What Is Our One Thing?

(Source: Flickr/Jay Galvin.)

I’m not much of a Halloween person, but I had a surprising amount of fun this year sitting on the porch of our friend/landlord’s house with my husband handing out candy to children, asking them to explain their costumes and wishing them a “Happy Halloween.” Of course, as they turned away to head to another house, I found myself adding on a “be careful” as they vanished into the night, my eyes looking beyond them to the dark street without sidewalks to which they ambled.

The property behind which we live, in an accessory dwelling unit, is situated at a busy four-way intersection. I had never really sat out on this porch after sunset, so it was my first time noticing how incredibly dark it gets out here. The darkness, combined with the lack of sidewalks and the frequent presence of large trucks and drag racers made me nervous for the children, many of whom, in their giddiness over free candy, were impatient to cross the street and get to more homes.

At one point, I commented to my friends, “You know, trick-or-treating really is a litmus test for the safety of your street.” Despite claims about how neighborhood streets measure up to “best practices,” what could speak more of a street’s safety than how it accommodates children…or not?

It reminded me of an experience I had during my second year of living in Waco. I had agreed to volunteer at a massive trick-or-treat hosted by my neighborhood association. What began as a grassroots event several decades ago has grown into a massive annual event costing thousands of dollars and attracting thousands of families. The neighbors on the street decorate their homes with over-the-top spooky fanfare, blare party music, and give out thousands of pieces of candy.

Shortly after I arrived, I was sent down to the end of Colcord and 18th Street to make sure children and their families got to the event safely. Colcord is a major avenue lined with beautiful old homes, but with extremely wide avenues and hardly any street side parking, it’s a perfect street for blazing through to the other side of town. Unfortunately, for that night’s event, the city only allowed a few blocks to be closed. This created an awkward and dangerous situation where drivers pouring in from 18th street, eager to get to the other side of the city, were turning in at high speeds and suddenly encountering unannounced barricades, not to mention hundreds of attendees in costumes.

Not only did this catch drivers by surprise but it caught attendees, too. Many of them  didn’t know the official event was only inside the barricades, so they were trick-or-treating for a few blocks before arriving at the actual, city-sanctioned event. And in their excitement, many of these children were zigzagging back and forth across the street, close to the intersection of Colcord and 18th, trying to hit as many houses as they could. 

Standing out there in my orange reflective vest, my original task of guiding parents and families to the event quickly morphed into a mash up of traffic-director and pedestrian crossing guard as drivers, nervous parents, and hyped-up children stalled at corners. Everyone was unsure of how to navigate the traffic jams emerging as everyone approached the blocked-off streets. Drivers didn’t know where or how to turn around, pedestrians were nervous about when they could cross the street. I found myself literally standing in front of massive pickup trucks in the dark, ushering children across and trying my best to make eye contact with the drivers so they could advance in alternating turns.

At one point, the Parks and Rec staffers who had previously argued there was nothing they could do, jumped out of their cars and took on similar roles at other corners. With our flashlights waving, we did our best to keep the kids safe as the night darkened.

According to a study from AAA, Halloween is the deadliest day for child pedestrians in America. Between 2017 and 2019, 49 children died while trick-or-treating. It’s largely a design problem. Neighborhoods are safest for pedestrians of all ages when they are tucked away from major streets, when they have clear and distinct entry and exit points and when they contain features such as narrow, curvy streets, trees, roundabouts, and speed bumps, all of which work together to slow traffic. Such is not the case for many of our neighborhoods, many which are often seen as convenient corridors to speed from one end of the city to the other, an effect that diminishes not just safety but a feeling of neighborliness with it.

Part of this design failure is due to a lack of focus. Our streets and neighborhoods, our downtowns and roads suffer because of a lack of clear purpose and vision. We are not clear on our priorities and we are, in fact, chasing too many at once. Fun fact: did you know the word priority was, for 500 years, only a singular word? Only in the 1900s did it become pluralized. I learned this while listening to a talk recently (and reinforced by this blog). Before, you could only have one priority…not several, not many. You had one thing. But now, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear, “get your priorities straight,” or “my priorities for this week,” etc. 

Perhaps the design of our cities are expressions of this linguistic shift: the building blocks of our towns—streets, roads, neighborhoods, commercial districts, downtowns—no longer boast a clear priority. This is part of the thinking behind the stroad: This word exists to describe something that has lost its focus, that has lost singularity of purpose, that has tried to accomplish too many priorities at once, that has tried to make too many people happy. 

All around our cities, we can see snapshots of the kind of dysfunction that arises when multiple priorities compete for first place. I see it every time I drive to pick up my husband from the university campus where he works. Around 5 p.m., the place is a nightmare: distracted students walking in every possible direction with cars inching forward all around them, barely able to move, drivers undoubtedly frustrated. You see it on streets that have skinny bike lanes marked out with sharrows, but not really protected from cars. You see it in neighborhoods with roads wide enough for cars to go 40–50 mph and no sidewalks but cheery signs bearing the neighborhood motto.

What would change if we went back to thinking of priority in the singular as it pertains to our cities? What if we challenged our city leaders and ourselves to really think: what is the one priority for a street? For a neighborhood? For our downtowns? Maybe it would bring into focus more clearly what these spaces are for, who they are for, the activities we desire to see (or not) and the ways in which we are compromising those ends by trying to do too many things at once. 

The problem with chasing too many priorities at once is that when you chase several goals, you rarely succeed at all of them. Children and cars cannot both be the priority of a neighborhood street. Moving people and moving cars cannot both be the priority of our city streets. Serving small businesses and serving commuters cannot both be the priority of our downtowns. 

The beauty of chasing one thing is that it often enables us to actualize many goals in the process. A street that’s safe for children is also conducive to meeting neighbors. A street that’s safe for children is likely also to be safe for older adults. A street that’s safe for children is also likely to be safe for bikers, runners, walkers. 

On some level, perhaps this feels counterintuitive for our modern, multitasking world we live in, but when Halloween rolls around each year, I hope the presence of grinning, eager children in our neighborhoods can remind us more than ever that our cities desperately need focus, vision, and the humility to master one thing well.

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