Nostalgia For The Future
Creating safe spaces for better transportation connectivity
By Della Lowe
Photos: Southern Utah Bicycle Alliance
I heard a rabbi say recently, “In community we heal.” He was speaking about healing from the pandemic with the added burden of dealing with the riots in cities across the country. As households separate more and more politically, religiously, and socially, new ideas are emerging about how to regain a better sense of community, of oneness. Some might call this nostalgia for the future.
Did you have a front porch as a kid? Did you ride your bike to a friend’s house? Could you walk or bike to the store, the church, and your doctor? But, as suburbs grew and urban sprawl became more common, as the shopping mall and big-box stores appeared, did that sense of community disappear? Unless you were raised on a large farm or ranch, the answer to these questions was probably “yes.”
As cities grow, the pull and tug between what was and what can be creates stress. There are those who think about preserving what is good from the past while looking to the future. One of those organizations is Transportation for America, which published a report titled The Congestion Con. It states, “In an expensive effort to curb congestion in urban regions, we have overwhelmingly prioritized one strategy: we have spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars widening and building new highways. … Yet this strategy has utterly failed to ‘solve’ congestion.” Ideas to address this issue are circulating in Washington County, Utah, and its largest metropolitan area, St. George. City and county leaders and residents have come together in innovative ways to “go back” without going backwards. But what does it mean to” go back”?
Choices In Transportation
Change can be difficult when an area grows as quickly as Washington County has in the last decade, and appears to continue to do so. There is always a need for more services, more roads, more housing, and more schools. That can put pressure on a bucolic and uncongested lifestyle for residents who have lived in the area a long time. There are solutions, however, and one lifestyle need not push out another.
One group that has been studying this problem for a long time is the Southern Utah Bicycle Alliance (SUBA), because it looks at “active transportation” as a way to alleviate congestion but also to allow citizens to perform daily activities, both without using a car. This new way of living has become particularly noticeable during the recent pandemic lockdown. Having to travel to big-box stores and wait in line to enter has been frustrating. What if we could return to small commercial areas with walkable streets and safe bike lanes for adults and children? Where does that start?
“These changes start with public policy,” says Ryan Gurr, owner of Red Rock Bicycle in St. George. “You won’t get people to ride bikes or let their children ride a bike to school unless they feel it is safe, that bike lanes are wide enough and separated enough from traffic to do so. We can build better neighborhoods with easier connectivity. The very first step is to change the narrative of city planners and public-works officials so they adopt a mission statement focused on moving people instead of moving cars.” He makes the point that this is not about taking anything away from anyone, but rather adding choices, opportunities, and in the end, community. He refers to it as nostalgia for the future—a neighborhood with neighborhood stores, safe streets for walking and riding bikes, and the ability to communicate with neighbors.
Changing The Planning Mindset
Gurr feels strongly that one does not “educate” or “force” these ideas on residents. Rather, the barrier to entry should be lowered, and St. George City Councilwoman Dannielle Larkin agrees.
“There is a whole network of people when it comes to planning a city—land planners, infrastructure planners, engineers in charge of street planning. They tend to look at the street planning in a silo. Water infrastructure is another silo. Planning sometimes doesn’t coordinate in a way that we wind up with a holistic product at the end, based on human interaction, human movement, and just our basic humanity.”
She cites Charles Marohn of Strongtowns.org, an international movement dedicated to making communities across the United States and Canada financially strong and resilient. Marohn put forth the concept of the “stroad,” his term for combining roads and streets (see sidebar). Larkin notes that, when roads and streets are given the same meaning and purpose, they not only get us from point A to point B, but actually get in the way of building a community. “Roads are highways. Roads are spaces of pavement to get people from place to place with speed and efficiency. A street is a connector within a community that provides human interaction. So a street is a place where people come out and they meet their neighbors and they go to the coffee shop and walk to the park and kids do pick-up basketball games and ride bicycles and can do all these things on a street at a low level of speed and a high level of interaction. But too often in the United States we have tried to haveour roads perform both these functions. We can change this, however, with a change in mission by city planners.”
Create The Opportunity
SUBA’s local goal is to encourage Washington County cities to adopt a “complete streets” policy and work with local governments toward policies that will require most residents to have options for walking, biking, and driving. The group feels this should be incorporated into all city planning for streets.
Larkin gives the example of all the biking and walking trails that have been created in Washington County and St. George particularly. There was a lot of pushback at first, but once the trails were built and people started using and enjoying them, they were hooked. “You have to create the opportunity, and then people will understand the value,” she says.
A further example of this kind of thinking is the new Desert Color Community that is being developed near the St. George airport. The developers started by envisioning what an ideal community looks like for Southern Utah and eventually decided it was open but connected, with trails that link neighborhoods to parks, schools, commercial areas, healthcare, and education. Each home—no matter the size or type—is required to have a front porch. “We keep building roads, and as the roads get filled up, we keep expanding the roads and people have to go further and further just to do ordinary daily activities,” says Mitch Dansie, General Manager of Desert Color. “We want Desert Color to be a community where every home feels welcoming, and where you can sit on your front porch and talk with your neighbors and interact with them. The concept is you’re not tucked away behind walls. There’s a lot of value in that.”
Gurr concludes, “Everyone complains about congestion as they sit in traffic in their cars. But they are the congestion. To fix that, we have to think differently. It’s about connecting your community and creating as many options for interaction and movement as possible. At the end of the day, that’s what creates connectivity and, ultimately, that’s what creates personal freedom.”
Della Lowe was an Emmy award-winning producer for ABCNews. She is currently the Marketing Director for the DOCUTAH International Documentary Film Festival in St. George, Utah, and serves on the board of the Southern Utah Bicycle Alliance. Reach her at dellalowe@gmail.com.
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SIDEBAR
Five Rules For Improvement
In its report, The Congestion Con, Transportation for America—an advocacy organization comprised of local, regional, and state leaders, who envision a transportation system that safely, affordably, and conveniently connects people of all means and abilities to jobs, services, and opportunity through multiple modes of travel—calls out five policy recommendations:
Reorient a national program around access—connecting people to jobs and services.
Require transportation agencies to stop favoring new roads over maintenance.
Make shorter trips walkable by making them safer.
Remove restrictions on pricing to help manage driving demand.
Reward infill development and make it easier for localities.