KSUT Regional
(2009-06-04)
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Kinsee Morlan: Dan Burden showed up to the KSUT studio with wind-blown hair, adorned in a bright orange safety vest, with a fancy video camera in hand. Oddly, it's exactly what one might assume a guy who directs an organization called "Walkable Communities" might look like. Burden's in Durango this week holding a healthy communities workshop, and as a consultant and urban designer who's been in roughly 2,500 cities and towns across the world, giving advice about how city leaders can make their communities more friendly to walkers and bikers, the first step in his process is to cruise around town and record the types of things a municipality is doing right.
Dan Burton: I take pictures of all those who are walking and cycling, but also the things you're doing right, I video tape them, record them, what your opportunities are, for example we've done a lot of videotaping around schools to show how we would bring change. When I come back in five or ten years I'll get to see the contrast between what it is and what it wants to be.
Kinsee Morlan: What Durango wants to be, if Healthy Lifestyles La Plata, the organization who brought Dan in, has anything to say about it, is a community of as many walkers and bikers as there are cars. But there are a lot of changes and obstacles to overcome before that goal is completely realized, because as Dan explains, most cities were built for cars, not people.
Dan: The last America, which was actually built by mistake for the automobile, doesn't work. It's the first time out of the several thousand of years we've been building communities that we stopped building them for people and started building them for something that we'll never pencil out. You can't economically build cities for cars, now that doesn't mean the car will go away. It's here to stay. Although it will change, what will really be new is that we will again design cities for people, around the human foot.
Kinsee: Dan says there are ways urban design and development can be implemented pretty easily to change and rearrange the way a city works. He says tools like roundabouts, and curb extensions can easily and fairly economically calm traffic in places like downtown Durango and make it much safer for pedestrians. He also likes to tout what he calls "highway diets," which is actually removing and narrowing lanes rather than adding and making them wider. Contrary to popular belief, Dan says smaller roads actually make drivers more diligent and less likely to speed or drive recklessly. And then there are a few easy fixes, like encouraging people to ride their bikes through simple incentives.
Dan: Just things like all of the restaurants having preferred parking for bicycles out in front so that you incentivize people, OK, if you're going to come and eat two thousand calories here, you might get rid of three or four of them by the time you get home. So all kinds of ways we can make the next America much more prosperous and attractive and be able to start to get everything to where it actually becomes the healthy choice is the easy thing to do not the hard thing to do.
Kinsee: So Dan, in his bright orange safety vest with camera in hand, went out this week and looked at what areas were doing OK and which areas might need a little improvement. He found a few manmade dirt trails alongside roads, like the one that parallels 32nd street, which he says are prime examples of places that need sidewalks on both sides of the street.
Dan: Folks might way, well, we only have money enough to do it on one side, what's wrong with that? Well, the more volume the more speed you have on any street, the more you just have to have sidewalks on both sides of the street. And we just owe that to ourselves, that we really build a system that works for all people. We not only owe that to the person on a bike, the person walking, but he person driving who doesn't want to be involved in a tragedy.
Kinsee: Dan will be talking with county and city representatives today, and on Friday, he'll be leading an all-day workshop with Healthy Lifestyle La Plata, which the public is encouraged to attend. I'm Kinsee Morlan with KSUT Public Radio, and before I sign-off for good, I'd like to leave listeners with a reminder from Dan to not let people squash your walkability ideas through what he calls a technical brush-off."
Dan: People who aren't used to doing it, or for whatever reason, don't want to do it, will give you a technical brush-off. They'll say, oh, we can't do that here because it snows, or we can't do that here because of utilities or something. So when you answer that question, then they'll go to the next technical brush-off and the series will never stop until you call that person's brush and you say, sorry, no technical brush-offs, let's sit down and figure out together how we need to overcome the utility problem or whatever it might be.
DJ outro: Those interested in attending the all-day workshop this Friday with Dan Burden and listening to more of what he has to say can call Healthy Lifestyle La Plata at 749-5630.
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