Sidewalks = Jobs

It's time to start fixing America's crumbling infrastructure.  Let's do this in Nashville now... 

Think if our next mayor deemed it so that all major streets in Nashville would be lined with beautiful walkable sidewalks!  

As infrastructure in America is lagging think of the leg up on other cities this would give Nashville.  Over time, all cities compete for the best people and companies.  Imagine the economic boon to the economy of Nashville with the double whammy of additional construction jobs to create the sidewalks and the subsequent beautification of Nashville.  QOL would skyrocket.  Tourism would hit an all time high.  Companies would fight to relocate here.  The creative class would grow. 

Consider a recent article in the Atlantic entitled Larry Summer's 4 point plan for saving the economy. 'Summers seemed almost incredulous that the nation isn’t taking a golden opportunity to fix its crumbling infrastructure: “At a time when we can borrow for way below three percent and construction unemployment is high, why aren’t we building?”'

According to an article in The City Paper from 2010 (link below),  Nashville's 'street infrastructure ranks among the nation’s most unattractive, dysfunctional and, in spots, dangerous'.  It goes on to say 'much of the city’s streetscape system — particularly in areas three to seven miles from the downtown core — is pockmarked by inconsistencies in road striping; random curb types and conditions or no curb at all; and odd and/or potentially dangerous placement of mailboxes, signs and utility poles. Bike lanes and pedestrian crosswalks are rare. Deep ditches straddle traffic-heavy roads. And the city’s sidewalk network all but stops in any direction about three miles from downtown'.

And still more with 'Many secondary and tertiary (or “collector”) residential streets in areas developed mainly between 1930 and 1960 — streets that feature the type of building density and layout that lend themselves to a more attractive and functional form than is currently the case — are in brutal shape. These districts include Inglewood, Eastwood Neighbors, Woodbine, Radnor, Green Hills, the Nations, Sylvan Park, Bordeaux and Sunnyside'.

 Why haven't we put more into improving our infrastructure here in Nashville?

Look, if you need more proof - take a glance at Chicago.  Chicago, in the '90s was gritty.   Not anymore.

Chicago's Mayor Daley adapted the City Beautification model around the city to great effect. 

Historically, per Wikipedia, 'The City Beautiful Movement was a reform philosophy of North American architecture and urban planning that flourished … with the intent of introducing beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. The movement … promoted beauty not only for its own sake, but also to create moral and civic virtue among urban populations'.

Sounds really good, right?  Bottom line - Nashville needs high quality, well designed sidewalks. 

Wednesday
October 8th, 2014
7:45a
Ruby
Mayoral Candidate Coffee on Walkability
Hear our next mayor's solutions


Link to event: https://www.facebook.com/events/359966430823457/?context=create&source=49

Also, Pedestrian Paradise Oct 19th, 4-7p
https://www.facebook.com/events/422357221238242/

Sources:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/larry-summerss-4-point-plan-for-saving-the-economy/373849/

http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/floods-puts-strain-dysfunctional-and-dangerous-streets

Pedestrian Paradise - You Are Invited

Pedestrian Paradise
An Event For Walk Month Nashville

Pedestrian Paradise:
https://www.facebook.com/events/422357221238242/

Are you coming?
Have you shared this invite?

RSVP at link above

Not Angry but Growing Frustrated

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for The Tennessean.  The print version had the sweet titled of 'Where The Sidewalk Begins' but the on-line version had a much more sinister title - 'Nashville's Lack of Sidewalks Sparks Angry Campaign' (link below).  Thankfully, I had a number of people draw attention to the angry part and the author kindly removed it.  

Passionate about sidewalks - yes.  Angry - no.  In general, I see Nashville's walkability problem as fixable.  Fixable with strong leadership.  Other cities (see San Antonio or Vancouver) have made huge changes just by electing a mayor with the goal of making walking highest priority.  

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But, there are a few things about walking Nashville that are incredibly frustrating and frankly dangerous.  I thought I would point out 2 today.

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Slip Lanes

My son's school is 2 miles away.  We walk often.  To do so, I have to walk on Woodlawn. Woodlawn is a bike route & has a thin white line creating a small shoulder about 1' wide. Not really wide enough for a pedestrian and certainly not wide enough for a stroller.  

Rules of the road are that pedestrians walk AGAINST traffic.  With such a narrow road, you can imagine that oncoming traffic sometimes has to wait to pass me in order to proceed.  This almost always results in someone becoming impatient and either trying to pass the waiting car or honking loudly - another frustration but I will save this for another day.  

Other than the feeling of utter vulnerability, the thing that is the most worrisome about walking here is the intersection of Compton and Woodlawn.  Compton, a dreary cut through street invites a lot of traffic who travel at high speed. If they are heading south and turning west or right onto Woodlawn, drivers typically pull up hard and fast, angle their car towards the west (or right) look over their left shoulder briefly and go. Although not fully a slip lane, Compton functions as one.   

The problem is:  if a pedestrian is to walk against traffic - they are directly in the path of the driver.

Now, I do realize that drivers are not used to seeing pedestrians on Woodlawn. Frankly, it feels terrible to walk here - and, I am sure most in the neighborhood avoid it. In fact, I often hear comments like 'I saw you risking your life on Woodlawn'.  That being said - it is a driver's job, just like a small child, to LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE CROSSING THE STREET!

   

A solution to this problem would be to create a space that requires the driver to come to a full stop & be alerted to pedestrians.  Vanderbilt recently did this to great effect.

Stop bar distal to the sidewalk.

A little hard to see, but, if you are the driver - your stop bar is distal to the sidewalk!  So, drivers pull right up to the bar without looking for pedestrians first.  Essentially, that is what they are being directed to do.  

This is in busy Hillsboro Village at Belcort and 21st.  I called Public Works about this interestection and they said that the stop bar is supposed to be 5' proximal to the sidewalks - it was put in in error.  That was about 1 month ago - still waiting for the fix.  Once you are alerted to these - you will start to see them all around Nashville.  

Links:

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2014/08/23/nashvilles-lack-sidewalks-sparks-angry-campaign/14509885/

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/09/04/one-dads-twitter-photo-essay-on-his-daughters-perilous-walk-to-school/

Contact:  thesidewalkfoundation@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/shadeparadenashville?ref=br_tf

https://www.facebook.com/events/359966430823457/

A Comparison Of Nashville's Sidewalk Ratio to A City with Universal Sidewalks - in Pictorial Form

In recent days, I have had a lot of questions about Nashville's sidewalk to roadway ratio.  It is a little hard to wrap your head around the ratio so I drew a picture of it. 

Nashville
0.45 miles of sidewalks to 1 mile of roadways 
Population > 600k 

To clarify, compare Nashville to Minneapolis.  There, all roads are essentially lined with sidewalks on both sides!  Imagine!

Minneapolis
1.97 miles of sidewalks to 1 mile of roadways 
Population 400k 

If Minneapolis can sidewalk their city with a significantly smaller population - can't Nashville???

Contact Info:

thesidewalkfoundation@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/shadeparadenashville

Want to help?

- call Public Works at 311.  Request a sidewalk.

- donate to The Sidewalk Foundation - 1 sq foot of sidewalk = $50.  

- Walk [your city] signs:  $25. 

- come to The Mayoral Candidate Coffee on Walkability.  https://www.facebook.com/events/359966430823457/

- come to Pedestrian Paradise. Bowling/Elminton Park  Oct 19th 4-7p  http://shadeparadenashville.blogspot.com/2014/08/pedestrian-paradise-needs-your-help.html

- Wear a NASHVILLE NEEDS SIDEWALKS race bib when walking!  For all the drivers who honk at you when you are in the road - show them why!

- WALK!

Links:

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2014/08/23/nashvilles-lack-sidewalks-sparks-angry-campaign/14509885/

Sorry for the wholesale cut and paste but this article is a great argument for why Nashville needs sidewalks...

September 3, 2014

Why Walking Helps Us Think

By Ferris Jabr

 

 

 

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”


Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.


What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulates the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”


In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focused thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”


Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources than man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.

Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.


Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk.  There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.


Source:

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/walking-helps-us-think

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NASHVILLE NEEDS SIDEWALKS

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Street Art Scavenger Hunt - In Nashville?

October, in Nashville, is both Walk Month & Artober.  As the Pedestrian Paradise event (Sunday, 10/19, Elmington Park) is being fleshed out - I have come across some great ideas that could be used in Nashville.  In particular, I'd love to see more street art here as I am a big fan of the wonder that finding one of these pieces induces.  It is a great reward to the pedestrian to discover something that would be missed if speeding by in a car.

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A friend of mine, who lives in Austin, sent a lavender T-shirt, size 2, emblazoned with this image for my daughter when she was born.  Who knew, almost 5 years later, I would find this street art in a piece entitled 'Austin Street Art Scavenger Hunt'.   According to the author, 'It was cool enough to be worn on a T-shirt by Kurt Cobain, and no other locale captures the "Keep Austin Weird" ethos quite like this painting. It's a must-Instagram'.

Of the street art in Austin, this one seems better placed in Nashville due to the prominent Johnny Cash icon by Federico Archuleta's in his "rock stars" series.

Nashville would be wise to copy this.  Apparently, there is literally a line to take photos at all times.  I would LOVE to put this, with the substitution of Nashville for Austin, on the side of West End Middle School, for Pedestrian Paradise.  Any one want to take me up on this?  

Doesn't this make you want to eat here?  Street art can encourage people to stop by your establishment.

  

Pretty cute.  Ok Nashville - what can we do to make Nashville more walkable right now?  More street art. Followed by a scavenger hunt map.  Any artists out there interested?

Contact:thesidewalkfoundation@gmail.com

Sources:
Austin Street Art Scavenger Hunt.  By Joe Hanson
http://www.localeur.com/recommendations/austin/art%20&%20culture/austin-street-art-scavenger-hunt

Mayoral Candidate Coffee on Walkability - Formal Invite, Link to Submit Questions & RSVP

You are formally invited to the Mayoral Candidate Coffee on Walkability. 

Wednesday

October 8th, 2014

745-9a

Ruby

RSVP & submit your questions & concerns to the next mayor at link below.

Moderated by NPR's Bobby Allyn

Candidates who have confirmed their attendance:

Megan Barry

Charles Robert Bone

https://www.facebook.com/events/359966430823457/