Ellington

Can the width of our roads actually affect the quality of our lives? That's one of the questions central to the discussion surrounding "infill" and revitalization development in urban areas. It's something, for instance, that local urban planners are discussing in regard to the planned Jackson Metro Parkway and its impact on the surrounding neighborhoods—indeed, its impact on anyone doing business in central Jackson. But the design of a street can affect us on every level—at home, getting to work, heading down to the grocery store or fighting traffic at the mall.

At a recent "brown bag" seminar hosted by the Jackson State University Urban Planning department at the R&D campus off Ridgewood Road, Jonathan Bradford, representing the Inner City Christian Federation of Grand Rapids, Mich., spoke at length about an urban neighborhood that their Habitat-for-Humanity-type organization is attempting to revitalize. Central to that discussion was the main road, called Wealthy Street, that passes through the south part of town in Grand Rapids.

In 1912, Wealthy Street had "two lanes of traffic, a tree canopy, on-street parking," said Bradford, while aiming a laser pointer at different parts of a faded black-and-white image with a woman and baby in the foreground, and the street scene in the background. He pointed to the glass in the brick buildings (which makes them friendlier and more inviting to pedestrians), and the—get this—12-foot-wide sidewalks.

The next image showed a 2002 photo, with a contemporary woman and baby at the same location on that same street. The street is now five lanes of traffic, there are no trees, the brick buildings are windowless, there is no buffer of on-street parking between the traffic and pedestrians, and the sidewalk is just four feet wide.

The baby in the 2002 picture, as Bradford pointed out, looks sad.

Amazingly, the road was widened and the sidewalks narrowed only 11 years ago. Already, though, the city of Grand Rapids has seen its error and is willing to make changes, Bradford told me.

Today's roads over-emphasize the needs of cars, at the expense of people. Look around your neighborhood, and you'll likely see newer streets, regardless of their size, with "highway metrics"—curbs that curve instead of intersecting at right angles, sidewalks on one side only that disappear at property lines (if they exist it all), wider streets and wider traffic lanes, turn lanes for bypassing street lights and so on. Note which streets in your neighborhood you tend to drive faster on—they're almost always wider streets with fewer parallel-parked cars. You believe it's safer to speed up—which it may be for your paint job, but not for pedestrians.

Say, for example, that a two-lane city street with right-angle curbs is 25 feet across at a crosswalk—eight to ten paces for an average-size adult. Add a "modern" gentle curve to the curbs, and you not only encourage cars to continue around and through an intersection more quickly, but you also extend that crosswalk by eight to 10 feet or more. Now it takes 10-12 seconds for a mobile adult to cross that street, while the physically challenged and the elderly may have trouble making the light while dodging cars that screech up in the right-hand turn lane.

These conditions work together to make traffic move faster, but at the price of making city streets uncomfortable or scary for pedestrians. While such roads may work OK in the suburbs (although legions of evidence show that's a mistaken assumption), such metrics are deal-killers for urban and semi-urban development—the type of development that would take place in the JSU vicinity, around Fondren, in Belhaven Heights or midtown Jackson. In these cases—or even with an artery such as the Jackson Metro Parkway—keeping people in mind when designing and implementing the road is paramount.

Bradford quoted Winston Churchill: "We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us." The design and care of our roads and public spaces do much the same thing—the more people-focused they are, the better they are to live on. What worked for neighborhoods and communities in 1912 may just work as well or better than what's often done in 2002. Surprised?
— Todd Stauffer