Column: The streets belong to you

What are streets for? This seems like a relatively dull and easily answerable question to many Americans. “They’re for cars! They’re for taking you from point A to point B, nothing more, nothing less.”

There have been three times in my life I’ve had the pleasure of walking down the middle of Franklin Street, our town’s rendition of Paris’ Champs-Élysées.

The first was the snowstorm in Feb. 2015. I claimed the space usually dominated by four lanes of cars, buses and trucks, entranced by the freeing feeling of a snow day and the streetscape’s beauty.

The second was a resounding victory over D00k early last month, when I sprinted from North Columbia Street’s rolling hills to join 15,000 others in the pure euphoria of victory. The atmosphere was more wild than an EDM music festival, and I quickly grew weary of being surrounded by so many couch fires and warm bodies.

The most recent was Tuesday’s House Bill 2 protest, a powerful manifestation that, despite the General Assembly’s best intentions, North Carolinians aren’t too fond of discrimination. There have been accusations that the protest blocked an ambulance from reaching UNC Hospitals expeditiously. If that is true, it is a shame, and I’m confident that if the organizers knew about it, they would’ve allowed the vehicle to pass.

Marching in the streets in protest is part of the United States’ origin story. It is how our forefathers declared independence from Britain. It gained women suffrage. It created the conditions for Black Americans gaining Civil Rights. It is popularized in popular culture (see Les Miserables and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”).

One lyric in Dylan’s progressive battle call of a song is the following:

“Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.”

Through my lens, these words have a new meaning for American communities that are reimagining and rebuilding streets for people, not just vehicles. Reactions to this resurgence of celebrating and building walkable places range from small-scale events such as Carrboro’s Open Streets to New York City’s massive investment in traffic calming measures that slow vehicle traffic to speeds that ease the worries of pedestrians. These include increasing the width of sidewalks and median refuge islands, building new crosswalks and removing turn lanes.

Citizens are already voting with their feet. Numerous economic studies cite that walkable neighborhoods command higher property values than similar auto-centric developments. It’s reassuring that Chapel Hill’s new development projects such as Obey Creek have made walkable urban form a centerpiece of its design guidelines.

Will Franklin Street and newly constructed North Carolina avenues be left stuck in the auto-centric paradigm, or will planners, engineers and politicians lend their hand to giving the streets back to people?