Healing Small Cities

I'm going to give a minute for for folks to come in then we're going to get started here foreign so I wanted to welcome everybody to on the Park Bench a Public Square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the new urbanism and on the Park Bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in New urbanism and Allied Industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time and today we have healing small cities with Rebecca Kick Mark Fenton and Marcia Garcia um register for coming webinars uh and uh um we've got one coming up March 7th these are all at 12 noon eastern time and uh there will be a discussion of building urbanism on sites related to houses of worship and Faith communities in cities uh March 21st we have one coming up on parking reform Trends Nationwide and April 11th join us for a conversation with Urban designers and architects involved with the cul-de-sac Tempe and cul-de-sac Atlanta developments and these are two highly watched projects that are eliminating cars in residential areas which allows for Innovative Urban Design Solutions go to cnu.org resources slash on the Park Bench uh to register um and uh don't forget uh seeing you 31 Charlotte is taking place uh May 31st through June 3rd in one of the most diverse vibrant cities in the American Southeast with deep roots in new urbanism the Queen City of Charlotte North Carolina learn more cnu.org seeing you 31. and join or renew your membership uh become a current CNU member and save 250 off of your CNU 31 registration can't beat that uh check your membership status today at members.cnu.org memberships and we've got a great show for you today um Rebecca kick is assistant city manager at the City of Kalamazoo Michigan she has architecture degrees at both Andrews and Notre Dame two schools that are noted for the new urbanism focus and Rebecca has traveled the country creating designs for small homes historical facade renovation and infill in existing neighborhoods and now she's focusing on economic and planning models for sustainability in the City of Kalamazoo Mark Fenton is a national public health planning and transportation consultant and adjunct associate professor Tufts University's Friedman School of nutrition science and policy and former host of the America's walking series on PBS television he's author of numerous books including the best-selling complete guide to walking for Health weight loss and fitness he's part of the blue zones team which focuses on longevity and Community design and works all across the country in cities of all sizes Marcia Garcia is a director of Education and Training at CNU prior to seeing you Marcia was the University of Rhode Island's campus sustainability officer I'm Rob studeville editor of cnu's Public Square and today's discussion is all about small cities with a particular focus on health and sustainability as well as the economic case for making small cities walkable and livable Rebecca will focus on Kalamazoo a city of 73 000. people well Mark will offer a broader perspective in the many small cities he's worked in Nationwide first is going to be a presentation followed by a conversation with Marcia and in Q a from the audience so we want a good discussion today uh please be ready to use the Q a function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you and now I'm going to pass this along to Rebecca no I'm sorry Mark is going to present first thanks Rob um it's great to join you guys I'm only laughing because we only talked about that 30 seconds ago and we said okay so who's going first Mark's going first but we still no great to be with you I'm gonna broadly Define small if I may and Rebecca I think you're with me on this I'm gonna you're gonna see pictures in my few minutes of comments here that range from cities of 2000 up to 200 000 but I think there's really a sweet spot in the 20 to 100 000 range and I say sweet spot because a lot of recent evidence suggests Americans are very interested in living those sized communities from you know National Association of Realtors and things collect data on this and lots of folks want to live in these kind of mids to small size cities because they have much of what they want but they aren't overwhelmed by traffic and things like that um Rochester New York interesting at the upper end of this scale is I grew up in a small town outside of Rochester but it's an interesting Community because it's modeling uh some of the uh move back toward new urbanist ideals and active Transportation specifically which I think is Central to these principles it was a classic City uh uh rust valley selfish City in the sense that it had a a 1950s era Ring Road or trenched Highway called the inner loop that sliced right through the city separated historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods from the downtown area they envisioned in the early 2000s trying to fill that in and create a mixed-use um Corridor multimodal Corridor above that and in fact by 2016 this is the same view and the pictures in the left there they were actually starting to tear up the Eastern portion of that Loop and um most recently have filled it in are now building mixed use and uh Missing middle kind of housing you know multi-multi level affordable housing but in a very multimodal surface Corridor there and this is Rochester New York this isn't Boulder Colorado or Portland Oregon you know one of the Socialist enclaves that's supposed to be way ahead on this stuff super Progressive regular middle American city that has realized um these benefits will confer not only on the local economics and arguably the environment but also on public health getting people moving again will lead to a healthier population and indeed this is an article that I'm going to tell you you don't have to read because I'm going to summarize it for you I was a co-author it's a position statement really a policy statement from the American Heart Association and and their Journal circulation that essentially says um if we put in place the kinds of policies that support active transportation and therefore get more active transportation and that by the way is land use as well as Transportation policies not you can't look at them in isolation it's how they mix together to create more opportunities for walking and bicycling and Transit use the active travel modes what you get is population Health improvements more people being more physically active not because they're exercising but because it's built into their day um and I'm going to summarize her literally scores of citations at the end of that article but I'm going to suggest to you that really we we found when we did that the literature review for that basically four things characterized settings where you tend to see people walk bike and take transit more and they are classic new urbanist principles right you tend to see a greater mix of nearby destinations Right Live Workshop play learn pray are intermingled rather than segregated by use there's a quality network of facilities for the active modes walking bicycling and Transit the details of design reward you rather than punish you for being a pedestrian or a bicyclist and it is truly safe and accessible for all importantly this happens therefore on three scales the macro scale of land use where stuff gets built and where different uses are the mesoscale of the connecting fibers between those land uses right the networks and the micro scale of design the place making that makes us feel comfortable there as a pedestrian a cyclist a Transit user and and it's really functional for those users so it's important to always think about all three of those scales and I would argue there are many many policies but is uh that that inform and support this but that is as long as a year ago I did a review article for this journal in it it's notable that it's a help journal the the journal childhood obesity came to me and said do a review tell us what you think is going to help us turn the tide on the childhood obesity epidemic that we're facing in the US and they figured I was going to talk about stuff like phys Ed programs and uh School nutrition and uh you know exercise classes Youth Sports and I said I think it's this stuff and I think the evidence supports that I think the evidence suggests that we got to build a world for what I call free-range kids a world where kids can still hop on a bike and ride a bike to a friend's house to school walk to school walk to a bus stop uh participate in the life of their Community without having to be driven everywhere and therefore then these are all familiar to all of us the notion of compact mixed-use zoning and affordable missing middle housing or complete streets Transportation trails and my lingo means Trail networks that are not just for recreationists right people who are going to put their bike on their car and ride out to the edge of town to a trailhead side but rather the trails that actually connect the very destinations we all want to get to in our communities so um I think that's the setup right I think we're all in this space if you're on this webinar you're probably your head's already there right I believe in multimodalism and new urbanism and mixed use and all of that the problem is we get this riba you know when I do this work in communities it is not uncommon to hear these three things these are the most common kind of challenges out here right here you know we we don't really have the technical know-how we're not a big Metro Center I don't have a 25 person planning staff uh this the technical details of this rewriting our zoning ordinance Beyond us um second is it's going to cost too much this complete Street stuff sounds great but it's going to make every road project twice as expensive right they they amplify the fear of the cause and last but not least I will always get that yemo that's fine for there right but that would never work here and there is usually what they perceive as the Communist Enclave within their state so in Texas it's Austin in Colorado it's Boulder and or again it's Portland OR Eugene right somebody's got the there and Wisconsin it's Madison right up into the university towns that are forward-thinking and are doing this kind of work um so I actually have answers to these I I really think and we I think we need to equip ourselves too and I think Kalamazoo is a great example of a community that is in fact addressing these very directly um but I'm gonna these are my four key points I think this is a public health part priority and therefore we should be partnering with public health it shouldn't just be planners and Architects and engineers and uh Economic Development folks having these conversations uh two the knowledge does exist so even if you don't have it it's available and it's readily available um the return on investment is very clear so don't complain about the cost it's an investment you must make and you will see return and I believe that for the communities they're hesitant a poly Pilots to policy approach has proven very effective put some stuff on the ground prove to yourself and this pictures on the right these are young people high schoolers in Rio Grande Texas right down on the Mexican border between McAllen and El Paso um they wanted to look at some intersections that should have cross-blocks so they painted black tar paper and made pop-up crosswalks just to prove to themselves that they would have impact that drivers would respond and by the way neighbors as soon as they put these on the ground they said are those permanent those are great and he said no it's tar paper it's going to be gone in a couple of days and they said well we need to make it permanent the demonstration project like these can make a huge difference so regarding the three rebuffs again uh one I think there's plentiful design and policy knowledge our good friends with the National Association of city transportation officials nacto a lot of us know it has done a great job there's a library of materials the Urban Street design guide the urban Bikeway design guide Transit Street design guide and many many more a pandemic guide a guide that came out during the pandemic for rapid response ideas um that content is out there and much of it at very low cost um I want to say that that sounds like just the road stuff there's lots of good stuff on land use I show here um stuff from the epa's smart growth system the putting smart growth to work in smaller and more rural communities but smart growth America the American Planning Association lots of organizations are really putting out good information that help guide and inform for example updated zoning ordinance does it reflect the mixed use we're talking about I really want to focus on the one on the right here I think this is not getting enough Play It's called The Small Town in rural multimodal networks it is published by federal highways all to planning and design helped them do it but the fhwa imprint is on there and that's important because it means Engineers even the most reticent may be ready to try some of these things because Federal highways says it's okay right and the nice thing about this small town guide is it's not just for small towns I find the tools they suggest are for communities of all sizes simple tools like pedestrian Lanes the picture on the lower left here that's Bonners Ferry Idaho where we're right near the school complex middle and high school off to the right the Public Works director everybody agreed that yes we need sidewalks here near the school he said but I don't have the money right now so I'd like to stripe a pedestrian Lane on the road and a couple of people said you know on the nights when we have a home football game people have to park on this road and of course on parent-teacher night and when we have the the school concert the holiday concert and he said wait a minute wait a minute so you're saying for 10 days a year when people have to park here I shouldn't stripe a pedestrian Lane so maybe we could put up some sandwich signs and say yes on those days you can park here but I'm not going to let 355 days of the year us not have a marked shoulder or pedestrian Lane here let us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good was really his answer but my point is low-cost tools that could work in big Urban centers but also very very small communities with modest resources The Pedestrian Lane on the right here in Boone North Carolina that's paint and flexible delineators that have Crea and by the way fully reversible if it's a problem you take it out um but the Small Town Guide also talks about bicycle boulevards more sophisticated tools and talks about how they can be done at reasonably low experience low cost and so on um one last point about the technical knowledge evolving you know for for years I'm an engineer by training and we were taught you know the the the important measures of a roadways performance or its level of service and the average daily traffic that you can move through that and I just want to suggest that that's evolving I'm not that's not the hard line through those of course they're part of the consideration but another fhwa document everybody should know about the guidebook for developing pedestrian and bicycle performance measures which essentially says again Federal highways imprint on there says yes you can be looking at things like these measures when you're considering how we look at the performance of a roadway Beyond just how many cars we can push through so things like economic impacts on uh across the economic Spectrum Health and Equity outcomes so we're back to the health of the community here are people able to get physical activity through active Transportation um I also think we got to be ready to make the economic argument remember I talked about uh um the return on investment so the the many people have heard of the triple bottom line the notion that when we designed for active transportation we are improving not just healthy people but a healthy economy or healthy environment sometimes referred to as people prosperity and Planet uh and you know Franklin Massachusetts population 20 000. they're doing Transit oriented development that's not just for big cities because they're on a rail line that goes into Boston a Commuter Rail line so that's where they're focusing their mixed use development um another article you don't have to read because I'm going to tell you the quick version of the story which is they convened a national panel and said what are the best economic indicators of the benefits of Designing for physical activity or active Transportation these are 10 of those factors uh that they uh that this expert panel uh felt the evidence was strong for and needless to say things like retail sales and employment you've perhaps seen these kinds of studies what happens when we make a street a more complete Street or more multimodal Street we see retail activity go up tax revenue go up a mix of users increase multimodalism occurs um and so that's one of the strong Arguments for complete streets and people will say yeah but it costs a lot well Urbana Illinois realized when they were going to repave this road anyway the cheapest way to do it was during the repaving project turning it into a three lane or doing what we call a road diet and if you look closely at that photo that served all four user groups it's going to be safer for cars because you don't have to turn across two lanes of oncoming traffic and you get out of traffic when you move into the center turn lane man we got room for bicycle Lanes Center median islands for pedestrian Crossings and that's placed right where the bus stops are so we're serving the transit user too in other words a multimodal road that serves all four groups including the automobile driver better um and when's the cheapest time to do it well I like routine accommodation when we're doing the work anyway Hutchinson Kansas was about to repave that road we had done a walk audit there identified it as a candidate a year later they sent me this photo of the road diet change the character of the road simply by moving where the stripes are right where we painted it by the way another fhwa document incorporating on-road bicycle networks into resurfacing projects are you getting the theme here yes even the national roadway organizations right the guys that were often used as the excuse to not be able to do this are acknowledging these techniques in building More Walk bike in transit friendly spaces so the economic poll is clear there's market demand people want to live in these communities that they perform better economically developers are increasingly interested what are we going to do with that whole first and second generation of malls and big box stores and surrounding parking lots what are they going to look like when they redevelop and their quantifiable health benefits up in the top right that's an actual link to a website the National Coalition no National collaborative for childhood obesity research another Health Organization has compiled a website with lots of resources to make the economic argument for physically active transportation and land use decision last but not least never work here well have you asked have you even tried it's pretty easy to say that when you don't do anything so how about some inclusive community engagement let's get people out from inclusive walk Audits and let's make sure they're interdisciplinary have our team there Ennis Montana we did an inclusive walk audit they identified that location in the lower left for a possible curve extension and to their great credit they tried it in the picture on the right those are that's just paint and vertical delineators could all be removed but on walk to school day they had that installed to see would these curb extensions make it safer for crossing pedestrians here in Whitefish Montana kids parents will never let their kids ride their bikes to school we have these big logging trucks it's dangerous well what if we created a protected biplane well what will happen is we'll fill the school yards with bikes right and that's that photo is from walking bike to school week when they created that temporary bicycle lane so we find these pop-up demonstrations are a great way to get people thinking differently last example in Billings Montana uh Again part of their safe routes to school in initiative identified this as an important Crossing Public Works says we don't have the money to actually tear the road up putting curb extensions but we can use these low-cost materials to demonstrate it and by the way in the interim when we pass a complete streets policy and this road comes up for repaving it's coming up in the cycle anyway we'll build it like this we'll make it a complete street because we've complete past the complete Street policy and we use the low-cost example to prove to ourselves yes students will in fact cross here it's not just roads too I think we can do this with land use this is a pop-up Food Park and a parking lot in McAllen Texas and on the right on an overly wide Road in Salt Lake City they've created an entire community garden and Festival space with basically found materials right those are shipping containers and pallets the point being we can create those walk-in bike to destinations as well as the networks that get us there and there are great resources out there indeed I'm going to tell you that in this in my PowerPoint I've got a dozen additional resources we won't go through at the end but if you take advantage of getting the PowerPoint after words you'll have all the all the links that I've shown you and the resources so I think the answers are out there I think we have good evidence that there's plenty of technical information the how to do it I think the the economic argument is clear now I've got plenty of evidence it's a winning investment um and you can start if you're concerned with low-cost simple approaches routine accommodation build it into what you're doing already and I would urge you to partner with public health because they get this and they're really good at making the argument and they're really good partners um and if you say my God this guy is a raven lunatic he didn't take one breath in his entire comment and it's because I realize these are my kids who are now 25 and 27 but when they were this age we were anticipating a potential decline in life expectancy among their generation based on chronic diseases by the way and it's come to pass before the pandemic we had seen a reduction in life expectancy in this country largely attributable to the diseases of sedentary living cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes osteoporosis and its complications we can do better for them and we have to so engage Public Health folks in this conversation as you build the new urbanist world that we all aspire to and with that I'm going to ask Rebecca to give us a really good example of how that's happening in Kalamazoo Michigan because they're doing some great work there I've had the good privilege of visiting and seeing it thank you so much Mark that was and set and I I do I hope that what I can show you is that we're doing this in Kalamazoo and how we got it done as well and I'll also have a bunch of resources for you you can go to our imagine kalamazoo.com website you can follow a bunch of the pilot projects that we are working on and you can see the progress that we're doing because that was one of the biggest and most important things in our community was to allow everyone to see what was going on and so when we started imagine Kalamazoo uh I was city planner and I decided I was going to do the unthinkable thing and try to reach out to as many residents as humanly possible I have no consultant and I had twenty five thousand dollars to write a master plan um but that's where Innovation is born and I wanted this new plan to be written as a work plan for my staff to actually have an implementable master plan um and by engaging so many people I created a self-fulfilling prophecy right you can't engage nearly 10 percent of your population and then not do what they've asked you to do that would be horrific and so I was able to spend the rest of another big chunk of my career as the Director of community planning and economic development implementing this plan and one of my other bright ideas was that I would celebrate this every single year and so that's this timeline and every year I bring to my community and to the city commission how far we are in implementing our master plan and it has done some pretty incredible things like for one it's created trust and that trust started by our Outreach and I'm using this analogy of setting the table because I feel like a lot of planners use it oh we're going to set the table we're going to set the table with Transportation we're going to set the table with zoning and the thing is is that we're not always setting the table for the meal that the community was expecting or we're not setting the table quite in the right way so the community might be asking for a steak dinner and we served a steak dinner but we served it with a spoon we haven't always given the community the full range of what the that project could be because we haven't really gotten into the details of what's necessary you might be able to give your guests a bowl of water and they might go along with it but their experience of what that truly is on a daily basis may not be what's necessary for your community so if you're going to do deep engagement and deep listening and be intentional about implementing your plans this is where I want to help you think about how you're going to set your table for the outcomes that you actually want the first one um was really thinking about the healing and happiness of our city if you haven't read happy cities you need to get a copy of happy cities in fact we're thinking about doing a city-wide reading of happy cities for our community and that's because while the engagement process gave us input on what the community wanted we also needed to return and say here's some educational things that we want to give you because the way that things are actually implemented are totally different than they were before Mark just gave you a ton of examples of pilot projects in the way we Implement things now and test things are not just like well let's just get that construction budget together and you know start building no we want to test we want to do these pilot projects and we want to set them up for Success so we need to communicate better with our our residents and our visitors so that they understand oh I see what you're you're trying to do here now I didn't get those bollards I didn't understand this pain I I didn't know what you were doing here they have to understand the way that you are actually implementing your new work you also have to realize that zoning caused as many ills as it can do fixes so acknowledge that acknowledge where you had made mistakes and think about the ways that you're going to heal your community from that think about the ways that you've made Transportation decisions and how they are now evolving just like when we talk about level of service we need to talk about level of service for all the users not just the vehicles we're so used to talking about it in one particular bucket everyone needs to learn that there are so many more buckets now and so educating your community along with the Outreach is uh one big step that I encourage you to make the second is we induced in transportation you're going to hear it for the rest of your career so Gotta Get It Together guys it's a secret sauce there's three ingredients you've got to put that land use and transportation in your master plan just get it done the second thing is you're going to do your complete streets policy and the third you're going to do a street design manual I know you're thinking tiny little town but here's the thing your your master plan is your vision so you've set that Vision that philosophy up for your community the complete streets policy says okay everybody here's our roadmap this is what we're going to use to all go in the same direction together and then your street design manual says these are my procedures everyone from top to bottom is going to understand what that street is going to look like if you have a street design manual so I call it the secret sauce and it's gotta happen with your land use and transportation it really will make a profound impact when you know what your street is going to end up looking like it's like your town just changes overnight it it really is an incredible example I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about the repair and reconnecting I I said a little bit about zoning how zoning can really hurt the work that you're trying to do and how it can also help so frame that in the terms of repair and think about how just our example was severely divested neighborhoods that had an ex historical lot size of about 32 feet then come in 1966 and say nope lot sizes should be 66 feet and we suburbanized our most disinvested neighborhoods and that would mean for a city that actually looks to property taxes for their revenue a huge divestment because now you would have to demolish three homes to build one that conformed with your zoning code in 2019 we repaired our zoning code by saying 32 feet at absolutely that is an acceptable lot size in our city and was in the past and we went from 67 of our residential zoning being non-conforming to now at one percent of our Lots being unbuildable in our 25 square mile city it's been a game changer because when you think about the lack of housing that we're already facing and Habitat for Humanity can't build there none of our non-profit housing builders can build their private Market isn't going to save us this is where I I have to say I'm so excited about all of the pre-permitted plans work that is happening out in the world but you're not going to get it done if you don't get your zoning right you've got to have this realization that there's a reason these things aren't being built there's a reason missing metal housing is not in your in your area and you've got to do the work yourself to get really familiar with those blocks really familiar with those lot sizes and understanding how to calibrate that zoning we've been doing ours very very slowly in Kalamazoo we chose not to just go in and work for two years to do the zoning code we've been doing it very incrementally we knew that this was the first dial that needed to be changed and then ever since then we've been opening up more and more to get us ready to implement those pre-permitted plans and that's where we go it's our housing boom zero to 48 but if you think about zero for 10 years doing nothing to 48 so that was 42 new single family homes three duplexes and three adus we never had a duplex built in the City of Kalamazoo for 10 years so we're getting that missing middle housing but we're doing it with our non-profit housing partners because your private Market still isn't going to come in if the comps aren't there because you're not going to get it financed by a bank you start to see where I'm going with how to set your table you've got to understand how every single one of these things works so that you are setting the table for exactly what you want so to reiterate what Mark says about policy to project to you know and the pilot that happens in between you've got to think about what those family and those guests you know drink in that bowl of water and you know did you choose to serve them hot water or cold water did you put some sparkling water in that bowl like what did you think um about how that's going to work out for you right if that's a pilot product you're going to get some feedback and they're going to know it's just temporary right but if you can let them in on the process a little bit more you can save a whole lot of money getting it right and so we've been piloting everything this is kind of our list of all of the transportation projects but know that um like Mark said it's not just about Transportation it's also about the city beautification projects that you can do because I believe our transportation projects really can show return on assessment we've seen that whether it's two-way restoration projects or bike Lanes many of these projects have shown that Economic Development will grow around those kinds of Street improvements but the way to gain trust and really begin to feel what your community can become with the land use is to think about piloting things that like composting or recycling Projects Home garden projects all of the kind of sustainability things that you would love to bring into your city are great pilot projects as well so I'll leave you there and again you can go to imaginekalamazoo.com to be sure that you can take a look at all of these projects and you can see how much they cost and how long they've been running all of our pilot projects we run for a minimum of three years to Gan uh you know get the data that we feel like we need to be able to make it into a permanent project thank you Rebecca thank you to mark for this really energizing kind of inspiring presentation of um what could be done and what has been done and I think a lot of people will appreciate um the fact that we're looking at this from a multi-disciplinary team effort of healing a city not just our urban planners and our Architects and our designers but also our Public Health officials policy makers and and all of those things um probably one I think one of the bigger questions that most people have is if you are in that small City and you're a planner for that small City where do you start is it do you look at an existing master plan and try to figure out how you can kind of squeeze in there or do you have to kind of do the big lift for um you know asking for a revisit or a re-mastering of rewriting of a master plan how did how did that start with you Rebecca and then and Mark do you have any suggestions for those um just starting how do I flip the switch sure that is an excellent question and it it's about um taking the first bite of the Apple so if you can think about uh whenever we're trying to get to an end end in mind I pull my team together and we start and there's like three of us right like that's the whole team we don't have a big planning department either and we start to work backward and we start to say okay what's the first thing that we we could do you know in that engagement or in that education to get to this project who else needs to be at the table and we start to think what can we do with just paint what other infrastructure do we need can we do curbs can we do Planters can we use pallets can we who are our uh Champions who can we think of um which neighborhood association could we pilot this with is this something that we could do in um you know our Vine neighborhood or do we want to do this in our North Side neighborhood like we immediately think about the easiest place that would possibly happen What tool do we have the best allies at you know and and then we start to kind of work with that team yeah yeah I'm just gonna it's a it's a good question and and there's not a standard answer because you I would argue you've got to be opportunistic so if you're due to update your master plan right if you're about to update your comp plan then man integrate all this in the process um uh if on the other hand you're not just as Rebecca said look at your Paving program what's getting paved next year this summer right this next building season you know Paving season uh that could we could just take 12 foot Lanes down to ten and a half widen three and a half foot the shoulders to five feet and make them bicycle lanes and I mean you might say well that's lame but it's way better than nothing and you'll have an impact the narrowing the travel Lanes bring speeds down a few miles an hour you'll Define a space that's a little safer for a pedestrian or a bicyclist on the side of the road so so you've got to be opportunistic I would say this though my number one thing is community engagement so if you're saying I don't understand hold a walk on it literally organize a Community Gathering of some sort and I like walk audits because they are utterly egalitarian we can walk a role together I want them to be inclusive I'm going to reach out specifically to the independent living group of my community to have some people who are we tier users or users of assistive devices or visually impaired or blind um therefore and so that we can all experience them navigating the environment that we've built that is often very unfriendly to pedestrians and particularly with physical disabilities so so my point is create an inclusive group get out there people across the spectrum of age and income and race in your community and and maybe you do a series of walk audits what if you could partner up with your city councilors and say this summer is going to be the summer of walks and each City councilors uh a district they are going to lead and walk on it in their district and we're gonna and City staff are going to show up we're just going to ask what would you like here what could we do to make this a place where your kids could be more free range and by the way your seniors who don't drive anymore older adults who aren't driving where they could be free range or somebody who doesn't own a car could be free range right because free range kit is really just an indicator species so starting with some Community engagement that's very inclusive I think is perhaps the single most powerful thing much credit to Rebecca and the process they undertook there because to her Point once you do that you got to move you can't just sit on it this is what we like yeah yeah and I I think you also mentioned um Rebecca that you you kind of want to talk about you know not only the the smaller First Steps but what is the bigger goal um and and we talked uh prior to today about how you know really when you think about it the bigger goal especially true of small cities or small towns is that you want to heal it in every possible way not just for physical health as we've been talking about so making things more um walkable or for you know playing for multi-modal um use but we're trying to heal from an economic standpoint we're trying to heal from a social a social social justice standpoint um what are the I guess maybe the question is what's the prescription for it so we talked about the land use plan and transportation plan and going into this prescription that we'll call the master plan um that that we come up with so um can we talk about some examples Rebecca that you've had you know probably didn't first thought be a Public Health Solution but something that's going on in Kalamazoo that turns up you know it is doing a lot more healing than we thought it would it's not just bringing down vehicle models travel where it's not just bringing down um you know car crashes but it's actually promoting a healthy economy promoting a healthy environment and also promoting uh public health is there anything going on in Kalamazoo that can point to that yeah absolutely I think our our piloted bike lanes are the biggest um the biggest project that we're doing right now that would hit all of those points and the the reason we're piloting bike Lanes is because we're working on a two-way restoration project so we have four one-way pairs that are in our downtown that are hugely wide and really unruly and they were part of our state DOT and I say were in capital letters so you know that's another folder that we moved um in Kalamazoo was we got to take our streets back and so we are now the ones in control of what happens when you pave it and so to Mark's point when we knew those streets were going to be redone and we did a chip seal we repainted with bike Lanes we took a lane off every single one of those one-way Pairs and we did that now our two-way restoration is probably four years in the future we're just now racing the dollars we've got the raise grant for planning but while we're doing that we want to show progress and so we're we're taking Lanes off all of these streets and that has caused our traffic calming it has been incredible we're already seeing five miles an hour in a drop and these projects have been up for about eight months we did them last summer and we also Incorporated um crosswalks with that we focused on our schools we've got the curb those built curbs that Mark showed you in the in the photographs we've got Bill curbs we've got um lots of pedestrian Crossings and the reason this impacts Public Health in such a critical way is that crashes in Kalamazoo fatal crashes in Kalamazoo on these streets and pedestrian crashes were way high for our for our size of city um and seeing reductions in all of those um fatal accidents as well as you know severe injuries has been a real eye-opener for us and and you know we you know everybody's going to have this moment where you're like oh my gosh I can't believe we didn't do this sooner um because once you see the results of the work that you're doing um it it really does become a profound impact uh Margaret with a benefits with public health you know we we've talked a lot about you've talked a lot about the health um and uh in terms of accidents and fatalities and also obesity particular childhood obesity can you talk a little bit more about chronic health issues um what the benefits are of a walkable um City going towards healing uh particularly probably with you know the the past pandemic what that has shown Us in terms of uh survivability of those who are in better health absolutely right so the data is really really striking we had known that there are um deep um uh uh social injustice is associated with health in our society so in other words rates of cardiovascular disease obesity type 2 diabetes are are far more burdensome far more heavily on households of lower income often of people of color indigenous populations in in so for example uh Native American Indians and Hawaiian island um a Native Alaskan natives or North American so in the point being in each case um it's the imposition of sort of this new food stuff right these these kind of the high high fat High High um sugar foods that you you see sort of in American society and and you know kind of Western Society in general but most importantly it's reduction in physical activity right the elimination of routine daily physical activity um so we've seen that that striation occurred what we saw during the pandemic was the same thing was occurring among who was getting sick from and most importantly dying from covid we saw those same populations having much higher risk and what we began to realize was physical activity is protective not just around uh in uh I'm sorry chronic disease but also infectious disease so if you were to say to me write the best prescription you could write to somebody to avoid death from covet I'd say mask wearing hand washing vaccination and stay Physically Active the data is crystal clear the Centers for Disease Control has said it and people they were more physically active much lower risk so now we're starting to realize that there's this public health imperative you know think about the roots of planning in this country it was public health that said we should segregate land uses and make dirty factories be separate from where people live right we don't want the the filthy smoke from the coal fire and and we don't want the water contamination so it was a public health thing to use single-use zoning right to segregate land uses similarly lowering density low density suburbs well but pandemics like the 1918 flu pandemic to just burn through the the city tenements in New York and Chicago right lower density that's a good so we had good intention not really realizing we were going to then afflict ourselves with all these chronic diseases associated with having to drive everywhere um so it's really really important that the public health conversation be a part of this and I would argue this in social justice because the public health people are saying I want everybody to be crystal clear about this we are now saying your ZIP code is a better predictor of your life expectancy than your genetic code where you live place is so important to your access to healthy foods to your physical activity opportunities and I would argue social connectivity and all of the other social benefits the mental health benefits that come with being in a connected Community right coming out of the pandemic what are we seeing Rising rates of depression and sense of social isolation live in a walkable Community I can help reduce that so I I the the benefits are Myriad and and we can't say enough about their their importance right now especially Marcia right right and I think everyone can argue that um public health is a bipartisan issue so it's yes yes it's not something I think you should feel as an obstacle to changing policy or to um go in the direction that you wanted to go as being more of a liberals dream Utopia that we're talking about People's Health which is not um up for political discussion I don't think it's it's you know either serving your community and helping them to be healthy or you're paying for the consequences about you know population wise and and economically um well we have a lot of questions from our viewers so I'm going to get to those um so that we don't run too much over time um the one question for Mark is do you think a three-lane road diet would work with an ADT of approximately 27 000 how is essential is it to have state DOT on board as this is yeah I tried to pop an answer in there but the bottom line is I'm shocked at the some of the roads I've seen up to 30 000 ADT successfully have Road diets on them um and a lot of people say no no 20 is the number we used to say 10 was the number 15 000 right we used to kept thinking what we're realizing it's about the details of design what happens at the intersections because the intersections are often often the flow Governors not with with the lane uh you know carry capacity is so for example uh you get to an intersection it's a big signalized intersection with a lot of Left Right Turn slip lanes and all left turning movements that's what's going to govern what your throughput on the corridor is go to Modern roundabouts on the other hand then a three-lane alignment with modern roundabouts at intersections can carry surprisingly High volumes with no worse delay and most of the time with much lower delay right even a peak hour though the delay won't be any worse than a signalized setup so bottom line is it has to do with your turning movement you know how many driveways and things like that you know how much you're going to use the center left turn lane will you do medians at intervals to make sure it doesn't become just another through Lane so the design Details Matter but Mike's appearances yes and indeed yes the state DOT is going to have to be involved if it's a state route I will say this we are seeing movement in other words depending on what state you're in and we won't pass the Judgment but there are states that are ready to do this stuff now and there are others that are moving up the learning curve but you know the more fhwa documents that I I included in my my summary resources include ones on road diets and recommendations around that so Federal highways is weighing in on this meaning the more reticent dot State dots are also moving in this direction great okay it's a great question because it's a very timely one now people are doing this kind of work right uh Rebecca we're complimentary public transit services incorporated into the prescriptions for your community at all and if so were there any specific needs or designs for them so we do have a public bus system and we do keep our lanes to 11 feet wide so that is kind of our standard um the buses like to like like us to keep that for 11 feet we have also made sure like when we're placing our curb extensions or we're placing our bollards we do a test with our bosses make sure and the fire truck we also use the fire truck in our tests too so there's lots of times where we'll set up a pilot project we'll grab a bus driver and a fire truck and make sure that we've got the design correct before we open it up to the public as well so yes nice like a Transit audit exactly how great um and I saw that you were trying to um type in an answer for the use of the term two-way Restorations yes and I actually I would love for Mark to answer this one because he taught me um and so I feel like that is a great one for you mark thanks well well it's and I give Ian Ian Lockwood a good friend and colleague credit for this because he's the first so we were talking about one-way conversions in a one-way to two-way conversions in a community and we all got talking about he said you know we're restoring what was here originally we should be calling these Restorations we should always because you're just restoring most of these Street networks had two-way streets that worked wonderfully not just for cars but for pedestrians and bicyclists and right certainly Transit Riders right you put in these one-way cutlets and you really complicate it for lots of the users and tend to bring up speeds uh because it's really about evacuating the city in the suburbs right I mean that's so often what the one-way pairs were for so let's call them Restorations because we're restoring and only use that language so that nobody can challenge where did this idea come from it came from what this was originally and we're restoring what was here and worked well for so many many decades agreed agreed um okay another question what is a good model of a policy guide for implementation of the complete streets guide as well I threw one in the chat I think I put the link in for of all things Springfield Massachusetts we've been doing work out there they have a great complete series policy the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission pvpc worked with the City of Springfield at Central Mass it's another it's a classic example of those kind of medium sized cities um they are putting lots of great complete streets infrastructure all over they just did a big redesign of a of a six-way complicated intersection with a modern roundabout that won an award from the Society of civil engineers um so they're really doing state of the artwork here's the point the manual is 24 pages long because people get overwhelmed by this now I'm not saying everybody wants it only at 24 page but I think it's a nice example of an elegant and simple document that informs what they want to be their standard practice what they're saying is look on local collectors we should be using these techniques and on on larger streets we should be doing this um but we should be thinking about all four user groups all the time and here are actual profiles that give you a sense and cross sections that give you a sense of what this can look like and this is these should be our defaults not the old sort of multi-lane arterials it's just about a level of service and average daily traffic and a manual like that then gives license to the public works department and they have a great one these guys and men and women are really doing great work to to make this reality and they're doing a lot of what Rebecca talked about as part of their routine Paving program when we're touching a road anyway they knew they had to reconstruct this intersection that was the time to not just resignalize it again and make the signals fancier but to actually tear it out and put in a roundabout long term by the way they're going to make up that cost on the lower maintenance costs oh and by the way the roundabout's going to work when the power goes out you know every time they lose power in New England right because we had another New England storm roundabout's gonna work just fine no we don't have to worry about the lights there's just so many reasons these roundabouts are better so that's just a great example though look at their look at their manual so that's in the chat and it's just one there are plenty more but it's a good modest example so you don't get overwhelmed by the idea of trying to do this yeah Rebecca was there a complete streets guide that you were using um owners is kind of all the brain power of your staff that no we have a complete streets policy our policy is about five pages long um it's on that imagine kalamazoo.com website uh if you click on the plans link you can see all of our plans and then right next to it you'll see our street design manual and so that gets into some of the details that Mark's talking about you know about the roundabouts and what's appropriate and where they go with our land use and transportation being in our master plan so we use our streets okay here I'm gonna get nerd out for all my my planner peeps out there right so we use our streets as a regulating guide okay so you'll see the different classifications of streets that help to inform the zoning on the regulating side and so that's how we use the the street design manual so you'll go to the section that's you know main streets and you'll see oh okay here are all the different you know reasons we want this Main Street type and why we want it here in our city and so you'll see that map where we've mapped out all those corridors economic development areas and we know that for streets to be really successful as a Main Street then they need wider sidewalks and they need parking you know on street and we need good connectivity for our non-motorized Network we need to consider loading zones we need to think about public transit and so it gives you this um menu you know it starts to really shape out like oh yes I want that character for this street and that's why I say get to know your city understand what you want that street to become how is it functioning and know this right like the street might run through five miles of your city but it might change three times right it goes from neighborhood to that little Neighborhood Center back to Neighborhood back to me or maybe it changes completely because it's about to loop with a um Interstate or something like that so you think about how your street design manual kind of sets you up for success in terms of what are the elements that make that part of the street really successful within its context as well excellent um I have a personal question because I um I will take off my CNU hat and ask as a public citizen I live in a small town where there are a lot a lot of because I'm I think this this whole town was built Riot sprawl peak of industrial and office Parks business parks and since the Pandemic those are huge empty spaces now so we've got a whole bunch of buildings that are only half occupied if at all we've got huge parking lots with maybe four or five cars in them because those are the only ones who are required to go back into the office where do I start with trying to find someone who can better address that issue because I don't want to have to look at it every single day and think there's got to be something that can be done it can't be obvious to just me as somebody who's in this in this industry and who thinks about these things um it's it's along the side of a major road so it can't be just me who's trying to hope for something more visually interesting or useful for that space um to make us all happier and to make it more of a town and not a town for this business but a town you know that we can all enjoy yeah that might be a hard question what I mean okay so what I would do and especially if um you know I've worked in economic development in my city now for about nine years so I have pretty good relationship with both you know who who would be the neighborhood leader in that space and also who's the owner of that building right I think those are two really good relationships to have to begin with and then you can layer on kind of the third piece which might be who can I bring in or what can we do if I engage my developer in my in my neighborhood leaders and say okay what would you guys want to see here is it a retail space is an office space this is something fun for kids is it a restaurant like what is it then going to that developer we say can we pop up a restaurant here can we put picnic tables out in the parking lot can I host a food truck rally here what can I do to bring something of interest can I put up can I put up some basketball hoops and pickleball courts everybody wants pickleball you get all that parking pickleball it right everyone takes a lunch break yeah activate the space with something to bring attention to it in a different way right like right now the attention that it's getting is like I don't want to see that um I you know make it go away and now you need to bring you know you do need Partnerships you've got to have relationships and Partnerships um that that help uh spark the fire on this but you know if your community brings forward a five thousand dollar Grant or something like that and we've got lots of great philanthropy here in Kalamazoo where you know a five thousand dollar asks to throw a a food truck rally and you know get some neighborhood association to really pump it up and and make it a party would wouldn't be out of the question and you know so those are just so what you're hearing there is start to use what's there right now right so many of these office parks by the way had things like you know ponds and sometimes trails and things like that you know there are assets that sometimes can be quite Pleasant so jump on those do that and then big picture though find the developer because they're out there man I've got some compelling images of big box stores where they had to rip up the zoning by the way the zoning would have never allowed them to do this but where the surface parking got turned into parking boulevards facing sets of buildings multi-story residential above retail and all of a sudden you've started to repopulate um now not everywhere can become that not everywhere can become a Village Center or something like this but I love showing like there's one in Winter Park Florida that was called Winter Park Village which was utterly ironic because it was big box stores surrounded by parking right it was the opposite of a village right rewrite of the zoning allowed it to villageize by creating these parking lanes and rather than service parking areas roads basically streets uh with facing sets of multi-story buildings and most importantly I believe mixed use right because once you start to put in residential they are in fact the first Patron the first customers for the business is there so you don't get that 10-year turnover that a big box small or a store a strip mall absolutely has right those are financed on a 10 to 15 year old time scale 15-year time scale because they know that's about their lifespan how tragic is that that we're building at that level of um uh you know kind of expendability and we can do better we can do better so so that's the so you start with exactly the stuff we're about to talk about get people thinking about these spaces differently and then say okay what could it be and then find that enlightened developer or this remember the building owners eating horrible taxes right now would love to make this be more useful space right yeah attendance again okay what does that have to look like and can we can changing zoning or putting in an overlay help you get there I wanted to say that we're a little bit past the hour point right now and uh uh we will be posting the video of this online tomorrow um and uh letting everybody know with a follow-up email that that is posted and at that point we'll also try to uh you know include a a link to uh do any of these uh resources that we've been talking about um so I don't know we could have uh we could talk a few more minutes if we have any parting thoughts or if there are any more questions that we haven't gotten to I'll just say that I tried to attach a document that had most of my resources in it I had had them on a Word document a PDF so I threw that in the chat so if it came through as an attachment maybe somebody could just give me a wave and say yeah yeah I was able to download it and and it did and I tried to have hot links in there so you could just um go to some of those and there are a lot of good ones and I did make this point on in the chat um most of the stuff from federal highways and a lot of these organs is free if you're downloading you know if you're not trying to buy a printed version and then their print cost Associated if you want a printed one but uh well worth it doing a little uh somebody talked about their bookshelf getting heavy and that's great great it looks like that resource thing does work okay good thanks thanks for checking that click on it um well I think well I you know I want to thank everybody thank you all the participants and the panelists this was really a lot of fun it was a great show and I really appreciate the effort that you all put into it and um uh you know until another time we'll have uh we'll have another on the park bench in a couple weeks and I look forward to talking with uh Mark and Rebecca sometime soon thank you so much for having us yeah thank you great to be with you Rebecca looking forward to visiting Kalamazoo I can't wait to come see you again no 2A come on Cheers everybody take care