Scattered Work

Taking back the streets

Following up on my post about Brackenridge Park, I wrote my column for Plaza de Armas this week on the similarities — in terms of rethinking the street — between the HemisFair framework master plan, and the Midtown Brackenridge master plan. Here’s the core of the piece:

Another key recommendation of the framework plan is to make both South Alamo and Durango streets more pedestrian friendly, by narrowing them, expanding on-street parking, widening sidewalks, and bringing in landscaping. The team hopes that by making these thoroughfares less daunting to cross, and opening up more portals to the park along them, HemisFair will become a more cohesive part of the city.

The planners at Johnson Fain aren’t the only people hankering to reconfigure San Antonio’s streets. The Midtown Brackenridge Master Plan, released in February, also puts a strong focus on turning streets into usable public spaces. Although the Midtown Brackenridge plan looks only at the streets and neighborhoods around Brackenridge Park, while the HemisFair plan is mostly focused on the park site itself, the two projects have much in common. The former proposes to remake Broadway as “the ‘extended living room’ of the City,” using the same structural changes Johnson Fain recommends for Durango. It aims to make Avenue B (which runs parallel to Broadway) into a woonerf, a type of anarchic road found primarily in the Netherlands on which pedestrians, bikes, and cars all have an equal right to the street.

Underlying both these plans is the idea that streets are public spaces, not just big pipes for moving cars from one parking lot to another. Where streets have become barriers — as Broadway is between the Mahncke Park neighborhood and Brackenridge, or as Durango is between Lavaca and HemisFair — these proposals hope to heal the divisions the streets have created, and knit the city back together.

And more broadly, the Metropolitan Planning Organization has adopted a Complete Streets policy, which I hope to look into in more depth soon. As Mr Fain told me, San Antonio’s biggest asset from a planning perspective is its neighborhoods. But the roads, which should serve as a connective tissue, too often divide the neighborhoods from each other as well as from other cultural assets.

Tags: Brackenridge Park, Broadway, Complete Streets, Durango, HemisFair Park, South Alamo, William Fain

2 Comments to Taking back the streets

1. While we are on the subject of making streets user friendly may I suggest doing some revisions in the area adjacent to Magik Theater and the playground at Hemisfair Plaza? It is extremely difficult to park when taking in either or both of these family oriented activities. Hotel parking across the street is entirely too costly and transporting toddlers long distances puts a damper on the entire experience. Just sayin’…
Pam on May 5th, 2011

2. [...] we’d have to start by removing lanes from streets and spaces from parking lots. And there are plenty of spots where it would be completely appropriate to do that. We should certainly take it further and see [...]
The street paradigm & the resurrection of place | Scattered Work on May 8th, 2011

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