I walked downtown in Northampton on Saturday, June 18, to witness in person the Complete Streets Demonstration Day, a mock-up of one of several proposals by the Cambridge office of Portland, Oregon-based Alta Planning + Design, a consulting firm that specializes in, according to its website, the “design and implementation” of “bicycle, pedestrian, park, and trail” systems.
Alta was paid for the study from a $108,000 grant from the state Department of Public Health. The proposed demonstration narrowed Main Street at its curve, temporarily creating two adjacent small parks extending from the sidewalks by using traffic barrels and potted plants; one park in front of City Hall, another directly across the street protruding from Cracker Barrel Alley.
In so doing, it also funneled motor vehicle traffic down to a single lane in either direction.
In front of City Hall, I spoke with Tom Doolittle, a landscape architect and senior design associate with Alta who was on hand to discuss his project. He was surrounded by an impressive array of artists’ renderings, set upon easels, of the various proposals his firm had designed for Northampton.
My comment to him was that while a perfect day for a public showcase, a Saturday is not an accurate test run for the impact such a modification of the flow of traffic downtown would ultimately have.
I asked Doolittle if he had witnessed the flow of traffic downtown on a late weekday afternoon during the rush hour. He told me that he had not.
While they may be experts on cyclists and pedestrians, it seems Alta does not specialize in traffic flow and the potential congestive shock wave that would be created by funneling one state highway (Route 9) from four lanes down to two within the -mile gap between the convergence of another state highway (Route 10) and a federal highway (Route 5). With all of the tax dollars and time spent on this study, the apparent failure to consider this essential component is baffling.
While the study was paid for with our state tax dollars, it should be noted that any implementation of Alta’s proposals would be funded at the local level. To move forward at the suggestion of a consulting firm that apparently failed to consider such a critical element as traffic flow would be foolhardy.
We pride ourselves on being a bicycle and pedestrian-friendly city, but drivers have a right to use the roads unimpeded as well. The excise taxes paid on cars and gasoline fund a sizable lot of the costs to maintain our roads and highways. While it’s great that a person who lives in Florence and works in Hadley may wish to ride a bicycle to work, residents and passers-through who have much longer commutes don’t enjoy that luxury.
To impose the political will of those within a single small city upon those who are using the state and federal highway systems on a much larger geographical scale is unfair, and moreover it’s illogical and lacking in common sense.
In the story about the project in the June 20 Gazette, Mayor David J. Narkewicz was quoted as saying that “traffic is like water; it’s always going to seek another route.”
I couldn’t agree more.
One only has to witness the intersection of Elm Street and Riverside Drive after a heavy rain, when water converging from three directions overwhelms storm drains there.
The water most certainly does seek another route, though I’m not sure that the owner of the auto body shop on the corner is particularly fond of where that water goes.
I’m curious what the mayor’s explanation would be to the residents of Union Street and Crescent streets and Pomeroy Terrace should their neighborhoods become major arteries for weekday afternoon commuters seeking to avoid the bottlenecking of traffic downtown.
Brian Cooper lives in Northampton.