Mark Plotz

Mark Plotz is the director of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, a resident program of the Project for Public Spaces. What that means, in practice, is that Mark is the man who makes Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place happen! Mark’s been poring over the results of last September’s conference in Long Beach, CA, and we recently had the chance to sit down with him when he made the trek up to HQ, to get a sense of how people responded to the new “Pro Place” focus. Mark also offered some teasers about the lead-up to Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2014, which will take place in Pittsburgh, PA next fall.

What were some of the trends that you saw in terms of what conference-goers voted for with their feet?

The good news is that Placemaking sessions fared very well, which is encouraging because it shows that the conference theme of “Pro Place” was resonating with people. One session that did very well was led by Victor Dover and John Massengale, who spoke about street design where we’re not just talking about paint and asphalt and dimensions, but really paying attention to context and creating beautiful streets.

Women and cycling was a popular subject. I could definitely see a lot of broad interest in making cycling a lot more reflective of this diverse country that we live in. A lot of bike advocacy has been geared toward the alpha-male bicyclists for too long, and now there’s a growing realization that there’s a whole new population that’s really interested in cycling and ready for alternatives to the car. We’re trying to be supportive of that in how we plan for the next conference, because people are indicating that they’re really interested in taking advocacy in that new direction.

Building on that advocacy theme–as much as people were coming to the last Pro Walk/Pro Bike and learning about Placemaking, us Placemakers all have a lot to learn from biking and walking advocates about how to run a campaign. Can you talk more about that?

Fred talks a lot about Zealous Nuts in his presentations, and there are no more zealous or nutty people than bike advocates! We’re very good at organizing, and showing up to meetings, and writing congressional offices. We’re a highly motivated crew. I think that Placemakers can learn a lot from rubbing elbows with bike advocates.

Bikers are sort of tribal. When you get a bunch of them in a room together, the conversation always seems to gravitate to the last a**hole you had an encounter with out on the road. That’s one of the things that really bonds bikers together: we’re out there and we don’t have much in the way of protection, so we’re dependent on the goodwill and skill of drivers, and also the DOT to give us a safe place to ride. So safety is a big shared concern.

You have to take the long view. The first Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference was in 1980, and it was about a hundred people in Asheville, NC. We had 900 people in Long Beach this year. From what I’ve been told by those who were there, the folks who showed up in Asheville were a bunch of idealists, working outside the system. But through the years, biking has been institutionalized, so a lot of those advocates became the first state bike/ped coordinators, and later the first local bike/ped coordinators. Over time, they were co-opted into the transportation establishment, which is a great thing.

There are still advocates out there, because that bike/ped coordinator still needs support from the public, and to know that people want this stuff. So advocates give him or her the cover. And I wonder if maybe that’s where Placemakers need to go now: to organize as advocates, develop a common agenda, and then hopefully get co-opted into transportation, governance, all of these places where our government already spends money but builds a bunch of crap.

How did that co-opting happen? How did these folks go from being the idealists outside of the system to being the inmates running the asylum, so to speak?

I would say it was ISTEA in 1991. It helps if the Feds are saying “look, if you want to get this money to build trails and other enhancement projects, you need to have a state bike/ped coordinator.” That was a major boost for the movement. But there was demand for that legislation. Back when Dan Burden was hired on as the first state bike/ped coordinator in Florida, biking was pretty popular. The Feds saw demand, and they wanted to answer it.

Any other thoughts on where PWPB is heading in 2014, and how it will continue to evolve? 

Well, of course, I think that we have the smartest conference attendees out there! And we function best and are most effective when we can demonstrate that the improvements we’re arguing for benefit a community. That when you rightsize a street, for instance, you’re not just doing good things for people who walk and bike, you’re adding value back to the property that the road had subtracted from. Placemaking is always going to be a part of it, if we’re smart. We’re seeing that in the attendance in 2012, and that’s going to continue in 2014.

The people in Pittsburgh are very excited. One of the reasons that they wanted to host the 2014 conference is that they want to kickstart their bike/ped plan implementation, but they also want to do more with Placemaking. I’m looking forward to doing interventions around the city. We’re going to do a warm-up event in the fall of 2013, and I hope to see a lot of good things come out of that, a lot of project ideas. PPS has budgeted for staff involvement with the city.

Pittsburgh is a great laboratory for Placemaking. That city has a lot of people in foundations that are interested in place, they’ve got a burgeoning tech sector, and they’ve got a couple of great people, like the guys from Walnut Capital who re-purposed an old Nabisco plant…you don’t have to sell these folks on the principles of mixed-use neighborhoods! They want more of this. They want to get developers there so they can evangelize to them and get city councilors there to see that this stuff works, and that there’s demand. That’s exciting.

Coming from the bike advocacy world, I believe that we’ve made a key mistake in thinking that federal legislation is the be-all and end-all of what’s going to make this country bicycle-friendly and walkable. But it’s more complex than that, especially when you’ve got a Congress that’s not interested in solving big problems. It’s going to be incumbent on us to engage with the private sector. It helps when you’ve got people who’ve shown that this can be tremendously lucrative, and that people want it.

Next stop: Pittsburgh! / Photo: mismisimos via Flickr

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

• Peter Norton’s excellent presentation on the history of media depictions and societal opinions on pedestrian-vehcile crashes
• AAA report on the societal costs of pedestrian-vehicle crashes
• World Health Organization pamphlet on the risk of pedestrian fatality as a function of traffic speed
• AAA report on the risk of pedestrian fatality as a function of traffic speed
• Transportation for America’s Dangerous by Design, interactive pedestrian-vehicle crash data
• National Highway Transportation Safety Administration pedestrian data
• America Walks, the best starting point for resources, tools and links

Locals mill about Silanga Field, which will soon become the Silanga Community Centre / Photo: PPS

In Nairobi, Kenya, the contrast between rich and poor neighborhoods is beyond stark.  And even though half of the city’s population lives on a mere 1.5% of the total land area, in Nairobi, public space is scarce. Since the creation, by Colonial powers in 1948, of the master plan that led to the formation of the city we now know today, little to no provision has been made for well structured common spaces for much-needed programming, activity, and services. In that same period, the city’s population has ballooned from 120,000 to more than 3.1 million people–and that’s just the official number! Nairobi is home to many informal settlements, where it’s very difficult to take an exact head count.

One of the most well-known of these settlements is Kibera, a massive slum comprised of 13 separate villages where most residents get by on less than a dollar a day. It is here where PPS has joined forces with UN-Habitat, the City Council of Nairobi, and local partners including the Kilimanjaro Initiative, KENSUP (the National Housing branch of the Kenyan Government), Chief of SOWETO (South West Township) in Kibera, and the Undugu Foundation, for one of two pilot projects in the city’s effort to create 60 great public spaces over the next several years.

Earlier this year in Kibera’s Silanga village neighborhood, PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin and Board Member Vanessa September met with community members to conduct a Placemaking workshop to generate ideas and support for the next phase of improvements to a soccer field that serves as an important recreation facility for this long-underserved community. Today residents continue to work toward the transformation of Silanga Field (which contains school facilities, a meeting room, a pottery studio, and other important resources) into what they have agreed, collectively, to re-name the Silanga Community Centre. “I have taken great delight in the confidence that is being displayed by the team in how they have taken ownership of the projects,” wrote PPS board member Vanessa September (who continues to work on the ground with partners) in a recent email. “If they have 58 more spaces to do, then the sooner they take ownership, the better!”

We have written previously on the Placemaking Blog about how dangerous social conditions produce alienating public spaces in developing world cities, especially for women. In Kibera, the desire for a safe and welcoming space for the community very clearly influences recommendations for everything from comfort to accessibility. A variety of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper improvements are included in an as-yet-unpublished report detailing recommendations generated through the Placemaking process, with many of them focused specifically on creating a safe space for people to gather. From using fences to define the perimeter of the site (and designate entrance and exit points), to programming the space, very intentionally, with local security meetings and social programs focused on youth and good parenting, the focus on safety plays a critical role.

“The best way to make a public space safe,” the report suggests, “is by creating positive activities in and enhancing wider citizen ownership of the space.”

We often say that public spaces reflect the communities that surround them; this can be both a good thing, and a bad thing. In Nairobi, the lack of adequate public spaces reflects the stark social divisions across the city and, worse yet, reinforces them. Since Nairobians rarely come into contact with people from different socioeconomic groups, there is little upward mobility for people in places like Kibera—diminishing one of the chief benefits of urban agglomeration. The lack of space communicates to these people that their presence is undesirable. This contributes directly to the sense of isolation and desperation that makes for more dangerous neighborhoods.

In wealthy areas, meanwhile, fear of the violence created by this tension leads to more fortress-like compounds and walled golf courses when what the city really needs are great public spaces, and shared destinations where people from different neighborhoods and backgrounds can take part in the formation of a shared civic identity. Spaces like the Silanga Community Centre are steps toward a stronger Nairobi.

Presently, the UN-Habitat is working with local partners to accurately survey the site, and prepare for the RFP process in order to push forward on Silanga Field’s reconstruction. The newly appointed City Planning Director, Mrs. Rose Muema, recently presented on progress at the site both at the World Urban Forum in Naples Italy and more recently to major donors from Norway, Sweden, and Spain, “[stressing] the importance of participatory approaches to development.”

Gary Toth – Senior Director, Transportation Initiatives, Project for Public Spaces from Clean Air Partnership on Vimeo.

Last month Gary Toth spoke at the Complete Streets Forum in Toronto about the symbiotic relationship between the Complete Streets and Placemaking movements. Early on in the talk, posted above in full, Gary points out that a complete street makes travel “safe, comfortable, and convenient” for all modes–but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it overtly provides for each one in its own area. Complete streets can often include flexible or mixed-mode areas (Salt Lake City’s green lanes are a great example), but the focus should be on creating a street that is welcoming to everyone, no matter the mode of travel.

The question at the heart of Gary’s talk is about how we build community through transportation. When talking about streets, “Complete,” he argues, “has got to be about community-building, not just about taking space away from cars.” Efforts to create more complete streets often bump into opposition that claims bike lanes and bump-outs are part of a “war on cars,” and Gary explains how to re-frame the issue as being about creating neighborhoods that are safer and more inclusive: the kinds of places where you feel comfortable letting your child ride ahead a bit when out biking.

If you enjoy the video above and are interested in learning more about how to engage your local transportation agency to start rethinking streets as places, here’s a link to the Citizens Guide to Better Streets, which Gary mentions at the end of his presentation.

Cynthia leads a workshop in Kibera. Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

Over the course of a week, I led a series of placemaking trainings with 40 staff people from seven city council departments, the Kilimanjaro Initiative, UN-Habitat, and several local organizations working on the ground in the Kenyan capital, as part of an ongoing partnership. When talking about expanding public space within the city, I kept bumping up against this assumption from the Nairobi staff  that this meant they had to buy big chunks of land and even clear people out of existing neighborhoods to make room for new parks. The idea that schoolyards and sidewalks, streets, plazas, and fire stations could be meaningful places within the city’s public realm was new to them. There’s a division, for many in Nairobi, between “Public Spaces” and spaces that merely happen to be public.

Reasons for this division aren’t hard to figure out. We worked at two specific sites during the trip, in very different neighborhoods. The first was an athletic field in the Silanga section of Kibera, purportedly the largest informal settlement in Africa. Our project was to re-think the field as a multi-use community destination, but just walking through the surrounding  neighborhood was so eye-opening. Kibera’s buildings are built mostly out of sheets of corrugated metal, and its streets are packed dirt. The main (and only) thoroughfare here, Kibera Road, is a pretty amazing place. It has an intense mix of activity, all right out there on the street: a huge variety of vendors, people getting their hair braided, people cooking, socializing, reading the paper, kids doing their homework. But the infrastructure is terrible. It’s a clear-cut example of how Nairobi has so much public space that people don’t even recognize as public space.

Shops along Kibera Road. Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

Back in the center of the city, our second site was a very formal English garden donated to the city by the Jeevanjee family. I visited the site with several members of the family and the city council who had recently been to New York. They’d seen successful public spaces all over the city, and when we visited the garden, I said ‘Think of this as the Bryant Park of Nairobi!’ The space had been kept very pristine, and they didn’t have an idea of how it could evolve. Once we started talking about it with Bryant Park as a reference point, they got really excited. The idea that this could still be a lovely green place that was also full of activity was something that sunk in very quickly.

"Think of this as the Bryant Park of Nairobi!" Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

Promoting the idea that existing spaces could become really wonderful pieces of public life was so important on this trip. The idea that you can do many small things instead of a few big things–that placemaking doesn’t have to be capital-intensive–is critical in a city like Nairobi, where so much economic activity is still informal. Public spaces there have to provide a way for people to earn a living. Vendors, hawkers, performers: these are people whose livelihoods depend on active public spaces. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper interventions that change things right now are what’s going to raise the quality of life in Nairobi; not big new parks on the edge of town that take years to build.

Children play at the Silanga athletic field next to a sign advertising coming infrastructural improvement. Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

At one point, I showed a slideshow of possible examples for how the athletic field in Silanga could be made into a more vibrant hub for the community, and the group had already come up with a lot of the same ideas on their own. It’s one thing to suggest to people what they could do; it’s an entirely different thing to show them, ‘This is what they did in a slum in Rio; this what they did in a slum in Colombia, where the neighborhood used to be completely run by gangs,’ and to have them see that what they’ve envisioned is totally possible. When a few dedicated people take ownership of a place and band together to push through existing misconceptions about what public space “should” look like and how it can function for the people that want to use it–that’s where placemaking starts.

Work on the two pilot sites will continue, spearheaded by the Nairobi City Council and supported by UN-Habitat (whose international headquarters are located in the nearby Girgiri neighborhood) with PPS providing technical support.  Two down, 58 more to go!