Why the Strong Towns Movement Needs You: Streets Too Scary To Cross
The terrifying intersection at Venice Avenue and U.S. 41 Bypass in Venice, Florida. (Source: Google Maps.)
Nine lanes. A 45-mph speed limit. Slip lanes with right turns on red. And because it’s equally grim a mile in either direction, you have no choice but to walk across. If this scene sounds terrifying, that’s because it is.
My local stroad is scarier than most, but if you only ever experience it from behind the wheel, you only know half the story. Even in car-centric places, thousands of local residents get around by foot, bike or public transportation. And it’s when you’re taking slow steps on pavement and not conducting two tons of metal at 50 mph that you realize how terrifying this landscape is.
It’s all but certain that, if you live in North America, you have a similar scene somewhere in your community. And if you’re reading an article from Strong Towns, it’s equally certain that you’d like to do something about it.
So, while you may not have the authority to fix a dangerous road yourself, do the next best thing by taking someone who does for a walk. Elected officials and people who work in local government want to hear from citizens, and we know of thousands of them across North America who earnestly want to fix the unsafe environments we’ve built. Reach out and ask to meet in the field or at a coffee shop near your most dangerous intersection.
Come equipped with stats and facts, especially if there have been documented crashes at that location. Describe alternatives, such as curb extensions, road narrowing and elimination of turn lanes. But most of all, just stand together on the street corner feeling the concussive winds of large vehicles blazing past. Show how, even after the light changes and the walk signal goes on, you’re still looking furtively in every direction as you cross. Note that, even when you’re almost across and still have the walk signal, you have to make eye contact with drivers of cars creeping into the crosswalk to make right turns on red.
Once across, stop and ask them to observe how other nondrivers are struggling there. Can a slower walker make it across comfortably in the signal interval? How about a wheelchair user? I watched a person on a mobility scooter veer dangerously close to oncoming traffic because the curb cut on one side was unusable.
End the session by hitting the walk button on the other side, noting the absurd interval to go back across. By the end, you’ll have spent more than five minutes walking a hundred yards, and virtually every moment will have been on full sensory alert.
As I was writing this article, I participated in a public information presentation about my city’s multimodal transportation plan. It included a heat map of local crashes in the past five years that put data behind the visceral fear.
The inset on the lower right shows the intersection in question (Venice Avenue and U.S. 41 Bypass). I’ve written about crash maps in several cities, and those danger zones are almost always exactly what you envision, a setting where high-speed traffic interacts with other users. Also note the red area south of the intersection on the lower left of the large map, proving that there are few options to seek a safer crossing.
This is an urgent problem. It’s also a complicated one given that the city, like many in North America, only controls 30% of the roadways within its boundaries. So you may have to cast a wide net in your advocacy efforts.
Strong Towns Local Conversations have done variations on this to great effect. Advocates in Orem, Utah, took city council candidates for a bike ride to show them what cyclists face every day. In Bloomington, Illinois, a group invited elected officials to participate in neighborhood cleanups, and some were troubled enough by the amount of cigarette butts they collected that they helped revise city ordinances to reduce them.
Join them — and if you haven’t yet become a Strong Towns member, join us — in identifying important needs in your community and connecting the people who care about addressing them. You may be surprised to find how many of your fellow citizens, elected officials and planning professionals feel the same sense of urgency.
Strong Towns is helping local leaders, technical professionals and involved residents across North America make their communities more prosperous and financially resilient.
This movement needs you. Become a member today.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.