Meeting #7 - Crafting a Plan to Engage the City
We are solidifying plans and preparing to present our ideas to the city
Hello and thank you for reading the Strong Towns Seacoast newsletter. We are getting ready for spring as it looks like winter has finally passed us by, so get ready for the wave of pollen. Longer days and warmer weather await us in the next few months, and with that comes an invitation to enjoy walking and explore our beautiful downtowns. Part of being able to enjoy an urban space comes from feeling comfortable and safe within it and efforts on how to improve that was the focus on our latest meeting.
At our 7th in-person meeting we took the results of our conversation from Meeting #6 and homed in on exactly what we want to accomplish. We made headway on finding exactly where in Dover we can focus our attention and I want to share with you the conversation we had. While reviewing the plans that Dover presented for changing its downtown we found that there were two crosswalks that we shortened by extending the curb further into the street. This does several things at once:
It gives pedestrians a safe place to wait until the street is safe to cross
Drivers have increased visibility on pedestrians who want to cross
Driving lanes are narrowed which encourages drivers to use caution
The distance that pedestrians needs to cross safely is shortened
It reclaims unused street space from motor vehicles for pedestrians
What Does Extending a Curb Look Like?
You might be picturing pouring cement and extending the existing sidewalk infrastructure, but that can be expensive and if you get the design wrong, even costlier to change. To keep project costs lower, cities will often use a method called tactical urbanism to temporarily try out new designs with low cost materials before fully committing to it. This can be paint, stones, bollards, rolls of hay, parking barriers, pallets, traffic cones, or really anything that creates an obvious barrier or at least communicates one. This approach can also let us phase in new designs so that they are less disruptive to existing traffic flows and gives community members time to observe and adjust to the changes as they are phased in.
I’ve included examples that I was able to find of other cities, including one from New Hampshire.
Crosswalk #1 - First Street and Central Avenue
Looking at this crosswalk we can immediately notice that there are diagonal, no-parking stripes all around it. We can take those spaces and extend the curb to their edges and reclaim all of that space for pedestrians and shorten the crosswalk in the process.
#2 - Waldron Court and Cocheco Mills
This is a similar situation to the previous crosswalk, but the parking lane on the left side ends here and the driving lane widens. Though, we can still extend the curb on the left-hand side to get that narrow crosswalk that we are looking for.
Car-Free Third Street
Another idea that we’ve been discussing at our meetings is taking a space that is normally given to cars and blocking through traffic to make a temporary third space for the community. Dover does this every year with Apple Harvest Day, but can we do something on a smaller scale more often? After considering several streets, the idea of Third Street between Central Avenue and Chestnut Street being closed to through traffic seemed like a strong contender for this. Reasons for this choice are:
It is easy to detour around since it is not a vital connection between places
It is centrally located in the downtown and is near the transportation center
It has only a few parking spaces along it, which should not impact the downtown if they are unavailable for one day each month
Another thing to consider is what day to choose to make the street car-free and Sunday seems like a good choice for this. It is on a weekend, so more people would be available to attend a community event, and the bank and the furniture store are closed on those days so we wouldn’t be disrupting their businesses. Though, the restaurants that are open on Sundays would still need to approve of this idea.
To make this idea a success, we need to do more than just close down the streets to cars, we also need to invite people to come. Some ideas have been thrown around such as a local craft booths, live music, entertainment, etc. and we recognize that this will be one of the challenges of this initiative that we are still figuring out.
Wrapping Up
Thank you so much for reading! This meeting really felt like a change in the momentum of our group. We are attracting new people, discussing projects to engage in, and even had a city official stop by to chat with us. I hope that some of what we are working on is inspiring and exciting to you. If it is, then we would love to see you at our next meeting in April, so be on the lookout for details in our next post.
Third on Third! The Strand often has matinees on Sunday at 2pm. I bet they'd welcome the foot traffic. I wonder if Seacoast Eat Local would be interested in having a Farmers' Market there between their Winter and Summer series.