Civil Streets!
  • Home
  • Take Action
  • Blog
  • Stories
  • About

Merida Mexico: Beauty and the Beast

2/9/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Can a city be beautiful and harsh on pedestrians at the same time?  Before visiting Merida I would have said no.  Any city that is beautiful, must be first and foremost a good walking City.  
The colonial architecture is amazing. Merida was  founded on the site of Mayan temple in the early 16th century by Spanish Conquistadors.   The historic center is crossed by an almost perfect grid of one way streets.  The city parks are beautifully landscaped, and draw residents and visitors alike for an awesome people-watching experience.

At some point in the City’s history, the City made a decision to maximize the road space devoted to cars and minimize sidewalk widths.  This has created an awful pedestrian environment on almost all of the streets in the historic center.  In some places there is less than 2 feet for a pedestrian to walk.  This is coupled with the almost perfectly straight mostly one-way gridded streets that allow cars to get up to 40 or 50KM between lights.  

Picture
In addition to the speeding traffic whizzing within inches of the many pedestrians, a good percentage of the cars and busses in the City are poorly maintained.  This creates a noxious mix of  air and noise pollution.  This leads to the strange mix of a terrible pedestrian environment and a beautiful city.  

There are some fairly easy fixes to the problem that could improve the situation for pedestrians radically.  This would involve the City reclassifying some of the streets as pedestrian priority (PP) streets.  In a PP street, the car would be the guest and would be expected to defer to pedestrians walking on them, just as the pedestrian now to defers to the car on almost all streets in Merida Center now.

I did find one cross alley in Merida has been closed to cars.   Cars could possibly use this space, but the message would be “this is pedestrian street”.
Picture
As seen above Merida does have experience with building excellent pedestrian environments.   

Furthermore, in the short term, could do many low cost treatments to slow traffic and create shared PP streets.  These include making some of the current one way streets two way and even having  opposing one way streets that force drivers to turn instead of being able to go straight.  Essentially the PP streets would break up connectivity for cars while maintaining connections for pedestrians and bicyclists. Residents and businesses would be able to access the streets with cars for loading and parking, but their speeds would be low.

Important design features would be needed to slow traffic.  Planting trees in the street would do much to slow traffic and bring much needed shade to the streets of Merida.  Bike lanes also narrow travel lanes and slow traffic.  Furthermore businesses could be encouraged to move seating in to the street (something Merida is very familiar with when they completely close some downtown streets).   Finally in residential children could be encouraged to play on pedestrian oriented streets by including child-friendly element in the design of the streets.

There's an element of social justice too.  Enrique Penalosa makes this point well in his TED talk on Bogota's success:

Picture
There are some tools that could be used to alleviate traffic during peak times.  Currently buses move far more people in Merida than cars.  More use buses could be encouraged by dedicating  the right hand lane of two-lane streets for exclusive use of buses.  Having all the buses in one lane would rationalize the traffic and reward bus riders with a faster trip.  With faster trips by bus, more car drivers might be willing to switch to the bus.  Furthermore, with comfortable walking corridors downtown, more people might be willing to walk further from their parking spaces to their destinations.  Also some would choose to live in the city center and closer to work instead of fleeing to the quieter suburbs.

Merida is an amazing town. If the streets were friendly to pedestrians it would really be a world class city.

0 Comments

New York City-- Uncivil Street

6/20/2011

 
This is a great video of just about everyone acting badly.  I love the box-graphics that show the conflicts.  Bicycles appear to be extra bad-- but really pedestrians are jay-walking and cars are routinely nudging in to crosswalks full of pedestrians.

3-Way Street from ronconcocacola on Vimeo.

Civil Streets & Respect

5/13/2010

 
I was really heartened to get an email from an advocate in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn.  They're looking to make the streets safer for pedestrians-- especially mothers with kids.  They want to buy some stickers.  There are two really cool things about it:

1. I wanted this site to be truly multi-modal and not linked to any particular geographic area. The Bay Ridge folks are concerned about speeding traffic and I'm concerned about the public image of bicyclists and this site works for both of us.  At it's roots this is about treating each other better.  With respect.

2. The second cool thing is that they asked if we had a poster that they could ask shops to post in windows.  Great idea!  The idea of the sticker was to post it on bikes, bags and strollers-- be small enough to be cool and large enough to see.  The beauty of the poster is that anyone could print an 11 X 17 and hang it in a store window.  Low cost/ effective.  What's not to like.

In the next week or so, we'll upload a poster that you can use

    Author

    Mark Chase, co-founder Civilstreets.org

    Archives

    February 2014
    February 2012
    October 2011
    June 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010

    Categories

    All
    Anger
    Angry Bicyclists
    Angry Drivers
    Angry Pedestrians
    Bikes
    Cars
    Children
    Cycling Behavior
    Health
    Kindness
    Livable Streets
    Pedestrians
    Road Rage
    Shared Streets
    Traffic Calming
    Walkers

    RSS Feed


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.