We’ve written before about how the town’s new traffic circle has successfully managed traffic flow at a busy five-way intersection, diverted thousands of gallons of untreated stormwater away from the nearby creek, and become the town center by bringing residents together in an attractive public space.  The more recent news is how the traffic roundabout is spurring local economic development with the construction of a multimodal transportation station adjacent to the circle, courtesy of a U.S. Department of Transportation grant.  Both the transportation hub, which will eventually have high-speed rail service and create an estimated 400-500 new jobs, and the circle take advantage of the town’s existing infrastructure, bus service, and the historic central business district to attract even more residents to the new town center.

The one-third-acre roundabout does much more than move cars. It invites pedestrians with shade trees, benches, lighting, bike parking, green space, and a water feature. People have lunch, read, and play music, and the open space invites community gatherings such as a holiday caroling event. It is the anchor for a community-wide revitalization and is part of Uptown Normal’s LEED-ND Silver recognition.

A popular rails-to-trails conversion, the Constitution Trail, leads to and around the roundabout, helping both to revitalize Normal and to bring people from surrounding areas to Normal’s central district. A new Children’s Discovery Museum on the edge of the roundabout already receives over 140,000 visitors per year, and a hotel and conference enter have recently opened nearby. One indication of the success of the redevelopment is that property values in the district have increased by about 30 percent since 2004.

According to the short video, this traffic circle was almost banned to pedestrians.  It’s a good thing town officials fought back.

Read more about the project here, as well as the other winners from the 2011 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.

From all of us at City Parks Blog, thanks for reading, commenting and inspiring us this past year with all of your park stories and successes.  We look forward to hearing how park development and redevelopment is changing your city.  Happy New Year and all the best in 2012

The “Plaza Movil Street Park” was one of three winners of the Philips Livable Cities Award, a global initiative designed to generate innovative, meaningful and achievable ideas to improve the health and wellbeing of city-dwellers across the world. The creator of the Plaza Movil Street Park received a grant of €25,000 to help translate his concept into reality.

Also worth viewing is the video of one of the five finalists, who brings a plan a little closer to home. The “Design Your Own Park Competition” in Binghamton, NY would turn neglected, urban spaces into parks by having neighborhood residents and groups submit designs in a contest, with the winning vision ultimately created and maintained as a public park.

We’re hoping to harness the collective expertise of our readers to keep up to date on current trends in park road closures.

Is your city considering a road closure in a park, either permanently or for certain days of the week or hours of the day? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Thanks for your input!

According to Sadik-Khan, there are 356,000 pedestrians each and every day in Times Square, and although there is a 10:1 ratio of pedestrians to cars, 90% of the space was allocated to cars.  By removing Broadway from the road system, the city created 1.8 acres of new pedestrian space, which has led to a 63% reduction in injuries.  In addition to the decrease in accidents, there has also been a substantial reduction in noise levels.

We’ve written before about the effects of road closures in cities.  For a more in-dept discussion on this topic, please visit our earlier post.

Credit: Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects

But the true innovation comes from the sustainable infrastructure used to create the traffic roundabout.  Apparently the water in the public fountain is actually cleansed and re-circulated stormwater from five main streets leading to the traffic circle.  Although not safe for drinking, it is perfectly fine for toe-dipping as these kids would gladly testify.  And as soon as those London plane trees grow a little more fuller, I imagine this will be a relaxing place for a good book or a picnic.

We’ve posted before about how parks can be great green places, regardless of size.  Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle is a nice example of a vibrant urban park that is heavily used in the midst of a busy downtown.

The new Circle in Normal is only one component of the city’s plans for redevelopment of the downtown area.  As the residents of Normal find increasing popularity in their new park, perhaps now is a good reminder of the five characteristics of Great Green Places:

• Landscape: a place that is successful uniting site planning and landscape design;
• Mixed Use: a place that demonstrates a variety of retail, housing, and commercial uses;
• Sense of Place: a place that physically embraces its history and culture;
• Streetscape: a place that is pedestrian-friendly with activated public spaces; and
• Transit Options: a place that encourages and supports multiple forms of transportation including subway, bus, and biking.

It’s only when looking at sustainability from a holistic view, can we truly see the transformation in a community.

For more pictures and technical details regarding the Circle in Uptown Normal, visit the Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects website.

Credit: Alan Miles NYC (Flickr Feed)

Of the many unique activities New York is known for, the most entertaining this summer involved closing roads and opening pools, specifically dumpster swimming pools.  

For the third summer in a row, New York’s Department of Transportation presented the Summer Streets program, closing almost seven miles of posh Park Avenue to motor vehicles from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park. Numerous residents and visitors came out to run, walk, bike, blade, play and even swim on the first three Saturdays in August.  

There were many free activities to choose from including attending concerts and theater productions, a group bike ride set to music, yoga, fitness and dance classes, and of course, pool parties in a dumpster. Wait, swimming in a dumpster? Who ever thought shipping containers used for trash could serve a higher purpose?  

The unique dumpster swimming pools, located near Grand Central Station, enticed New Yorkers to grab their swimsuits and make a splash in the streets. Three clean, unused, garbage dumpsters were repurposed into portable, code-compliant swimming pools. The 8-feet by 22-feet pools, 3 to 4 ½ feet deep, all had protective liners (with felt on the bottom) and their own built-in water filtration system. Even though the pools came with lifeguards and 5-foot wide wrap-around metal decks (with a nonstick rubber surface to prevent slipping) swim time was limited to 10 people a session. And just like permanent pools, there were even showers for rinsing, hammocks and bean bag chairs for lounging and stalls for changing underneath a colorful cabana. The dumpster pools were created by design company Marco-Sea and actually debuted last summer in Brooklyn. This year, the pools moved to Manhattan and drew more attention.  

Considering much of the Mid Atlantic and Northeast broke records with all-time-high temperatures this summer, dipping (because diving is actually prohibited) into a re-imagined swimming pool sounds like a mighty fine way to cool off

Some great photos of the dumpster pools can be found here.

1. Permanently closing street areas. Copenhagen is a poster child for this, and several cities have followed suit around the world, in places such as Arequipa, Peru and as mentioned, in Times Square in New York City. Copenhagen architect/planner Jan Gehl described the Copenhagen actions as a series of small steps over many years in gaining public support and success.

A word of caution here also. Many U.S. cities created so-called “pedestrian malls” on wide American streets starting in 1959 in Kalamazoo, Mich. and as many as 200 more in the following 20 years. Yet only a select few have been successful. The successful and surviving ones (the Kalamazoo mall was converted back to cars) seem to have been programmed and well-managed (mostly in college towns) in a more updated view of how public space functions. Two others, the 16th Street Mall in Denver and Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis are viewed as successes, but they are actually transit malls — and well managed and programmed.

2. Putting a road diet on streets and creating pedestrian space from freed up areas. Sometimes, a street may be best left open to traffic on some level instead of turned into an all pedestrian area. This could be because the street is too wide, it has insufficient density to have sole pedestrian access or it may be decided that the street is an important thoroughfare for car traffic.  Two examples come to mind. First, again in New York, aside Madison Square Park the city narrowed streets to provide a pedestrian plaza with chairs and tables with a stunning and direct view of the famous Flatiron Building. In Seattle, the parks department is building a linear park on a street known as the Bell Street Park while still maintaining limited car flow. This is basically a variation of the Dutch Woonerf or British “Home Zone.”

3. Closing park roads. Countless examples from across the country from Central Park in New York to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Kansas City’s Cliff Driver in between. This is a growing trend, and there remain many roads that are not serving their parks and cities well by being open to cars.

4. Temporary “ciclovia” closures. Around the world, city streets are being shut down to cars on one or more summer weekend days — in the U.S. this includes Portland’s Sunday Parkways, New York’s Sunday Streets and Baltimore’s B-more Streets for People. The concept originated in Bogota and then other Latin America cities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara before going global.

There are more ways this has been done, including one idea in the Scientific American article from Paul Steely White of New York’s Transportation Alternatives on “time-flexible streets,” which might be open to vehicle traffic during part of the day and pedestrian-only at other times. “You’re accommodating peak use—that could be peak deliveries in the morning and peak pedestrian use during lunchtime,” he says. “That’s something I think you’ll see more of, and something we’re pushing for.” Some streets already have this, but not on a regular basis — so we will watch for some examples.

There are more examples or one could use a different typology for closing streets, but in any case, these efforts can help land-starved cities provide great public space to residents by just using land already in public ownership.