At least the Museum is going to charge for parking. Remember, other than at the Museum, the City’s highest and best use for tax dollars is providing free parking and traffic infrastructure. That’s why there isn’t money left over for the parks themselves.

And maybe that’s why the City is so unenthused about expanding existing parks onto street rights of way if that means losing some non-revenue-generating free parking spaces.

** Let’s leave aside the issue for now about whether we should be building garages and parking at all. Or if they actually improve the neighborhood or make it worse. That’s a whole ‘nother issue.

 

Downtown Moves

The folks running the Downtown Moves study had an open house last evening. I was very pleased and surprised at the large turnout  around 6pm. Some attendees were the usual suspects we find at these events, ie the city builder activists and those promoting their favourite causes. There were a l0t of “new” faces as well. All good.

One of the display boards offered attendees the opportunity to put a dot on the main cycling and pedestrian problems in the core. Jumping right out at any viewer was the cluster of both ped and cyclist dots at the Albert-Bronson intersection, especially on the NW corner running to Commissioner Street.

In many respects the meeting was like a cocktail party (with the wine and snackies missing). Little clusters of conversation appeared and reappeared as people mingled. So many people were talking about “solutions” they saw elsewhere on their travels. When talking to HM, he described a truly transit-oriented development (TOD) he recently saw in Sweden. A ring road circles the residential area, and has access fingers penetrating — but not crossing — the central area. From anywhere in the residential area within the ring, residents can access schools, stores, and the transit station directly, without crossing a road. To use the car requires a trip out to the perimeter ring road, a longish drive around, and then finding fresh parking. It was simply easier to walk or cycle.

I compared this to the City’s concept sketch of a TOD immediately north of the Hurdman Station. The motorist road came into the neighborhood right by the transit station, and circled the site, but with buildings on both sides of the road. Residents coming or going to the transit station had to cross a road, sometimes twice or three times. Their walks home were glued to the curb. In short, it wasn’t transit-oriented at all, it was car-oriented but just located close by a transit station.

I find the approved  Bayview Yards redevelopment site similarly too auto-focussed despite the proximity for transit. Now maybe, as plans evolve, these layouts will become more TOD and might actually make the car the less-convenient choice. But Ottawa is still far short of being comfortable with or even conceiving of auto-free developments let alone transit-priority development patterns. We talk well, but don’t yet walk the talk.

Here are two pic from Vancouver, taken last week, showing the easy proximity of cycling and pedestrian facilities. Note, no curb separates the two surfaces, they are at the same level. Ottawan’s are still married to the bureaucratic view that there must be physical bounds between peds and cyclists, they cannot be trusted to get along together. Gotta have rules! Fences! Curbs! Signs! Policing!

Thanks to Michelle for both photos.

 

 

 

text

Proposed condo, 175 Richmond Road

Claridge is proposing a six and nine story condo buildings at the corner of Richmond and Kirkwood, opposite the Real Canadian Superstore:

view along existing building on Kirkwood; cross traffic is on Richmond, 30 storey Metropole is in the background, beside Westboro LRT station

The lot is currently occupied by a three storey industrial building, with strip-mall type retail on the Richmond side; with undefined street/parking lot on the east side where Kirkwood sort-of runs northwards from Richmond; and with loading docks and a very industrial frontage on the north side, Wilbur Street. 

some of the Richmond frontage is a strip mall set behind a parking lot; this type of ribbon commercial development is a planning no-no for traditional main streets

The current industrial building is zero lot line on the west, where it abuts the rear lot lines of homes. This is quite similar to my own home, and I greatly value the industrial neighbour on my zero lot line. This of course depends on the exact occupancy of the adjacent building. I would not be so happy with an auto body shop, for example (noise and smells) or even a bakery (however artisanal, after a while the smell would get tiring).

I am particularly curious to see how well the development proposal handles the close proximity of the residential rear yards: do it well — and further condo developments might be accepted; do it poorly — and the hue and cry against intensification will continue.

It turns out that the vague parking lot cum street on the Kirkwood side is actually a city street and in the proposed development will be curbed, sidewalked, lit like a real street. The parking on the building curb line will be located in protected parking bays. It is isn’t perfectly clear to me if the east side of Kirkwood will be curbed, sidewalked, and landscaped. I wonder if the streetlighting and pavement textures should match the Richmond main street?

Here are some views of the proposed building:

view from Kirkwood & Wilbur, the northeast corner of the project. The taller tower building is on Richmond

The nine storey building on Richmond is supposed to be differentiated from the low rise building along Kirkwood, although they will be connected at the 3rd thru 6th floors, above a portico or walkthrough (there are two of these already at Claridge’s condos on LeBreton Flats and they work quite well when you walk around and through the buildings).

The bottom of the Richmond condo is commercial storefronts, and the describing jargon in the planning documents certainly says all the right things about narrow storefronts, vertical and horizontal detailing, etc. Unfortunately, there is no detail or close up available on the web site. I do wonder if “mixed use” should mean more than just a few storefronts. What if the second floor, facing Richmond, was offices for therapists, accountants, and other uses? The more variety, the more street life…

Presented Right: The proposal has done something very right, something I have not yet seen any other developer do. It has avoided those “helicopter shots” that view the building from a great distance and from several hundred feet up. We walk on the street and few of us will see these buildings from 500′ up. Helicopter planning is rightly derided as ego-feeding the architect, and blamed for plunking buildings on existing neighborhoods with all the grace of bird droppings. Splat, take that! But this project thus far has shown  sidewalk views that real people will have of the buildings. Long may this trend continue!

Real setbacks?: On the Kirkwood side, the low-rise building has two-storey townhouse-type apartments all along the street. A similar row of townhouse-type apartments will face the rear courtyard. There is a small step back in the building façade above the Kirkwood townhouse units; I hope it is enough to visually distinguish between the podium and higher rise building facades. Too often, Ottawa planners let developers get away with pseudo-podiums or bases just drawn on the high-rise building but not really expressed with a physical change in the vertical plane. Set back should mean a real set back, not just a drawn-on texture change.

On the back side, facing the existing low-rise residential street, the building has much more articulation, with set backs at the 3rd and fifth floors. The back of the building is located about 15m from the lot line. Coupled with the existing houses’ back yards, this should provide reasonable sight line privacy, space for trees, etc. I was impressed that the shadow study shows that there will be no significant shadowing of the existing yards after 10am. While the devil is in the details — and the execution — it appears that this project will successfully abut its low-rise neighbours, esp further north where the condo’s landscaped deck will be several feet up on a wall topped with a 5′ fence.

Real townhouses or fake?: I have posted previously that I am concerned that ground level units that are supposed to animate the street level should actually do so. Too many new projects (including some Claridge ones) only pretend to animate the street. If the animation is genuine, there should be no need for an internal indoor corridor behind the units. But if there is a corridor, residents will use it to access the garage, the mail room, and the individual “front entrances” will be fake. The corridor entrance will win out and be the real entrance. Will this project have a real lively urban street or a dead zone?

My reading of the site plan suggests that the ground floor patios will be very similar to the ones at Claridge’s LeBreton Flats project ( a bit more on this in the next post).

This plan shows the townhouse patios, sidewalks, the street with parking bays along Kirkwood shown to the top of the illustration:

And here is a more detailed view of the back of the building patios and landscaping:

And here is one of those optimistic landscape architect views of the back of the building:

The proposed new Kirkwood sidewalk aligns with the pathway through to West Village Private, and thence to Scott Street, the BikeWest route, and LRT station. It is really nice to see useful pedestrian connections shown early in the project rather than as an afterthought. Can we please plan in a textured sidewalk crossing too, just to point out to drivers that taking the curve that this is a ped zone? (this section of Kirkwood is currently used by commuter rats running the residential maze, and needs to be discouraged).

Parking (Mis-) Management: The project has one or two other features worth pursuing. For example, the 240 units will have 310 parking spaces, which is an awful lot, in my mind, for a building within 600m of a major LRT transit station, located on two bus routes, and on a mature main street with a huge variety of shops and services including the giant Loblaws right across the street.

I firmly believe that if they provide parking, it will get used. So yes, I think it has too much parking. And while some of it is for the commercial space, it isn’t well-located for customer parking, as the only garage entrance is way back on Wilbur Avenue. This means the store owners and staff will drive (parking expense is a tax write off) which further perpetuates our car-oriented city.

I wonder also if condo owners driving home might sometimes spot a surface parking space on Kirkwood and park there rather than drive around the building to access the garage, much the way lazy homeowners with back lanes park out front more often than in the lane. Perhaps a/the garage entrance should have been off Kirkwood right behind the taller condo tower. This would make for some useful customer parking for the stores, and visitor parking for the condos.

The planning documents do vaguely mention traffic demand management techniques, such as unbundling the parking spaces from the condos (ie, spaces could be available on a priority list basis rather than individually deeded), space for VirtuCars, and bus passes for buyers. But alas, these are only talked about unless the community (and Councillor) demand them.

I think it is really important for Ottawa to break the buy-a-condo-buy-a-dedicated-parking-space linkage. It’s a concept well beyond it’s past-due date. Once one or two projects are built with more efficient garages, we can expect to see others follow. Is Claridge brave enough to be the first?

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There will be a public meeting on the proposal on Wednesday at 6.30pm at Hilson PS, just a block east of the site.

More details on the application can be found at http://app01.ottawa.ca/postingplans/appDetails.jsf?lang=en&appId=__8U6YGF

You can improve what you measure; and we aren’t

This is the next in a series of posts building on the Downtown Moves articles I did in late December at the www.SpacingOttawa.ca site.

The Downtown Moves team did a sort of crowd sourcing exercise to identify the problems and some solutions for the downtown enviornment. City staff, consultants, and amateur planners/keeners like myself heard three prominent speakers on urban issues, then sitting around tables of six to ten people cranked out solutions to perceived problems. The consultants then sorted these ideas into major clusters.

This is a perfectly legitimate method of finding a bunch of things to do, quickly. I am not surprised they used this technique since it is strongly advocated by Ken Greenberg, one of the speakers, author of Walking Home (you can get it from the OPL), and consultant who floated, rather like a hovering godfather,  from table to table.

Nonetheless, this approach misses some of the things a more formal approach could have found. The traditional approach identifies problems, an array of solutions, tests then selects the measure. It is the approach best suited to bureaucracies and those attached to linear, systematic thinking. As such it works well with process-oriented civil servants, such as those that run the city.

The Greenberg crowd-sourcing method was quick but will the results be simply one-off project ideas or will they get incorporated into the slow and steady march of bureaucrats? I used to be strongly attached to the Greenberg method, wishing the city would just “do something” rather than fuss forever about process. But I now understand more the value of getting something ingrained into the city policies so that for every future project the staff is supposed to look at things like main street designations, etc.

So what do I think Downtown Moves missed?

A number of speakers and participants emphasized the fine grain, the mixture of businesses and storefront sizes that makes for a lively downtown. And lamented the dead spots. Sometimes these are inadvertently dead, like the front of the CBC building. Other times they are dead by design, for example those large building complexes with interior malls. Some are old thinking, the tower in the plaza of Place de Ville. Sometimes they suffer the dead hand of the NCC which combines so much built creativity with killer marketing that sterilizes what should be lively. Everyone agreed the downtown suffered from excessive city focus on moving cars in and out rather than that what the people do once they are downtown.

So what can we do about the dead sidewalk zones? This is the actual interface area between people and buildings.

Jan Gehl cites a popular measurement tool he has used in many cities. Developed in Stockholm in 1990, it applies a five point scale to “rate” every bit of building frontage in the downtown. This gives a score to every bit of sidewalk, and by mapping *  all the scores you can see at a glance how the downtown rates, where the good parts are, and where the disaster zones are.

With such a simple map at hand, it becomes easy to show developers and property owners, planners and politicians, that their next project or renovation needs to build on the high score or “fix” the low score. The City can also do some things itself to improve the low scoring areas, perhaps with street furniture, or encouraging a pop-up cafe to replace a curbside parking spot.

The actual scoring of the buildings is easy to do with volunteers; the entire downtown could be done in a Saturday morning. The map construction should be doable in just a day by someone skilled in e-mapping.

Once the core has been measured, and the map produced, the city can set goals for improving the core. Goals might include a x% increase in rating 1 zones of the next four years, or a x% decrease in low-rated zones. Mayors and politicans and BOMA would then find themselves being assessed over time by how well they improved (or ruined) the core.

We can improve what we measure. Thus far, we are not measuring.

Here is the rating scale, from Gehl, Cities for People:

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* Technique: the Gehl book seems to indicate that every section of sidewalk / building interface is rated A through E. The scores can then be mapped. An easy way is to assign a line thickness to each letter, then show the lines along both sides of the street. At a glance, the deadest areas are visible, as are the “winners”. It is easy to understand and sell to politicans, planners, and architects.