Posts about Park(ing) Day

Public Spaces

Wells, Catania organize Park(ing) Day on Pennsylvania Ave

by David Alpert   •   September 15, 2011 4:43 pm

For Park(ing) Day tomorrow, DC Councilmembers Tommy Wells and David Catania will turn 2 of the councilmember-only spaces in front of the Wilson Building into a temporary park. Casey Trees will do the same in Dupont, and the Montgomery planning department in Silver Spring.

Photo by Eric Gilliland on Flickr.

Park(ing) Day started as a performance art project from Rebar Group, which made a park out of one San Francisco curbside space for 2 hours with a roll of sod, a small tree, a bench, and a sign. Now, every year people do the same across the nation.

The project illustrates the tradeoffs we make in our public space. For the amount of space devoted to one car sitting empty, we could have a small park. That's not to say all spaces should be turned into parks, or that converting even one space means a "war on cars," but to point out how we have a choice for how to use 150-200 square feet of space.

Events

Don't hear enough of me on the blog? And other events

by David Alpert   •   September 9, 2011 12:20 pm

On the off chance you haven't had enough of my opinions from reading Greater Greater Washington, tune into WAMU now listen to today's Politics Hour, or a Smithsonian seminar tomorrow morning. There are also many great events coming up around security at federal buildings, Maryland transportation, bicycling, DC historic preservation and more.

Photo by thisisbossi on Flickr.

The Politics Hour (now): From 12:30 to 1 pm, I'll be a guest on WAMU's The Politics Hour. You can listen live here, and the archived audio will be posted this afternoon has been posted; jump to the 35 minute mark for my segment.

Greening Greater Washington (Saturday): Tomorrow, the Smithsonian is running a seminar called "Greening Greater Washington," and perhaps in recognition of the name's similarity to a certain blog, I'm giving the morning keynote.

The whole day will be streamed live, and we'll have a post up Saturday morning with the video. My talk starts at 9:55 am.

Bicycling

Past and future chances to walk and bike

by David Alpert   •   September 21, 2010 10:45 am

This week was, and is, jam packed with special events around walking and biking, including some great walking and biking tours coming up.

Photo from DDOT.

Capital Bikeshare launched yesterday to great fanfare in the plaza behind USDOT. TheWashCycle summarized all the press coverage. Memberships are still $50 so join now!

Don't panic if the station you were hoping to use isn't included in the official map. More stations will be rolling out, a few a week, through October. The printed maps on the existing stations have the complete map, and there are no plans to cut any of those stations.

The bike sharing launch wasn't the only non-motorized transportation event yesterday, however. It was also Park(ing) Day, where people in cities across the world feed the meters and occupy one parking space with some artificial turf and a little park.

Last year's efforts to get official permits ended in bureaucratic absurdity, so ReadySetDC just did it guerrilla-style, and ran into no trouble. They even got a game of horseshoes going in the little park.

Photos by Steven Greenstreet.

Tomorrow is Car-Free Day, where commuters pledge to go car free for a day. It's also a great opportunity to try Capital Bikeshare. There will be rallies at CaBi stations at Gallery Place in DC and in Crystal City.

The biennial WalkingTown DC, a jam-paked weekend full of free walking and biking tours in neighborhoods all around DC, is this weekend. On Saturday morning, Richard Layman is leading one of his excellent tours of the Florida Market, DC's functioning wholesale food market, and Sunday morning, GGW contributor Kent Boese will show off the history and architecture of Park View. Sunday afternoon, Concilmember Tommy Wells is leading a bike tour around Ward 6.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth has some great events coming up: a forum on revitalizing Fairfax's Route 1 with the former mayor of Indianapolis on Wednesday, September 29, and walking tours of White Flint and the West End on two Saturdays, October 2nd and 23rd.

Public Spaces

Park(ing) Day reminds us how society shapes public space

by Pete Witte   •   September 22, 2009 1:55 pm

"Environments change...in the midst of these events, people remember the past and imagine the future."
—What Time Is This Place?, the late Kevin Lynch, Urban Thinker and MIT Professor

Photo by the author.

On Friday, September 18th, the international event known as Park(ing) Day took place here in Washington, D.C. The annual event, which transforms metered parking spaces into mini parks, began in San Francisco in 2005 and has since spread to other cities around the globe, including spaces in New York, Denver, Rome, and Berlin.

Park(ing) Day's purpose is "to bring awareness to how we use public space in our cities and how to use it to make our urban neighborhoods more livable, environmentally sustainable and beautiful."

While this was not the first time the event was attempted here, it was the first time the event ran successfully through the course of a full day (some activists and planners tried to host the event in a parking space a couple of years ago, but they didn't have permits and the authorities shut them down within an hour). This year's Park(ing) Day wasn't free of planning troubles: as discussed on GGW last week, the organizers (Justin Young, Brandon Schmittling, and Chris Loos) had difficulty obtaining permits from DDOT for the four planned locations. At the last minute, they were forced to alter plans.

The event's location was moved to one large space, a vacant parking lot along 14th and S Streets, NW owned owned by Garden District, a local urban garden center, who stepped up just in the nick of time and saved the day so that the demonstration wasn't turned into a larger act of civil disobedience. (Another backup plan was to just pack up and move park(ing) locations every time authorities shut down the event.) The lot of impervious surface was transformed into a beautiful park, with real green grass and potted flowers, garden furniture, and lots of happy people playing board games and badminton, eating cupcakes and apples, and discussing life's pleasures. Some passersby heard about the event online, others just happened to walk by and were invited to partake. The scene was beautiful.

Park(ing) Day in D.C. reminded me of a lesson I learned in an urban planning course on behavior in the physical environment. In that course, University of Maryland Professor Sidney Brower described how behavior settings—a combination of both the physical and human components in any given space—provide the conventions in the environment that define what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior. While the designers of the physical setting obviously play an important role in the formation of the behavior setting, the space's users can, do, and should alter it according to their needs.

In his book, Design in Familiar Places, Brower wrote: "Successful spaces and facilities conform to the conventions of the particular society to which the users belong; they owe their success not simply to the way they look, but to the way they are used, managed, presented, and interpreted, and to the goodness of fit between their physical and behavioral components" (page 57). In essence, Brower argues that public space isn't a static physical entity; it is thoroughly a social entity, too. We are not just stuck with whatever physical space is provided for us. A little programming, such as an event like Park(ing) Day, can go a long way toward inexpensively transforming mundane spaces into greater spaces.

There are plenty of opportunities for taking action in spaces around D.C. In fact, this isn't the first time you have heard the suggestion that what is needed is more programming in public spaces. Alex Block recently pointed to all the "odd-shaped public spaces" scattered around D.C. that result from the diagonal avenues crossing through the rectilinear grid. Many simply need re-programming to make them functional. Of course, there are many other spaces where a little more programming could go a long way toward making "our urban neighborhoods more livable, environmentally sustainable and beautiful." Go out and find those spaces! On next year's Park(ing) Day, hopefully D.C. will transform many more spaces for the day. Perhaps even, between now and then, some spaces ripe for transformation will already have been changed.

Park(ing) Day spawned many videos of the festivities in cities around the county and the world, including Charlottesville, San Francisco, , and New York.

Public Spaces

DDOT being narrow-minded, overcautious on Park(ing) Day

by David Alpert   •   September 14, 2009 12:43 pm

People and cars operate every day in relatively close proximity. People walk on sidewalks right next to moving traffic on streets without parking. People walk along crosswalks while cars wait to turn, and cars enter and exit parking garages or alleys across the sidewalk. Sometimes this proximity results in injuries or deaths, but we don't refuse to let pedestrians go in crosswalks. And as designers like Hans Monderman discovered, often the less governments try to enforce separation, the safer streets actually are.

But if DCRA DDOT were issuing permits for streets today, they'd never allow any of this. They'd require 22 foot gaps between people and cars, concrete jersey barriers along every block, and huge planters on every corner. Those resemble some of the restrictions they're trying to palce on the organizers of Park(ing) Day. Instead of saying, "great idea," DCRA DDOT officials keep telling Justin Young, Brandon Schmittling, and Chris Loos that it sounds awfully unsafe for people to sit on benches in a parking space, even buffered by cars on each side. And they're demanding ridiculous designs, including a 22-foot "buffer zone" on either end with no parked cars, concrete barriers, planters with flags, and more.

There's no need for these restrictions. Cars in a travel lane don't suddenly swerve to the right or left; if they did, they'd be jumping the curbs on many streets all the time. And, in fact, these buffer zones may make the impromptu parks less safe; with a large car on either side, if a car did veer out of its lane, it would probably hit the car in front.

The original Park(ing) Day in San Francisco, and many of its followers, didn't apply for permits at all. They just fed the meter, unrolled some turf, and put a bench down. In some cities, the laws don't specify what you can do with a parking space if you pay for it. Unfortunately, in DC, it says the spaces have to be for vehicles, unless you get a permit. That's why the organizers have asked for a permit. Instead of getting help from the government, DCRA DDOT officials responded by throwing up every roadblock—literally—that they could think of.

According to Young, they're meeting again this afternoon with DCRA DDOT to try to persuade them to allow a more sensible design, though one that still contains extra barriers for added safety:

If DCRA DDOT doesn't allow this, residents should consider just going ahead and setting up parks in spaces anyway. People take up public space without permits all the time. Sometimes, when regulators are just being far too narrow-minded, the only option is to push the envelope anyway.

Update: The officials responsible for the policy decisions are from DDOT, not DCRA. The organizers originally approached DDOT, who sent them to the DCRA permit center, which includes public space permits. However, DCRA only acts as a conduit to DDOT public space officials who actually make the policy.