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Annie Fung looks over at some trees
in bloom in DeWitt Park Monday afternoon as she walks
down North Cayuga Street on her way to work at Cornell
University. The City of Ithaca has been selected to participate
in the Walkable Communities Initiative workshop pilot
program. After living in Paris for 20 years, Fung says
she enjoys walking around downtown because Ithaca has
the advantage of being a city surrounded by nature.
ITHACA -- Why is having a walkable
community important -- and how could Ithaca be made more
so?
Two authorities on pedestrian planning
had plenty of answers at a two-hour presentation for nearly
20 people Monday night at the Sciencenter: Charlie Gandy,
an Austin, Texas-based, self-described "wandering
consultant," and Peter Moe, the deputy director of
the Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Bicycling
and Walking.
Ithaca is one of nine urban areas nationwide
selected to participate in "Walkable Communities"
workshops. The National Center for Bicycling and Walking
is sponsoring the workshops with help from various metropolitan
planning organizations, including the Ithaca-Tompkins
County Transportation Council.
Monday's event also was one of many
this month coordinated by the local Curb Your Car Coalition,
leading up to Curb Your Car Day on May 21.
Gandy and Moe led a four-hour workshop
for about 40 local elected officials and other community
leaders earlier Monday, walking on the streets around
The Commons to discuss obstacles and brainstorm ideas.
"It's not unique to Ithaca,"
Gandy said. "There are plenty of obstacles that get
in the way of our decision to walk."
Some of those obstacles, he said, include
insufficient or obstructed sidewalks, roads that promote
speeding and unattractive streetscapes.
Moe added that Americans have built
separated residential and commercial areas in ways that
have taken walking out of communities by making them most
easily accessible by car.
"It doesn't work for kids,"
Moe said. "It doesn't work for seniors. It doesn't
work for people who want or need to walk."
The impacts of a car-centered culture,
Moe said, are national health problems that run the gamut
from obesity to diabetes to depression.
To encourage walking, "It needs
to be more than utilitarian," he said. "It needs
to be the preferred choice among the options."
A key step to encouraging walking is
designing low-speed streets, the experts said.
Gandy showed a slide of a street in
Fort Worth, Texas, lined with trees and large sidewalks
filled with people. The traffic lights are timed so speeders
will hit red lights and motorists following the speed
limit will hit green lights, he said.
"Putting up a new sign is not
going to change the speed," Moe said.
Later, Moe showed a slide of a commercial
strip that looked much like Elmira Road, with two lanes
of traffic on either side, a turning lane in the center
and no sidewalks.
He then showed another slide of a reconstructed
street with a landscaped median in the center and narrower
travel lanes that freed up space for bike lanes and sidewalks
-- all effective speed-reducing devices, he said.
"It's all about re-prioritizing
the use of public space," he said.
Gandy showed a slide of a street in
Celebration, Fla. known as a courtesy street or a yield
street. When cars are parked on both sides of the street,
there is only room for one car to travel, he said, adding
that streets used to be designed this way years ago.
"They don't have a problem with
speeding on that street as a consequence of the way the
street was designed," he said. Moe also showed a
slide of two streets in the same neighborhood in Suisun
City, Calif. On the narrower street where cars drive more
slowly, property values at homes identical to those on
the wider street are $5,000 to $15,000 higher, he said.
"We can reclaim some of the space
that we used to give to traffic and put it back in the
community," he said. |