A VAMOS Audio Snapshot

Transcript

This is Avi Stopper from Bike Streets and this is an audio snapshot of what the Vibrant Streets Pilot Program would be like.

You’d step out your door, hop on your bike, and ride to the nearest demonstration project location. This would be on a weekend – that’s as long as the initial pilots would last.

You would ride a mile or so down a quiet residential street made even quieter with no high speed cut-through traffic. And that would be because small sets of cones on the street placed in strategic locations would make it so these streets were for local drivers only. There would be other people out riding bikes – kids on small bikes, adults on trikes, folks on beach bikes cruising along comfortably. Occasionally, you might see a neighbor driving the last block or two to their house, and parking in front of their house. But that would basically be all the vehicle traffic on those streets.

Otherwise there would be lots of people out riding bikes up and down the street, interacting with very few active vehicles. It would just be delightful. You would be able to experience on a small scale what this could look like if there were a complete network like this covering the city. You’d see the possibility.

Over time, the demonstrations would last longer with cones and signs that lasted another week or so. You’d notice that the layout would be slightly different based on the feedback and observations we had from the first round of demonstrations. Those designs might even change bit by bit over the course of the demonstration week. Once the demonstration was over, the streets would return to their normal state. In the later months of the pilot program, we’d start to replace those temporary materials with more fixed materials like signs, paint, and pre-formed concrete that blends in with the surrounding neighborhood. The idea is that as our designs get better, we graduate from construction-like materials to the actual types of materials that these facilities would be built with.

You’d be able to experience what these might look like longer term and we can observe how they work so these would be materials like signs that are permanent paint on the ground and in some places is preformed concrete.

Throughout this process, there would not be any plastic flex posts. If we can avoid them, we will.

What’s most important is not the materials, but the vibe you’d experience when you’re out there – a sense of safety, delight, and empowerment. You’d start to think about the possibilities if there were a full network of these types of streets and how incredible it would be because you could go anywhere comfortably. Your kids could go anywhere comfortably. As a family, you could hop on and ride ice cream, go to a museum, ride to a friend’s house or a baseball game.

Even though these demonstrations would be on a small scale, through the Vibrant Streets Pilot Project you could start to see possibilities of a larger scale complete network.