Mind the Gap

Once a week, I visit Drug Emporium, a locally owned health food store in Waco, Texas, where I stock up on favorites that I can’t find at our nearest big-box store. As a low-key health nut, it’s one of the few errands I look forward to. I enjoy ambling the aisles with a tiny basket on my arm in search of coconut aminos, gluten-free pasta, or my newest obsession: sugar-free Olipop sodas.

The store is one of a few places in Waco that has that “locally owned” quirkiness that you can’t find at a big-box chain. Contemporary Christian music blares from the speakers, cheery old ladies run the cash registers, and occasionally a farmer will have a table set up at the front offering produce for sale. And amazingly, the store succeeds at providing something for nearly everyone: half of the store is dedicated to health foods, but just a few aisles from where the essential oil diffuser is hard at work, you can find more conventional potato chips, orange juice, and cereal.

The only thing I don’t like about this store is the shoddy and dangerous surrounding environment I have to navigate to get there. Drug Emporium sits in a declining shopping plaza, at the edge of a massive and extremely underutilized parking lot close to one of the oldest and most dangerous intersections in the city. Not only does the intersection feature the crossing of two stroads, but also several slip lanes, a “suicide” turning lane, and turning signals that are nearly impossible to see in the early evening against the glare of the sun.

To enter the parking lot, I must weigh the danger of turning across two lanes of traffic against the danger of turning into a slip-lane-adjacent lane, and crossing a parking lot known for attracting speedy drivers who interpret the absence of parked cars as permission to zig-zag from one end of the lot to the other. (I was once almost hit by such a driver.) I usually take option one. It only takes me a few seconds to navigate this intersection, but it’s a nightmare nonetheless, one composed of design “ingredients” that were all, at one point or another, considered good ideas but ultimately exposed as failures when implemented in the real world.

In the design world, this is called the experience gap. It’s what happens when designers implement what seem to be good ideas in theory, only to discover that they have completely unexpected and sometimes negative and unwanted effects when implemented in the real world. Wise designers are those who learn from these failures and iterate constantly until they arrive at a better fit. Even wiser designers are those who, anticipating such design-experience gaps, test their ideas before scaling up. Yet, a process that seems so normal and sensible in other industries seems to be completely foreign to those determining the standards by which engineers and planners design the human ecosystem we call cities.

Think about it: on paper, it makes sense to have a turning lane that spans an entire half mile. Wouldn’t that make it so much easier for folks to enter and exit the parking lots of the aligning businesses? Or consider slip lanes—how much more convenient do they make it for drivers turning right? Massive parking lots ensure no worries about the availability of parking, and what could be bad about paving four lanes of high-speed traffic through a commercial district? In theory, these all could be considered improvements…depending on how you define the purpose of these spaces. But when implemented in the real world, the experience gap becomes blatantly obvious.

Those long turning lanes? I’ve heard them referred to as “suicide lanes” because of the unpredictability with which cars coming from opposite directions might enter them at high speeds, both aiming for the same entry point. We know slip lanes discourage slower turn speeds, creating dangerous situations, especially when combined with pedestrian crosswalks. And those massive parking lots? Once they reach the inevitable end to their lifespan, they become magnets for wild-west driving maneuvers. And let’s not even talk about stroads…another “good” idea that slipped through the gap.

The experience gap only explains part of the problem. I’m not a designer, but I’ve been around enough of them to know that a central consideration driving their work is a near obsession with the user experience: with thinking about their product or experience from the perspective of their end user. It’s an incredibly humble posture and its absence is part of what’s driving the design failure in our cities.

For decades, our downtowns, roads, and neighborhoods were designed by individuals whose design paradigms orbited around implementing the advice of the “expert,” rather than serving the needs of the user. In this paradigm, experts decreed what was best from the top and users were expected to conform and adapt to their declarations.

We now know the tragic results that can happen when “expert” designs fail to account for how real people actually make decisions. The human brain is designed to optimize for efficiency and this is what will drive people navigating the city to make all kinds of dangerous decisions, especially when they’re on foot or bike: jaywalking in the middle of huge stroads, crossing streets without crosswalks, biking in lanes too narrow for them, walking where there are no sidewalks. For so long, we’ve had our metaphoric wrist slapped and made to feel guilty when making such decisions, but maybe we should start pushing back: why are we constantly expected to adapt to bad design? And why are designers not chastised when this perceived “failure to adapt” leads to bad outcomes?

Much of the failure in the design of our cities can be explained as a failure to “mind the gap,” whether that’s the gap between ideation and implementation, or the gap between what we think people should do and what they actually do in the real world. Where we can be involved in advancing better, more beautiful city design, we should strive to avoid such gaps by imitating successful designers: obsess about the user experience, test at the small scale, and iterate constantly based on how our ideas actually work (or not) in the real world.

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Tiffany Owens Reed

Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.