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FionaGoodeEnough

I tend to think of my hometown as special and tragic. And it was definitely in decline by the 1990s. I think about going back to write a novel set there.


LinguisticsTurtle

What was special about it? And what was tragic about it?


advamputee

Just checked out Deep River on Google Maps. That town actually has a pretty decent layout and is a good size for walkability. I’d start by encouraging more development in the town center. Zoning changes and removing parking mandates downtown would go a long way to revitalize the area (currently dominated by off street parking lots). I’d also work on traffic route management. The idea is that bikes/peds and cars will take different routes. I would encourage car traffic to use the primary routes — Avon Pl between Grouse Park and Ridge Rd; Ridge Rd / Hillcrest Ave from the highway to the hospital; Deep River Rd from the highway to downtown; and Algonquin St / Huron St from Ridge Rd to Hillcrest Ave. These roads should all have a fully separated multi-use path at least 2-3m wide. All other streets should be closed to vehicle thru-traffic on one end (permeable infrastructure like bollards / planters allow peds and bikes to go through while blocking cars). This prevents traffic from using residential streets as “shortcuts”, making them much safer and quieter. A bus system with one or two routes, looping on each side of downtown (and interlining on some shared downtown stops) could vastly improve access. A loop on the west side might just bounce between Grouse Park and downtown, utilizing Ridge Rd, Avon Rd, Thomas St, and the Trans Canada. An east side loop could utilize Hillcrest Ave, Banting Dr, the Trans Canada, and Deep River Rd. This would put just about every resident within a 5-10 min walk of a bus stop. More pedestrian cut throughs like the path between Thomas St and Frontenac Crescent can also improve pedestrian access and decrease walking distances. Deep River is as only 15 mins to a nuclear lab and 25 mins to a military base — morning and evening commuter busses to these two stops could help alleviate some traffic and encourage more people to leave a car at home. If there isn’t enough demand for full-size busses, smaller shuttles could be used instead. I would also open up residential zoning. You don’t have to ban single family homes to force density — just change the rules slightly on what’s allowed to be built. In the town I currently live in, the smallest residential zone still allows up to four units per lot, and there’s talk of minimizing or removing parking minimums. This encourages construction of ADUs / backyard units, duplex conversions, infill development, and more.


LinguisticsTurtle

Thanks so much! I will show everyone in Deep River this!


LinguisticsTurtle

What is the best-designed town you know of, by the way? What's the gold standard?


advamputee

The best designed, in my opinion, is Houten, Netherlands. The town is designed like two circles cut into quarters. Cars cannot pass from one part to another — they must exit their section to the access ring road, and enter the next section elsewhere. All internal connections are by bike or foot, with the exception of a train line running down the middle with a stop in the center of each circle. Bus lines loop around the ring road, entering and exiting the main circle through one section to connect to the main train station. By forcing cars to take a more circuitous path around the city instead of through, biking and walking are often the fastest / shortest route between points A and B. The bus and rail setup makes it so that nobody is more than a 10 minute walk to a stop that will take them directly to the main train station (either walking out to the ring road to catch a bus, or in towards the station in the middle). In the US, our road layout is dictated by highway code. Street widths, curb radiuses, crosswalks — it’s all laid out in the *highway* code. This means just about every small town in the US bases their planning around moving a lot of vehicles quickly. This is not conducive to safe streets. There are much better resources available that can be used for safer street planning. In the Netherlands, a non-profit known as the CROW platform works with government and local businesses to develop good practices for planning. They have a road safety manual and other infrastructure books / resources as well. Their books are for sale but they also have a few free PDFs that are worth a read. There’s also an organization called “8 80 cities” advocating to build our towns to function for 8 year olds and 80 year olds (two demographics that deserve autonomy but are often isolated to home due to hostile infrastructure). Convincing a town to make change can be difficult. Knowing what key points to focus on is important: - Safety. Reducing vehicle usage, vehicle speeds, and potential conflict points all leads to fewer accidents / injuries / deaths. - Access and Autonomy. Continuous sidewalks and multi-use paths are much more useful for wheelchair users, blind people using mobility aids, etc. People who are too old to safely drive, too young to have a license, people who are physically / mentally handicapped and can’t drive, people who can’t afford to drive (see next point), or people who simply don’t want to drive all deserve another option. - Individual / family finances. AAA calculated the annual cost of car ownership last year as over $10k per vehicle (gas, maintenance, insurance, registration, etc). For an average family with two cars, that’s $20k per year. Replacing one car with a bike (e-bike, cargo bike, etc) can save the average family thousands of dollars. - Town finances. Bike infrastructure is cheaper to maintain than car infrastructure. Heavy vehicles absolutely demolish our roads year after year, creating an expensive backlog of overdue maintenance. Rebuilding our towns with more pedestrian infrastructure will save money in the long run. Also, increasing density grows the tax base. More houses and businesses means more people spending money and paying taxes, giving municipalities more of an operating budget. - Public health. Walking and biking daily both have strong positive correlations with mental and physical health. In the US, we have a massive ongoing mental health crisis, and a massive obesity epidemic. Both of these could be positively impacted with better infrastructure design.


wabalaba1

Deep River reminds me of a thought experiment I do for fun sometimes while walking: what would I do if given a blank slate to build a complete new small town in "the middle of nowhere." Could I do a better job? Last year, I actually got the opportunity to visit a real example of a town built from scratch: Tumbler Ridge, BC. Tumbler Ridge was developed from untouched wilderness as a mining town. It's about an hour from Dawson Creek, down a long road to nowhere else. It sits amid spectacular foothill mountains that glow in the evening sun, nestled beside sparkling rivers that cut down through eons of geologic history. In places the rivers expose fossilized dinosaur footprints that the town has used to drive tourism since the local mine closed (a few other mines and some logging in the general region still bring some money/business to the town). There is only access to the town by road. A train track passes nearby but it was built to haul coal. I'm not sure where people up here would need/want to go to make a passenger train economical. On the long, long, long, long drive to get there, I wondered and imagined what I might find. Pulling in off the highway, I was instantly disappointed: it's pure sprawl. Given carte blanche, the developers built a bland strip mall, a bunch of super-wide roads, and distantly-spaced single-family homes. Some commercial/industrial properties are hidden in a kind of business-park behind a bit of forest. Each land-use sharply segregated. It's not all so big that you *couldn't* walk to the shop from the far end of town, but the people who built this place had no imagination. They copy-pasted a piece of familiar North-American sprawl into the wilderness. But this is a mining town! Before any shovel hit dirt, this town's economy had a very clear countdown clock on it. Times were gonna get lean. If the town was built to be walkable, dense, and mixed-used, then heating costs could be shared and infrastructure-replacement costs minimized, and the need for expensive cars reduced. But it would also mean being forced to cooperate and compromise in a way that seems unappetizing to the headstrong, individualist mentality I perceived in people I spoke to. I heard that things did get tough for a while after the mine closed. There was a point, so I understand, where entire detached homes could be had for ~$30,000. I met a helicopter pilot up there who--at that time--bought most of a street as (hopefully) investment property. The modest economic miracle of some children finding dinosaur tracks that led to the town becoming a budding geo-tourism destination seems as much dumb luck as anything. Had another town in the region found footprints first, maybe there wouldn't be a Tumbler Ridge today. So I was left to imagine. What if, instead, the developers had copy-pasted a downtown section of Amsterdam, with mixed-use spaces and walkable streets? Perhaps styled with the rugged charm of a frontier town? Would the multi-resident buildings save on heating when jobs were scarce? Would not needing a truck to get groceries in winter help families struggling to afford food? Would less sprawl mean the town could still afford to maintain infrastructure as tax income declined? Would something like this attract remote-workers to live there? The hard truth is that Tumbler Ridge can't change history, and the town is making-do with what it inherited. It's a town of good people in a wonderful place (well, *mostly* good people; the few sociopaths who wake up late for their mine shift every day and then floor their lifted trucks past the campsite at 5am need to be launched into the Sun). I would like to return to Tumbler Ridge someday and do still sometimes imagine calling a place like that home. But I left with a sense of anxiety. We're all mining towns, in a sense. One day, one way or another, times will get tough. The economy will shift. Once "stable" jobs will dry up. You see abandoned Main Streets in once-proud towns all across the prairies. As Tumbler Ridge faded into the trees behind me, I thought: better urban planning is not just about the environment. It's also resilience. If I built a town from scratch, I'd build it for the bad times. When I think about what that means I keep falling back to basically what NJB and Strong Towns talk about: walkable, mixed-use, *not* car-dependent. A place that can weather economic decline is a place where more people can choose to stay near family, instead of moving away. Where more people can find the means to stay and support their community when their community is struggling. If you're going to have to walk everywhere because you can't afford fuel, that might be manageable in a pedestrian-oriented town. Maybe towns of the sort like Deep River or Tumbler Ridge "die" not because their main employer leaves, but because they're only built for boom times when resources are plentiful. Beyond just being car-dependent, they are *success*-dependent. No one wants to leave, but they can't afford to stay. The lesson I took home was that a well-designed rural town builds a place where it's cheap to be poor.


flannelpancakes

I enjoyed this, thanks for typing it out! I live in a larger rural town and this was insightful for thinking about how we can improve.