Delmar crosswalk now has the ADA ramps it should have had in the first place

Last July I posted about a crosswalk on Delmar that lacked ADA ramps (Delmar Crosswalk Missing ADA Ramps)

This past Monday I was pleasantly surprised to see ramps were finally installed.

– Steve Patterson

Volvo more important than pedestrian crosswalk

I was pleased last year when the city finally painted the crosswalk lines and installed a “no parking here to corner” sign on St. Charles St at 10th St. Today the driver of a blue Volvo decided their car was more important than than pedestrians who need the crosswalk and ramp.

Yes, I called the police to report the illegally parked Volvo but who knows if they made it to ticket the car. I left my card under the wiper and I hope the owner reads this.  If so, here is a message just for him/her:

I use a wheelchair and I had to go a block out of my way — twice — because you decided to park so that the ramp I need was blocked.  Thank you so very much for visiting downtown today, please come back often.  I called the police and gave them your plate number so they could help welcome you.

I’m guessing where they live they don’t have pedestrians.

– Steve Patterson

Finally impressed by new residential construction in the city

“You’ll love these townhouses,” real estate agent & friend Leigh Maibes recently said to me.  “Yeah, right,” I thought. She mentioned the location and at first I got it confused with another new construction development that I don’t like.  After I Googled the address I knew the location but I didn’t realize anything had been built there.   I was skeptical about liking the design, we’ve had lots of new residential construction in neighborhoods throughout the city over the last dozen years or so and the bulk has been boring and highly suburban in it’s relationship with the sidewalk and street.  I agreed to take a look the next time I was in the Hill/Southwest Garden area but my expectations were low.

Here are some suburban new construction in the blocks near the townhouses that have a poor relationship to the sidewalk, the norm if you will:

The original plans called for three units on the site above but it ended up being only two.

The garage door is the most prominent feature on this house.  The front door is so far from the sidewalk and the porch is just a decoration.

Any car parked on the above driveway would block the public sidewalk.

So wrong!  Bright white and you have to walk up the driveway to access the steps to the front porch.

Again, the walk to the front door connects not to the sidewalk but to the driveways. Nobody should be subjected to such houses and certainly not within the urban core of the region.

Where to begin? It just hurts to look at the above.  Hey, they could be worse:

The above site doesn’t have an alley but better options exist.  The best for this site would have been a shared garage with a single garage door.  New construction here should have been built closer to the street, roughly in line with the existing building to the right. Again, the bright white paint is what jumps off the picture.

So you can see why I was not optimistic about what I was about to see:

The development, Magnolia Heights, is at the SE corner of Macklind & Reber Place.  When finished four units will face Reber Place and six will face Macklind.  Above you see the first four units facing Macklind. What is great is how they filled in around the 1896 building on the corner.

I like the different brick colors with the old buff building in the red on the new construction.  Had the corner building been red I would not have liked the selected color but it works very well here. The black trim and windows on the new construction is classy and works well with the overall color scheme of the facade.

From the sidewalk we immediately see the differences with the other new construction shown earlier. The units are only slightly set back from the line established by the corner building. Steps exist but they are few in number. Hand railings on both sides of the steps would enable me to easily navigate them. This facade enriches the sidewalk experience rather than taking away from it as the other examples do.  Each townhouse has their own two-car garage accessed from a private rear drive off the public alley.

I hope to see more infill like this in the future!

– Steve Patterson

Three out of four doesn’t cut it

At the intersection of 11th & St. Charles the existing curb ramps were recently redone on three of the four corners.  The forth corner lacked a curb ramp.

But the three that already had ramps now have new ramps and the forth corner still lacks a ramp.  My logic would tell me to get the all directions where someone in a wheelchair (or pushing a stroller) could easily pass before replacing existing ramps.  Who makes these decisions?

– Steve Patterson

Walkability/accessibility in auto-centric suburbia

I was in Chicago last weekend.  Saturday night we stayed at the new ALoft in Bolingbrook (map), near Ikea.

The location is highly auto-centric) but walkability/accessibility was given some minimal attention.  From our room I could see the sidewalk along the public road as well as the private sidewalk to the hotel. The above is the minimal I’d accept, not the goal.  All the buildings in the area are so far apart that no amount of perfectly green grass or upscale landscaping will make it a good walking environment.  These sidewalks are decoration, a feel-good measures to imply walkability.  Don’t get me wrong, it is better to have them than not, but hopefully we will cease building such environments completely.

To create walkable areas we must:

• Reduce the amount of auto parking in private lots.
• Reduce the distance between buildings.
• Reduce the distance from the public sidewalk and the building entrance.
• Allow on-street parking.

With every business having a huge parking lot the distances become to great to walk.  But if parking were scaled back they can be closer to each other and walking becomes a viable option.  The total parking in this area far exceeds the total number of cars at any given time.  By significantly limiting private off-street parking but permitting on-street parking you introduce affordable shared parking.  Shared parking is often thought of as a parking lot or garage structure but taking all the cars and spreading them out in a linear fashion along roads reduces the impacts from massive parking lots that  spread our destinations apart to the point we must drive to reach them.

– Steve Patterson