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.

Can We Define Walkability?

By Dom Nozzi

In my career, I’ve often thought about whether it is possible to objectively quantify walkability. It seems to me that the question will always be subjective in many important ways.

This does not mean – I would hasten to add — that we should give up on creating plans or land development regs that strive to get us walkable design.

In looking to buy a walkable home in Boulder CO, Asheville NC, and now Greenville SC in recent years, I’ve decided it is essential for me to walk or bicycle the street where the home is located. I need to get subjective “feelings” for the vicinity. Does it FEEL walkable? Will the home offer me a “front-porch” lifestyle?

For me, only by walking down the street will I be able to evaluate how neighborly or convivial or human-scaled a neighborhood happens to be.

I ask myself the following questions when I walk.

How many homes have a well-designed front porch (and a porch that is a conversational distance from the sidewalk)? How many friendly people do I tend to encounter on my walk? Are there any gap-toothed dead zones (vacant lots)? Is the architecture interesting and pleasantly ornamental? How old are the homes? (for me, housing stock newer than about 1940 tends to fail to provide the walkable, charming character I seek) Is the street designed for low-speed car travel? Is there well-used on-street parking? Is the street one-way or two-way? How long is the street block? Is there a tree canopy? How tall are the street lights? Are signal lights mast-arm or post-mounted? What is the ambient noise level? Are there sidewalks on both sides of the street? Are the buildings five stories or less?

Regarding the very important proximity question (distance to regular destinations), the 100-year old cottage we renovated in Asheville NC had a crazy high walkscore (80). But it is debatable whether this home was “walkable.” For example, I have a 15-minute walk to the center of downtown, but I must walk over a large and loud interstate highway to do so. We are just a few steps away from a huge number of cafes, restaurants, bus stops, and large grocery stores, but that is because we are very close to a very noisy, high-speed, dangerous arterial road. And before we bought the house, a number of historic homes across the street from us were demolished and replaced by a large, conventional, ELEVATED shopping center that looms over us when we sit on the front porch.

I believe it is also the case that a “walkable distance” (15 minutes for regular “utilitarian” walks is the conventional rule of thumb for maximum distance) varies depending on the quality of the walk. If I find a lot of quality elements I mention above on my walk, I’m happy to regularly walk for 20-30 minutes. If the nearby elements are unpleasant or dangerous, I’m not going to enjoy regularly walking, say, a 5-minute distance.

Walter Kulash made this point about strip commercial “stroads” (the Chuck Marohn term): Driving down one mile of stroad FEELS like it takes longer than driving down one mile of a convivial, low-speed, tree-canopied street.

The same is true with walking.

Is Walkable Design Possible in Our Age?

 

By Dom Nozzi

December 5, 2018

The question of walkability in our time is an enormous dilemma. On the one hand, designing for easier and cheaper car travel (which is politically essential in pretty much all US cities) is a zero-sum game. When we do that, we inevitably make places that are too dangerous, car-scaled, unpleasant, inequitable and dispersed for walkability (not to mention for bicycling and transit).

Providing bike lanes, sidewalks, or quality transit does very little to counteract those things. But adding such facilities is common, not because it is effective, but because it is politically easy.

On the other hand, to create the relatively high residential densities needed for viable, walkable retail (ie, retail with a neighborhood consumer-shed, rather than a regional consumer-shed) is nearly impossible in pretty much all US cities.

In too many cases, new urban neighborhoods are created in a vacuum. Too often, that is, they are not built at an important travel crossroads where retail and compact residential has historically been viable due to the high traffic levels such places naturally draw. By not locating in a place that contains a crossroads, a new urban neighborhood must somehow establish powerful “destination” retail — retail that is such a draw that community members are willing to go out of their way to regularly visit such a place.

And this is very difficult to achieve and sustain.

Opposition to More Housing or Better Urbanism

 

By Dom Nozzi

February 19, 2019

Often, but not always, opposition to compact development (or more housing) comes from folks who either don’t like cities or don’t have a good understanding of what makes for healthy, safe, sustainable, diverse, convenient, choice-rich cities.

Other opposition, understandably, is based on the many of us who are appalled by the many newer buildings which are too often unlovable, boxy, jarring, look-at-me modernist architecture.

Still others oppose more housing because they believe that such development will make their car-based lifestyle more costly and difficult (a concern that is more suburban than walkable urban). But in a healthy town center, it SHOULD be costly and inconvenient for space-hogging, high speed motorists.

I’ve never been enthusiastic about “educating” people about the benefits of compact urbanism (such as adding more housing). I think there are different strokes for different folks, and that we should equitably accommodate all lifestyle choices (even suburban choices), as long as people choosing such lifestyles are paying their fair share. Of course, this is rarely the case with suburban lifestyles, which tend to be far more heavily subsidized by the community than any other lifestyle.

There is a place for every form of lifestyle, but I insist that we need to let the urban town centers be urban, rather than be degraded by suburban (car-happy) values (ie, the values that deliver design elements that are toxic to walkable urbanism, such as excessive open space or building setbacks, low densities, wider and higher-speed roads, large surface parking lots, required parking, “horizontal skyscrapers,” and single-family zoning).

Too often, this toxic degradation harms town centers, as America is a very suburban society with suburban values. Even many who live in town centers have suburban values they wish to impose on the town center, which is unsurprising, given the many decades America has subsidized and enabled suburbanism.

More Blogs I Have Written Regarding Modernist Architecture

The Failure and Unpopularity of Modernist Architecture
https://domz60.wordpress.com/2018/12/07/the-failure-and-unpopularity-of-modernist-architecture/

The Failure of Modernist Architectural Design
https://domz60.wordpress.com/2019/06/04/the-failure-of-modernist-architectural-design/

Modernist Architecture is a Failed Paradigm Ruining Our World
https://domz60.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/modernist-architecture-is-a-failed-paradigm-ruining-our-world/

Modernist Cult of Innovation is Destroying Our Cities
https://domz60.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/the-modernist-cult-of-innovation-is-destroying-our-cities/

Moses and Modernism and Motor Vehicles
https://domz60.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/moses-and-modernism-and-motor-vehicles/

Indirect Opposition to Affordable Housing
https://domz60.wordpress.com/2018/12/04/the-indirect-opposition-to-affordable-housing-in-boulder-colorado/

Redesigning North Broadway in Boulder, Colorado

By Dom Nozzi

July 17, 2017

My city of Boulder CO has plans to redesign a portion of a major north-south street in Boulder – Broadway Avenue. As a member of the Boulder Transportation Advisory Board, we periodically receive notes from Boulder citizens about such things as proposed street projects. In the summer of 2017, I responded to a member of Community Cycles – a community-operated bicycle shop who had sent my Board a note. The following is my response…

Dear “Tom” (not his real name),

Thank you for sending this to my Board. As you probably know, I am very supportive of much of what is called for by Community Cycles. In particular, I often call for low-speed street geometries in appropriate (compact, walkable, urban) settings. Smaller turning radii and more narrow street lanes are substantially more effective in inducing low-speed, attentive (ie, safe) car speeds than Warning paint, Warning signs, Warning education, Warning signal lights, and Warning enforcement. These five categories of warnings are the conventional tactics that all US cities – including Boulder – have used for the past century.

And continue to use.

Obviously, this section of Broadway is appropriate for low-speed geometries – and will be even more appropriate when we see more buildings pulled up to the sidewalk on the west side of Broadway.

I agree that the street design is too strongly tilted toward delivery (and other) trucks.

With regard to that issue, I believe that when more buildings are pulled up to the sidewalk on the west side of Broadway, there will be a substantial increase in pedestrians crossing (or wanting to cross) mid-block, rather than at intersections. To design for that inevitability – and to support the low-speed design we need for this section of north Broadway – the design needs to include raised medians along the street. Raised medians reduce average car speeds, increase motorist attentiveness, substantially shorten pedestrian crossing distances, and promote street beautification. I therefore believe raised medians should be included in the Community Cycles recommendation.

When I proposed that raised medians be installed on North Broadway at the last Board meeting, staff responded by noting that it would be difficult or impossible to install raised medians because this stretch of north Broadway has a lot of delivery vehicles using the continuous left turn lane to make deliveries to businesses. However, I believe it is quite feasible to accommodate both pedestrian safety needs and delivery vehicle needs with raised medians.

For example, raised medians do not need to be continuous throughout the entire stretch of north Broadway. By having, for example, turn pockets interspersed with raised medians, delivery areas are largely maintained. Yes, this will sometimes require a delivery person to have to walk 20 or 30 feet further to make a delivery, but this tradeoff is a relatively minor inconvenience compared to the dramatic pedestrian safety (and other) benefits provided by the raised medians.

Should We Require Green Space in Front of a Large Building in a Town Center?

 

By Dom Nozzi

March 15, 2017

 

Some of my friends in Boulder, Colorado are bothered that a new Google corporation development project in the eastern town center lacks “open space” between the building and the street. I point out in response that Boulder town centers have WAY too much open space (Boulder Junction, for example, has far too much open space). Most of this excessive town center open space is for cars, by the way, but even if such space was for people, it would be inappropriate for a town center.

I’d rather our town centers be like Siena. Why do such people want our town centers to be like Buffalo or Phoenix? Large open spaces are inappropriate in what should be compact, walkable, human-scaled town centers (what new urbanists would call a “transect violation”).

Given this, it would be a terrible mistake if Google had a huge, windswept dead zone open space in front of their building. It would kill walkability and vibrancy.

Similarly, I strongly dislike the dead zone concrete open space “plaza” in front of the new Pearl West building in original Boulder town center. It is another form of deadening. Walkable design principles that reliably deliver vibrancy instruct us that such a space is a dumb thing to do.

But we don’t seem to care much about walkability.

We then scratch our heads when so many drive instead of walk short distances.

If I was in charge, all Boulder town centers would make it illegal to create large (even “green”) open spaces. An occasional hard surface piazza or square would be okay if designed well – which is, of course, HIGHLY unlikely.

Would anyone use the open space in front of Google if they installed such a space? Does anyone use the open space in front of, say, Celestial Seasonings or IBM? Those open spaces make us more like Houston and less like old town Bologna.

Why do we want that???

By pulling their buildings up to the streetside sidewalk (instead of separating the buildings from the street with “open space”), Google will put more people on buses, on sidewalks, and in retail shops.

Those are all WONDERFUL things for urbanism.

Why do we instead want green space in front of buildings that put less people on sidewalks, less people on buses, and less shoppers for smaller retail? Do we want green space in front of Google so it will look nice as we drive by in our cars at 40 mph?

That is desirable for a suburb, not a city.

 

Suburban Values Corrupting Urbanism

 

By Dom Nozzi

June 14, 2000

Applying the same land development regulations throughout a community is a surefire way to degrade the quality of walkable urbanism in a town center.

Unless development regulations such as building setbacks and roadway dimensions are calibrated to appropriate locations – larger dimensions in suburbs and smaller dimensions in town centers – a community would need to water down various ordinances to make them palatable to suburban and rural interests.

If there were no clear distinction between urban and suburban regulations (if, instead, regulations were “one size fits all,” as is the case in most cities), it would be nearly impossible to adopt rules that would require sidewalks on both sides of all streets. In rural and suburban areas, this would be seen as less critical, and communities typically must water it down the development rules so that sidewalk installation remains optional citywide.

Another thought: I often lean toward thinking that if a community achieved quality walkable design in its town center, it would eventually stand as a clear indictment of the outlying, lower-quality sprawlsville. I think it would be desirable if sprawl residents started feeling some envy for the urbanism they do not enjoy on their low-density cul-de-sacs. So I like the idea of keeping the quality walkable urbanism in the town center, and accelerating the process of having the outlying suburbia lose its desirability due to the white elephant syndrome.

As an aside, annexation of outlying areas into a city can amplify the corrupting influence of one-size-fits-all suburban values I mention above. When you annex outlying areas, you almost inevitably make your local politics more suburban, since people with suburban values are more likely to live in outlying areas.

In addition, when you annex outlying areas, you tend to be annexing liabilities. You tend to be annexing high public service needs and high auto dependence, coupled with such low-density areas producing relatively low tax revenue that comes nowhere near covering the costs of such development patterns.

 

Urban Creeks: Protecting Water Quality AND Urbanism

 

By Dom Nozzi

November 9, 2001

As an urbanist, I often make the point that “the pedestrian is the design imperative” within the urban core zones of the rural to urban community transect.

A crucial way to deliver a walkable, high-quality urbanism is to use modest, human-scaled dimensions.

Unfortunately for this design objective, environmental scientists (and arborists) often call for relatively large dimensions to achieve environmental conservation objectives (big stream setbacks, large tree planting areas, etc.).

The objectives obviously clash.

I enthusiastically support efforts to design walkable cities, and argue that successfully doing so results in better long-term regional environmental conservation, because designing great cities reduces the desire to flee the city in order to buy a home in remote residential subdivisions in sprawlsville. For this reason, it seems reasonable to me that those strongly seeking environmental conservation should buy into the urban-rural transect concept — the pedestrian/human is the design imperative in the core zone of the transect, and “the trout” (nature) is the design imperative in the rural conservation zone of the transect.

A dilemma here is that water in streams is flowing water — sometimes from the urban zone to the conservation zone. If the water is degraded in the urban zone with its pedestrian imperative, it can degrade the conservation zone when it reaches that zone, thereby harming the trout imperative. Nature often does not respect transect boundaries…

In my humble opinion, we should strive for a middle ground. That is, a stream within the urban zone needs to respect the pedestrian imperative by not creating pedestrian barriers. Yet the stream cannot be significantly degraded to the point of harming outlying conservation zones.

Must urban zone reaches of streams be “piped” or “paved over” to be walkable? Will they inherently suffer from ugly littering and dumping if they are not covered up? I don’t believe so.

Seems to me that a middle ground design would be to leave narrow, vegetated banks along the streams, and include a paved, hard-surface path along side it, as well as fairly closely spaced pedestrian bridges over the creeks (say, every 200 feet, as we often call for such cross-access distances within a block).

By doing so, we achieve at least two things: First, the stream is walkable and does not create meaningful inconveniences to the pedestrian. Second, by establishing a hard-surface path nearby, we encourage a regular flow of pedestrian traffic along the stream. Such pedestrians become “eyes on the stream,” so to speak. They end up providing regular monitoring and voluntary clean-up when littering or dumping occur (or the “pedestrian police” will call city hall and demand that the clean-up be done). Greenways built around the nation have demonstrated the effectiveness of this form of citizen surveillance. A sense of stream/path ownership by path users typically results in clean up of litter problems that has sometimes persisted for decades before the path was installed. The key is that a formerly hidden, neglected stream is now visible to people on a daily basis, which means that we’ve created a chance for knowing about and caring for the stream. “Piping” or “paving over” a stream creates “out of sight, out of mind” problems, not to mention externalities that we would be blissfully unaware of…

Finally, I believe that the urban stream design I recommend above, while not creating a pristine water quality filled with healthy trout, will at least minimize exporting environmentally harmful water to outlying conservation zones.

 

Timelessness versus Change

 

By Dom Nozzi

May 13, 2002

I am thoroughly convinced that our era of extremely auto-dependent design is a brief, failed, dysfunctional aberration in the course of human history. We are now starting to turn back toward timeless, HUMAN-SCALED, pedestrian-oriented design techniques that worked for several centuries (and remain our most lovable cities — Florence, Siena, Charleston, etc. — cities that will NEVER go out of style). It will ALWAYS make sense for us to design for people instead of cars. The age of huge parking lots and multi-lane roads is a dinosaur age. Either we jettison that mistaken age, or we will lock ourselves into a downwardly spiraling path toward extinction.

Is there a reason that the pedestrian design that has worked so well for thousands of years will one day not make sense? I doubt it, UNLESS the planet is populated only by robotic cars, instead of people.

While there are certain fundamental, timeless design principles, there will also be, within those principles, some shifting about in societal desires. That is why so much of my work focuses on designing for housing and transportation choice. Like in ecosystems, human habitats that are able to adapt to change will better survive than those that cannot adopt to change. The latter are more likely to become extinct.

The car-based design I work so tirelessly against is PRECISELY the kind of approach we need to avoid if we are to adapt to these inevitable changes. We must be able to deal with change on a regular basis. We cannot afford to live in a world where EVERYONE is forced to drive a car and live in suburban, single-family housing. To be able to adapt to change, our communities MUST be designed for transportation and housing choice. Auto-based design does not give us any choices.

Therefore, I am convinced that the most responsible, durable method is for us to select designs that expand our choices, and to draw quite heavily from time-tested designs that have worked for thousands of years — tempered with a dose of pragmatism that incorporates contemporary lifestyle needs.

Adaptability is crucial in the face of such inevitable uncertainty about the future. We need to proceed with caution (and, I might add, with a sense of modesty, rather than the arrogance of, say, modernists, who arrogantly believe we can cavalierly jettison timeless design principles from our past).

The 911 attack on the World Trade Center buildings has influenced a move toward shorter buildings. I am sympathetic, as one of the time-tested design features I am supportive of is the idea that (non-civic) buildings should not exceed 5 stories in height. Above that height, we lose a human scale. For example, it is said that one cannot easily converse with someone on a sidewalk if one is on a balcony higher than five stories.

I think there are certain things we’ve tried in the past that we can say with a fair amount of confidence will NEVER be a good idea. I think that the Triple Convergence demonstrates that road widening will NEVER be a good idea in the future (to solve congestion). Studies in environmental science show that it will NEVER be a good idea to return to an age when we spewed hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Medical science shows that it will NEVER be a good idea for humans to smoke three packs of cigarettes each day.

 

The Appropriateness of Nature in Cities

By Dom Nozzi

July 18, 2004

Introducing nature into cities nearly always degrades the human habitat.

WHAT????

I say this about nature in cities even though I am an advocate for urban open space.

After all, I have a degree in environmental science, so I understand the importance academically.

When I was a child, the most profound, critically important, priceless experience I had was to be able to play in the neighborhood woodlands. I did that ALL the time. The main inspiration for my becoming a city planner was that I wanted to be in a job in which I could work to see that future generations of kids had that same opportunity, as NOT having that experience would lead to an awful, sterile, barren childhood. Indeed, a study once looked at a HUGE number of variables to determine if there was a correlation between childhood experiences and wanting to conserve the environment as an adult. The study found that there was one variable that stood out head and shoulders above the others. Adult conservationists typically were able to engage in unstructured, unsupervised play in natural areas near their home when they were kids.

Because of the above, I remain a leading advocate for establishing an urban greenway trail systems in cities. Such a system is the only effective way I know of to allow kids (and

adults) to have easy walking/bicycling access to the natural world, on a regular basis, right outside their back door. Nothing is better able to create the army of conservationists our environment needs.

I would therefore hold my strong desire for urban open space up against anyone else with the expectation that my desire would be stronger. I am intensely supportive of URBAN open space.

Note that I say urban open space. This is a crucial qualifier. The urban habitat (in contrast to the suburban and rural) MUST be compact and walkable if it is to be a high quality urban habitat. That means that if we are to introduce nature into the urban world, we must be as careful as if we were planning to introduce human activity into a wildlife habitat.

In the former case, the introduced nature MUST be compact and walkable. In other words, small, vacant woodlots, plazas, squares, piazzas, utility corridors, creek corridors, etc. are perfectly compatible with walkability. One can easily walk from origin A to destination B without an enormous amount of physical exertion. By contrast, putting a golf course or even a 50-acre park in the middle of a city creates an UNwalkable condition, as the distance between A and B becomes too excessive to easily walk (Central Park in NYC can work because NYC has extremely high densities and a quality transit system that means you can easily walk or ride to all of your daily needs along the PERIMETER of the park without having to cross it on foot).

In other words, big open spaces in a lower density community would create unwalkable spaces that would degrade the urban habitat in such cities.

The key for most cities is to preserve and create URBAN open spaces while retaining walkability. Greenway trails that wind their way through neighborhoods and small parks are compatible.

Big, unwalkable parks are not.