Buffalo’s Main Street is coming back to life thanks to one simple change: the city has opened it up to cars after three decades of being a pedestrian mall. As a pedestrian mall, “it was like a ghost town,” says one business owner. Now that it is open to cars, “the difference on the street is like night and day.”
The surprise is not that opening the street to cars has revitalized the downtown area. The real surprise is that it took the city so long to learn its lesson. Businesses started closing almost as soon as the street was closed. By 2002, everyone knew the street closure, which was supposed to renew the area, was a failure. Yet it took more than a decade after that to open it up again.
The Antiplanner gets into the background of this story in Best-Laid Plans. In 1959, Kalamazoo, Michigan became the first city to try to create a downtown pedestrian mall by closing streets to cars. Over the next three decades, cities across the United States and Canada emulated this example by creating more than 200 pedestrian malls. But far from revitalizing downtowns, nearly all of them hastened their demise.
Despite this record, Buffalo blithely closed its Main Street to cars nearly a quarter of a century after Kalamazoo. Vacancy rates rose 27 percent and property values declined by 48 percent.
In 2002, after two decades of failure, Buffalo planners reviewed more than 70 pedestrian malls. They found that more than three out of four had been opened or re-opened to cars, including Kalamazoo’s in 1998. Seven others were “struggling” and cities had proposed to re-open five of those to cars. Buffalo planners considered only nine malls a success: seven were in either university towns (such as Boulder’s Pearl Street) or resort towns (such as Aspen), while the other two were transit malls (Denver’s 16th Steet and Minneapolis’ Nicollet Mall).
In other words, success depended on already having high rates of pedestrianism. Attempts to turn auto drivers into pedestrians almost invariably failed.
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Why did it take Kalamazoo nearly forty years to admit its mistake? Why were cities like Buffalo repeating Kalamazoo’s mistake more than two decades later? Why did Buffalo take more than a decade after its 2002 analysis to finally rectify its problem?
Part of the answer, I think, is that no one likes to admit they made a mistake, so it takes a generation–the retirement of the planners who made the mistake and replacement by others not so invested in the plan–for new ideas to prevail. In Buffalo and elsewhere, urban planners probably told themselves that downtown would have declined even if they hadn’t closed the street to cars; how else could they justify a policy that hadn’t worked elsewhere and clearly wasn’t working in Buffalo?
Another part of the answer is that any plan immediately creates special interest groups dedicated to keeping the plan in place no matter how badly it fails. Someone–pedestrians, cyclists, or just people who don’t like cars–benefits from the plan and they lobby to keep it from being changed.
A third part of the answer is just the slow pace of government decision making. The city has to commission studies, write draft and final plans, hold hearings, and accept written comments from the public. One reason for this protracted process is to spread the blame in case something goes wrong. Another reason is that government tends to gold-plate everything: Buffalo, for example, says it will cost more than $125 million to open Main Street to cars, and so far has found the funding to open just three of the ten blocks that had been closed.
Planners today like to talk about “adaptive management,” where they monitor the plans every year and adjust them in response to the results. The Antiplanner is skeptical that this can work in a world of planners who refuse to admit mistakes, special interest groups that want to perpetuate mistakes, and politicians who want to avoid making hard decisions.
Life happens faster than planners can plan. This means cities and other government entities need to find ways to deal with change that don’t involve government planning. Perhaps one solution in this case is to privatize streets so that the businesses and residents on those streets can decide for themselves what works best.
We also have to consider that many planners are unaccountable, authoritarian progressives and want people to suffer due to not following their prescribed plans. Yet another reason to not place such highly distilled power in the hands of a few bed wetting, tantrum throwing mamma’s boys.
This has happened before, Paris France in the 60’s street side parking was prohibited and the retail all but died along it. It wasn’t until Pompedieu realized the error of the urban planners and law makers and street parking was reinstated. It turned out the parked cars did several positive things, One they acted as a minor sound barrier to traffic up and down the street. Two acted as a safety barrier, a layer of dead metal to protect the pedestrians between the road and the sidewalk and the prospect of people getting in and out encouraged drivers to pay attention and slow down rather than dash fast thru the road and finally gave a sense of fullness and occupation compared to the appearance of empty streets.
In Clem Lebine’s article on auto centric plannning… “decades of car-centric planning and “modern” architecture has failed to produce places of local character, charm or appreciation. And since globalized finance requires a homogenized building product, what gets built in one place must be the same as what gets built everywhere else, be it in Dallas, Columbus or Charleston.”
It’s sorta true, modern architecture sucks and automotive parking eats into potentially useful property. Unlike the picturesque historic cores of most cities in Europe or colonial cities in the US, many of our urban hubs consist of a crop of hideous highrises and bland commercial buildings grounded with acres of surface parking lots. Neither aesthetically pleasing or historically valued. So the first generations of city planned commercial development is swiftly demolished as fast as it’s put up.
Whether we contest against or for the car’s use in the city, the truth of the matter is, we need the car. And holding that many cars requires the use of say….the parking lot, inadequate space the parking structure. So the aesthetic of the otherwise hideous garage that dominates most of our cities would seem paramount. Why focus so much attention on the appearance of such a utilitarian structure; because historically we used to. In the past buildings of a utilitarian nature were compatible with the architecture of the buildings we work and live. Factories, warehouses, processing centers. There’s no reason to think the venerable parking garage shouldn’t meet the same expectations.
http://blog.classicist.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Figure-2.jpg This is another example of go home and try again.
Versus. http://blog.classicist.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Figure-8.jpg
Another example: http://blog.classicist.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Figure-5.jpg Find this architect and tear out his eyes so he can never design anything ever again.
Versus: http://blog.classicist.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Figure-9.jpg
Winston Churchill said after advocating the reconstruction of Parliament House after the War; the emphasis was to rebuild the structure exactly as it was. “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” the Antiplanner has frequently stated his disapproval of this quote. But he’s wrong, there’s a reason we love to visit London, Venice, Rome. It’s not the look of the McDonald’s. Or maybe… http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/mcdonalds-italy.jpg
I’ve always had a fascination with Rome. Even among dilapidated ruins, even in a grimy aged state, Rome remains beautiful. But what impresses me most is its civic leaders’ continuing fight to refuse to allow the latter-day narcissistic vandals of modern architecture come in to ruin it.
In “Program Management” of a real estate portfolio it takes a lot of time to see the results of the master planning supporting the program. Decisions made today (even major ones) may still only impact a fraction of the program decades from now. The same planners that converted the downtown in a year are still waiting on the rest of the city to “fill up” the zones/districts they planned out. The planners decide to spend our tax dollars, then they try to be good stewards by not “undoing” something they just did. How quickly can they rezone an undeveloped property? How quickly can they create a special tax district for a new factory… pretty quickly! These downtowns conversions were controversial to begin with, spending more money to undo the mistake can be stymied by the fear of the accusation of wasting tax payers dollars again.
The Antiplanner wrote:
In other words, success depended on already having high rates of pedestrianism. Attempts to turn auto drivers into pedestrians almost invariably failed.
Stated another way, a lot of people that did not have a private vehicle available (such as many college students).
Why did it take Kalamazoo nearly forty years to admit its mistake? Why were cities like Buffalo repeating Kalamazoo’s mistake more than two decades later? Why did Buffalo take more than a decade after its 2002 analysis to finally rectify its problem?
Part of the answer, I think, is that no one likes to admit they made a mistake, so it takes a generation–the retirement of the planners who made the mistake and replacement by others not so invested in the plan–for new ideas to prevail. In Buffalo and elsewhere, urban planners probably told themselves that downtown would have declined even if they hadn’t closed the street to cars; how else could they justify a policy that hadn’t worked elsewhere and clearly wasn’t working in Buffalo?
Planners are often part of the problem. But so are the elected officials that those planners work for. Most (all?) of the planning mistakes that I have seen “up close” are a direct consequence of policy decisions by elected officials – often elected officials that gain their seats through “closed” and low-turnout primary elections where a small but passionate base of voters show up at the polls on primary election day. The elected officials that promote these plans may be in office for years after such bad plans are implemented, and are often unwilling or unable to admit that they made a mistake.
“In other words, success depended on already having high rates of pedestrianism. Attempts to turn auto drivers into pedestrians almost invariably failed.”
What’s dissatisfying about pedestrian-ism is it’s seldom encouraged because the city planners don’t even try. Converting auto drivers to pedestrians is hard not simply because historical trends favoring automobiles. The way the place is designed. The traditional city/town block and grid configuration has been abandoned in favor of the suburban style dead-worm configuration.
https://anormalblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/new-urbanism.jpg
top half: In the dead-worm configuration (thus named as it resembles worms eating it’s way through an apple and ceasing) all properties segregate by it’s varied use. Single family homes, multifamily homes and commercial stores and businesses by land and roads, the only means of access is via collector roads that lead to the main highway. It was an effective way to gain highway passengers but a horrible nightmare when it came to later managing traffic.
lower half: In the grid configuration traffic is distributed if it exists, but it’s easier to walk since all the town blocks are wrapped in sidewalks and crossings. In the top half, the mall is configured in the center, surrounded like an island in a sea of asphalt, a veritable desert of black shoe melting asphalt. In the grid style, the mall still exists, but separates into four buildings divided by streets, parking lots exist but are relegated to the back. The buildings no doubt are easily traversed by a bustling pedestrians or connected bridges above.
So Pedestrianism isn’t impossible, of course it’s too late to modify the urban street scape in places designed using the Dead-worm. Simply a better strategy is to accommodate the traditional plan of streets and grids when new developments are announced. The New Urbanist’s propose this plan but they entice sophisticated rules and zoning and timeframes which adds to the cost. Designing Suburbs to adopt the traditional method without all the zoning and complications and timescales of the New Urbanists is not impossible or unnecessarily expensive. The Antiplanner dissuades the New Urban plans for thinking it leads to multi family, multistory development density. That’s not really true. It’s a matter of streets and placing of sidewalks, that’s why pedestrianism is dead since there are no sidewalks, you’re just walking along collector roads and the highway with traffic buzzing by your ear. Pedestrian friendly is also bike friendly.