Project for Public Spaces » Omaha

9 Communities Selected to Receive Free Place-Based Sustainability Technical Assistance

Project for Public Spaces — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:02:50 +0000

This Earth Day, Project for Public Spaces and our partners at Livability Solutions are pleased to announce the 9 communities selected to receive free technical assistance in 2013, thanks to a grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Sustainable Communities under their Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program.

These governments and organizations represent a diverse group of communities from across the United States, from large cities to rural communities. All have a strong commitment to sustainability and smart growth and are poised to implement positive change by making use of the assistance we are offering. Each community will receive a one- or two-day training session with a livability expert from Project for Public Spaces or one of our Livability Solutions partners on an issue of their choice.

Livability Solutions is a coalition of professionals from 10 leading nonprofit organizations with deep experience in sustainable development. Our common purpose is to work with communities on transportation, land use, Placemaking, environmental issues, and public involvement, with the goal of achieving livability, smart growth, and sustainability.

The communities selected for free technical assistance in 2013 are:

City of Omaha, NE, which will work with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) on efforts to improve their planning process to create more vibrant, attractive, and livable neighborhoods.
City of Seattle Department of Planning & Development, Seattle, WA, which will work with Reconnecting America (RA) and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) to train in Transit Oriented Development data and implementation tools in order to help promote walkable, vibrant, and affordable neighborhoods around major public transportation hubs in the region.
City of Twinsburg, OH, will work with the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) to train the community on the benefits of walkable urban thoroughfares. This training will help create a town center that improves connections and creates a safe healthy downtown destination.
Lee County, FL, where the Local Government Commission (LGC) will work with the community on how to evaluate and improve neighborhood walkability, as well as solicit feedback on local citizens’ walking and bicycling needs, in order to inform the County’s Bicycle and Pedestrian plan.
Valley Metro, Phoenix, AZ, where RA and CNT will train local officials in the use of Transit Oriented Development data and implementation tools to track indicators and build capacity in the region for more efficient, vibrant neighborhoods around public transportation.
Upstate Forever, Spartansburg, SC, where PPS will facilitate workshops focused on training local citizens and government staff in the creation, implementation, and enforcement of Form-Based Codes in order to help create a more attractive and livable Duncan, SC.
Village of Hyde Park, VT, where PPS has already begun training local stakeholders in the use of the Power of 10 and Place Audit tools to strengthen the village’s Main Street as a destination by building on local assets, as well as improving the area’s walkability and connectivity.
Vanguard Community Development Corp., Detroit, MI, which will work with PPS to envision a more vibrant public realm and destinations in the North End neighborhood, identifying site-specific improvements to serve as pilots for Placemaking in the neighborhood.
Working in Neighborhoods (WIN), Cincinnati, OH, which will work with the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute (WALC) to identify opportunities to transform streets for improved safety for all modes, and to better support economic development.

The EPA’s Building Blocks program funds quick, targeted assistance to communities that face common development problems. Two other nonprofit organizations—Global Green USA and Smart Growth America—also received competitively awarded grants under this program to help communities achieve their sustainable development goals.

We encourage interested communities to continue to check the Livability Solutions website for additional opportunities for technical assistance. We also welcome interested foundations, organizations, and individuals to contact us if they are interested in supporting assistance to one of the many other qualified applications we received.

Click here for information on other opportunities to work with Livability Solutions or here for training and technical assistance offered by Project for Public Spaces or our partners.

Walking is Not a Crime: Questioning the Accident Axiom

David M Nelson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:25:45 +0000

Industrial Rd & Millard Ave in Omaha, America’s worst intersection for pedestrians according to Streetsblog / Photo: Google

The Pedestrian Pandemic
In 2010, the last year the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHSTA) published such figures, a startling 4,280 pedestrians were hit and killed in traffic and 70,000 were injured. For many states, this past year was one of the most deadly in a decade, ending a general decline in pedestrian fatalities. Even still, there is a disturbing cultural willingness to accept these deaths as a necessary evil. The public increasingly blames the victims. The police rarely prosecute, and if they do, the courts are often lenient. In 2012, 136 pedestrians were killed and another 11,621 were injured in New York City alone—and in all that time, only one sober, unacquainted driver was charged.

The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) just released their annual Urban Mobility Report resulting in the usual public outcry to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to address congestion, because of what time stuck in traffic costs the American economy. According to AAA, pedestrian deaths and injuries cost American society $300 billion in 2010, that is nearly three times the national cost of congestion as estimated by the Urban Mobility Report. Where is the public outcry to improve safety?

In the US, Common Law tradition has a clear provision for the right of access. Given that all forms of transportation begin and end with walking, this is essentially a right to be a pedestrian—a right severely restricted by expensive and counterproductive high-speed roads that we’ve built. A key problem in defending this right is that very few laws motivate law enforcement to consider killing a pedestrian as a crime. Involuntary Vehicular Manslaughter is a potential charge, but it’s hard to prove constructive manslaughter since a little speeding is rarely seen as a crime, and the threshold for recklessness is hard to meet. Anecdotally, drivers who kill a pedestrian are better off waiting for the police to arrive, because hit and runs really are about the only time the police reliably pursue these drivers with any prejudice. New laws specifically dealing with pedestrian-vehicle crashes are needed.

Blaming the Victim
In my opinion, our local media outlets are exacerbating the problem. Their stories discount the human loss and reinforce widely held misconceptions. First and foremost, underlying all of the poor media coverage is what I call the “Accident Axiom.” This is the widely-held (but almost never-question) belief that accidents are an unavoidable and innocent consequence of modern motorized society. The assumption here is that crashes not involving excessive speed, alcohol, or gross negligence are presumably the fault of no one, but an unfortunate systemic fluke.

This axiom has two corollaries: the Inherent Risk Corollary and the Reckless Driver Corollary. The former states that in this world of unavoidable accidents, pedestrians and cyclists are senselessly putting themselves in harm’s way by traversing concrete and asphalt. If they get hit, it is a deserved consequence of their poor decision making. And the latter states that those rare instances when a driver is at fault, it is the result of that driver being a reckless and careless individual, a deviant member of society. All blame is attributed to the individuals involved. The road network and driving culture are given immunity.

Recently the focus has been on the bad behaviors of pedestrians: texting, wearing earphones, jaywalking, drunk walking, etc. While there is clearly a personal responsibility to remain aware of your environment, we should not rush to judgement. Freakonomics ran a particularly illogical analysis of drunk walking back in 2011, claiming that it was eight-times safer to drive under the influence. Safer for whom?

As the mounting death toll makes the issue of pedestrian safety harder to ignore, the Reckless Driver Corollary has expanded to include distracted driving, a legitimate problem just like drunk driving. But in the age of TV screens, internet radio, and GPS navigation systems in dashboards, can we really claim distracted driving to be the isolated acts of a few negligent operators? Driving at high speeds with all of these modern additions is a pervasive indiscretion, a transgression a plurality of society idly commits on a daily basis.

I’m from Nebraska, one of the “safest” states for pedestrians, though that statistic is largely a function of our rural population and lack of pedestrians in cities. Even in the Cornhusker State, 2012 was a 250% increase in pedestrian fatalities over 2011 as reported by AAA. The Omaha World Herald, is particularly fond of stating pedestrians “were not in a crosswalk” when they were hit. But this is often not even true! Victims were often not in a marked crosswalk. By law, crosswalks do not have to be marked; in a city where road salt strips the paint every year, few crosswalks even are. In September, when the World Herald reported on the increase in fatalities, I decided that enough was enough, and I responded by challenging the misconceptions so flagrantly repeated in their reporting. It took mere minutes of research to refute their presumptions.

The state’s traffic laws, Chapter 60 of the Nebraska Revised Statutes, lays out that a crosswalk exists whenever sidewalks are present on both sides of an intersection, regardless of whether there are white lines painted or not. It goes on to explain a pedestrian can step into an unmarked crosswalk even if an approaching car is in view, so long as the driver has time to stop and there isn’t a Don’t Walk signal. And most importantly if references a case Vanek v. Prohaska that states, “Violation of a statute is not negligence per se, but is merely evidence of negligence.” In other words, just because a pedestrian violated these laws, doesn’t mean they should be considered the party at fault. Given the inadequacy of the infrastructure, it might have been perfectly reasonable to cross in such a way. Though the original post has since been deleted, you can read the full text of my comment here.

In the early 1900s, cars and their drivers were depicted in editorials, cartoons and accident reports as reckless murderers / Photo: via Peter Norton

The Rise of Motordom—and the Future of the Message
This wasn’t always the media’s modus operandi. In the early 1900s, cars and their drivers were depicted in editorials, cartoons and accident reports as reckless murderers, as grim reapers spreading death across cities and as pagan gods appeased by the sacrificing of children. What changed, mid-century, was that the highway lobby essentially took over the reporting of pedestrian and cyclists harmed by drivers; unsurprisingly, they changed the voice of coverage to presume the innocence of drivers.

Fortunately, there are signs that the narrative might be starting to change. While stories highlighting the injustice inherent in the way we treat pedestrian fatalities are usually the purview of urbanism-friendly publications (think Streetsblog, The Atlantic Cities, et. al.) NPR ran a story last month profiling the impossible task that police face in tracking down hit-and-run drivers involved in vehicle-pedestrian crashes. Brian Williams also covered the topic recently on NBC’s Rock Center, and the segment starts off promisingly enough. Unfortunately, about twenty minutes in, it becomes clear that the story is being framed using the Reckless Driver Corollary, focusing on the fact that drivers involved in the crashes being discussed were on their phones, rather than the fact that pedestrians died.

Solutions
There are many things that can be done to keep pushing the message back to a place that values human life first, and speed and efficient movement of automobiles second. On the policy side, get a Vulnerable Users Law introduced into your state legislature. Vulnerable Users Laws shift the burden of evidence onto the more dangerous individual. Drivers are responsible for cyclists, cyclists for pedestrians. I’m a huge fan of these laws, because pedestrians are put on a pedestal. They’ve been popular in Europe and are catching on in the United States.

You can also pursue other policies like Vision Zero, famously applied in Sweden and currently being campaigned for by Transportation Alternatives in NYC. Essentially, Vision Zero is a directive to eliminate all pedestrian and cyclists fatalities in quick order. The central premise being, “that no loss of life is acceptable.” Concerning law and order, you can find local lawyers to represent and advocate for justice on the behalf of pedestrians and cyclists injured or killed by drivers.

You can work to lower the speed of traffic. More specifically, advocate to decrease the range of speeds driven over a segment of road. A fundamental belief in traffic engineering is that differences in operating speed causes higher risks of crashes. Spread can be reduced by lowering speed limits and using roundabouts instead of signalized intersections. The end result is travel times remain the same but maximum operating speed and the range of speeds are significantly lowered. Other geometric changes include narrower lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, neck-downs and Rightsizing.

However, only so much will be accomplished until our local papers and the nightly news starts putting pressure on state DOTs and public works departments to keep our citizens safe on foot. So, first and foremost, pay closer attention to the way that pedestrian deaths are portrayed by the local media in your area, and don’t be afraid to put pressure your local news outlets when you see improper coverage that blames the victim. It is easy to find language in your State Statutes that debunk published misconceptions about crosswalks and jaywalking. We all have the right to walk—and like most rights, it’s one that must be defended.

Helpful Resources

How to Really Look at Your City: An Interview With Connie Spellman

Project for Public Spaces — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:46:33 +0000

Connie Spellman

PPS Transportation Associate David M. Nelson is our resident expert on all things Omaha. When he heard that we were interviewing Omaha By Design director Connie Spellman for the Placemaking Blog, he was not at a loss for words! David had this to say:

Growing up in Omaha wasn’t necessarily glamorous. In 1980s, Omaha was opening a new freeway on one side of downtown and tearing out a million square feet of gorgeous warehouses—the single largest loss to the National Register of Historic Places—on the other. The egregious acts of the 80s became the built environs of the 90s. And Omaha, simply put, was a place you left, not a place you lingered.

Then came 2001, when everything began to change. An organization called Lively Omaha was formed, which would go on to catalyze an incredible urban renaissance within Nebraska’s largest city. In fact, Omaha By Design, as it is now known, inspired me to pursue my career in planning and design. Through their tireless environmental and urban design work, Omaha By Design has restored the elegance of the prairie landscape, implemented a form based code, and empowered neighborhood after neighborhood to realize their own visions. Today, Omaha is one of the most liveable communities in the US—a distinction for which Connie Spellman and everyone else behind Omaha By Design deserve much of the credit.

Omaha by Design has been something of a pioneer in working with Placemaking at a citywide level. Can you tell us a bit about how your work in this field got started?

The Omaha Community Foundation (OCF) was first introduced to Placemaking when PPS came to town as a consultant for the National Park Service (NPS). The NPS was interested in building its new regional facility on Omaha’s riverfront, which was beginning to experience a revitalization. As part of that process, Fred Kent suggested hosting a Place Game Workshop, so the city partnered with the OCF to help organize the event and get the right people to participate.

At about the same time, OCF had commissioned a report, Above All Others on a Stream. The consultant summed up the comments from over 75 donors interviews with the five words they wanted Omaha to be: smart, significant, sparkling, connected and fun. That threw everybody for a curve, because, in the late ‘90s, those weren’t terms you’d use to describe Omaha! That led the OCF to create an initiative called Lively Omaha [which became Omaha by Design in 2003] to begin working toward making those descriptors a reality.

I was hired to lead the initiative. The original idea was to transform Omaha into the “City of Fountains,” even though Kansas City had already become known for its fountains. I guess the idea was that Omaha was going to do them one better; but I didn’t really think that fountains would get us the outcomes we were shooting for. I started looking back over the process that led to the initiative’s creation, and that’s how I personally discovered PPS’s work. The rest, as they say, is history.

How did Placemaking help you to re-orient the work you were tackling? It sounds like it helped to crystallize something for you.

I wasn’t familiar with the term “Placemaking,” at least not at first. The parts that captured my attention were the ideas about public space. Public space, to me, was a park, or a road; I had a very limited understanding about what the term “public space” meant. Realizing that public space is basically everything except your home or business was a very eye-opening experience for me. And because some of the people at the OCF had gone through the Placemaking workshop, I started asking them about what they did and how it was organized.

I remember the president of the foundation taking me over to a window in his office when we were talking about this; we looked out over the Civic Center, and there was a very blank porch along the entryway, the plaza was empty, and there was a faded bench on the corner—it’s a very vivid memory, because it was the first time I looked at my city with fresh eyes. I had lived in Omaha for probably 30 years at the time, and I loved it, but I’d never really looked at it. I got hooked very quickly. I thought, “I get it; we can be better.”

Omaha by Design’s 2012 PARK(ing) Day installation, at at 13th and Howard Streets in downtown Omaha / Photo: Omaha by Design

And that eventually led to your organization conducting Place Game Workshops all over Omaha; several a year?

I went to one of the Placemaking trainings in New York right after I got hooked, and then we worked with PPS to create our first website, which we had for six years. Then we invited PPS to Omaha to train local residents to become Place Game facilitators so we could start doing more of these games around Omaha. It was a great way to start helping other people open their eyes and see the city in a new light.

We’ve done more than 70 Place Games during the past 11 years. The amazing thing is that quite a few of the facilitators who attended that first training session with Fred are still volunteering with us today. We’ve had new ones join us as well, so we’ve got a half dozen that still love to lead Place Games.

How has the organization’s work and scope changed over time? And what role has Placemaking played in that evolution, if any?

The catalyst for us to start looking at our role was the local development of two Walmart stores back in 2001. The architects were coming in with a very generic design for the stores, right about the time we were beginning to introduce this new vocabulary and encourage interest in how our city looks and feels. You could sense the beginning of this heightened awareness when the attorney for Walmart was asked by a planning board member (who had just come back from Fort Collins, Colorado), ‘Why are you building this plain, bland box in an area that is one of the most beautifully-maintained and landscaped places in the city?’

The attorney’s response was essentially, ‘Fort Collins has design standards, and we build to design standards and local politics.’ That led to Lively Omaha conducting a lot of research about design standards. We talked with City of Omaha officials, and while there were components of urban design in the master plan, it was not a major element.

Fortunately—and this is another influence of PPS—I had created an advisory committee to guide what our organization was doing. At the Placemaking training I attended, I learned that you need to engage leadership in public space work, and that includes city government department heads, the development community, designers, neighborhoods, public art folks—people from all corners of the city. When this idea of creating design standards for Omaha came up, it was great to have that advisory committee available to kick around ideas and to ask, “Why aren’t we—why isn’t Omaha—asking for more?”

So with the support of our advisory committee and the leadership of our founding donors, we decided to begin broadening our focus by working on an urban design plan for the city. Our donors helped raise about $750,000 to hire Jonathan Barnett with WRT in Philadelphia and Brian Blaesser with Robinson Cole in Boston to create a comprehensive urban design plan for the city. That was passed unanimously by our city council in 2004. Of course, we all recognized that just because it’s in the master plan doesn’t give the urban design plan the effect of law, so our donors agreed that we needed to work to get the new design standards codified. That took us two years, and we were able to get major changes to the existing city codes passed—unanimously, if you can believe that—by the planning board and city council, with developers at the table.

The Urban Design Handbook for Omaha illustrates the high standard of design that Omahans consider appropriate for protecting their city’s unique character, for everything from parking garages (shown here) to pubic spaces / Photo: City of Omaha

What is Omaha by Design working on now?

Right now we’re transitioning to becoming an independent nonprofit organization. 2011 was our 10-year anniversary, and that was when the OCF (which originally thought this was going to be a three-year pilot project!) and our original donors suggested that we were ready to start thinking about striking out on our own. After we reached out and determined that the community wanted us to continue on as an independent organization, we spent about six months going through the process of figuring out what that means and creating a vision statement, mission statement and business plan. If there was any organization pursuing something we were doing, we eliminated it. But there wasn’t much overlap; we’d always been focused on something very different from what other nonprofits were doing for the city. I think that’s why we continue to be supported.

Our mission today is simple: we’re dedicated to improving the way Omaha looks, functions and feels. We facilitate partnerships among our public, private and philanthropic sectors to carry out projects that will improve the quality of our city’s built and natural environments. All of our projects stem from recommendations outlined in the urban design and environmental components of Omaha’s master plan, which we helped develop during the past decade. We also monitor the local environment for adherence to policy changes resulting from these visioning documents and stand ready to act on activities that threaten to undermine their validity.

Ultimately, we’re successful for two reasons. First, we have the incredible support of our community leadership. That allows us access to the resources to make this work, and it’s been the direct result of a lot of coalition building we’ve done over the years. The second reason is the people who do the work; 99% are volunteers. They give willingly of their time, talent and resources. Some of the people who attended our very first meetings have kept with it all the way. Without them, we would have been a three-year pilot project that came and went. Omaha by Design is lucky to work in such a generous community; it makes great things possible.