An acquaintance of mine works in an office building downtown. She tells me that she’s thinking of quitting her job because:
- She lives on the west side of Fairbanks, and driving to and from downtown is an unpleasant commute; and
- The air around her building stinks. She described it as smoky and diesel-ish, and that makes her uncomfortable.
And who wouldn’t be uncomfortable, breathing air full of car exhaust?
I like walking, whether on an idle stroll or on a pointed errand, and I suspect that most people do, when it’s pleasant. It saddens me that downtown Fairbanks, a place that ought to be full with the hustle and bustle of human activity, is so inhospitable that people not only don’t want to travel there on pleasure, but are even reluctant to work there in air-filtered offices.
Downtown isn’t just my neighborhood. It should be everyone’s neighborhood — that is, our city commons, the place where all of Fairbanks feels welcome and safe. Everybody with any business in the Fairbanks area has a right to be there. But what a shallow right it is, when the air quality puts people in fear for their health.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the poor air quality near my acquaintance’s place of work is due mostly to automobile exhaust. (If anybody has another suggestion, please speak up.) If that’s so, the exhaust is due to high numbers of automobiles — probably single-occupancy — traveling or idling in our streets and parking lots.
Can anybody see a better way? something that might help downtown be a pleasant, safe, welcoming environment?
Here is my very short list of suggestions. (The first will work only if coupled with the second.)
- Get private automobiles out of downtown. Limit motorized traffic to emergency vehicles, utility vehicles, possibly some commercial service vehicles, and public transportation.
- Provide copious public transportation all around the Borough to bring people into downtown.
Given the fact that most of Fairbanks would be driving downtown from somewhere, the transit stops would have to provide a modicum of parking. Transit would have to be frequent — say, never more than a five-minute wait at stops — so that people would not feel it was too much of a time burden to come downtown to begin with.
The car — a ton or more of smoke-belching steel — is a natural enemy to the pedestrian. It never makes the pedestrian’s life any safer, only scarier, and it causes the pedestrian’s retreat from the public sphere that is our common right. Take the cars from downtown, and watch it become a place worth being.
The main downtown street in my hometown was converted to an outdoor mall, complete with artwork and fountains. There is plenty of public transportation and there are several strategically placed parking garages nearby. But what works well in central California poses some problems in a northern city like Fairbanks. There would have to be a quick response for snow removal. And there would have to be enough pedestrian traffic to make the idea appealing to downtown business owners. This last seems doubtful to me, at least during winter, given the jockeying for a position as close to a building as possible by Fairbanks drivers and, as you mentioned, drivers who leave their cars idling. Many Fairbanksans don’t seem to be eager to spend time away from the warmth of buildings and cars.
It’d be nice if the police were a little more diligent about issuing citations to people who leave their cars idling.
You’re right, Magee, about the differences in planning here from planning in warmer places. One of the frustrations I face in reading books on city planning, urban architecture, car-free living, street reclaiming, et cetera is that there’s always an unstated assumption that Frostbite Is Not A Risk. Which isn’t the case here, to be sure.
I think that getting enough business — including enough pedestrian traffic — downtown is fully possible through zoning, building codes, property taxes, and a commitment, in a thousand small details, from our local leaders to make downtown once again a true city center.
What I’m proposing isn’t just that cars be kept out of downtown. It’s that downtown be restored its sense of place: that is, that it be such an attractive, exciting, welcoming place to be, that only a fool would want to waste time jockeying for a parking space and waste money on the gas it took to get there, when walking around is so much more appealing.
Later I’ll see if I can get some discussion going on just what conditions we’d have to meet, to make downtown a place people would choose to walk.
Valid points… Although, there really isn’t much to see downtown. With how cold it has been, the idling-fumes get trapped under the ice-fog and gives Fairbanks its title of the worst air-quality in the nation.
“Although, there really isn’t much to see downtown.”
Well… Yes, no, and maybe.
You’re right that, currently, our downtown is not as vibrant a place as it could be or should be. Fairbanks, as it’s currently built, was founded on (1) personal automotive transportation and (2) a population hell-bent on turning its back on the city. Naturally, we won’t have a concentration of interesting destinations downtown while people think the only viable way to live is having large spaces between every property (a condition known as “sprawl”).
This is a problem that some (like the Downtown Association of Fairbanks) are working on. There are certainly several incentives to offer residents and businesses to locate centrally and densely — not the least of which is that downtowns can be exciting, beautiful places, if only we will commit to them.
Another way of reading your comment is that there’s more to see somewhere else. But where else in Fairbanks can I walk to a library, a hardware store, a liquor store, a pizza joint, a Korean restaurant, an Asian grocery, a courthouse, a top-notch wine and cocktail bar, a camera repair shop, a public health center, an Italian restaurant, a steakhouse, two Thai restaurants, two museums, at least two clothing stores, ten churches, half a dozen bed-and-breakfasts, and several banks? All of that to me is *exciting* — I only with there were more.
It’s hard to address in one post everything that needs to be said. Pedestrian rights, public transit, dense living, street reclaiming, civic life, and local economy are all tightly woven together. One of my goals in this blog is to pull some those strands apart long enough to examine them — and someday weave in something finer.