Greenville’s Impressive Transformation Faces a Severe Challenge

By Dom Nozzi

Greenville SC — the city we moved to in June 2021 — was brought back to life over the past decades. Before 1980, Greenville’s oversized main street had led to many abandonments, much crime, a lot of drug and prostitute activity, many vehicle crashes, and an overall flight of citizens away from what had become an awful town center. Since then, the downtown has seen an astonishing rejuvenation — so impressive that the City has won several national awards and those selling property in or near downtown boast about the property being near main street.

This, in sum, is the story of how an American city can be brought back to life by reversing its century-long design direction: Designing primarily for people walking and bicycling rather than designing for happy cars. In large part, this meant undoing the century of damage done to the city by the engineers and planners the City had hired — ironically — to “fix” problems.

In 1968, citizens and community leaders commissioned a downtown development plan to help direct efforts to revive a struggling business district. The plan recommended what is now a key element of downtown — making Main Street a pedestrian-friendly environment.

Max Heller, who is known as the “Father of Modern Greenville,” was the 29th mayor of Greenville for almost a decade from 1971-1979. The sidewalk and café-lined downtown enjoyed in Greenville today is a result of Heller’s vision for the city and his European heritage. Under his guidance, Main Street was converted from a four-lane thoroughfare to a two-lane oasis complete with trees, streetlights, flowers, and green spaces.

In 1979, implementation began on a new streetscape plan, which included narrowing Main Street from four lanes to two and creating angled parking. Trees and decorative light fixtures were also added, and sidewalks were widened to 18 feet, providing space for outdoor dining. The streetscape was extended from South Main into the West End and the improvements were completed in 1981.

While the framework for revitalizing downtown was in place, in 1987 community leaders contracted with Land Design/Research, Inc. (LDR) to identify additional development opportunities and create a Downtown Development Strategy. The LDR plan recommended focusing development efforts in three key areas, including the Reedy River Falls area. This was the first time the often ignored Reedy River and Reedy River Falls were identified as significant assets for downtown. The plan further suggested that future developments should open to and engage the riverfront, and removal of the Camperdown Way Bridge was mentioned as a way to highlight the distinctive natural feature of the falls. In the ensuing years, these ideas would come to fruition and help create what is now a centerpiece of Greenville’s downtown.

A transportation consultant and colleague of mine gave me additional insight into the history I provided above. He noted that while the main Street is a great story, there are 10 large parking garages on the downtown grid, within 3 blocks east or west. The “B” Streets feeding these garages, he noted, are very slow to mature into even average walkability. When will the parking demand diminish, he asked?

Hearing these thoughts, I let him know that I am fully and painfully aware of how Greenville has a long, long way to go to engage in an essential reform of its transportation system.

The City — while taking bold steps that nearly all other US cities are unable to take due to lack of wisdom or political courage — has barely scratched the surface on crucial reforms needed. After moving here, I immediately noticed that while main street has wonderfully walkable urbanism, it is a tiny sliver of urbanism in a downtown that has been excessively given over to enabling motor vehicles — thereby degrading walkability, bikeability, retail health, and residential health.

As my colleague indicated, the City does not get it regarding parking. I’ve spoken with the mayor and a number of residents, and while the mayor openly supports road dieting for near term and long term projects, he seems opposed to on-street parking (a great many streets suitable for on-street parking do not have it) and he also seems to strongly oppose — tragically — priced on-street parking.

There are many roads in town center Greenville that are oversized “stroads” (oversized roadways that also try to be streets, but fail as both a road and a street).

Each is in crying need of a diet: Augusta, Pete Hollis, McDaniel, Dunbar, Academy, Stone, Buncombe, Wade Hampton, Rutherford, Richardson, Poinsett, Pleasantburg, Laurens, Mills, and Church.

A significant obstacle for all South Carolina cities is that the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) owns nearly all roads, and SCDOT has only two objectives: maximizing motor vehicle speeds and maximizing motor vehicle volumes – such objectives are deadly for the health of a city.

Given the above, I’d say the top three transportation objectives for Greenville are taking ownership of many roads owned by SCDOT, road diets for the 14 oversized stroads, and Shoupian parking reform (which emphasizes properly priced on-street parking).

I have a growing sense, however, that like nearly everywhere else, even Greenville has passed the point of no return on transportation. Barring an unprecedented economic collapse, there is no turning back on the self-perpetuating downward spiral we’ve spent several decades getting ourselves in regarding transportation.

https://domz60.wordpress.com/…/17/the-point-of-no-return/

Suggestions for Accessibility for a New Town Center Conference Center

By Dom Nozzi

Introduction

An essential ingredient for a town center to be healthy is to be compact, human-scaled, and accessible. For the town center, then, this means that the pedestrian must be the design imperative. By deploying this objective, transportation accessibility and therefore transportation choice is maximized for bicyclists and transit users as well as pedestrians.

Accessibility is an essential objective, since essential destinations – when they feature good accessibility – can be safely and conveniently enjoyed by all citizens, including children, seniors, the handicapped, the poor and others without access to a car. This principle guards against a development design that can only be reached by those with the use of a car.

High accessibility is therefore inclusive and community-building.  Low accessibility is exclusive and isolating.

Accessibility Tactics

Consider, below, a proposed new conference center in Greenville, South Carolina. These are some of the design features we must strive for if we expect to achieve adequate accessibility for the development.

*The conference center must be required to lease parking spaces it needs from the underused bank parking garage [as an aside, for Greenville to promote a compact, walkable town center, it needs to own and lease parking spaces within a multi-story parking garage to a large range of town center private uses such as offices, retail, and culture]. The conference center should not be allowed to create any new off-street surface parking. If the center builds a multi-story parking garage, the first floor must be wrapped with retail.

*The conference center must be designed to keep blocks relatively modest in length (a maximum length of 300 to 500 feet). If this cannot be achieved with driveways or streets created by the center, mid-block cross-access must be created for pedestrians and bicyclists.

*The conference center first floor must be faced with ample window space at eye level. Large expanses of blank wall should not be allowed.

*The conference center needs to be exempt from landscape requirements, car parking requirements, and setbacks. Buildings for the center must be brought to a build-to line no further than 20 feet from the street curb. No motor vehicle parking, blank walls, or HVAC equipment is allowed to front the public sidewalk. Building facades that abut the public sidewalk must use weather-protective awnings.

*Floor area ratio (FAR) must be relatively high. Building height for actively used floors should not exceed five stories.

*Streets serving the center must contain priced on-street parking, shall be no more than two lanes in width, must be two-way in operation, and shall not include turning lanes. Very low design speed geometry must be used for streets serving the center. For streets not built or controlled by the center, the center shall provide assistance such as funding to retrofit existing streets serving the center but not under the control of the center. Retrofitting shall be as described in this section. In addition to street and turning radius dimensions being low speed, other infrastructure shall also induce low speeds. For example, any traffic signals (preferably post-mounted), signage, or street lights shall be relatively short (at a human scale of no more than 10 feet in height). Street trees shall be used for shade and enclosure canopies. Alignment of street trees, other vegetation, sidewalks, and streets shall be formally rectilinear rather than informally curvilinear. Any use of plazas or squares shall be hardscaped (rather than grass-surface) and flanked on all sides by active retail. Low-speed street design shall not include speed humps.

*Public art sculpture is strongly encouraged.

Greenville South Carolina Brought Back by a Road Diet

By Dom Nozzi

Greenville SC — the city we moved to in May 2021 — was brought back to life over the past decades.

Before 1980, Greenville’s oversized main street had led to many abandonments, much crime, a lot of drug and prostitute activity, many vehicle crashes, and an overall flight of citizens away from what had become an awful town center.

Since then, the downtown has seen an incredible rejuvenation — so impressive that the City has won several national awards and those selling property in or near downtown BOAST about the property being near main street. The boasting about being in or near downtown was the opposite of what was happening before the main street rejuvenation. Before the restoration, people were falling all over each other to flee downtown, and the value of downtown property was plummeting.

This, in sum, is the story of how an American city can be brought back to life by reversing its century-long design direction: Designing primarily for people walking and bicycling rather than designing for happy cars. In large part, this meant undoing the century of damage done to the city by the engineers and planners the City had hired — ironically — to “fix” problems.

In 1968, citizens and community leaders commissioned a downtown development plan to help direct efforts to revive a struggling business district. The plan recommended what is now a key element of downtown — making Main Street a pedestrian-friendly environment.

Max Heller, who is known as the “Father of Modern Greenville,” was the 29th mayor of Greenville for almost a decade from 1971-1979. The sidewalk and café-lined downtown enjoyed in Greenville today is a result of Heller’s vision for the city and his European heritage. Under his guidance, Main Street was converted from a four-lane thoroughfare to a two-lane oasis complete with trees, streetlights, flowers, and green spaces.

In 1979, the city narrowed Main Street from four lanes to two (ie, gave their Main Street a “road diet”) and created angled parking. Trees and decorative light fixtures were also added, and sidewalks were widened to 18 feet, providing space for outdoor dining. The streetscape was extended from South Main into the West End and the improvements were completed in 1981.

While the framework for revitalizing downtown was in place, in 1987 community leaders contracted with Land Design/Research, Inc. (LDR) to identify additional development opportunities and create a Downtown Development Strategy. The LDR plan recommended focusing development efforts in three key areas, including the Reedy River Falls area. This was the first time the often ignored Reedy River and Reedy River Falls were identified as significant assets for downtown. The plan further suggested that future developments should open to and engage the riverfront, and removal of the Camperdown Way four-lane highway bridge was mentioned as a way to highlight the distinctive natural feature of the falls.

In the years that followed, these town center design decisions would spark a nationally-recognized rejuvenation of Greenville’s downtown.

The lesson: designing a downtown for happy people rather than happy cars is a powerful, effective way to create a healthy, thriving, lovable downtown.

Making Town Centers Healthy

By Dom Nozzi

Town centers are made healthy with projects that add proximity, human scale, and mixed use density — each of which activates or energizes sidewalks with vibrant, interesting experiences that induce people to hang out and feel a sense of place, a sense of sociability, and sense of security.

This sort of design also promotes town center financial health through what economists call “agglomeration economies.”

Greenery (what James Howard Kunstler calls The Nature Band-Aid) tends to deaden a town center and kills both a sense of place, conviviality, and sense of security.

Sadly, nearly all calls to “improve” a town center are calls to add “greenery” or “open space” or parking. Nearly all US cities have far too much greenery and open space (and parking).

US cities over the past century have suffered mightily because almost no citizen, city staff person, or elected official understands much at all about what makes a town center healthy. Indeed, nearly all “remedies” proposed for the past century have harmed US town centers.

Tellingly, the great town centers in Europe that are so lovable that they draw people from all over the world have very little greenery, setbacks, open space (except piazzas!), or parking.

The Need for Gainesville, Florida to Retain the Courthouse Downtown

By Dom Nozzi

January 15, 2001

The downtown is the fountainhead of civic pride for the community, and both keeping or building important civic buildings downtown is a vital way to achieve or retain pride.

When our significant government buildings are downtown, it sends a powerful message to residents and visitors that we are proud of our city. It is also an important way for our downtown to remain “relevant.” We need to encourage and retain a meaningful number of jobs, residences, and retail downtown. Sprawling, “Anywhere USA” cities (where “there is no there there”) have hemorrhaged their important “social condensers” (community gathering places and key symbols of government) to dispersed, outlying areas. We’ve already the main city post office move way out to the western fringe of the city, and this has been to the detriment of downtown. Fortunately, a post office remains downtown.

Keeping a county courthouse in the community downtown is an important way for a community to avert a “South Florida” future. It matters that we retain a sense of place. And a sense of community.

All this, by the way, is not to imply that I’m fully supportive of the current proposal for the downtown courthouse. I’m rather unhappy about many of its “downtown-hostile” design features. Some of these features try, in a juvenile way, to protect the building from a “Waco bombing.”

Other examples of design features that degrade the need for a welcoming, compact, walkable downtown is the incorporation of vast expanses of deadening asphalt parking.

Nevertheless, a downtown needs to retain its courthouse in the town center. Hopefully, in the case of the new Gainesville courthouse, surface parking will be incrementally replaced with active, downtown-friendly buildings.

Sadly, the old courthouse built in 1885 no longer exists (see photo below), and has been replaced by an unlovable modernist building (photo above).

Making a Town Center Vibrant vs Making an Individual Development Vibrant

By Dom Nozzi

July 30, 1998

Often we hear a big pitch for more parking downtown.

Today, I was giving some thought to a principle that I read about in an urban design book recently:

[this is a paraphrase]

“The further you park from your destination or front door of your house, the more vibrant the place (or your neighborhood) is. This is because when you park too near your destination or front door, there is little or no time for serendipitous meetings/greetings with friends, strangers or neighbors.

“By contrast, when you have to walk (from an on-street spot, a lot a block or so away, etc.), there is more time and opportunity for you to socialize — thereby lending a more vibrant character to the area.”

What often happens in a downtown is that the developers of a downtown project who are calling for more downtown parking are striving to make their project the exciting destination, whereas the community is striving (or at least SHOULD be striving) to make the entire downtown the exciting destination.

Unfortunately, these objectives can conflict. In a sense, by implementing such an objective, the developer is making their project an internalized shopping mall that turns its backs on — and ignores — the downtown.

And that is detrimental to the overall vision for downtown health. By striving to make the entire downtown our exciting destination, we can focus our design efforts on making the public realm — the sidewalks, the plazas, the outdoor cafes, the streets, etc. — wonderful, vibrant, safe, convenient places.

And by doing that, every downtown business benefits. It’s synergistic, and in the public interest.

And probably in the best interests of downtown developers, since I don’t believe they can make it on their own without a healthy downtown.

 

Will Open Space Make a Town Center Better?

By Dom Nozzi

May 25, 2017

Despite the conventional wisdom, town squares are not improved via big setbacks and vegetated open space. Squares such as in this photo below feel wonderful, safe, convivial, and happy because of such things as human scale — the compact mixing of offices, retail, homes, services, bars, restaurants, and govt. Adding big setbacks, green open spaces, short buildings, big parking lots, and oversized roads suburbanizes a place and undercuts its ability to be a wonderful public gathering place.

It is tragic that we so badly failed to create human-scaled spaces at Boulder Junction in Boulder, Colorado, but instead have opted for over-sized, unlovable, uncomfortable spaces (see the second photo below).

We are unlikely to create human-scaled charm and vibrancy in the redevelopment of the Boulder Community Hospital site between Balsam and Alpine.

Or at any other place in American cities such as Boulder as long as we make the mistake of believing that big setbacks, big open spaces, vegetation, shorter buildings, and bigger roads and parking lots are important ingredients for new development.

Is a Road Bypass (Beltway) a Good Idea for Cities?

By Dom Nozzi

November 12, 2016

An extremely common suggestion for “improving” or “easing” car travel in cities is to create a bypass road (sometimes called a “beltway”) to take regional motor vehicle trips not destined for the city center away from the city center to reduce congestion.

I question the conventional wisdom that traffic congestion is bad for cities. I have written and given speeches extensively on this topic. See here and here, for example.

For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that it is a good idea to reduce city traffic congestion. Will a road bypass reduce congestion and help make for a better city?

I think it is now clear that a bypass does not reduce congestion, and has been toxic for many cities throughout the nation.

By funneling a large number of motor vehicle trips away from the city center, a bypass drains the lifeblood from a city center: retail shops, offices, homes, and dollars depart from the city center and into remote, sprawling locations as they chase after the disappearing trips and dollars and vibrancy.

The idea that a road bypass would only accommodate regional trips not needing to go into the city center has not been realized, as a bypass tends to attract a large number of local trips (due to the promise of faster trips).

All of these big downsides for a city in exchange for saving seconds or minutes in a car trip — savings that usually end up being a loss of time for the motorist, as they tend to end up driving much greater distances.

We also find (due to Anthony Downs Triple Convergence) that the bypass tends to become congested in a few short years, because the bypass induces new car trips that would not have occurred had the bypass not been built.

The solution, in my view, is not to funnel urban trips on a few large capacity roads and highways but to move away from the hierarchy of roads toward a more connected street system that more evenly distributes slower speed (and less congested) traffic. Such an approach also more successfully recruits transit riders, bicyclists and pedestrians (which, among other things, creates more parking spaces for motorists).

Another big plus: by avoiding building a bypass, there is a big reduction in the need for initial and on-going transportation dollars for capital projects and operation and maintenance expenditures.

Recreational Bicyclists and On-Street Parking

 

By Dom Nozzi

June 27, 2002

Ever since I started work as a town planner in 1986, Gainesville FL has had very loud bicycling advocacy.

As a lifelong bike commuter, I am obviously supportive of some of what is being advocated. Yet despite this city paying a lot of lip service to fighting sprawl or increasing the number of bike commuters or reviving our town center, much bike advocacy has been detrimental to such objectives.

The problem, as I see it, is that bike advocates tend to be mostly recreational bicyclists, have little understanding of the needs of a bike commuter, and have even less of an awareness of quality urban design. The result is that they tend to sub-optimize on the needs of recreational bicycling. That is, they overemphasize such needs to the detriment of other crucial community needs.

Bicycling advocates in Gainesville and other communities in America will often fight against on-street parking. In my opinion, such a fight is terribly counterproductive to not only quality of life, but the interests of bicyclists.

In my years as a city planner, the most important lesson I’ve learned is that the pedestrian is the design imperative for cities. Not bicyclists. Not transit users. Not motorists. Not Bambi. Not even seniors or the disabled.

Getting it right for the pedestrian is the most effective, efficient way to create and promote a city quality of life.

And one of the most important way to design for the pedestrian is to have on-street parking.

A healthy town center (not to mention healthy transit, healthy Bambi, and a healthy place for seniors/kids/disabled) depends on a healthy pedestrian environment, as even AASHTO recognizes. And a healthy town center is an important way to protect or promote a compact city.

An unhealthy town center, by contrast, accelerates the abandonment of the town center and dispersal of important community destinations to destinations that are too remote to get to by bike, by bus, or by wheelchair.

This is an important reason why bicycling advocates should be advocates for pedestrian design — particularly for features such as on-street parking. A quality pedestrian design promotes the continuation of a compact city. A compact city reduces travel distances. Modest travel distances are, of course, crucial in making bike commuting viable, not to mention improving conditions for Bambi, the disabled, children, and transit users.

 

Easing Our Guilty Conscience Can Subvert Quality Urban Design

By Dom Nozzi

September 19, 2003

Over the past few decades, environmental advocacy groups have had great success in making most people feel “sinful” for “damaging” nature. Such guilt leads to an increased desire to, for example, recycle soda cans. Or object to cutting down a few low-value trees. We ease our guilty conscience — guilt felt because many of us know, in the back of our minds, that we lead environmentally destructive lives. So recycling a few cans is our way to do penance and avoid damnation.

Another result is that arm-chair enviros often naively think that making our world tidy and neat is a meaningful and sufficient form of environmental conservation.

For both the can recyclers living in remote, car-dependent subdivisions with their SUVs, and the tidy and neat “enviros,” we see that most in our society have internalized the idea that “protecting the environment” is good. It is a cultural norm that most everyone takes for granted. It is now pretty much a bi-partisan consensus.

The end result of such a cultural victory, unfortunately, is unintended consequences. Many seem to believe that a tree or a shrub is ALWAYS a good idea in EVERY POSSIBLE location. It is inconceivable that a tree is not a good idea in some places.

That is, nature is sacred.

Given this cultural norm, naive enviros who don’t see the big picture too often decide to exclude a town design decision that has overall positive benefits for both humans and nature. For example, naive enviros will occasionally succeed in stopping an in-town project by convincing decision-makers to save a low-quality wetland or woodlot located in a town center. Naive enviros are often joined by commissioners who are naive about the needs of quality urbanism. Lacking any knowledge of what the ingredients might be for urbanism, it often seems case, that it is a no-brainer that we should save a few trees in exchange for loss of, say, a retail corner on an otherwise sterile building.

But is it really a no-brainer?

Is it really true that we can afford to give up a retail space in a part of a town center that is a scary, uninhabited prostitute- and drug-saturated no-man’s-land? A part of our town center where no one (except the homeless) walk, because there is nothing to walk to except empty parking lots and vacant buildings? (and a tired clump of trees)

The unintended consequence of saving every tree in a town center is that the town center ends up becoming, incrementally, a dead zone that no one wants to be a part of. Nothing happens there. It is not hip to be there, or be seen there. The hip, safe, happening places instead are in the outlying areas — areas that are incrementally wiping out our REALLY important woodlands and wetlands.

Preserving natural habitat by creating better human habitat. So says – correctly — the Smart Growth America’s web site.

The campaign over the past few decades to make environmental conservation (however naively practiced) a cultural norm has meant that we end up unintentionally harming other societal objectives — an example of “knowing just enough to be dangerous.” We often fight and win easy “environmental” victories (such as saving a scraggly tree or degraded wetland), and pat ourselves on the back. But we are either blind to, or have given up on, the REAL war: stopping auto-oriented roadway and town design.

Because there are few, if any, citizens or decision-makers who know anything at all about what the ingredients consist of for a quality, compact, walkable habitat for humans, we easily and blindly harm that habitat as we zealously continue winning tiny, trivial battles to save Bambi.

No one objects, because no one sees any harm.