KENNETT SQUARE — The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has determined that an additional $94 billion is required annually to maintain American roads in minimum viable condition. According to the National Safety Council, over 42,000 Americans died in auto accidents in 2020. And, in 2019, tens of millions of Americans traveled to places like Disneyland and to cities in Europe—destinations known for their beautiful, walkable, people-centered places.
What’s the connection between our broken transportation system and people-centered places?
At the Kennett Square Speaker Series this week, Charles Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns and author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, presented a different approach to transportation that costs less and helps to solve safety concerns and create the kind of human-scale places where people love to live and work and where everyone can find economic opportunity.
“Kennett Square was very fortunate to have Chuck Marohn, one of the nation’s greatest community planning advocates, lecture at the KSQ Speaker Series on the inherent strengths and weaknesses that define a place, and how ordinary people can enact change for the betterment of that place,” says event sponsor Mike Pia Jr. A local developer and longtime Kennett resident, Pia is also Vice President of Business Growth at South Mill Champs Mushrooms. “Chuck demonstrated how the automobile-centric mentality of municipalities has caused the downfall of proper town planning,” Pia says, “and he explained what ordinary citizens can do to reignite traditional planning values.”
“I find Pennsylvania to be an interesting state,” the Minnesota native told the KSQ Speaker Series audience on Tuesday evening. Over the course of his travels, Marohn has fallen in love with a lot of what the state has to offer. “You have some of the most beautiful old towns that are functionally near-perfect—except for the deep damage done that you’ve done to them with your transportation systems,” he said. Pennsylvania, of course, is not alone in this.
The Funding Question Is “the Wrong Obsession”
Discussions about transportation—in Washington, DC and at the local level as well—always end up focusing on finding the money to build, expand, and maintain our transportation networks. “There are 77,000 miles of roadway in poor condition in this country,” Marohn says. There isn’t enough money for repairs and maintenance, let alone expansion. “Our transportation funding system has gone beyond the level of ridiculousness,” he says, citing the example of a $1.4B highway project in California that was projected to raise the average rush-hour speed from 8mph to 9.4mph.
“The things we’re doing are completely disconnected from what our finances suggest,” he says, “and from what our intentions are.” It’s an impossible conundrum—except that, Marohn says, finding more money is “the wrong obsession.” The question to ask, instead, is this: If we don’t have the money, what then? There are all kinds of interesting answers to this more sophisticated question, Marohn said.
The Problem: Traffic Flooding
To clarify the problem, Marohn uses the arteries of a watershed and flooding as an analogy for traffic. Like streams, local streets pour into collector streets, which pour into arterial roads where, at rush hour, there’s a flood of traffic. In response, Marohn says, we’ve overbuilt for periods of peak congestion. With a single-minded, contextless focus on making car travel as quick and efficient as possible, we’ve applied design standards that work well on highways—where moving lots of cars at high speeds is the goal—into our suburban and even urban environments. Fast moving traffic in these contexts is extremely dangerous for both drivers and pedestrians, and it also significantly devalues the shops and homes that make up our urban environment.
“The uncomfortable truth,” Marohn says, “is that people will drive the speed they feel comfortable driving. Enforcement measures, lowering speed limits, and public education campaigns are counterproductive and don’t reduce speed.” The problem is the design of the street itself. In other words, “If you need a sign to tell people to slow down, you designed your street wrong.”
Where the greatest number of fatalities occur, and where the most money is spent with little or no return, Marohn says, is not on highways or on local streets but on the “collector” roads between them where we combine higher speeds with complexity (cross streets, entrances and exits to parking lots, pedestrians, bikers, and so on). Marohn calls these street-road hybrids “stroads.” “They’re the futon—an uncomfortable couch that makes into an uncomfortable bed—of transportation. A stroad tries to do two things at once and fails at both. It tries to be a street that creates a place and wealth and it tries to be a road and move people very quickly. It does neither.”
The Solution: “Thickening Up” Neighborhoods
Fixing stroads is relatively easy, Marohn says. While it’s simple from an engineering point of view, it’s the cultural shift that’s more challenging. Making a stroad into a street, for example, involves slowing traffic, prioritizing the place (e.g., pedestrians and bikers) over traffic flow, and embracing the complexity of the street. Anyone who’s driven down State Street in Kennett Square intuitively understands the stresses of thinking of it as a road. It’s not built for speed. But Kennett residents and visitors also appreciate the value of this place. The street-adjacent and densely built historic buildings with shops and restaurants and sidewalks and walkways and planters make it a place where people want to be.
Water needs to be retained by various means at each source so it doesn’t cumulatively create a flood and a huge amount of damage. To solve the analogous flood of car travel, Marohn says, requires reducing car trips by building places. “We build neighborhoods. We substitute auto trips with other trips. We give people options. We build corner stores, local barbershops, provide local services so that people don’t have to get in their cars.” By doing so, we also provide economic opportunity and start to address income inequality. This concept of “thickening up” neighborhoods is central to the thinking that Marohn and Strong Towns have brought to countless communities across the country.
Mike Pia, who was able to implement some of Marohn’s ideas when he developed Magnolia Place, a New Urbanist mixed-use community in Kennett Square, was introduced to the work of Strong Towns in 2010. “I saw the work they were doing to encourage traditional neighborhood development and to discourage suburban sprawl,” he says. “This was at the time that we (Kennett Square Realty) were trying to convince the Borough to pass legislation that would allow for Magnolia Place to mimic traditional town planning design. We were fighting the same fight—Strong Towns was doing it on the national level, and we were working on the local level.”
“Chuck is a master in the art of placemaking,” says Pia. “We speak the same language as it relates to traditional town planning methods and the need for towns throughout the country to re-embrace the standards and practices that their make historic cores so coveted.” Pia strongly recommends Marohn’s first book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. “It should be a prerequisite for anyone joining a planning commission or taking on a leadership position within local municipalities,” he says.
Kennett Collaborative Executive Director Bo Wright, who came to Kennett Collaborative from a position working with Strong Towns, is pleased with the community engagement and response to the KSQ Speaker Series and the ongoing community conversations they’re inspiring in Kennett Square Borough and Kennett Township and in surrounding communities. “At Kennett Collaborative we conceived of this series to help residents and leaders establish a common understanding and language so we can work together to achieve our shared goal—a beautiful and sustainable community where everyone can belong and prosper,” he says. “We’re at a critical point in our growth as a community, so we believe the timing of this series couldn’t be better. One way that community members can take action and make their voices heard as our community grows is by filling in the survey, developed by Kennett Collaborative for the Borough of Kennett Square, on what you’d like to see in the development going in at the former NVF site. The survey is available here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScqB1HFyoRpHYA3mwLc9fqUEVHzWLD5uzBJ1b-FcRbv_1WCug/viewform
All of the KSQ Speaker Series events are livestreamed, interpreted live in Spanish, and recorded. Although each event stands on its own, the next event on March 10, with local author and placemaker Christie Purifoy, will build on Marohn’s ideas about creating places for people as she reflects on the importance of placemaking and what it means to love and cultivate a place.” You can RSVP for the March 10th event here: https://www.evite.com/event/03A7753JJUHWEATQ4EPMLUNU6XTR6M/rsvp?utm_campaign=send_sharable_link&utm_source=evitelink&utm_medium=sharable_invite
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Engineer to Kennett officials: Let growth occur around people, not cars - Daily Local News
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