Downtown is (not currently) for People
Part 1: We Have a Choice
So recently I had an article in the Register-Mail on what Downtown Galesburg should be for. The main thrust of the argument is the same argument that has been echoed from famous urbanists Jane Jacobs to Chuck Marohn; that downtown is for people, or at the very least should be for people. But like many downtowns, Downtown Galesburg is not set up for people, it’s set up for cars. Cars rule downtown Galesburg, chiefly through US 150 running down our Main Street with 4 lanes that are as wide as interstate lanes. Although Main Street has its issues the side streets are still just as dominated by the car. The places for people are small and not full of life and are actively worsened by the surrounding streets.
The opinion article sparked considerable discussion. It sparked a corresponding community round table with local thought leaders weighing in. And then following that the discussion got play in Strong Towns with an article by Seairra Sheppard showcasing the arguments.
I was thrilled when all the responses in the community roundtable weren’t negative. Nobody agreed with me fully, but nobody disagreed fully neither. Essentially everyone concurred with the idea that Downtown should be for people but had issues with whatever their idea of a downtown not for cars would be.
So I wanted to expand on the ideas proposed in the original 800 word opinion piece in what was originally going to be a 3 part series, but now a 5 part series of articles on what Downtown Galesburg currently is, what I think it should be, and how we get there.
This first part is mostly a prologue, a brief discussion of what downtown should be for and what choices we get to make. Part two will be an exploration of Historical Downtown Galesburg and what we’ve lost. Part three will discuss in depth the issue US 150 plays in the structure of downtown and what we need to do about it. Part four will be the big, aspirational plan for Downtown Galesburg if I could wave a magical wand and change the built environment for the better. And then last Part five will be the practical small steps we can actually take using the incremental change model outlined by Strong Towns.
With that outlined, let's get to the substance, the big question: “What is Downtown For?”
Downtown is For People
I keep using the phrase Downtown is For People because it is just such a good encapsulation of the mindset I believe we should have for Downtown Galesburg. But I can’t take credit for the phrase. It actually comes from a 1958 article by the famous urbanist Jane Jacobs by the same title, “Downtown is for People”. It’s a great article that is a response to the urban renewal projects of the 50s and 60s. In it she details some of what makes downtowns delightful. She was writing long before downtowns all across the country were essentially bombed out to make car infrastructure and the resulting trend of whole car-orientated cities.
But her last line in the piece still rings true today: “Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living city takes imagination.” I feel that is so true for Downtown Galesburg. We’ve gotten to the point of even imagining our downtown filled with people on a regular basis is a stretch of the imagination. While Downtown Galesburg is not dead, and certainly does not seem to be at its lowest point ever, it is certainly far from thriving.
I believe we can someday have a thriving Downtown Galesburg once again. Downtowns are an almost natural occurrence when people start to build communities larger than a tribe. We see downtowns in cities as small as Alexis or Alpha around us. While they can be as small as a block they are still a valuable urban form. People want to exist in downtowns that are thriving, because people want to be where the other people are, and then by proxy where there are things to do. People and things for people to do often go hand in hand and create a virtuous cycle.
We Gave it all to our Cars
I am once again here to share the video of Downtown Galesburg from 1912. I am sharing it now, I’ve shared it before, and I will share it again. Why? Because it is such a crazy contrast to the downtown we have now. I am clearly obsessed with this video.
If you watch the video, you’ll see there are a few cars, but literally just a few. There are many horse drawn wagons, scores of people walking, and lots of bicycles. This video was taken before the beginning of the so-called “golden age of the automobile”. This was still the very early days when only the most wealthy had cars. They hadn’t learned an important lesson that we know very well now: cars are very dangerous.
Back then there were few enough cars that people were still *mostly* safe to walk about and use the streets however they saw fit. After all streets are owned by the community, they are community space, and historically people were able to use the streets in whatever fashion they wanted whether it be on foot on the sidewalk, walking down the middle of the street, riding a horse, driving a horse drawn wagon, bicycling, riding a streetcar, or anything else that was possible at the time. There was a freedom to use the street using whatever form of transportation you had available to you.
But then cars came along. In the very early days like in the video the cars were able to mingle with everything else because there were only a few and the true danger they posed to everyone wasn’t known yet. But as more and more cars came onto the streets the less society was able to ignore how devastatingly dangerous cars are. It turned out that on the big open streets, cars and everything else could not safely co-exist. If more and more people were going to be using their cars, then the whole street had to be given over to be used by cars. This meant restricting access to the street for everyone else, and even inventing the crime of jaywalking along the way. Before cars the idea that you could only cross a street at an intersection wouldn’t have made any sense, but now it’s often a hard legal rule.
Now there are many, many, many, many other developments along the way that changed our nature with our streets. In part two I’m going to go into how that changed the landscape of Downtown Galesburg and how the change in the streets also changed the neighborhood around it. But for the rest of the article I want to zero in on the choice that we made.
We (or at least those before us) chose this
Yes, it is indeed a choice that we have made and continue to make.
Having streets that are solely the domain of cars is a choice we as a community/society have made. It wasn’t ordained by god or any natural law that our public spaces have to be shaped to maximally accommodate our transportation machines that were invented only a mere century or so ago. We made this choice.
Now the choice may have been justified at the time. Traditionally anyone using any means could use the streets so it would follow that we had the right to use our cars on the streets. And then once enough people owned cars for it to become a problem also meant that it was hard to then ban them or place big limitations on them, being that it was mostly the wealthy and powerful who had cars. So then by the time the middle class could afford cars, the streets became places for cars and almost nothing else (besides maybe walking but between little painted lines).
The people of Galesburg and other communities all over the world hadn’t figured out that there are steps between giving cars full reign of the public space and totally banning cars. We don’t need to do either extreme, and doing either would be pretty disastrous for Galesburg as it currently stands. But we make the choice of how much we design for the convenient use of cars and how much we design for people walking and everything else.
I believe we should choose differently
Now I want to remind everyone that this is an opinion piece, not a statement of some natural law but my opinion of how I believe things should be. I often think opinion writers should be more clear that they are writing opinion pieces. So let me state my opinions here:
It is my strong opinion that Downtown Galesburg should be a place primarily for people, and not a place primarily for cars.
It is my opinion based on evidence that I’ve seen that this would make Downtown Galesburg a better, more vibrant place worthy of spending more time and money at
It is my opinion that the current way Downtown Galesburg is set up is detrimental to its well-being
It is my opinion that it is possible to once again have a thriving, vibrant Downtown Galesburg and city in general, and that we have to work toward that in part by catering more to people and less to our cars
It is my opinion that a more walkable downtown would be a better use of our space than how we currently use it
Those are my opinions and I’m going to advocate for those and hope that leaders make choices towards those goals. We as a community choose to take steps towards those goals. We could also choose to keep things the same which I think is unproductive.
The beauty of public spaces is that we can choose what it can be. We could choose to make the five blocks of Main Street that are the most built up into a garbage dump. Would that be good for downtown? No! It surely would not be, but we could make that choice if we wanted to. Would it be good to get rid of all the traffic lights on Main Street so cars can go even faster? No! The space would then be even less for people and kill off downtown even more, but we could make that choice. We can make choices that are better for our town and we can make choices that will make it worse.
Places all over the world have been making choices about who their streets are for and have been making changes. The Netherlands used to be a car dominated country like everywhere else, but in the last 40 years has gradually changed to being a biking/walking haven. Paris is moving from being car dominated to being people and bike orientated. Closer to home we’ve seen places like Green Street at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign go from 4 lane roads serving cars to a 2 lane road with a thriving mixed use neighborhood that is positively thriving. All these places have seen the benefits of designing more for people and less for cars while often not completely banning cars either. I think we can use this same formula and it could have a major positive impact on Downtown Galesburg.
So it is my opinion that choosing to keep the current design, layout, and rules of our downtown streets is unproductive and is a strain on the life of the neighborhood. That is my opinion through and through, and the remaining 4 parts are going to be my justification for that opinion and thoughts on what we should do about it.