Sharpening the Cut.

My latest appeared at Huffington Post a few days ago, but thanks to persistent wifi problems, only today have I been able to link it.  Sorry about that.

It focuses on the Dequindre Cut, a high-profile rail-trail conversion in Detroit, whose Phase I (extending about 1.2 miles, from Gratiot Avenue to the Riverfront) has been quite popular for cyclists and pedestrians.  A conversion of the Grand Trunk Western Railroad  that, until the early 1980s, could take commuters from the suburb of Royal Oak southward within a few blocks of the Renaissance Center, the line sat vacant and derelict for many years.  Now, this southern spur offers a generous linear park that is almost completely grade separated.


For the vast majority of the cut's northward trajectory, it looks like this--lots of room for different modes, regularly spaced lighting (and emergency phones), along with an expansive grassy buffer to the trail's west.  But at the southern terminus near Atwater Street (yes, when you are at the water), the right-of-way for the Cut broadens even more.  At this point, the Cut meets with street grade, and the whole thing transforms to something different.


Essentially, the designers of the Dequindre Cut decided to sculpt this section into a plaza with benches and landscaping, but, as the second photo indicates, the bike lanes in particular get goofy, meandering in an S-shape, then splitting.  What's going on?  Anyone not expecting this change--which is pretty much anyone coming along the Cut from the north for the very first time and headed southward--is going to be confused by this.  And it shows.  Pedestrians have to stop short; bicyclists have to veer out of the way.  It's an accident waiting to happen.

Approaching the trailhead from the river and looking northward, the image also poses a problem.

Quite simply, it doesn't look much like a trail; it just looks like a plaza.   The first time I went running along the Detroit Riverwalk, I ran right past the Dequindre Cut and had to ask someone where it was.  And I know I'm not the only one.  My hope is that, as Phase II begins (extending the conversation northward to Warren Avenue) the designers focus on clean simplicity and don't try to gussy things up with fulsome programming.  In my estimation, they over-programmed Campus Martius Park as well (which I blogged about several weeks ago).  But I'm confident they'll redeem themselves through the remaining segments of what someday will--inshallah--be a fantastic way to connect the burbs to the River.

As always, comments are welcomed, either here or on HuffPost, where I've included the full article along with lots more pics.

Movable, misunderstood apparitions.

In certain subcultures, it’s become a meme.  But it took me a little while to catch on. Only after driving past this curiosity for three consecutive days did I realize what it was.  It’s not exactly showy, but that’s the point.  Look slightly to the left of the center of this photo, and it should be clear what I’m referring to. 

Since it really doesn’t jump out, a different angle and better weather might help.

Yes, it’s a fairly standard ten-speed, only painted all in white.  It’s a ghost bike—a spartan memorial to someone who was killed or severely injured while bicycling. According to the Ghost Bikes nonprofit site, St. Louis christened the first ghost bikes back in 2003, but it has spread to hundreds of locations all across the world, nearly always as a tribute to someone struck by a car.  Usually the accident took place at or near the location where the memorial stands, and frequently the dedicators deploy an already damaged bike, to intensify the mangled effect of the collision.  Sometimes the installers remove the tubes from of the tires in order to deter theft.  In this Detroit example, the bike leans against a traffic sign on Grand River Avenue and Temple Street, right in front of the Motor City Casino.

As is the case with many ghost bikes, other passers-by have inserted flowers and scribbled messages onto the enamel.

And, not surprisingly, I’m not the first to capture this discovery.  One of the more prominent local urban advocacy websites seems to have taken notice just a day or two after the installation.  Hub of Detroit created the memorial to honor Hal Williams, who died last month following a hit-and-run collision, purportedly along the same segment of Grand River Avenue as the site of this memorial.  Incidentally, a Detroit City Councilman’s son was hit on his bike at this exact intersection in 2010.  Though the councilman’s son did not sustain life-threatening injuries (not doubt abetted by the solicitude of the driver, who stopped that time around), the fact that multiple accidents have taken place along this stretch of Grand River prompts one to question the overall safety level for bicycles at this part of town, or this intersection in particular.

Even a Google Maps view suggests that this intersection is a doozie.

It’s essentially three-way, except that the bi-directional John C Lodge Service Drive straddles both sides of a below-grade State Highway 10 (M-10), which operates as a limited-access freeway throughout the Detroit city limits.  And Temple Street is particularly confusing: contrary to the appearance on the map, the motorists traveling eastbound from the west side of M-10 can fully cross, but those on the west side of Temple heading eastward (toward the Motor City Casino) cannot completely traverse this intersection.  A good portion of the traffic uses this intersection as ingress or egress from M-10 (Lodge Freeway), and an additional service ramp loops across (parallel to Temple Street) cutting through the intersection in an opposite flow that one would expect (the left side of the road) in order to continue access on the south side of the portion of Temple separated by a median.  If this description seems baffling, one can imagine how it would appear to any bicyclist or motorist unfamiliar with the intersection.  The photo below at least provides a hint of the sort of “Charlie Foxtrot” situation that this intersection inflicts upon its users.

Ghost bikes could serve as a sobering reminder to passers-by of the risks that bicyclists assume when maneuvering in urban environments with fast-moving automobile traffic.  They could prove particularly effective in reminding motorists to proceed with caution in already complicated, high-traffic intersections like Temple and Grand River.  But unfortunately my inner grammarian impels me to use epistemic modal verbs in the previous two sentences, because I don’t yet think ghost bikes are achieving their goal.  They could someday.  But if a website exists to track them, they clearly aren’t that widespread.

Sure, we don’t have nearly as many bicyclist fatalities as we do of motorists; after all, not very many people ride bicycles in the US.  But one far bigger hindrance to the visibility and viability of ghost bikes is that they rarely survive long.  Floyd Reeser of Bike Saviours, a nonprofit community bicycle education center in Tempe, observed that ghost bikes rarely last more than a week, while officials in the Arizona city were finalizing a measure limiting the placement of roadside memorials in the public right of way to 90 days following a fatal accident.  Tempe officials agreed in June to work on a relocation of two ghost bikes, divorcing them from the accident sites but preserving their commemorative integrity.  Meanwhile, the New York City Sanitation Department announced that the “eyesores” had to come down after receiving numerous complaints about the ghost bikes, though the department is giving families of loved ones a 30-day grace period—25 days more than typical abandoned and derelict bikes receive. For those who think this callousness is stereotypically American, the City Council recently ordered a family to remove a ghost bike in Hackney, UK.  And a ghost bike just north of Dupont Circle in Washington DC managed to survive a year as a tribute to a young woman hit by a garbage truck in 2008.  This particular episode amplifies the poignancy of ghost bikes for me.  I remember this accident, since I biked across the exact same intersection and through the often-terrifying Circle every day on my way to work in Georgetown that year. 

These interventions are among the more courteous.  Most cities remove the ghost bikes with little to no notice.  The only reason this might attract greater attention is because the public sector usually accords another grassroots memorial much greater respect.  We’ve all seen wooden crosses or miniature gravestones along the road to commemorate a life lost in an automobile accident.  Ghost bikes are little more than a semantic subset, specifically indentifying individuals killed while bicycling.  But to remove a wooden cross—or even to complain about it—borders on blasphemy, while petitioners routinely campaign for the successful removal of ghost bikes.  What’s the difference?

I attribute it to several factors.  Obviously bicycles are much larger, and they can legitimately impede a right-of-way in a manner that few roadside graves ever will.  Ghost bikes are far more likely to inhabit urban settings, where the higher population density engenders a higher propensity toward complaints.  But neither of these excuses is entirely fair to ghost bikes, since other memorial graves can be large and ostentatious; meanwhile, ghost bikes could just as easily commemorate an accident in a rural setting.

My suspicion is that the multitude of implied uses to bicycles serves as a liability to the proliferation of ghost bikes.  Obviously the most common function of a bike is as a means of transportation.  So when one remains planted at one site for weeks or months at a time, the public often draws the conclusion that it is abandoned, regardless of an alabaster coating.  Meanwhile, grave markers serve a discrete semiotic purpose: to memorialize—nothing else that I’m aware of.  We see a wooden cross or a flower-embellished placard along the road and we know exactly what it means.  No one has the gall to refer to them as “eyesores” because they fundamentally cannot become abandoned, no matter how aged and deteriorated they might be.

The connotations to a long-parked bicycle are never quite so clear, and ghost bikes suffer as a result.  Since they’re a relatively new phenomenon, maybe time will grant them the same respect that wooden roadside graves enjoy. But the need for widespread public education on ghost bikes references something far more critical: a superior public understanding of how vehicles and bicycles can safely co-exist on roads both urban and rural.

When egalitarianism rests on two wheels.

With scores of urban advocacy blogs out there, I find it hard to imagine that I have much to add to the conversation on the defining characteristics of Mackinac Island, Michigan.  Even if the northerly island in Lake Huron—a former Jesuit mission, Ojibwa sacred site, and strategic military encampment—elicits little more than a head-scratching among people from the coasts, nearly everyone in the Midwest is at least familiar with the name.  And in the summer, the isle draws tens of thousands of visitors daily from downstate and elsewhere in the Great Lakes region.  Even those who consider the Great Lakes a pale substitute for a genuine sand beach would probably concede that the town itself is fairly picturesque.

While most visitors to the Island will first encounter the dense cluster of buildings along Main Street, the overwhelming majority of the 3.8 square mile island is unsettled.  Not only is the entire island a State Park, but the National Park Service also classifies it as a Historic Landmark. The impeccable condition of the buildings should therefore come as no surprise.  What distinguishes it from most other historic districts, however, is that it shows little to no evidence that the historic preservation movement that emerged in the mid 20^th century spawned a revival of Mackinac.  It’s difficult if not impossible to spot any telltale indications that the town was ever down-and-out: few, if any, architectural embellishments fail to conform to the rest of the structure; not a single building (some of which are over two centuries old) is in even slightest disrepair; no parking lots where a building once stood.  It looks like the town never went out of style.  And, to be frank, Mackinac probably never did suffer.  It earned popularity with tourists after the Civil War, then quickly expanded to serve as the premier summer destination for wealthy downstate industrialists during the Victorian era, the time period influencing the preponderance of the town’s architecture.

Generalizing though it may be, the nation’s pioneer spirit has always valued novelty—whether through our persistently decentralizing metropolitan areas, or for our storied history of domestic vacation destinations that peak suddenly then decline to a permanent malaise (Atlantic City, Monticello NY, Salton Sea).  Or, conversely, those vacation destinations that have demonstrated sea legs for remaining viable over many decades—Las Vegas, Disneyland—primarily because they have reinvented themselves every few years through the demolition and construction of new attractions.  Mackinac Island has done none of this, yet has continued to age gracefully.  It’s an outlier.

Of the three aforementioned preservation indicators listed above, however, one should stand out in particular: the absence of parking lots in the space of buildings.  Mackinac has no parking lots because it doesn’t need them.  It has no cars.  The island’s government passed a law forbidding motorized vehicles as long ago as 1898, a time well before the motorized vehicle had become commonplace.  The law’s original aim was promote clean, noise-free air and to avoid startling the town’s horses; subsequent leadership has maintained the law ever since, with few exceptions for snowmobiles, shipment trucks, and emergency vehicles.  But no residents or entrepreneurs on the island can own a car.

The absence of cars on Mackinac translates to a modified system of rules for human settlement, which manifests itself in the look of the town.

Not surprisingly, roads don’t need to be particularly wide to accommodate on-street parking, and parking lots are unheard of.  The town itself doesn’t look particularly unconventional in terms of the positioning of structures—instead, it looks almost hyperconventional, an unsullied facsimile of Main Street Americana.

Even outside of the most urbanized parts of the island, a dense network of paths crisscrosses through the woods and the hills, almost exclusively intended for horses and bicyclists.

And the perimeter of the island features a complete multi-use path, which many of the beachfront homes depend upon for access.

And, of course, the inordinate cluster of bikes parked together.

One might easily confuse such a vista for Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but in this case the bikes are almost uniformly in good condition—no need to grime them up to deter thieves.  And the proof is the fact that virtually none of them are locked or secured.

If it all seems impossibly idyllic, it’s likely that you formed the same conclusions that I had, at least until I set foot on the island.  I’ll concede that I was expecting a bohemian enclave, with provocative murals on the sides of buildings, purveyors of hemp products, unwashed street musicians, and vegan pastry shops.  And if that guess was way off base (and it was), at the very least I was anticipating something a little bourgeois-bohemian—a resort town for affluent urbanites, filled with expensive pet salons, micro-brewpubs, Asian tapas, or wine bars.  Strike two.  Maybe these were bad assumptions on my part, to think such a settlement would thrive in such a remote village.  But such communities do exist: Vermont is filled with hippie hamlets like my first description, and Michigan can claim more than its share of ritzy waterfront towns that attract weekenders from Chicago and Detroit (Petoskey, MI is the first that comes to mind).

But Mackinac Island is neither of these.

The most famous comestible for sale along Main Street is fudge, offered from a variety of vendors.  Other shops display different flavors of hot pretzels, Native American-inspired crafts, family dining, soda fountains.  And so forth.  Superficial as it may seem for me to define the character of a community through its retail, it is a judgment call we all make in our assessments of unfamiliar urbanized places.  And what it indicates is that Mackinac Island is, for the most part, a slice of Middle America.  Nary a whiff of counterculture.  I guess it got the bourgeois part right.

Was I naïve in expecting Mackinac to appeal to society’s fringe?  Probably.  But since the island’s most enduring claim to fame is its century-old ban on automobiles—in the state that serves as the cradle of the automotive industry, no less!—it’s understandable to expect the community to push its anti-establishmentarianism to greater extremes.  But, as far as I can tell, it really doesn’t.  Instead, we get chubby Midwesterners on bicycles.

In many ways, this is a greater marvel than if Mackinac were filled with hippies, or hipsters, or Luddite militias.  The fact remains that banning cars is unorthodox just about anywhere in the world, and such a gesture could have easily scared away the peak of society’s bell curve.  After all, most people crave convenience on their vacations, and yet here is a community that outlaws one of the most quintessential American creature comforts.  And middle class families flock here anyway.  And while some opt for the horse-drawn shuttles to view the town, many more rent bikes.

I’m probably being a bit unfair to Middle America in my astonishment—and more than a little patronizing.  But, in many regards, Mackinac is wonderful because it’s so normal. It aggregates a population that, though not necessarily averse to bike-riding, is certainly unlikely treat it as a utilitarian means of getting around—and these vacationers are even less likely to take a hardline stance toward bicycle advocacy, the way the fringe groups do.  They’re recreational bicyclists back home (if they use bikes at all), but on Mackinac, getting around by bike is both utilitarian and recreational.  No militancy to be found.  Yet Mackinac is militant about its ban on motorized vehicles.  The accomplishment of Mackinac Island vaguely resembles the achievement of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail—a shared use path through the Circle City’s downtown, less interesting for attracting hipsters (we knew they’d use it) than it is for luring Mom and Dad and the kids from the suburbs.  It effectively democratized bicycle riding by making it much less intimidating.  I suppose Indy’s achievement is greater than Mackinac’s, since it’s easy not to be afraid of biking the streets of a small town when the streets have no cars.  (Indy obviously still has more than its share of vehicles on the roads.)  But the implementation of this Mackinac law and its unlikely pairing with mainstream culture still makes the island more of a peculiarity.

Mackinac’s ability to perpetuate this ban ad infinitum may depend on a few other embedded advantages the town has over other enclaves.  First of all, the community is really only bustling five months of the year at most; otherwise, population plunges to below 500 people.  Bike-dependency is unlikely to demonstrate such widespread appeal during northern Michigan’s long and unforgiving winters.  Secondly, its island status means it discriminates who wants to arrive there, as well as who can arrive.  Passers-by just don’t stumble onto the community.  By paying for a ferry, visitors have already largely bought into the way of life while they’re there.  And the geography fosters a sense of comfort impossible to replicate if it were part of the mainland.  Even if crime does occur, it’s clear from the absence of bike locks that no one perceives it to be a problem. It’s hard to steal bikes too far on a 4 square mile island in which 99% of the people arrive by ferry.  (Though I guess people could take bikes on the ferry and claim they belong to them?)

If I were more of a cynic, I could see these two advantages (the isolation and the seasonality) as inextricable with Mackinac’s biggest cultural drawback: people like it precisely because it’s an escapist novelty, meaning that all but the few hundred year-round residents are perfectly happy to return to the comfortable, auto-dependent suburbs of Detroit on Sunday evening.  The characteristics that make Mackinaw distinctive also preclude its replicability anywhere else.  But since I don’t think the abolition of cars makes for pragmatic policy in most of the country (at least not in jurisdictions much bigger than this town), I resign myself to appreciate the island’s broadly accessible charms on their own terms.  Mackinac is just fine without the car-hating counter-revolutionaries.  At least everybody has a good way to burn the calories from all that fudge.

The right kind of sidewalk clutter.

My latest post--a short one (for me at least)--is now up at Urban Indy.  It focuses on the Mozzo, a newly completed multifamily residential development in the Sacred Heart neighborhood, fronting the increasingly active Virginia Avenue commercial corridor.


By and large it's a satisfactory building, with a massing that befits the old neighborhood just a mile southeast of Indy's Monument Circle.  While in the long run, I wish it had more retail, the fact remains that the density downtown is probably not yet there to support it--several other recently completed developments have also struggled to find first-floor retail tenants.

My focus, however, is on the one 1,700 sf pocket of retail in the corner of the Mozzo's first floor.
 
It does not yet have a tenant, but the promotional screen in the window claims to offer outdoor seating.  After looking around the area, I can only help but ask, "How?"  The sidewalk to the left of the above photo (fronting local road Merrill Street) is conventional width for this neighborhood, and has a big utility pole sticking out of it.  The sidewalk to the right in that photo is the much more generous Cultural Trail, hosting both a pedestrian and bicycle component.  Generous as it may be, the Cultural Trail is not wide in order to host cafe-style seating.  The sign in the window is misleading, and my blog explores the broader implications of what this is saying about private sector perceptions of public space embodied by the Cultural Trail.  Comments as always are welcome.

Street slimming.

My latest post went up last night on UrbanIndy.com.  The issue it features is fairly parochial: a minor collector street on the east side of Indianapolis is far wider than it needs to be.  Ritter Avenue, barely four miles long in its entirety, offers a reasonable accommodation for a segment south of East 10th Street, looking more or less like this:

It's not perfect--no sidewalk for much of the west side of the road, few crosswalks, the southern portion has utilities poles blocking much of the existing paved space for the sidewalk--but the bike lanes are clearly striped with good signage, and the remaining sidewalk has a good setback from the street.  The neighborhood around it (mostly Irvington) is also fairly walkable.

Ritter Avenue north of 10th Street is a different story:


The street received a serious widening and exists solely to serve cars.  Speed limits have increased.  The hard curbs eliminate a safe shoulder for cyclists to ride on.  Why did the City do this?  Most likely it was to accommodate Community Hospital East, a major hub that sits at East 16th Street and Ritter.  (North of East 16th, Ritter reverts to essentially a country road).  Maybe Community Hospital needs somewhat wide streets to cater to emergency vehicles traveling at high speeds.  But East 16th, the other street that the hospital fronts, is not as wide as Ritter, despite being longer, more prominent, and having an overall higher average daily traffic volume.  (Ritter isn't even a prominent enough street to justify a traffic count.)

If anything, this segment of Ritter Avenue would be a prime candidate for a road diet: reducing it from four lanes to two, or even reducing it to three lanes with a shared central turn lane (the same level of services that East 16th Street offers).  Both options would allow for larger shoulders that could accommodate both bike lanes and sidewalks.  Narrowing the width of the lanes might even allow for on street parking on one side of the street, further calming traffic and promoting a safer environment for a variety of users.

I explore this situation in much greater detail and with more photos on UrbanIndy.com.  Comments as always are welcome.

Improving urban bikability amounts to more than just spinning wheels.

It’s not just for the Dutch anymore. The inclusion of infrastructure to accommodate bicycles has, at least in the US, finally entered the mainstream, most likely far later than in most other developed countries that are less dependent upon the automobile. While some large American cities introduced segregated bicycle facilities as early as the 1970s, it did not become a widespread urban infrastructure improvement practice until the 1990s. Today, nearly every large city has at least some form of bicycle accommodation, whether in the form of bike lanes, multi-user paths, grade-separated sidepaths, or another means of visually identifying a right-of-way in which bicycles achieve some recognition. It would not be particularly bold of me to assert that bicycle infrastructure has become a popular means of instilling a city with “progressive” cachet—a badge worn with pride by local boosters who can claim to recognize what was a fringe group thirty years ago, before bicycling enjoyed a widespread reawakening. Organizations like the Bicycle-Friendly Communities Campaign announce annual awards to a new league of cities each year, bestowing Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum to municipalities that have made a clear effort to make bicycling easier through public works investments.

The cynic in me suspects that some of these widely proliferating bicycle initiatives border on insincere kowtowing to a certain population in order to elicit the impression of urban coolness more than a genuine desire to make bicycling safer. Why? Because organizations like the League of American Bicyclists have certain numeric benchmarks that cities can strive to achieve in order to earn the coveted recognition without necessarily being particularly useful. Thus, a city’s public works department may install bike lanes along the margins of roads that otherwise remain neither desirable nor safe for bicyclists, such as the frontage roads around the Philadelphia International Airport that I mentioned months ago in my extensive post on Complete Streets. Cambridge, MA has resurrected Frankenstein’s monster through its bike network, stitching fragments of lanes and sidepaths wherever the road offers sufficient space, without bothering to make the lanes contiguous or responsive to demand. The result is an inconsistent patchwork of lanes that come and go, which may be more hazardous in some locations than leaving them out altogether. Indianapolis, meanwhile, has created a system of numbered routes marked by specialized signs (not the generic green and white ones), yet none of these “routes” correspond to any infrastructural improvements that might help bicyclists. The City thus spent a fair clump of money spent on cosmetic enhancements for roads that often remain quite dangerous for bicycles. Thus, in a desire to win accolades from the progressive bike advocacy community, city leaders dish out the dollars for improvements without necessarily contemplating whether they achieve the fundamental goal: improving safety and mobility for cyclists. My guess is the Bicycle-Friendly Communities Campaign and similar agencies have become more selective in recent years at bestowing honors to these ingratiating cities, but the fact remains that a great deal of bicycle infrastructure focuses more on looks than operationality.

But I hardly want to dwell on the negative here, especially when many communities are promulgating creative, workable solutions to the challenges of urban bikability. One subtle example recently came to my attention in the Capital Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge. The signage on a quiet residential street is the first indication that something is out of the ordinary:

In the foreground to the right of the photo is a yellow caution sign indicating two-way bicycle travel, yet further to left and in the background, a stop sign indicates that the perpendicular street is one way to the left. How does this work? It’s as simple as it sounds.

Now sitting on Capitol Heights Avenue, the demarcation of the rights-of-way becomes clear: the margin with the white line travels with the traffic, while the margin with the yellow line travels against it. (The street section wouldn’t be complete without the universal “bike lane” sign in the grass to the right, a sign referenced earlier in this blog post.) This intervention on behalf of bicyclists is not particularly intrusive; it most likely did not require any road widening or eminent domain proceedings on the abutting property owners. Nor is it radical: I’ve seen it before in Burlington, Vermont, and I’m sure plenty of other communities have replicated the practice. What is particularly interesting to me is that the road seems the perfect width for two cartways, suggesting that, prior to the introduction of the bike lanes, Capitol Heights Avenue was a two-way street. The photo below approximates the perspective of a bicyclist travelling against the traffic flow.

The physical features of the surrounding neighborhood suggest that this simple striping and signage could have proven a greater challenge than it would appear. As is clear from the above photos, Capitol Heights’ housing is not new, but it is by all estimates a stable and safe neighborhood. Originally founded in 1909 as one of the city’s first true suburbs, the community is now engulfed by urbanization on all sides. Despite the absence of sidewalks and its exclusively residential character, Capitol Heights feels relatively urban thanks to the density of the housing, the proximity to storefronts on collector roads like Government Street, and the basic grid structure, as indicated by the map below, where Capitol Heights Drive (circled in red) comprises the clear east-west spine.

The challenge thus lies in winning the approval in the neighborhood for such a project. How difficult would it have been to convince the residents nearby to sacrifice bi-directional mobility in their cars, when that sacrifice exempts bicyclists from the one-way requirements? The very fact that this bike lane striping exists suggests to me that a preponderance of the community perceived of bike lanes as an amenity that outweigh the disadvantages. Perhaps, although Capital Heights lacks sidewalks, residents of the neighborhood recognize that their neighborhood offers a relatively urban milieu and that boosting the options for mobility will draw positive attention to the area, improving desirability and perhaps property values as well. It could prove a useful trajectory for people biking to and from work in downtown Baton Rouge (which lies less than two miles to the west) and endows the community with some of that “progressive” cachet that seems to be widely coveted among urban professionals.

Measured from these standards, the bike lane is a success if the appeal of this uncommon method of bike lane striping outweighs the negatives of eliminating eastbound travel. Beyond that perspective, any assessment of the overall utilitarianism of such striping results in a stalemate, in my opinion. It clearly demarcates a useful path for bicyclists that serves as an alternative to busier streets such as Government to the north (which offers high traffic volumes, often at higher speeds would be allowed in a more dense urban environment) or Claycut Road to the south (which essentially operates as a narrow, high-speed collector with no urban traffic calming whatsoever). But would Capitol Heights Avenue be dangerous for bicyclists otherwise? I’m not convinced that it would be. It is a residential street which speed limits rarely (if ever) above 25; many of the perpendicular roads require a complete four-way stop; and the straight-line trajectory in a grid configuration eliminates blind curves.

Thus, the striping of bike lanes on a generally bicycle friendly street while reducing automobile traffic to one-way only results in a net loss of mobility, with cars ending up as the losers—and, let’s face it, cars are far more likely to use this road on a daily bases than bicycles. A true urban advocate would rebut, “Who cares if cars lose some mobility? They’ve had they’re run of the land since they were invented!” I would concede, but in viewing this in terms of aggregate benefit it still would seem a negative, mitigated slightly by the sheer “sex appeal” of a clever bike lane plan which the City of Baton Rouge can brag about as it achieves new recognition as a bike friendly city. (It was awarded Bronze last year.)

The installation of this lane shows more careful scrutiny than the hit-or-miss lanes of Cambridge, or the signs marking bike routes in otherwise bike-unfriendly locations. But Baton Rouge is also filled with “sharrows”, a pavement graphic that emphasizes generalized road sharing between bicycles and vehicles. That’s great that the city again recognizes bikes, but unless these symbols correlate and contrast with other routes in the network where bicycles benefit from segregated lanes, what does the sharrow achieve other than a cosmetic acknowledgement that bicyclists exist? That very acknowledgement may distinguish Baton Rouge from some similarly sized communities, and I applaud them for that. But the planners and strategists in this steadily growing southern capital city may still let their bird’s-eye-view ambitions supersede the actual visible needs on the ground.

Roadside Americana gets flair.

When a community takes a banal public works project and gussies it up, it is certain to divert a visitor’s gaze—what normally blends in to the landscape because of its ubiquity and sheer ordinariness has suddenly become remarkable. Other initiatives simply attempt to camouflage what the public almost unanimously agrees is an ugly piece of infrastructure. But when the improvements of that electric substation, those fire hydrants, overpasses, or retaining walls employ a subtle design implemented with fiscal responsibility, the positive branding for the associated community could, over time, transcend the cost. The difficulty of capturing this ROI through a cost/benefit analysis no doubt stalls some of these public-sector beautification initiatives, but every now and then a smaller town pulls off something charming, exemplified by this water tower outside the southern Indiana town of Scottsburg, on the east side of busy Interstate 65:



Since the Industrial Revolution, these top-heavy leviathans have presided over communities of all sizes, serving a purpose that the public overwhelmingly neither questions nor fully understands. They typically elevate a reservoir of water to use during a power failure (when the pumping stations cannot operate). The height of at least 100 feet induces a level of hydrostatic pressure through gravity that expedites widespread distribution across the piping system and the ability to flow powerfully from a tap. While large buildings in urban America routinely host water towers on their roof tops, they frequently blend in with the clutter of other prominently tall structures nearby. The freestanding, bulbous “mushroom” water towers play a quietly iconic role across suburban and small-town America, but rarely do they feature anything more than the name of the town in large black lettering. The City of Scottsburg, Indiana’s decision to place the town’s name in a handsome serif font with a decorative border adds distinction without being gaudy; it announces rather than merely informs.

Is the Scottsburg water tower design remarkable? Not really—but that in itself makes it worthy of recognition. On a scale of ambition from 1 to 10, 1 representing the standard water tower, Scottsburg may only get a 2 or a 3. But a 2 or 3 for a town of 6,000 amidst a sea of 1’s, these small efforts indicate a community willing to demonstrate a greater-than-average degree of stewardship for its most ordinary spaces. I can recall in particular that the suburbs of Chicago are littered with boring water tower graphics. Another contrast for Scottsburg is the water tower in Carmel, the state’s wealthiest large city (with a tremendous infrastructural investment to boot), which may have a more Spartan design but made no effort to distinguish itself in terms of an attractive paint job. The most remarkable water tower designs across the world are unambiguously flashy—Europe has quite a few elegant brick-and-mortar examples, the likes of which would probably infuriate most US taxpayers. In America the most eye-catching towers typically involve kitschy fiberglass pop art, such as the corn tower in Rochester, Minnesota or the peach-with-a-posterior in Gaffney South, Carolina. Perhaps these elaborate confections were cheap to build as well, or maybe they didn’t require a dime of public money, but they convey a certain extravagance that makes them a tough sell in small towns like Scottsburg. For example, Ypsilanti Michigan’s notorious “brick dick” water tower is a deserved community icon, but its Joliet limestone base was undoubtedly a formidable investment at the time of its construction over a century ago.

My opinion is that Scottsburg inadvertently followed the example of Florence, Kentucky, which initially decorated its tower with an advertisement for the new Florence Mall, until the Commonwealth determined that it violated a law by exceeding the height limits for a sign promoting a business that didn’t exist directly along the interstate. The Mayor of Florence cleverly opted to adjust the “M” of “Mall” to a “Y” through a few careful strips of paint, saving the city hundreds of dollars over a complete repainting and transforming the tower into a whimsical local treasure. It’s nothing fancy, but the tower has said “FLORENCE Y’ALL” for the past thirty years. I hardly know what the residents of Scottsburg think of their water tower, but it’s far more likely to elicit positive publicity than it otherwise would, and at the fraction of the cost of those opuses in Michigan or South Carolina. A few extra strokes of the paintbrush elevated it above the mundane. During the holiday season, the Town drapes the tower in Christmas lights along the poles and prominent edges, creating a colorful beacon that motorists can see along Interstate 65 miles before they actually pass it. Across the nation, water towers elicit a variety of reactions, from complaints of public eyesores to cherished historic landmarks—my suspicion is that the folks of Scottsburg have something they’d hate to give up.

This essay could easily be much ado about nothing, but these small, thoughtful design gestures contribute far more to building a favorable impression about a place incrementally. A little down the street from Scottsburg, the small city of Columbus, Indiana has incorporated stylistic verve into its bike racks:




These multicolored, jauntily angled C’s echo the logo the City has adapted the past few years as part of its broader tourist initiative.


As many know, Columbus is unique for having greater civic support for innovative design than just about any city of its size in the country—perhaps the world. (Indianapolis, unfortunately, can only dream of such organized design advocacy.) This nationally recognized little city may offer far better proof of what innovation in the built environment can achieve than a largely unknown town like Scottsburg, but somebody clearly sewed the seed among Scottsburg’ citizenry—perhaps unconsciously—and it blossomed into a far better piece of interstate folklore than the millions of passers-by are used to seeing.

Pedestrian hatred rears its ugly head in the humblest of ways.

One of my readers pointed out that I made some inaccurate observations in the post listed below, in which I used a picture provided by another blogger but failed to identify some of the details correctly. Specifically, the sign below refers to a surface lot and not a garage, and it is blocking a bicycle lane and not a pedestrian one. While they don't significantly alter the spirit of the analysis, I want the essay to reflect accurately the content of the photograph, so I am re-posting to account for this.



In meeting my goal of using other people’s photos for occasional blog posts, I submit this recent pic from John, a local blogger and contributor, who made this observation of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail earlier in August, looking southward down Alabama Street:

The metal sign advertising rates at an adjacent lot is blocking a portion of the bikeway. The trail, one of the most innovative pedestrian improvement projects in the country—let alone in Indy—clearly doesn’t rate highly among the owners of the surface parking lot, which, sadly, happens to be the City of Indianapolis. Not only does the car trump the bicyclist yet again, but even signage accommodating the car and promoting the parking lot takes precedence.

My use of the word “hatred” in the subject here is clearly hyperbole, and this was probably an isolated incident reflecting one city parking services employee. It’s unfair to assert that this episode reflects the overall status of bicyclists or pedestrians in urban settings, but it does demonstrate profound negligence on the part of city employees. Unfortunately, public servants with far greater decision making power have made similarly poor judgments in regards to the pedestrian environment; the results are often far more permanent. This link on Skyscraper City shows the catastrophic results when two other city agencies (most likely Public Works and Utilities) fail to correspond their plans with one another. The area is impassable for someone in a wheelchair. (Conversely, the parking debacle in Park Ridge that I blogged about earlier suggests a single department failing to see that its regulatory plans correspond internally.)

After seeing this photo, someone else essentially remarked that such a sign would not survive fifteen minutes if it were blocking the vehicular right of way. Most walkers, of course, can maneuver around this without infringing upon another person’s safety or personal space, while a car could pose an extreme hazard by swerving to avoid this. The less solicitous drivers would no doubt simply ding it off the front bumper. Bicyclists fall somewhere in between, in that they could probably avoid this particular obstacle but may endanger themselves or another cyclist in the process. Both bicyclists and pedestrians have developed a tacit reputation of extreme adaptability: witness the "goat trails" of worn grass at the verges of some roads that have no sidewalks but clearly get used frequently by walkers (or mountain bikes). Most will find a means of getting around by foot or two wheels regardless of the meager infrastructural support. This in itself may have far more to do with the reason so many urban roadways remain auto-oriented--cars are among the most demanding means of transportation, generally requiring specific surfaces, gradients, and traffic management devices to operate safely and efficiently. Even in urban areas where the population density and environment come closest to supporting bicycling and pedestrian infrastructure with little intervention, one often witnesses road repairs while sidewalks continue to crumble--if they exist at all.

This is hardly a profound observation, but it can manifest itself in banal and thankfully ephemeral ways. A few days later, John, our fearless photographer, revisited this site and another area where the Cultural Trail was partially blocked by a scissor lift, and both barriers had been removed.

Democratizing the streets.

It is obvious to the untrained eye that, in recent years, municipal and county governments are paying increasing attention to the capacity for streets to accommodate entities other than vehicles, most specifically for pedestrians and bicycles. In most parts of the country, sidewalks in new subdivisions are no longer a bonus feature to lend prestige; they are an amenity that consumers in newer developments have come to expect.

AARP and a local advocacy organization, Health by Design, recently sponsored a lecture and workshop in Indianapolis on “complete streets”—the notion that a street should serve a broader role than simply a thoroughfare for motorized vehicles. For a street to be complete, it should allow pedestrians, bicyclists, in-line skaters, wheelchairs and strollers to walk safely along that same trajectory. While most high density urban centers are far better at accommodating these other users than rural and suburban areas (often by virtue of the fact that heavy traffic forces cars to travel more slowly), few streets in most downtowns reveal a conscious effort to include infrastructure that puts non-motorized travelers on an equal level with automobiles. Perhaps the best—and one of the few—examples in Indianapolis is the incipient Cultural Trail (www.indyculturaltrail.org), a private initiative that, when complete, will connect many of the prominent sites and urban neighborhoods in and surrounding the downtown. It operates as a landscaped buffer that separates bicycles from cars at an elevated grade, as well as a second buffer separating pedestrians from bicycles (as seen in the photos).

Every road crossing is signalized, with the audible, chirping Accessible Pedestrian Signals (APS) for the visually impaired. Bicyclists and pedestrians get separate signals, as indicated in the pictures above. In addition, every crossing has a clear ramp for wheelchairs (long a necessity since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990). Resting on every ramp are Tactile Walking Surface Indicators, better known as “dot tiles” or detectable warnings to inform the visually impaired of an approaching vehicular right of way by the knobbed dots will feel on a person’s feet. Regular lighting, bicycle parking, public art installations, and historic markers intend to broaden the utility and appeal of the Cultural Trail. At this point, less than one-fifth has been constructed, though by the end of this year it should be about one-third complete, while the entire eight-mile loop should achieve completion by the end of 2011. The Alabama Street corridor is the only section currently finished, but one can see the sophistication and level of investment:

More impressive was the City’s willingness to cut rights-of-way on Alabama Street from three to two. No doubt the ADT (Average Daily Traffic) measurements showed that three lanes was generally unnecessary on this street; it will be interesting to see how it fares for potential narrowing of some of the more heavily trafficked roads used in the Cultural Trail, or for those streets in which it will be impossible to reduce the lanes any further. Some have questioned the effectiveness of complete separation of bicycles from automobile traffic, and others believe the signalization could cause confusion at crosswalks and intersections. And, of course, the cost of this far surpasses what any city could hope to apply to the majority of its streets to make them complete.

Nonetheless, this remains one of the only areas in Indianapolis that demonstrates cognizance of the need for complete streets. For good examples of initiatives aimed at achieving Complete Streets infrastructure in other locations, this Flickr page provides good before/after images. (Credit to Graeme at A Place of Sense for pointing this out to me.) The insufficiencies of most other streets in Indianapolis become obvious when one examines the lower standard for paved surfaces, road markings, signage, lighting, and signals. Bike lanes are still fairly uncommon. Sidewalks become inconsistent within about three miles from the center, uncommon four miles from the center, and rare just five miles away. Many of the roads five miles from the city center were set and paved long before the city of Indianapolis stretched out to these limits; the momentous passage of Unigov in 1970 merged the city of Indianapolis’ city limits with the boundaries of Marion County. Thus, the section of the city that formerly rested outside the limits shows evidence of its rural, low-density origins and minimal service by a county government: narrow streets, fewer curbs and storm drains, infrequent streetlights. To a visitor arriving in downtown Indianapolis and then driving outward, the road infrastructure begins to look suburban and sometimes almost rural quite quickly, particularly on the south side of town, which was the last to develop. Complete streets are non-existent seven miles south of downtown; this would be the norm for an arterial road:

This is the norm for a collector:

And this is the typical appearance of a local road developed before 1970:\

Clearly the Marion County Public Works Department of this time had only one concern: to clear enough space so that cars can traverse efficiently. Density in formerly unincorporated Marion County was often almost rural at this point. While the City of Indianapolis still has a relatively low density in comparison to most other Midwestern cities (huge tracts in the southeast and southwest remain farmland), steady development over the past few years has bolstered the residential and commercial activity in the purlieus of the old city limits. However, the City of Indianapolis/Marion County suffers the concomitant concerns of a significantly heterogeneous population, many of which live in poverty, with a greater need for social services, housing subsidies, law enforcement, bilingual education. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the city budget must be spread over a variety of needs, and pedestrian/bicycle improvements along the streets are not a top priority.

The suburbs of Indianapolis, most of which rest in the eight adjacent counties (Marion county rests in the middle, almost like the center square in a tic-tac-toe puzzle) generally enjoy a robust tax base of middle- and upper-income residents, with notably low poverty levels. This understandably allows municipal governments to devote more time on amenities and quality of life considerations, with far less money devoted to rectifying perceived social ills. The suburbs have, in many regards, surpassed Indianapolis in their attention to details necessary in achieving Complete Streets.

The wealthy northern suburb of Carmel, in Hamilton County, has achieved national attention for its radical reworking of its road network to improve traffic flow through the strategic incorporation of roundabouts, which in turn create an improved pedestrian environment because all cars are forced to slow through the convergence of two roads (as opposed to a stop light, where cars with the green can simply speed through the intersection during optimal traffic conditions). Carmel has achieved bronze status as a Bicycle Friendly Community from the League of American Bicyclists for helping to transform what had long been a predominantly disconnected patchwork of subdivisions terminating in cul-de-sacs into a community in which most major collector roads have some level of pedestrian or bicycle accommodation. This extensive upgrade has culminated in a significantly refurbished downtown, the Arts and Design District , which has significantly enhanced the credentials of Carmel’s downtown as a leisure destination. This link from the city’s International Arts Festival has some of the better photographs I can find.

Completing Streets in an Indianapolis Suburb

Perhaps I’m caving in to convenience, but Carmel is quite a drive from where I live in Indianapolis, so it is difficult for me to capture it in photos as of yet, though I do plan to include some Carmel’s achievements in a later blog entry. Carmel, while still developing, has matured much more in its infrastructural improvements than Greenwood, the equivalent suburb on the south side of the city, in Johnson County. Greenwood is nowhere near as affluent as Carmel, so the tax base may never allow for the widespread public investment that helped stimulate the renaissance of the former city’s downtown. Greenwood nonetheless is a bedroom community with a solid middle and upper-middle class—a population likely to demand evidence of sound government spending in infrastructural needs. The east side of Greenwood in particular has benefited from an emergent network of pedestrian paths along formerly automobile-only streets. Here, at last, is where this text-heavy blog entry introduces a bona fide photo montage.

Greenwood, like many suburbs across the Midwest, has a small, concentrated downtown in close proximity to the original railroad depot, with several blocks of strictly gridded residential streets surrounding it, followed by a broader swath of more recent, heavily auto-oriented development. The oldest part of Greenwood has always been comparatively walkable, with adequate sidewalks, narrow streets, and speed limits that promote an awareness of pedestrians. The remainder of the city boomed after the proliferation of the automobile, when Greenwood asserted itself as a suburb of Indianapolis. The goal among city officials appears to be to expand the walkability of the city beyond its old historic core. The path featured in the photo below is a recently constructed trail adjacent to the Main Street, attempting to instill some degree of completeness to the portion of Greenwood’s Main Street that extends beyond old Greenwood into the newer, more typically suburban, auto-oriented part. The Main Street trail is wider than your typical sidewalk, apparently attempting to accommodate both pedestrians and bicycles in lieu of altering the striping of the street for bike lanes; I saw both bikes and pedestrians using this portion of the trail.

As the photos indicate, the Main Street Trail has labels on occasion to identify it and to deter motorized vehicles (golf carts or ATVs perhaps?) from using it, and it appears to be paved with asphalt, rather than the conventional concrete squares of uniform size seen in most older city sidewalks, including the older parts of Greenwood. I’m no expert on paving surfaces, but I know enough to be aware that few public works departments would argue that, between concrete and asphalt, one is better than the other—they each have their disadvantages. But the shift from the old, narrower concrete sidewalk to the broader, newer asphalt is indicative of a trend I’ve seen in other cities that try to improve pedestrianism.

Now regarding the design: the Complete Streets lecture sponsored by AARP and Health by Design focused predominantly on policy, arguing that design strategies can vary greatly and become more complicated. I prefer to use my observations to comment on the general planning and layout because pedestrian planning as a policy initiative appears to be well-tilled ground. In Greenwood, one can see the gaps in the trail where the city has yet to complete its work. The discontinuity where the new Main Street Trail ends prematurely leaves a “goat trail,” where frequent pedestrian travel has worn bare the grassy turf:

The older, concrete portion of the Greenwood sidewalk connects about 150 further down. This is probably not a problem to the average able-bodied pedestrian (or mountain bicyclist). But it renders the trail along Main Street difficult or unusable for persons with strollers or in wheelchairs. It appears a simple mistake, easy for the planners to rectify, but the same gaps appear elsewhere in the trail as well. Notice this spot close to a major juncture with heavy commercial activity:

The user is forced to cut through parking lots and service lanes to the shopping areas nearby to pick up the rest of the trail on Emerson Avenue, where the path continues southward. This portion on Emerson Avenue is more contiguous, but reveals some interesting planning decisions where an older piece of sidewalk was apparently laid as concrete squares and the newer portion in asphalt joins it.

This is a minor complaint, of course, but this could create bottlenecking if a bicyclist and pedestrian were to pass one another. Such a fusion of two different widths would be unthinkable on a conventional road without warning signage and a gradual attenuation.

Interestingly, upon returning to Main Street and continuing eastward, the asphalt trail continues intermittently even as the population density thins, including one of the few sections where there appeared to be signalized pedestrian crossings, right as the trail continues under Interstate 65.

However, as the trail emerges to the east side of the interstate, it approaches a handsome wooden bridge over a large ditch and then terminates again. This eastern side of I-65 still ostensibly falls under Greenwood’s city limits but only comprises a few nascent housing developments, a number of smaller farms/cornfields, and some large trucking logistical centers. Yet many of the streets here have trails and sidewalks, sometimes parallel to both sides. While this suggests the city’s anticipation of future residential growth (further supported by the widening of one the narrow country lanes), it does appear far fetched to think that there will be a great demand for running and bicycling alongside these sprawling warehouses:

My speculation was at least supported by the fact that I saw no walkers around here, while there were quite a few on the other side of I-65, where the bulk of the population lives—and where there were noticeable gaps in the sidewalks and trails. This seemingly arbitrary placement of pedestrian amenities reminds of me of an observation I made several years ago when I was testing bike lanes in Philadelphia. The city of Philadelphia has one of the strongest networks of bike lanes in the country—of all the large cities (population over one million) I’ve visited in recent years, in may be the best, in terms of thoroughness, contiguity, and visibility. However, one place with particularly thorough bike lane presence was along the service roads leading to the international airport, and frontage roads near the interstate in this same area. I had to bike along these lanes, and I didn’t see another soul—even with the lanes I felt somewhat unsafe because cars were traveling at high speeds (over 50 mph) and clearly did not anticipate seeing any bicyclists in the area. Aside from the bike lanes, the built environment in this section of Philadelphia in no other way accommodated pedestrians, and there was no indication that there were plans to make it pedestrian friendly. There would be no reason. All the area had were a cluster of hotels and restaurants one would typically see at an interstate exit ramp, corporate offices, and trucking centers; it was fundamentally an auto-oriented zone, and it is also unlikely to appeal to bicyclists seeking scenic views.

In the cases of both Philadelphia and Greenwood, installation of lanes/sidewalks seemed motivated by convenience and expediency than by a demand among the constituents. These sparsely settled areas require less intervention and less earth-moving or potential disruption of utility provision than dense neighborhoods and commercial zones, so it is no doubt cheaper to build bike lanes and greenways around there, and the city can still boast of its achievement in marketing campaigns that claim a certain number of miles worth of marked lanes or paved trails. I can also respect that it is wise to consider the appeal of rural bikeways as well. But these districts in Philadelphia and Greenwood are logistical hubs for motorized vehicles—planes and cars—and among the last places most bicyclists will seek for recreation or utilitarian purposes (i.e., few people will ever commute to work at an airport or trucking distribution center by bicycle). My observations of the ill-conceived application of Complete Streets principles at these locations only further disaffirms the famed Daniel Burnham maxim of “build it and they will come”: my observations suggest that it has been built in an area where there is no “they”, and nothing is coming. Decisions like this from the planning and public works departments from these two respective cities erode their credibility among taxpayers who demand accountability for their transportation improvement plans. Perhaps someday a demand for trails next to these trucking centers will manifest itself, but couldn’t that money have been used to upgrade sidewalks and trails where they are missing in older, more densely populated parts of Greenwood?

Nonetheless, Greenwood seems to be getting in right in many accounts. I have gone jogging on some of these trails, and the continuity in many cases is quite strong and only likely to improve over time. The City’s website provides a trail map which shows how comprehensive it already is.

The City’s efforts stretch across the entirety of the municipal limits and do not dwell on a single part of town. It does, however, appear that the City has no intention of improving the intersection of Main Street and Emerson Avenue, based on the absence of any overlay red or dashed yellow lines on the pedestrian plan. This intersection with high traffic volume will most likely always remain auto-oriented, but pedestrian provisions on the north side of Emerson Avenue fail to connect with Main Street, resulting in a complete absence of safe crosswalks on any of the four major street crossings. They also do not appear interested in any improvements on US 31, which is particularly lacking around the perimeter of Greenwood Park Mall, a pedestrian unfriendly area by nature but one with such concentration of activity that it behooves the city to allow some safe maneuvering for walkers or bicyclists along the verge or at major intersections. At this point only the Madison Avenue side has sidewalks (on one side of the street) and County Line Avenue has a proposed sidewalk. I would encourage the planners to evaluate improvements on the Fry Road and US 31 sides as well, if not for the entire length of these streets than at least for the portions that abut the Mall.

My final quibble with this Greenwood Pedestrian Plan is its conflation of sidewalks and trails, as manifested on the key to the City’s map. The very fact that the pathways marked with red lines on the Trail Map use a variety of paving surfaces, widths, signage, and trajectories suggests that the planners have a duality of systems in operation here, which they are not communicating the public. The Random House dictionary’s definition of sidewalk (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sidewalk) is “a walk, esp. a paved one, at the side of a street or road”. This matches the general public perception of a sidewalk: that it runs parallel to a street or at least a right of way. Conversely, trails, towpaths, or greenways are almost completely fungible, mostly because none of them adhere to a single definition. Trails could essentially comprise anything that is not a sidewalk. In the case of Greenwood’s classification system, a sidewalk would be anything paralleling a street that is most likely composed of concrete slabs of uniform size—most important, however, is the fact that it hugs a street by either directly abutting the curb or allowing a small grassy buffer (the verge) between the curb and the paved walk. Sidewalks most likely to serve a utilitarian purpose of aiding a pedestrian of getting from one point to another using the right-of-way formed by roads without the suffering the danger of walking in the road. Trails, by Greenwood’s standards, tend to be wider than sidewalks, use an interrupted strip of asphalt, and may inscribe property lines. They have signs with a “yield” warning of an upcoming intersection, as well as disruptive posts (almost the equivalent of bollards but nowhere near as durable) to prohibit vehicles—particularly golf carts—from using them. Trails are fundamentally recreational instead of utilitarian: their width and smoothness should allow them to accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists, or inline skaters; sidewalks are typically engineered only to accommodate the former. However, these stipulations are a moot point: I would give the City of Greenwood the complete freedom to make distinctions as it sees fit, and to adhere to those established definitions.

No doubt my obsession with trails and sidewalks seems like hairsplitting. But the main problem is that, as it currently stands, Greenwood is apparently using its trail system as a means of shirking the responsibility of building sidewalks where they are clearly lacking and could benefit the neighborhood. Building a trail system is by most measurements a wonderful endeavor for a municipality of Greenwood’s size with real bedroom community aspirations, especially if they are wide enough for bikes to use in lieu of adding bike lanes, but it would be prudent for the City to avoid thinking of them as a compensatory gesture for the vast swaths of town that have no sidewalks. The collision of these two entities—trail and sidewalk—and the lack of distinction between the two only serves to dissipate the identity of either one, and it results in physical design shortcomings like the bottlenecking trail photograph I posted earlier.

Revisiting Indianapolis and its Overdue Efforts

Regardless of its weaknesses, the Greenwood trail/sidewalk system comes far closer to demonstrating a citywide awareness of the need Complete Streets than Indianapolis can even hope for at this point. So much of the transportation network in Indianapolis remains unchanged from pre-Unigov periods that it is high time the city start designing its roads like it really is a city. Mayor Greg Ballard’s recent establishment of the Infrastructure Advisory Committee is a much-needed step in the right direction, though its scope is vast: the committee must also address concerns of sewage treatment (combined sewer outflow), storm sewer drainage, water treatment, and a variety of other public works-related improvements that have long been postponed or ignored. The focus of this committee is spread across a variety of formidable needs, and the fact that, outside of the older urban core, many of Indianapolis’ streets are dark, narrow, and lacking in curbs, sidewalks, or bike lanes means that prioritization will be essential.

The Complete Streets lecture recognized that it would be unreasonable to expect every street in America to come fully equipped with sidewalks, bike lanes, lights, cross walks, Accessible Pedestrian Signals, or traffic calming devices. Many streets, lecturer Randy Neufeld acknowledged, are “complete” even though they lack all of the aforementioned. A rural street with a strict speed limit for cars will be generally safe for pedestrians, if the density of the built environment around it (homes, businesses) is particularly low. Indianapolis has plenty of these, and it would be unwise to prioritize the upgrading of these streets at the expense of neighborhood streets that are currently much more unsafe for pedestrians, bicyclists, or wheelchairs. A perfect example would be the street included in the photo below, just a little over four miles south of downtown. The originally developers of the street clearly subdivided and platted a long and narrow parcel long before the street was ever part of the Indianapolis city limits, resulting in a road which has an almost rural feel: no sidewalks, no curbs, intermittent streetlights, no storm sewers, and houses built some distance off the street. No one could conceive that the City of Indianapolis would someday absorb the much more urbanized character of everything else around it.

Obviously it doesn’t look like a standard urban road. It is a dead-end street without even a cul-de-sac for quick turnarounds in vehicles. The layout and rural infrastructure would most likely not receive a permit by today’s standards; it would have to seek a variance to omit sidewalks, storm sewers, or a cul-de-sac from its plan, and the permitting department would probably reject the application for such a variance. But it was acceptable in unincorporated Marion County at the time, long before the 1970 passage of Unigov. Such a street, rarely traveled by mere passers-by, assumes the quality of a private road, and the absence of strict zoning regulations at the time it was platted allows for an unlikely mix of uses, with large-lot homes next to structures such as this, a holding facility for vehicles of the local school district:

The private nature of this street is reinforced by some winsome eccentricities among the landowners who live there:

My suspicion is that a street such as this is perfectly suitable for the people who live there, posing little danger to pedestrians who must walk along the street. It is likely that the people who live here prefer the almost rural character, even if, when returning to the main artery from which this street ramifies, one can cross the street of the principal artery and see a much newer subdivision adhering to more contemporary permitting standards:

Clearly streets such as this should rank quite low in any upgrade embarked upon by the Infrastructure Advisory Committee. Plenty of arterial and collector streets lack sidewalks; many of those that do have sidewalks fail to meet current standards of suitable safety for wheelchairs, vision-impaired users, or those who need more time to cross the street. Generally speaking, the city has been fairly diligent at including electronic pedestrian crossing signals at most intersections (sometimes even those that don’t have real sidewalks). Compare this to cities such as Philadelphia and New Orleans, where even the downtowns often lack electronic signals: pedestrians in these cities typically have to look at the stoplights to know when to walk, and the only warning they get that a light is about to change is the same four-second-long, amber caution light that drivers receive.

To conclude this lengthy post, I commend the leadership of AARP and Health by Design for integrating Complete Streets into the dialogue, so quickly after the formation of the Infrastructural Advisory Committee. Whatever the current leadership’s shortcomings, it has demonstrated far more of an interest in upgrading transportation to accommodate non-motorized users in Indianapolis than any mayoral administration in the past. It is high time the city improve its lamentable standing for pedestrian friendliness of its streets: not only does any further negligence hamper the city’s competitiveness with other, more walkable cities of comparable size, the City of Indianapolis is failing even to compete with many of its suburbs. Recognizing that the city has a needier population and a far less robust tax base than its almost poverty-free suburbs, the challenge will be to articulate a plan that maximizes the return on investment. My own recommendations for how Indianapolis can proceed with its vision of Complete Streets include the following:

1) Prioritize streets based on existing traffic patterns, connectivity, and density of residents/workers. Arterial and collector streets that service those portions of the city that meet the US Census Bureau’s definition of Urbanized Areas should be top priority for sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, and ASPs. [Note: an Urbanized Area (UA) includes core census blocks groups of at least 1,000 people per square mile or more, and their surrounding census blocks with a minimum density of 500 people per square mile. Check the website for more.] This would involve most of Center Township, where the original city limits of Indianapolis lie and the areas that were platted long before the automobile. Obviously, much of this area already has sidewalks, though there are some that are still lacking. Many of the existing sidewalks haven’t been repaired in decades; in some cases, it’s hard to make out any sidewalk at all because nature has devoured so much of the paving surfaces. These same areas are likely home to a higher concentration of bicyclists who depend upon them for basic transportation (utilitarian biking rather than recreational biking). The higher population density already forces automobiles to stop more often and travel at slower speeds, so the environment is more amenable to a bike-friendly infrastructure already. Striping and signage will enhance its visibility to motorists. Hierarchically organizing the improvements plan based on allotted time periods that link directly to the funding stream will allow a mapped vision: i.e., a 2-year, 4-year, 8-year, and 15-year plan. The variables, as mentioned above, should be based chiefly on the following: a) population density; b) mixture of uses: residential, commercial/retail, civic or public; c) existing levels of danger posed to pedestrians/bicyclists; d) evidence of heavy pedestrian bike activity through goat trails or other improvised rights-of-way; e) connectivity of the street network, where ecumenical, gridded streets take priority over hierarchical (cul-de-sacs) for the abetment of multidirectional pedestrian movement; and f) topographic and other natural features do not pose an undue burden. Such a plan will no doubt favor increased upgrades to Center Township at the expense of the surrounding, more suburban portions of Indianapolis (the collar townships), but parts b) through d) in particular will allow suburban roads with a high mixture of uses—homes in close proximity to jobs or shopping—to still warrant high priority improvement.

2) Distinguish the different types of improvements—sidewalks, bike lanes, trails, greenways, towpaths, streetlights, crosswalks, etc—during the research and information gathering process, but consolidate the research findings during master planning. This will help avoid some of the problems posed by Greenwood’s process, in which conflation of ideals has resulted in an unclear distinction between trails and greenways, amenities for bikes and pedestrians versus those for pedestrians alone. By the same token, the Central Indiana Community Foundation, Indy Parks and Recreation, and Indy Greenways have seemingly concentrated all their efforts in recent years on the Cultural Trail, which, while admirable, has caused the once nationally recognized Indianapolis Greenway system to lag. Indy Parks have forged some trails that are developed without record in the greenway system, others have been built as greenways when sidewalks are preferred given the location, and some greenways have stalled and languished when goat trails indicate a significant demand for their continuation. The research should look at sidewalks on their own terms and not how a greenway on one side of the street will preclude the need for a sidewalk on the other side; otherwise the planners are conflating recreational path use from utilitarian path use, which is again a problem I have witnessed in Greenwood. Only when fusing the results of the findings for each of these improvements as separate entities should the various agents engaged in research put their findings together to devise a comprehensive Complete Streets Plan.

3) Before refining a Complete Streets Plan, engage in extensive public outreach to reveal the results of the findings. This is a no-brainer, but it will put the preponderance of the city’s support in favor of these improvements when the city demonstrates how carefully researched the tentative plan is. Research would have likely stalled the development of sophisticated trails in the truck warehousing section of Greenwood; if it failed to stall it, a public hearing showing the trails built in an area intrinsically hostile to bikes and pedestrians could easily have killed it. A city such as Indianapolis, with far less discretionary spending available for amenities, would need to be held to a higher degree of accountability. Many citizens, particularly those living on local residential streets in high density areas that would clearly benefit from sidewalks, may still wonder if the disruption and noise caused by the construction is worth it. They in particular could need convincing of how these improvements will boost the desirability of their neighborhoods. And, like the Complete Streets lecture, persuading the citizenry by raising awareness of how vulnerable certain pedestrians are enhances the cause: senior citizens trapped by dangerous streets are among those likely to elicit the most sympathy.

4) Integrate the Complete Streets Plan to a broader capital improvements initiative. Indianapolis is hardly the only city suffering from aging or inadequate infrastructure; this is a national problem, a result of deferred maintenance and steady technological advancements rendering the older system obsolete. Remember that at one point engineers clearly thought that Combined Sewer Overflow was not a particular problem. Not only will complete streets necessitate a new budgetary component for their eventual maintenance, but they will require the ability (or at least the financial resources) to anticipate further advancements that can be integrated to the system, to make streets even more pedestrian friendly that we can currently even imagine. This does not require prescience as much as flexibility and lack of complacency among civic leaders; even if Indianapolis meets its goal of achieving X percent complete streets in X years, it is inevitable that by that point, superior engineering should supplant the materials we are using right now. The budget for the Cultural Trail is accounting for the eventual need for improvements and rehabilitation as a specialized project with a definitive end date; transportation improvements for a city of 800,000 people and over 300 square miles will never be able to articulate a definitive end date. Yet this is not so much a problem as it is a concern that planners must account for, both in terms of labor (planning brains and construction brawn) and in terms of budgetary allotments.

No doubt most of these points have already been considered by people far more informed than I am, and I scarcely want to insult anyone’s intelligence by including them. But my casual observations suggest that, at least in places like Greenwood and Indianapolis, the right hand and the left hand aren’t always operating in sync. Sidewalks end abruptly, bike striping disappears with the application of a new layer of asphalt, utility poles get installed in the middle of a sidewalk (blocking passage for wheelchairs), and street signs suggest prioritization of pedestrians or motorized vehicles at crosswalks, without the accompanying changes to the road to reinforce—or simply to enforce—them. See these final photos in Greenwood for other examples of elements overlooked in their trail/sidewalk/greenway network.

Here in south Greenwood, an otherwise perfectly acceptable sidewalk lacks a wheelchair ramp:

Here, also in south Greenwood, a sidewalk fails to traverse a railroad crossing. See how it ends near the utility pole (by the sunbeam):

Taken from a different angle:

And then the sidewalk continues, on the other side of the tracks, but on the other side of the street:

Perhaps these photos imply that I am critical of the City of Greenwood's efforts--definitely not my intent. I believe the City has already made tremendous strides and is likely to rectify many of the problems I have identified. I hope that, as a growing portion of citizens see Complete Streets as an important component to urban or suburban livability (particularly the aging Baby Boomers!), the evidence will be obvious. Seeing people walking and riding along streets will be normal, instead of a curiosity. An increase in both recreational and utilitarian use of streets by bicycles and pedestrians might also be reflected in the shrinking waistlines of the American populace…but I’ll reserve that for another posting.