Main Street of TomorrowMain Street of Tomorrow
A tactical urbanism experiment
Wayne Feiden
Recently a lot has been written about a few vacancies along downtown Northampton’s Main Street. Nothing has been written about vacancies and wasted space on the road and sidewalks, part
of our public realm. It may be more important to pay attention the part of the public realm that carries the life blood of the city, you.
It is the public realm that helps determine how inviting downtown is for visitors, workers, residents, and customers. It is the public realm that determines how many crashes there are
going to be downtown. Main Street is considered one of the most pedestrian-friendly streets in the state, because of the desirability of our downtown and the sheer volume of visitors,
not because of the layout of the street.
On Saturday June 18th (Sunday if there is a steady rain on Saturday), Northampton will host a Main Street complete streets demonstration in front of City Hall. We will explore with you
how we can best use our public realm to make the street more desirable and accessible for everyone, to make it safer, and to serve all modes of travel. Help us figure out how we can
improve the experience and plug both our public realm and our private realm vacancies.
This is tactical urbanism, an exploration of how to make the streetscape work better. Instead of measuring, designing, and building, we are building a cheap temporary pop-up intervention,
and then measuring to see what works and how we can improve it.
We hope that this is the beginning of a greater focus on quick, fast, and cheap interventions to test opportunities. Later this summer, our grant is funding a movable temporary parklet
(literally a six foot wide by 16 foot long park that we can place on an underutilized piece of asphalt). We hope to move it around, based on requests from abutters, to test if such
a park makes those areas more desirable and generates more pedestrian traffic and for local business.
We know that on-street parking is critical for businesses and we need to protect that, but we also know that sometimes a parklet actually generates far more pedestrian and business activity,
especially if that parking spot is otherwise hosting a downtown employee who would be better off parking in a parking lot. We know that traffic needs to flow smoothly to serve our downtown
and our businesses, but we also know that cars weaving and crashes are not good for circulation nor for business and that cities that focus on moving vehicles quickly through their downtown
suffer.
Help us figure out how we can truly have it all. Come on Saturday. Participate in future temporary parklet installations. Think about what you love about downtown’s public realm and
how we can make that better.
Wayne Feiden is Northampton’s Director of Planning and Sustainability. This project is in collaboration with Healthy Hampshire and is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public
Health Mass in Motion program.