Measure twice, cut once

Last night, I was walking down Elm Street in Davis Square past the bus stop in front of the Social Security office and Dunkin Donuts. As usual, there was a big crowd of people waiting on and around the bench for a bus. And since it was prime after-work time, there was a lot of car and foot traffic around and about, too.

The sidewalk there is about 8 feet wide, and it's an extremely high-traffic spot. Both the Dunk and the Social Security office have a lot of visitors, the bus stop, especially during rush hour, probably has no fewer than 10 people waiting at any given time, and often 20 or more. And, of course, there are a lot of people walking by on their way to or from engagements in Davis Square.

This sidewalk, I thought to myself as I stepped off the curb and into the street to get around the mass of people waiting for a bus, is insufficient. It's insufficient for any of the uses it sees at rush hour, much less all of them. And it leads to pedestrians stepping out into the street in order to get by, not to mention a lot of frustration and annoyance for all involved.

But what can you do about a sidewalk that's not wide enough? Obviously, taking down the buildings and pushing them back isn't an option. The best bet in this case, actually, is probably a curb extension, which would approximately double the width of the sidewalk and could provide plenty of waiting room for bus riders while clearing the rest of the sidewalk for through foot traffic. This would not lose parking, since the curb would extend into the bus zone, but it would mean that one lane of traffic would be blocked when buses stop to load and unload passengers, which would make it a hard sell.

This got me thinking about the importance of careful and thoughtful design at the beginning of any development. In most cases in urban settings, we're working within the constraints of previous decisions with regards to the built-environment, and that limits what we can do going forward. This will always be true, so it's super important for planners and designers to consider all the uses an area might see. These days, as we look ahead to increasingly costly personal-vehicle use, we know that pedestrian and bike uses of streets will represent more and more of the traffic, especially in dense neighborhoods where that's realistically likely to be a major portion of people's daily trips.

This is one of the reasons that I think the work of WalkBoston is so important. The decisions we make today have a real, immediate, and long-term impact on people, communities and neighborhoods. The fact that I have to step into the street to get through shows a failure in the past to effectively foresee the current uses, and that failure constrains how we can respond now. We're not always going to foresee in an accurate way, but it's incumbent upon us to think carefully about our decisions. At WalkBoston, we daily raise this kind of issue with urban designers and planners to keep all street uses on the table in the planning process.