GoodHood: Austin Neighborhood Rides

Not long ago as I was doing some design research on what makes good urban signage, I found an image that had the word "GoodHood" put into the sidewalk. I love the idea of claiming your hood as good! In an effort to do my due diligence in trying to experience my neighborhood by bike, car, walking and riding (transportation), I met up with my colleague Jacob to do a neighborhood ride-about. My goal was to show him the biking infrastructure that was newly put in place on Justin Lane, grab a coffee and chat and complete our circle. I figure I would want to do little rides like this that are rides I would take on a regular basis when running errands etc... Here is graphic of our ride and a detailed list of the experience:

May 29: Sunny 90 deg

10:15 am: Jacob arrives by bike at my house on Denson

Notes: We went up Denson to Lamar and jogged over on Romeria. At the Lamar intersection we observed walkers, people at the bus station, and a woman going down the Lamar sidewalk in a wheelchair. 

We rode up Denson along with the car traffic and waited at the light, not knowing if it was going to change. We had to turn left onto Lamar, so we used the car left turn lane. It felt fine, but we are both used to biking with traffic. We did a really quick jog onto Romeria, as I led the way since Jacob doesn't know the area. Romeria does not currently have any bike or walking infrastructure but I think is slated for some this fall. 

When we got to Arroyo Seco we turned onto the protected bike lane and rode up to Justin Lane. The new bike lanes are great and the markings on the street are very bold. At that point we grabbed some coffee at Dia's Market which looked really appealing from the street. It has a great front patio for dining but needs bike racks out front. While at Dia's we observed 5-6 cyclists going down the new bike lane on Justin, one couple with a baby on the back. Most of the people we saw were in 2's biking together. Most were in regular clothes; one man was wearing biking clothes. 

Arroyo Seco bike lane

Extremely comfortable and shaded, no problem even in the summer heat. Note the lack of other cyclists on the path - maybe too early in the day?

Justin Lane bike lane

Brand spankin' new and easy to navigate. Hopefully this will be a part of a more comprehensive network through the City.

11:20 am: We left Dia's and headed toward Airport Blvd to complete the circle. Crossing Lamar was hairy and really confusing but we made it over riding on parts of the sidewalk. This intersection is kind of a mess and there were loads of pedestrians walking around because of the bus stops on Lamar. We used the pedestrian crosswalk to get across Lamar and it felt completely safe but probably not the ideal way to cross. 

We rode up the Airport bike lane which was really sunny because there are no trees, but it felt fine, maybe because of the wildflowers on both sides. We wove around several walkers but all were happy to be on the urban trail. 

We turned right on Guadalupe into the bike lane after the traffic went past the intersection. The lane was a bit narrow and hot because of the black pavement but became wider as we approached Denson. There was little or no traffic on Guadalupe as we rode down, we were able to continue our conversation. 

All in all, I gave the ride 4 stars because it was enjoyable, easy and mostly protected even on a hot summer day. The worst part of the ride was easily the Lamar/Airport intersection. 

Airport Boulevard Red Line Trail

Beautiful wildflowers line the path, making for an easy and safe ride. Could use some shade trees, however...

Living Out Front

The sidewalk is an essential element to any great city that is designed for people. The very nature of walking out of your house and feeling comfortable is contingent on your  surroundings. People love to feel protected and in control of their  environment.

 

In my life I have lived in a lot of places. I was born in Ohio and lived there until I was 5. One of the memories I have as a child was that of all of the neighborhood kids playing in the street in front of our houses. The street was the meeting place where all neighborhood activities took place. After Ohio, we moved to Columbia, South Carolina where our house was much larger and on a very large piece of land in the woods. It was suburban but also very wooded, backing up to a lake. We spent every day outside playing in the woods and in the neighborhood. We didn't play on the street as much, but rather in the park behind our house. When I turned 10 we moved to El Paso, Texas. Our house there was up in the mountains and on a street where we once again returned to playing in the front yard, riding bikes and playing games with the neighborhood kids. Three years later, we moved to Laredo, Texas. This experience was a bit different because I was older and our neighborhoods were very isolated from each other, lacking any sort of community. Granted, the weather was much hotter and this neighborhood, unlike the others, was newly developed. All of the houses were built brand new and the streets were wide, lacking sidewalks. I don't have any memories of being in the front of my house for any length of time. 

Rather than make this post about the "good old days", I am doing it for another reason. I have recently been working on photo books for my kids and came to realize that much of their lives were spent on the street in front of our houses in Chicago. Their first walking photos of them are on the front sidewalk, and that is where we spent a lot of our time. We valued the space out front where we could sit and watch the neighborhood, but mostly because our kids ONLY wanted to be out front. Our instincts were to stay inside or in the backyard, having grown up in mostly suburban places. Our kids and all of the neighborhood kids loved being in front. All of our houses also had transparent fences that separated us from the sidewalk. Contrary to what most people believe about fences, they actually brought us outside. In what would seem a more hostile place, the front of a house in the city can make you feel vulnerable to strangers and such. With our fence, we would sit for hours, working in the yard, with our dog joining us, greeting other dogs through the fence, and our kids generally outside the fence looking for other kids or making chalk art on the sidewalk. 

The sidewalk is an essential element to any great city that is designed for people. The very nature of walking out of your house and feeling comfortable is contingent on your surroundings. People love to feel protected and in control of their environment. Streets that are wide with fast moving traffic make people feel unsafe and they will always opt to drive rather than walk, if even a short distance. If this part of the city cannot thrive, people and communities will not thrive. In Texas, we need to understand that by making room for people to walk, we are not eliminating room for people to drive; there just needs to be a balance. If I could take anything away from our time living in the city and raising our kids, it was that people love to be a part of something greater than themselves. People love to feel like they have a community that supports them and that they are a part of. 

The street trees, the medians between the sidewalk and the street, and the parked cars were a protection from fast moving traffic and it made this outdoor space an extension of our home. Over the years I took great pride in the garden I was growing in the front yard and how my little garden transformed the street. The front of our house became the place where we wanted to be, and we were proud of the house we were making. We were creating a home and space not just for ourselves, but for our neighborhood. Living in Austin, we are missing that part of life. We currently live in a place where there are no sidewalks and are moving to a place where the sidewalks are confronted with energy poles, no trees and a very wide street. All over Austin, I see chairs in the front yards of peoples houses, but I never see people sitting in them. I am not sure if they are a symbol or if they are where people sit but I have to wonder if the simple move of better streets and a few trees would transform our city from car based to walking? 

Amsterdam + Suburbs

Here at URBS we look at regions and believe that our cities and suburbs are co-dependent. Many of our older suburbs were really small towns with a downtown and communities of people who lived and worked right there in their town. Over the years as our cities declined and our suburbs grew so did our design of houses in them. The houses became larger and the suburbs became car based. These car based suburbs in many cases have re-created car based cities. Both acting independently only accessible by car or car based transit (busses). The new move to create walkable/bikeable communities and towns is a refreshing change. Although you can't change the car based suburbs of America, mainly because the houses are too spread out, in in many cases code just won't allow it, we were inspired by what we saw in the Netherlands. 

We ventured with the kids out to Utrecht a small town outside of Amsterdam. We even ventured out of Utrecht and out into the suburban neighborhoods. We found some very surprising things, among them, these small communities being connected to the city by light rail, bike lanes and very little car traffic. You could flow between the downtown and the outer neighborhoods into the country seamlessly and effortlessly. The neighborhoods are designed to be dense and connected, walkable and bikeable.