Collegian T he Cameron University
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Monday, March 23, 2015
Volume 92 Issue 6
Walkability
Photos by Charlene Belew
‘New urbanism’ and a dominate downtown Charlene Belew
Quick bits with Urban Designer Jeff Speck When I think about Lawton, I think about the opposite of a “walkable” city. What could we do to make that better?
If you’re going to get people to walk, the walk has to be useful, safe, comfortable and interesting. The real bedrock of that conversation is “the safe.” Cars are going fast, [pedestrians] are very exposed and there are many lanes. So whenever I go to a place, I try to give a presentation on how to accomplish this by walking around and looking around. I take pictures and I talk about the things that I have found. One thing I found here is that a lot of streets have more lanes than cars. Every lane implies a certain amount of traffic and every lane holds a certain amount of traffic. When you have mismatch on certain streets between the amounts of traffic those streets can handle and the amounts they are handling, like by an eight-to-one margin, for example on C Avenue, when you’ve got eight times as much capacity as you have vehicles, there is an opportunity to take some of that pavement that’s encouraging speeding and to put it to other use. So that’s just one thing.
will help provide a bustling, more viable downtown area. Managing Editor These concepts include the @cbelew15 walking environment being City Planner and Urban useful, safe, comfortable and Designer Jeff Speck took the interesting. stage as the third Academic “If you want to get people Festival speaker with a in America to walk … the variety of events to spread walk or the bike ride has to the message of walkability be as good as or better than and sustainability in a the car ride,” Speck said. community. “If you design around the Various events consisted automobile, it makes you of a student session and a dependent upon it.” public session on Thursday, As far as safety, Speck March 12, and a special didn’t necessarily focus on session with the Lawton City crime. According to him, the Council on Friday, March largest safety problem is that 13. of the automobile, and the Speck – who has served variety of crashes, wrecks as Director of Design at and deaths that are caused the National Endowment by it. for the Arts from 2003 to He said with a safer area 2007 – spoke about four to walk or ride bikes, such aspects during his evening as sidewalks and bike lanes presentation “Towards a that are protected from Walkable Lawton,” that main streets with parking,
encourages more and more people to walk. He said a repercussion of this is that when there are large groups of people, crime is less likely to happen, especially in front of spectators. “You have the proper skeleton to have a healthy body put on top of that,” Speck said in regards to Lawton’s layout. “You aren’t hindered until you get downtown.” A majority of smaller cities are grandfathered into the design of “urban sprawl,” and a lot of larger, more sustainable cities use “new urbanism,” or a tighter zoning scheme to encourage citizens to walk from place to place, Speck said during his presentation. “New urbanism is about being of your place,” Speck said. “A walking city is a
successful city.” Speck swayed the audience, saying connecting Lawton’s downtown area, complete with houses and main streets, to the heart of what he referred to as the “spaceship mall,” in a more effective way will bring a bustling, beautiful area. “The more houses in the downtown area, the more walkable it becomes and then other things start to fall in to place … it is really the sweet spot,” he said. As a writer and an architect, Speck said a lot of the main roads around Lawton are oversized, stating that a two-laned street can handle about 10,000 cars a day.
See SPECK Page 3
What got you passionate about walkability?
I was trained as an architect and I thought I would be designing rich peoples’ houses for a living. And then I started doing city planning because I realized that a lot of our [architecture] didn’t really matter because it is all behind six acres of parking lot and so that got me into urban design. In urban design, I realized that regional design was more important than urban design because we live our lives to the scale of the region. If we don’t get the region right, then everyone is driving everywhere. Just as I was figuring that out, I started working at the National Endowment for the Arts where my principle program I was overseeing was with American mayors, called the Mayors Institute on City Design. The term that they used was “walkable,” “is it walkable?” All the things that we call urban design or good urbanism or new urbanism … could be communicated through the single measure of walkability. The walkability thing is a reframing … but we finally found the hook. The questions and answers in the Q&A occured during the 20-minute press conference at 4:30 p.m. on March 12 in the Buddy Green Room. The press, which included KSWO Channel 7, The Cameron Collegian and KCCU, took the f loor to ask these questions to Jeff Speck.
What’s inside Livestock Judging returns
Symphony invites Ike students
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Aggies compete in LSC tourney Page 10