A PLEA FOR PEDESTRIAN SAFETY

A PLEA FOR PEDESTRIAN SAFETY (made to the visiting AIA experts)

The American Institute of Architects national convention will bring about 18,000 of this nation's best designers and planners to Miami starting tomorrow -- June 9.
I am proud to live in the Magic City and pleased my hometown is hosting the AIA for the first time since 1964 -- the year I was born.

I would like to ask the AIA experts a simple question about why my beloved Greater Miami allows construction to endanger pedestrians.

Pedestrian-friendly, safe streets and walkable communities are have become almost sacred chants uttered by every elected official, banker, builder, planner, chamber and urban dweller in Greater Miami. We have adopted famous plans and paid millions of dollars to build a roadmap for a city where the pedestrian is king and street life valued and vital as it is in Europe.

But what do we do when the next development starts construction in our 21st century walkable city? We let the developer block an entire lane of traffic and even worse, block an entire stretch of sidewalk for a city block or more – to facilitate construction.

Talk about pennywise and pound foolish. Why do we force wheelchair users and other pedestrians risking their lives to needlessly cross lanes of traffic?

We do, because if construction closes a block of sidewalk on the north side of a street, we force all types of pedestrians to cross to the south sidewalk and back north a block later -- needlessly, in the name of construction necessity.

This is not a knock on the developer. Perhaps when the barricades are removed, after many years of inconvenience and endangerment to sidewalk users, the new site will have a wider sidewalk and beautiful pedestrian amenities.

This is a knock on a system – one that claims to be full throttle focused on walkability – that grants permission to shut down a sidewalk used by tens of thousands, ironically in the name of urban progress.

Anyone who has spent 48 hours in Manhattan knows that the most amazingly tall and architecturally-significant building can be built on a postage stamp-sized piece of properties in one of the most expensive places to buy and build on land – without so much as a week of disturbance to the throngs of pedestrians that energize the economy of the most productive urban center in the western world.

The futuristic innovation that allows people to safely walk the streets while skyscrapers are being erected overhead? A simple pedestrian-protecting scaffolding that has existed before we even had cars on our streets in America.

So how can sidewalks be much wider and unobstructed in the mega-populated City That Never Sleeps while the Magic City has narrow, broken, unshaded and often construction-closed sidewalks to serve its growing urban population?

We don’t know. But we sure know that it is NOT a necessity to block a sidewalk for a year and a half of construction, because great cities have managed to build great buildings while still protecting pedestrians.

As the spouse of a wheelchair user who risks her life for unneeded pedestrian detours, I hope someone from the AIA reads this and backs my notion that the solution is simple -- require some scaffolding for safe access during construction.

--Steve Wright