Strong Towns

If you could ask anything from a downtown redevelopment project, what would it be? For a lot of people, it’s a place to sit. This may be surprising to some, but public seating plays an important role in creating prosperous communities. Here are a few of the reasons why: 1. Having a place to sit is necessary for encouraging walking and biking — people need places to rest if they’re to travel under their own power. 2. Having a place to sit can help people of all backgrounds feel less isolated — while indirectly or directly interacting with passersby, they begins to feel a stronger sense of community and belonging. 3. Residents view “public space” differently than city staff do, counting any seating that lets them find solitude or socialization in the community, even if it’s at a privately owned business. 4. Seating can be used to draw customers to local businesses — business owners can do so by offering business-owned seating and city staff can do so by placing public seating near businesses. Learn more:

In the past 55 years, the amount of children who walk to school has declined from 40.7% to 11%. Why? Because the built environment has transformed in ways that make walking to school unsafe and nearly impossible. Strong Towns Director of Community Action Edward Erfurt has experienced it firsthand. His son’s middle school is less than a mile from their house, but it’s impossible to walk to. The school is on a dead-end street, and the only real traffic is school traffic. However, the street has no sidewalk, 14-foot-wide travel lanes (two feet wider than highway lanes) and a double yellow line, which is common on high-speed roads and makes drivers feel comfortable driving fast. Here’s a simple, three-step response to this problem: 1. Remove the double yellow line to visually communicate that this street is a slow, residential area. 2. Narrow the travel lanes to 10 feet to further emphasize that drivers must maintain slow speeds. 3. Turn the extra 8 feet of pavement into a walking area, divided from the travel lanes with paint, curbing or, even better, bollards. These are quick and cheap fixes that can be deployed in the course of an afternoon to immediately make the area safer. (See the images for an example of what this looks like.) Over time, as budgets allow, these temporary improvements can be made permanent.

Do cars count as third places? More importantly, should they? Car companies have been talking about making cars more like third places for years, and the concept has been engrained in North American culture for even longer. However, while most Americans own a vehicle and use it daily, that doesn’t mean they prefer spending time in a car. Most of them don’t have another choice. The Suburban Experiment strictly separates people’s homes, jobs, and third places like cafes or parks. This means that people have to use their cars if they want to do anything or go anywhere. In turn, this car-dependent design can degrade existing third places, replacing cafes with strip malls and parks with parking lots — places where you can only comfortably spend time in a car. The response shouldn't be to design cars to more closely resemble third places. It should be bringing back the true third places that cities need to prosper.

"Decades of housing subsidies, down payment assistance, artificially low interest rates, money printing and endless bank support have turned the American home into a financial product first and a place of shelter second."

Highway expansions are financial disasters for cities. They're always very expensive, and sometimes cities don't know how much projects will actually cost until they've already started. That's what happened with the Interstate Bridge Replacement project. It was estimated to cost a maximum of $4.8 billion in 2020, but the price tag has already jumped to $7.5 billion, with further increases expected. Project officials are now delaying the next cost estimate until 2025, which is raising concerns among residents about a seeming lack of transparency and fiscal responsibility. This pattern of underestimating costs and overcommitting resources isn’t unique; it’s a symptom of broader issues with North America’s overall transportation spending priorities. Click here to learn more:

Did you know you can make a studio apartment out of two parking spots? Parking requirements in cities often lead to inefficient use of valuable urban space, with parking facilities that sit mostly empty when the land could be repurposed for housing, businesses or community spaces. The true cost of these parking spots is significant — in some areas like New York City, below-ground spots can cost as much as $150,000. These expenses are typically passed on to residents, forcing even non-car owners to subsidize parking they don't use. The nonprofit Open Plans decided to illustrate how parking can waste valuable space by turning parking spots into a studio apartment. They only needed two spots to do it, too: On average, a single parking stall requires approximately 200–350 square feet of space. By occupying two spots in a Brooklyn garage, Open Plans was able to simulate what many onlookers described as “about the size of my first studio in New York.” What could you do with 400-700 square feet of space?

Strong Towns avoids using the term “car accident,” instead using “car crash.” Why? It comes down to messaging and the connotations certain words carry. The word “accident” makes collisions sound random, unpredictable and unpreventable. This false belief stops people from taking action to increase safety. The word “crash” accurately represents the violent, devastating nature of collisions. This recognition can drive people to take action and increase safety. Learn to talk about crashes in a way that creates real change by signing up for the Local-Motive session on October 24: “From Crash to Community Empowerment: How Addressing a Car Crash Helped Save and Change Lives,” with Strong Towns Director of Community Action Edward Erfurt. (Link in comments.)

In a strong town, the local government practices transparent local accounting. While, yes, this means that city officials need to offer residents clear, accurate and accessible information about local finances, it also extends to the stewardship of money itself. The more transparent and open the city’s finances, the more accountability there is, as both officials and residents can clearly see whether public spending is helping or hurting the city. That way, they can adjust their spending to build true resilience and prosperity for the community. To see an example of how non-transparent local accounting can harm cities, check out this article:

In Boone, North Carolina, a driver rolled through a stop sign and hit a pedestrian. This is a common occurrence at this intersection and in many cities. But why? A psychological phenomenon called inattentional blindness might play a role. You’re surrounded by a lot of visual stimuli all the time. If you had to pay attention to all of it, you’d get overwhelmed and not be able to function. To protect you, your brain often filters out things that you’re not consciously looking for. This is especially true when you’re doing a complicated activity that already uses a lot of mental capacity, like driving. This means that your brain can filter out the sight of a stop sign or a pedestrian crossing sign, especially if nothing in the street design forces you to pay attention. North America’s default for dealing with inattentional blindness is to add more signs, which just increases visual stimuli and forces your brain to filter out even more information. To actually address the problem, the street design needs to force drivers to pay attention through concrete, tangible measures, not just visual cues. Some cities do this is through raised crosswalks, others through curb extensions that narrow the street at crossing points. Broader traffic-calming measures, like narrowing the whole street, also force people to pay attention and makes it more likely that they’ll notice signs. Want to learn more about this crash? Join the free Crash Analysis Studio webinar tomorrow, where a group of experts will analyze the crash site and discuss the factors that contributed to it. (Link in the comments.)