"Kids Create Natick Center"

Natick middle and high school students will have a chance to share their visions for what downtown should look like, under a new Kids Create Natick Center program meeting Wednesdays from Feb. 28 to March 28, 5:30 to 7:30 pm at Kids-Connect (43 Main St.)

Working with two architects, they'll be given "real-world maps and plans and the space to create collages, drawings and models," according to a press release announcing the program. "At the end of the 5-week session, students will present their work to the public Monday, April 9 at the Morse Institute Library as part of a Natick Center Associates' planning forum."

The program is funded in part through a grant from the Boston Foundation for Architecture (there's also a $15 materials fee per student). For more info head to kids-connect.org.

Is New York City Losing Its Pedestrian Edge?

Is New York City - the only city in America where more than half its residents don't take private cars to work - losing its pedestrian edge?

Author Robert Sullivan thinks so. In a thoughtful N.Y. Times op-ed piece, he worries that "as far as pedestrian issues go, New York is acting more like the rest of America, and the rest of America is acting more like the once-inspiring New York."

Why? "We have lost our golden pedestrian touch in New York mostly because we still think about traffic as though it were 1950, and we needed Robert Moses to plow a few giant freeways through town to get the cars moving again. But the fact is that more roads equal more traffic." (something streetscape-improvement advocates have argued repeatedly).

After citing the many positive steps other cities are taking to make more pedestrian-friendly environments, he notes that "the city is the new suburb. Families have returned to the New York that was abandoned years ago for lawns and better public schools. They’ve brought with them a love of cars."

Uh oh.

How to fix things? "The simple and elegant cure for the loss of New York’s inner pedestrian is to open up car-clogged streets and public spaces." Worry less about taking over yet more public and private space for funneling and parking motor vehicles, and more about quality of life.

"With a million more New Yorkers scheduled to arrive by 2030, true sustainability requires the city — or at least its residents — to make a bold move. Some neighborhoods are already working on it. The Ninth Avenue Renaissance Project, sponsored by a coalition of residents and businesses, has held community workshops on converting Ninth Avenue from Lincoln Tunnel access ramp to boulevard.

"The now chic Meatpacking District plans to bring back a space that, since the area was a Native American village, has been a natural gathering place for people without combustion engines: wider sidewalks, public seating and a piazza in the restaurant-surrounded open field of paving stones could be more like Campo dei Fiori in Rome and less a spot for crazed U-turns. . . .

" 'Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places,' wrote John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the landscape historian. We've already lost a lot of New York to traffic. If New Yorkers don’t get out of their cars soon, the city’s future residents won't have a reason to."

The New Mall’s Impact on Natick, cont. Um, What About Framingham?

 

The Boston Globe's West edition has written yet another article about the Natick mall expansion in the works, including breathless marketing-like phrases such as "Developers aren't just adding size. They are adding swank and high style to the staid indoor mall of decades past." Swank and high style? Because of "a rolling gold sign that is inspired, designers say, by the folds of a women's skirt"? "A mezzanine 'floating' above a water fountain"? It all may indeed be as spectacular as advertised, but shouldn't we leave the PR-like accolades until after the new mall actually opens, and we can see with our own eyes whether it's glitz or kitsch?

That aside, though, I'm getting a little tired of all the coverage focusing solely on the mall's impact on the town of Natick, considering that you can walk from the mall to the Framingham town line. (Well, you could on a very low-traffic day. Christmas Day when all the stores are closed, maybe. But it's close enough that one could walk, with proper pedestrian-friendly design.) Traffic will obviously affect Framingham roads, unless all the SUVs and other vehicles coming from points west are helicoptered in. Residents and workers getting on and off Mass Pike exit 13 will deal with the extra traffic as much as those in Natick. If there is an impact on local merchants, it will be felt in downtown Framingham and Framingham Center as well as Natick. The retail "Golden Triangle" encompassing the mall in Natick also clearly includes Shoppers World and other retailers in Framingham. Yet the Globe West Weekly story reports only that "The [Natick] Planning Board's overriding concern has been making sure Natick is compensated for the impact the expansion will have on the town."

So, Natick gets $15 million in mitigation for things like road improvement. Lucky them! The mall is planning a potentially more pedestrian-friendly storefront facade on the Natick Rte. 9 side. Nice improvement for the Natick stretch of Rte. 9, but I've heard nothing about improving the pedestrian streetscape on the Speen St. or Rte. 30 sides close to Framingham office workers like me.

It's good that the mall and the town could solve the dispute over using the name "Natick" (I come down squarely on the side of the town over that one. Natick is the name of the town; if a retailer wants to use it, it should be as an adjective, not stand-alone). Now could the media please move on and also consider the impact of this major project on surrounding areas outside of the Natick town line as well as in the town itself?

Not Keeping Us Safe On Our Highways

Tens of thousands of Americans die in motor vehicle accidents every year, yet the U.S. government is falling down on the job of determining what engineering advances such as vehicle designs are most likely to save our lives (let alone mandating such things). An American's odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident is substantially greater than 1 in a 100 (1 of 84, according to the National Safety Council, based on 2003 data), yet the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration consumer-information testing program is "woefully inadequate, out-of-date and underfinanced," Joan Claybrok writes in today's New York Times. Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, was head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the Carter administration.

"[I]t still does not test to evaluate survivability in rollovers; it doesn't measure the effects of size differential when a passenger car collides with, say, a light truck; it doesn't test vehicle structure in frontal, off-center crashes; it doesn’t test fuel tank vulnerability in rear-end collisions; finally, it fails to test how badly pedestrians are injured when hit by vehicles. Most of these consumer information tests are performed, or are being developed, in Europe, Australia and Japan.

"What's more, the tests that are done are simply too weak. Cars are not tested at high enough speeds; sport utility vehicles are tested against insubstantial barriers. Take all this together, and consumers are ill served."

Remind me again why we pay federal taxes?

Final Update on the Radio Interference: WBIX Calls At Last

I finally got a call today from an engineer at WBIX. So I'm happy to say they were responsive at last, if belatedly. The engineer was prepared to try to help me deal with the problem, but the more prompt and responsive folks at Verizon have already taken care of it for me. He said they've been running 40,000 watts at the same location for the past seven years and there's been no recent increase in power. So who knows why this suddenly became such a bad problem. He did say that the calls from people experiencing interference were supposed to go to him, not an endlessly ringing phone with no voicemail, and that he'd look into that.

Hopefully, this is my last post on the subject and I can go back to interesting community planning issues, such as the newly expanded Natick Mall, and what it means to the surrounding community (hope to comment on the Globe West story about town and mall later today or tomorrow).