Awards that is (in this case, a California planning group Moule & Polyzoides won the EPA’s top award), but far, FAR more importantly, the areas that implement them are experience significant triple bottom line gains. The latest example is the BLVD project in Lancaster, CA, which transformed a five lane arterial (which had bulldozed its way through the historic Main Street to make way for more traffic and only ended up killing the place) consisting of 2 travel lanes in each direction and a central turn lane into one travel lane in each direction, one row of parallel parking on each side, and a central parking median for angled head-in parking with special plaza-like pavement.
More importantly, is the data (which really, should be what drives awards rather than the ideology that typically does), which comes directly from the City of Lancaster itself:
“Shutup with your observable statistics! We’ve got PROJECTIONS that say we gotta move cars and we gotta move’em quickly. Or Else!”
“Or else what?”
“Congestion!”
“Well, yeah. That’s what we want and need for businesses to thrive and attract investment.”
All that private investment from simple urbanization of inappropriate and disconnective suburbanized infrastructure. A novel concept indeed. Maybe some day they’ll learn that magic bullets of high cost/low yield ventures are the way to go.
Here is some imagery:
That’s obviously during a special event and I hate being disingenuous, suggesting, like an architectural rendering all of these people actually exist on a normal day (because after all, true urbanism is about the every day, not event planning):
This looks like a typical day and I wonder the nature of the parking. Is it free? Do employees take up all the best spots forcing visitors to circle? Either way, the amenitized central planning median in conjunction with narrowed travel lanes and pedestrian refuges at the crosswalks make it a more tethered, and therefore better interconnected, street.
The Before:
The After:
