Bringing Brackenridge Park to the street
The Express-News reported back in February that the Midtown Brackenridge master plan had been completed, with funding from the San Antonio River Authority (SARA). The plan rezones Broadway and N St Mary’s around Brackenridge Park, and invests heavily in making Broadway a more pedestrian-scale street (see a photo of the plan here).
The piece opens with the planners’ vision of a stronger connection between the streets and the 340 acre park, including trees and fountains along Broadway. The arterial street would be reduced from six lanes to four, allowing for on-street parking, bike lanes, and wider sidewalks. Presumably, the planned streetcar system would be integrated at the same time. New zoning would encourage high density mixed-use development.
The city has already designated a tax increment reinvestment zone (TIRZ) in the area, and according to the E-N article, some of the funds have been used to encourage development, offering millions of dollars in tax breaks for apartments at the Pearl and commercial space in the old Butterkrust building.
E-N blogger Benjamin Olivo takes issue with the plan:
I’m wondering if Midtown Brackenridge (as the area’s been coined) needs massive infrastructure change to be successful. For me, it’s like domesticating a wild animal. They want to take a thoroughfare (anti-pedestrian in nature) and whip it into South Alamo Street in Southtown. It can be done, but how would it feel? Would it feel loose and carefree like Southtown? … If I were running the show, I’d put all of my energy into River North…. Forget Broadway north of The Pearl for a few years. Maybe then River North’s growth momentum will spill into neighboring Midtown Brackenridge. And maybe then the massive undertaking won’t be necessary and drivers will eventually pause for pedestrians because they want to, not because they’re being told to.
A commenter responds by comparing Broadway to South Congress in Austin. South Congress is also a major arterial, but feels much more pedestrian friendly, and has a lot more development.
Take a look at Broadway:
Broadway Street in San Antonio
… and South Congress:
South Congress in Austin
Both streets are arteries, and will never be as pedestrian-friendly as South Alamo, but reducing the street to four lanes, adding some on-street parking, and encouraging pedestrian-scale retail would make a world of difference. If Broadway additionally had a strong connection to Brackenridge Park — which is currently invisible from the street — I think there would be a fundamental shift in awareness and consequently in the use of the park, the waterway, and the street. Hence, SARA’s involvement.
Offering incentives for developments like Pearl — and for increasing its housing capacity — are, I think, good uses of tax money. But with Pearl and 1221 Broadway now anchoring Broadway on the south end of the park, it is time to bring the park to the street and make the street walkable. This area of Broadway has some well-established businesses and restaurants, but still feels lifeless. It is crying out for the infrastructure improvements that would allow it to really function as a useable street, rather than the highway that it currently is.
Another issue worth discussing is safety. A report on street safety just came out in the Journal of the American Planning Association, which used San Antonio to research street design and safety [free PDF download here] for motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians. Interestingly, the authors found that the streets that are most safe for motorists are also most safe for pedestrians and cyclists. Those streets are not big arterials like Broadway. They are the streets with lower speeds, more on-street parking, and street-oriented buildings that create a “sense of visual enclosure.”
The study shows why the idea that motorists will suddenly want to slow down for pedestrians on a huge, six lane highway because of the momentum of the Pearl development is just wishful thinking. It also shows why a cyclist quoted in the article, who fears that eliminating lanes and lowering the speed limit would make Broadway less safe for bikers, is wrong. Build a street like a highway, and people will drive it like a highway, thus reducing awareness of potential traffic conflicts, and also reducing ability to respond quickly to avert accidents.
A plan that would simultaneously forge a stronger connection between one of San Antonio’s great urban parks and the city around it, increase traffic safety, encourage development, and connect downtown more strongly to Alamo Heights seems like a win-win-win-win to me.
The founding metaphor
Then we do one other thing before we ever begin work… we start to examine metaphorical values. For instance, take the harbor at Baltimore. A harbor, if you look at the founding metaphor of a harbor, is a place where fresh and salt water meet and mix. It is a place of generation. It’s really an ecological marketplace. There the harbor’s changed to a human marketplace. The same values hold, but if someone (as in Baltimore) puts an eight lane road around the harbor, you have breached the the metaphorical values. Therefore, you must first restore the metaphorical values, before you can restore the others, and these values drive our art. That’s why we set up a reconnection between the harbor and the rest of the city.
– Newton Harrison
The oil tax
Streetsblog asks why no one in Congress is making serious proposals to deal with transportation funding, which on the federal level comes from a gas tax that hasn’t been increased in 20 years. I’m not sure we’ll get a solution from Congress, but RAND released a study in late February showing how the “federal government could fully fund its surface transportation infrastructure needs by levying a percentage tax on crude oil and imported refined petroleum products”—while eliminating the gas tax.
The proposal is intriguing in that it would replace several taxes with a single one, potentially be more politically palatable than increasing the gas tax, and fully fund the transportation system. Obama has shown a willingness to raise taxes on oil companies, proposing to cut oil and gas tax incentives in his budget proposal. But I don’t see Congress having the stomach for anything like RAND proposes at this point.
BRT to the future
To those of us keeping an eye on San Antonio’s transit system, the slow development can be a bit painful. If voters had approved San Antonio’s light rail initiative over ten years ago, when it was on the ballot, we’d be running about on pace with Austin and Houston, with probably a limited system in operation today. But that didn’t happen, and city leaders pretty much forgot about mass transit at that point, focussing instead on improving the highways and the conventional bus system. We’re just now getting back to it. Dallas, meanwhile, has a pretty extensive light rail system that runs to a number of suburban communities, and even out to Fort Worth.
But there may be a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel here for San Antonio, and a silver lining to boot. Many of the light rail systems in the US are facing serious challenges. I just looked at a few for a piece I was working on for Plaza de Armas — Dallas, Denver, Charlotte — and they are all looking at cutbacks, in some cases major.
San Antonio is on track to finish a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line by next year. A line is not a system, of course, but this line looks almost identical in its configuration to Austin’s MetroRail line (travelling between downtown and the northwest side of the city). Houston’s METRORail is also just a single line, running from downtown to the southside. So when San Antonio’s BRT line opens, the level of rapid transit service should be about equal Houston and Austin, but at a much lower cost.
BRT has the potential in many situations to be as good as light rail, but is much less expensive, both in terms of infrastructure and maintenance. It’s not as sexy in the US, but the tide is starting to turn there as well. Earlier this month, the Brookings Institution put together a panel discussion on BRT which is worth a look (audio here, transcript here). They point out that Latin America has actually been the driving force behind development of these systems, due to rapid population growth, strained infrastructure, and budgets that won’t allow for rail investment. Sound familiar?
Now Austin is also jumping on the BRT bandwagon (actually, reviving a proposal that had been stalled for years while the city focussed on MetroRail). They say by 2013 they’ll have two new BRT lines with about 70 stations. So the good news for San Antonio is that some of this light rail investment may not have been an especially good idea. We’ll see. At the very least, BRT was long given short shrift by US cities. It will be interesting to compare ridership, speed, and reliability between Austin’s light rail and BRT lines. BRT is certainly not perfect. Cleveland’s HealthLine, often considered a model for the US, is going 33% slower than expected, barely faster than the old, conventional bus line.
But the good news is that the systems can come online much faster and much cheaper than light rail, while providing many of the same advantages. Those advantages include speed gains (though this depends on both a dedicated right of way for the busses and coordinating traffic signals so that they don’t have to wait at lights), a shift in social stigma surrounding busses, realtime schedule information, and increased development around the stations.
So while San Antonio may have dropped the ball on transit, it’s now much easier to make up that lost time—and the city isn’t straddled with an expensive rail system that needs to be maintained indefinitely.
Southside onion hunt
Yesterday around two in the afternoon I got a text from Justin Parr: “let’s go hunt some wild onions.” He was somehow convinced that it would be the perfect time to find unopened onion scapes, the little pods which eventually turn into flowers, and which can be quite delicious. By five we were in the car headed down to the southern end of the Mission Trail along the San Antonio River.
We’d spot little trails cutting down to the banks, poke around among the elephant ears and grasses and various weeds. Pretty early on we started spotting wild onions with the scapes intact, just as Justin said. But it wasn’t until we made our way to a little park by an old Spanish acecquia that we started really finding them in large quantity. (At this same park, Bill Fontana once recorded audio of Justin and I riding our bikes over a wooden bridge, which he incorporated into his sound installation on the Riverwalk near the San Antonio Museum of Art).
We grabbed a scape here, a scape there, slowly filling our foraging bag. Finally we found a patch in a sandy area that was big enough to just start picking whole onions, and we got about 30 of them — actually leaving many behind. By this point, it was only about 6:30 or 7, so we still had plenty of light.
After picking up some beer and a couple of ingredients, we headed back to my house to cook it all up. I made an onion cream soup with some of this wonderful stuff, while Justin battered and fried the scapes. I can attest to the fact that onions growing by the San Antonio River are definitely quite tasty, and that wild onion scapes are a wonderful once-a-year treat. If you get a chance to try them, don’t turn it down. They taste a bit like onion, a bit like asparagus, and a lot yummy.
Here they are fresh:
And here they are fried:
Not a bad way to spend a Friday evening in this beautiful South Texas spring weather. We’ve already started discussing spots to seed some wild onions further up the river, so next year’s crop will be even more prolific.
Training dog owners
I’ve been working my way through a long essay about the theories of social control that justified the creation of many parks in the United States. It’s a fascinating look into how the politics of public space has evolved in our country, and I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks. I’m kind of awed by the levels of idealism and cynicism that can exist so close together — even though I just observed astounding levels of idealism/cynicism in the build up to the Iraq war and then the battle over the Affordable Care Act. It gets me every time.
Here’s Frederick Law Olmsted describing parks as a place where people “with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each.”
And yet, here he is describing the lower classes who he proposes will be lifted up by his transcendent parks, men who “are either in a diseased condition from excessive devotion of the mind to a limited range of interests, or their whole minds are in a savage state; that is, a state of low development.” So much for disposing of spiritual and intellectual pride.
But reading this, and watching the completion of new park land along the San Antonio River, and hearing all the discussions of how to remake HemisFair Park, I begin to wonder: what do contemporary park planners want from their parks? Are these mere amenities for the people of the city, or is there some form of cultural training that enters into the calculation?
And then, as I was doing research on river water quality issues in San Antonio, I came across this in the Upper San Antonio River Watershed Protection Plan:
Dog parks provide enclosed areas where owners can let their pets run off-leash and typically include signage reminding the owners to remove waste. In addition to providing a public amenity, these dog parks also help to transfer the conscientious behavior of responsible pet owners who pick up after their pets to less conscientious owners, which helps to establish a social norm (EPA, 2004).
So we’ve been chastened a bit. But we haven’t given up hope that parks could transform our city, if not into a bastion of social harmony, at least into a place without much dog poop.
One thing led to another…
When I started Scattered Work, I was excited to move beyond my focus on arts writing, to grapple with social structures outside of a gallery. I showed my project to an editor at Plaza de Armas, and she asked me to contribute to the San Antonio-based web magazine. I agreed, happy to find a wider audience and an editor to help me sharpen my work. So far, I’ve written two columns, with another coming out next Tuesday. I’ve also been trying to keep up with posting here, and am investigating several ideas that should lead to new posts in the next week or so. For now, here are links to my columns:
Carne asada is not a crime — in this article I explored San Antonio’s prohibition on downtown mobile food vendors. I came at this issue from two angles: first, the practical effects of allowing kitchens on wheels into city center, as explored by by William Whyte in “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”; and second, the pride San Antonio has in its culinary culture, and the potential power of sharing that culture with both natives and visitors within the urban core. This is just one way, albeit a very compelling one, of sharing culture on a human scale.
The needs of the many v. the rule of capture — this is about an ongoing dispute over water rights in Texas (although this is playing out in various ways in many places). It’s a thorny issue with lots of legal ins and outs, but ultimately we need to recognize that ranchers and other land owners cannot all own the groundwater under their property, and this fact needs to be recognized and clearly codified in our laws. State lawmakers are currently unwilling to bring real clarity to ownership rights underlying the regulations, and until they do groundwater conservation districts and farmers will both be held back by legal wrangling.
Thanks for staying tuned.
Main Plaza Farmers’ Market
My girlfriend, who just wrote an article on the San Antonio Food Bank for San Antonio Magazine, tipped me off to a new farmers’ market in Main Plaza organized by the Food Bank on Tuesdays. We went down there today to check it out. It’s pretty small — the first image below shows about the entire extent of it.
The only thing missing from this photo is a booth selling some pretty tasty fish tacos, courtesy the Food Bank’s Catalyst Catering program. The market’s just getting off the ground, and it’s only there for a few hours around lunch time on Tuesdays. But for at least those few hours, this farmers’ market provides the best tomatoes within a five mile radius of my house. The carrots are quite good as well.
Regulations: downtown food vendors
I was digging through San Antonio regulations this week, and thought I’d share a few of my favorites.
Allowed food vending downtown:
10.26.1 Raspas
10.26.2 Pre-packaged, Non-potentially hazardous food items (not allowed on Alamo
Plaza)
10.26.3 Hot Dogs (not allowed on Alamo Plaza)
10.26.4 Steamed Corn (not allowed on Alamo Plaza)
10.26.5 Ice Cream (not allowed on Alamo Plaza)
And, assuming you do want to sell steamed corn to tourists:
6.11.2 All petitioners are required to receive approval of their cart design by the City’s Historic Preservation Office (HPO).
On the other hand, if you want to take your canoe out in the San Antonio river, go here to apply for a free permit. But beware:
Willful body contact with water is prohibited.
About
Search
Recent posts
Topics
- Buildings (1)
- Downtown (2)
- Exploring (3)
- Facebook (2)
- Meta (3)
- Midtown (1)
- Public space (3)
- Redevelopment (1)
- Regulations (2)
- Suburbs (1)
- Theory (4)
- Transit (3)