Quote:
Originally Posted by bhammer
Maybe the biggest inhibitor to growth in Bham is in the street grid, and no one seems to point it out. I dont have high hopes for any neighborhood if they continually plant the buildings on the side of streets that are bigger than most country highways. We can't hope to have an attractive place to live if it means having a sea of asphalt right outside your window, the most picturesque residential urban settings almost always have small streets and it's disappointing to drive through downtown while you're in the middle of a 5-lane road that also has on-street parking, but you've never seen it filled anywhere near half capacity. What's really disappointing to me is that they're too inept to realize this and they continue to spend the money to upgrade sidewalks and street lights at the same level, when they should use that as an opportunity to narrow the streets when they can. They never thought to build railroad park into that street facing the ballpark even though it's crumbling and never filled. And having full 4- or 5-lane streets in an urban setting is a bad thing anyway.
Seas of asphalt hurt liveability in several ways:
-Asphalt gets really hot, and we already live in a southern city. Instant detractor right there and makes it uncomfortable to walk in.
-It breaks and cracks a lot, giving the impression of a poorly-maintained and neglected city. It creates an unattractive environment.
-For each lane you add, you promote car dependency. That widens the distance between two points, making it incrementally more inconvenient to walk or bike.
-It’s expensive to maintain. Let’s put our tax money to good use and stop wasting it on maintaining bad environments. If streets are narrower, it’s much more feasible to pave them with bricks and other fancy things to create a beautiful environment.
-It lowers the density of an area. If everything’s spread out, it’s harder to achieve the population density that makes stuff like mass transit and neighborhood corner stores financially feasible.
I also have high hopes for 29/7 but not lake view as a whole if the streets and one-ways stay like that. Of course wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and on-street parking will be great and helpful, but it's still not going to be the kind of place that people are eager to move into or that developers will want to snatch up if we dont start actually building into the streets and making it more inviting.
I know that a lot of suburbanites like me stand back and criticize the city to no end but I'm only saying it because I want to see it get better and I'd like to move in the city.
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Bingo. Wider streets promote faster traffic and more road noise. Most of streets in downtown Portland and close-in neighborhoods are
two lanes. That's it. We do have some three-lane roads to allow for MAX and buses, and we have one four-lane thoroughfare running east to west (Burnside).
When every street is four lanes wide, it ruins the walkablility of a place. It also keeps people inside. There are scores of outdoor cafes in Portland, and that's due in part to the lower speed limits and traffic flows of narrower streets.
I think if Birmingham were serious about catching up to the "big boys" of walkable urbanity like Portland, SF, Seattle, Philly, Boston, NYC, Chicago, D.C. and Denver, they would begin modeling downtown development after the Mountain Brook "villages" (Mountain Brook, Crestline, and English). Only denser and taller!
The last thing downtown B'ham needs is another sterile bank tower set 60 feet off the road with no street-level interaction.