To Make a Place People Can Walk, First You Have to Make a Place
Death on America’s roadways remains a slow-motion national disaster. In 2022, over 7,500 people on foot were killed by drivers in the U.S. This was the highest level in 41 years, and a shocking 77% increase since 2010, according to figures from the Governors Highway Safety Association cited in Streetsblog.
The Crash Analysis Studio, now in its sixth month, is all about shifting the dialogue that occurs in our communities after a tragic crash: away from a narrow focus on what errors in judgment the people involved may have made, and toward a fuller accounting of factors that contributed to the outcome, including environmental factors. That is, how are the kinds of places we build contributing to these tragic outcomes?
“What would have to happen to make this a place people can safely walk?” is a question that has many layers. We can examine the immediate location of a crash: are there sidewalks; how wide are the lanes; are there factors that result in unpredictable, dangerous interactions? Addressing some of these factors is comparatively low-hanging fruit.
Yet try to examine the broader neighborhood context surrounding many of these sites, and one can quickly become demoralized or overwhelmed by the challenge it presents.
America’s problem is not an unwalkable street here and there. It’s whole, vast expanses of places that aren’t the slightest bit hospitable for anyone outside of a vehicle. I’m looking at the Amarillo, Texas, location of the crash we’ll examine in our June 30 studio, and that’s the very problem I’m struggling with.
The Crash
On the evening of January 21, 2023, Hayden Paul Ducommun was struck and killed by a driver on Osage Street just south of 27th Street in Amarillo. Ducommun lived in the Glenwood apartment complex just west of the intersection. What we know is that on the evening of the crash, he had had an argument with his fiancé and had left the apartment. Ducommun apparently had a couple of drinks at the neighborhood bar, and then later ended up crossing Osage, which runs between the bar and his home. Ducommun was hit in the right southbound lane by a 2005 Mercury Montego. He died on the scene.
The immediate crash location appears typical of the places in which fatal collisions disproportionately occur. Osage Street is a five-lane stroad with a wide clear zone providing very little visual friction that might psychologically cue drivers to slow down. Sidewalks are inconsistent and do not exist south of the intersection with 27th Street. A speed study found that 67% of southbound drivers on this part of Osage were exceeding the 40 mph speed limit. Putting people on foot in the position of needing to cross a roadway like this is a recipe for eventual tragedy.
(Source: Eduardo Valdez.)
When I look at the crash site and zoom out to get a sense of the neighborhood around it, I see a different kind of tragedy. It’s one that is more sweeping in scope, and yet altogether more mundane. But I believe it is ultimately connected to what happened to Hayden Ducommun.
(In)human Habitat
Here are some photos from the surroundings of the crash location. This is what the public realm looks like here: the streets, sidewalks, and front-facing parts of the adjoining private property.
The driver who hit Ducommun stayed at the scene and cooperated with the investigation. They told police they never saw him. Looking at the area of Osage and 27th, I’m not surprised: it’s not a place that looks like anyone should be there.
It looks like nowhere at all. This is not an insight I can claim credit for: I am channeling a classic book, The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler’s thesis is that the hallmark of the Suburban Experiment that unfolded all over America in the mid-20th century is the creation of places that nobody in their right mind would care about.
It sounds like an outrageous thesis. But Kunstler convinced me. I still think about that book all the time.
I don’t mean to say that nobody cares about Amarillo. Or that nobody cares about the Barrio neighborhood, or its individual homes and businesses.
I mean that nobody in their right mind would care about all the stuff in between those homes and businesses. When I look at these photos, I see a city that seems to have given up on the whole idea of a public realm. The streets exist solely to get your car from a parking space in front of one building to a parking space in front of a different building.
For most of human history, streets were built to accommodate people who walk. They were scaled to our bodies. You step out your door, and you’re discernibly in a place. It has a sense of enclosure, like a large outdoor room or corridor. The buildings belong to the street. They have front doors and windows that face it and engage with it: you can look around and see where you might go and how you would walk there.
Contrast that with this part of Amarillo. The buildings here all basically shun the street. Few have windows facing it. They have no visual or spatial relationship to each other: they appear almost arbitrarily plopped down on the landscape. Front doors aren’t prominent or even all front-facing. There is no continuous walking route that connects destinations.
(Source: Eduardo Valdez.)
Nobody wants to be on South Osage Avenue for a second longer than they have to be. For a person on foot, the public realm here is just the void in between destinations you might actually want to be. It’s a non-place. Negative space. A moat.
And that fact is the big, amorphous tragedy that makes an acute, visceral tragedy like the loss of Hayden Ducommun’s life into a more likely occurrence than it would otherwise be.
And, I will posit, that makes what happened to him seem less surprising or perhaps even worthy of outrage or corrective action than it should.
“I didn’t see him, officer.” Of course you didn’t. Why would anyone be there?
Only, he had good reason to be there: he lived a block away. Lots of people do.
It’s not lost on me that the apartments here are shoved to an out-of-the-way corner of the neighborhood, to the most incoherent, non-place setting of all. Take a look at a street lined with single-family houses a few blocks away for contrast:
This is a humble place, to be sure, but it is discernibly a place. It has an organizing logic. It’s obvious at a glance that it’s home to someone. You could imagine children playing and adults chatting in these front yards.
The Glenwood apartment complex, on the other hand, tucked away behind a fence, which in turn lines a street behind the granite countertop store, the discount liquor store, the funeral home, and a bunch of vacant lots, doesn’t make a lick of sense. It’s there because it was at one point a leftover piece of land where somebody could build some apartments. But you walk out your door and there’s no physical connection to anything you would care about on a daily basis. You’re nowhere.
It’s a common thing in American cities to shove renters and the poor into such leftover places. This has all the hallmarks of that, from what my eye can see.
If you live here, there are local amenities you may well need. The grocery store is past a bunch of vacant lots along South Osage (there’s no sidewalk). There’s a child care center and a public library on 27th Street a bit to the east (there’s no sidewalk for most of the walk). There are a couple restaurants. None of them exist in a coherent fabric of place. They’re just islands.
Even if you have a car and usually drive it, some occasions will be unusual. Life is going to happen to you, and sooner or later you’re going to find yourself walking through this landscape for some reason.
We don’t know everything that Hayden Ducommun was thinking the night he died. We know he was at Neighbors Bar, where the owner identified him as a regular. It’s reasonable to surmise that, stressed and upset (as all of us are from time to time), he went in search of community. Bars have served that function in neighborhoods for thousands of years. Here’s this particular bar:
It’s emblematic of the absurdity that is many a North American drinking establishment, plopped down in the middle of leftover space, surrounded by a vast parking lot (even though we as a society claim to abhor drinking and driving). Ducommun did not drive there. He walked the short distance, despite about a hundred environmental cues telling him, “What are you doing? Nobody is supposed to walk here.” He didn’t make it home.
I’m very afraid that in writing this, it will sound like I’m dumping on Amarillo, Texas, a place that I have never visited, and its people. That is quite the opposite of my intention.
I don’t know much about what the people of Amarillo think about South Osage Avenue and 27th. I don’t suspect too many of them think much about “urbanism,” at all. Most people, in general, don’t have time for that.
I have read the Barrio Neighborhood Plan that the city, working with the neighborhood association, prepared in 2018, though. And so I do know some of what neighbors told city planners about their aspirations for their home.
In public engagement exercises, residents identified crime, safety, and inadequate infrastructure as major concerns. Lack of sidewalks and lack of maintenance are mentioned repeatedly. So is the abundance of vacant lots in the neighborhood.
Residents also shared concrete ideas about establishing distinctive gateways to the neighborhood. Strategies for this include public art, wayfinding signage, and decorative street lighting to enhance a sense of place and embody the neighborhood’s brand.
(Click to enlarge.)
What I read in this is people who have a strong sense that they live somewhere, not nowhere. And want it to feel like somewhere. I haven’t been to West Texas, but I’m pretty confident West Texas is like everywhere else in that regard. People aren’t that different. Most of us want pretty basic things.
The owners of private property in this neighborhood have worked to create a sense of place. Check out Cool Cat Sno-Cones on South Osage Avenue:
Here’s the public realm doing it a disservice:
There are so, so many streets and neighborhoods like this all across the continent: places that matter to someone and that someone has put some effort into caring for, surrounded by a placeless public realm that undercuts that effort and spits in the face of that care.
The Crash Analysis Studio isn’t designed for the scale of that challenge. But it is designed to model a process that gets us asking about the kind of places we build. We can start by asking and answering some immediate, actionable questions: ”Was there a sidewalk? How fast are the cars going here?”
The process of thinking through those factors should start to clue us into the bigger picture: “Is this place somewhere? Or is it nowhere? And what things might we start doing to make it feel like somewhere?”
The East Coast Greenway spans 3,000 miles and is one of the most popular biking routes in the world. But as much as 65% of this route puts bikers in close contact with vehicles that are moving at high speeds. This has predictably terrible results.