STREETS ON A HUMAN SCALE

Streets on a Human Scale

A walk on the Broad Street urban trail

“What we’re trying to do here is make it easier to walk, bike, take public transit, skate, or scoot,” Liza Burkin says as she pushes her foldable bicycle over a freshly painted neon green crosswalk. We’re on a walk along Broad Street’s urban trail—a two-way bike lane physically protected from traffic by a row of reflective white posts. Burkin talks about her work as the lead organizer for the Providence Streets Coalition, which advocates for safer streets and additional public transit options in Providence.

We pass a parent pushing a baby in a stroller, two boys racing along with thick-wheeled bikes, and an elderly person rolling a laundry bin. Perhaps a dozen others scoot, cycle, and walk along the trail. Around us are the sounds of construction machinery rattling, a bachata song drifting from a car, and savory aromas wafting from restaurants. A cyclist on a low red bicycle, decked out with silver accessories and a large speaker, approaches us. Burkin stops mid-sentence to shout “Sick bike!”

Transportation generates 40 percent of total greenhouse gases in Rhode Island, making it the biggest source of emissions in the state. That’s why Burkin emphasizes, “The climate option is getting people out of cars, out of gas-powered cars making it easier and safer and more convenient to choose different options.”

According to the Providence Journal, over 3,000 people have been hit by a car while walking or biking in the city since 2012. With the infrastructure for people to walk, wheel, and bike, neighborhood environments are made safer, more enjoyable, and livable.

Across the street, passengers climb into a bright green R-Line bus—part of the city’s yearlong pilot program for a free rapid transit service. The bus line is also scheduled for conversion into a fully electrified one in the next few months. Broad Street, with its urban trail and free public transport, models what the Providence Streets Coalition hopes for the city’s streets. “We’re on our way to building out that cool vision,” says Burkin.

Participatory Planning

The Providence Streets Coalition is an alliance between community groups, local businesses, and individuals who are pressuring the city and state to create walkable, bikeable infrastructure. The coalition’s website lists dozens of local partner and supporter groups ranging from Youth In Action, a youth leadership group from the South Side of Providence, to In Downcity, a group that supports small businesses in Downtown Providence.

On our walk, Burkin explains that the Coalition carries out community and participatory planning related to streets and then campaigns to local governments who fund the creation of urban trails and bike lanes. Communities were sidelined during the building of highways that displaced so many people in the 1960s. “And so we’re trying to rectify some of that harm by doing all we can to include people in the process,” says Burkin. “We do not claim that it’s perfect, or that we have figured it all out. But we’re trying.”

For three summers before the Broad Street urban trail was built, advocates stood on corners, canvassed shops along the street, joined community meetings, and sent out messages to people in the neighborhood. They asked about changes residents wanted to see on their streets and discussed plans for creating the trail. “And all of this was bilingual,” Burkin emphasized. The Coalition pushed the city to implement its plans for an urban trail in accordance with public input, leading to the version built earlier this year.

Density and Climate Action

Now, nearly six months after the completion of the trail, a delivery person on an electric bike speeds past us. The Broad Street urban trail is designed not only for recreation and exercise, but also to connect people to grocery stores, schools, workplaces, and libraries. Links to this social infrastructure are part of a vision for a denser city that people can navigate easily. “We need to bring the various aspects of our lives together so that we can walk or bike,” says Burkin. “Climate action looks like denser and more mixed places.” Burkin lives in Providence’s West End and will soon move to Elmwood, near the trail.

These infrastructural changes are part of two bigger plans for the city of Providence, created by Mayor Jorge Elorza’s office—the Great Streets Plan and the Providence Climate Justice Plan. The Providence Streets Coalition holds the city accountable to see these plans “off paper and into the streets,” says Burkin. “The Great Streets Plan contains a 78-mile urban trail network and we’re about a third of the way to building it all. There is a long, long way to go,” says Burkin. That plan aims to reduce how much families spend on transport and improve safety and public health. The Providence Climate Justice Plan commits to transitioning to clean and efficient public transportation and cutting down the carbon and co-pollutants caused by cars. “You have to reduce the vehicle miles traveled and you have to electrify the miles that are driven,” Burkin emphasizes.

“In America, we’ve been conditioned to think that transportation means you get in your car, for every single trip that you have to do,” Burkin says. This reliance on cars and its negative environmental and social consequences can only be overcome with infrastructure that gives people options to travel in other ways.

Parking Spot Problems

To build some of the city’s other urban trails, like the existing one on South Water Street and the one proposed on Hope Street, traffic and parking lanes used by cars need to be removed. For a week in early October, to create a temporary urban trail on Hope Street, the Providence Streets Coalition cut down on 132 parking spaces—9% of the aggregate 1,318 parking spots in the area. The temporary trail was designed to collect data and opinions for the viability of a possible trail. In August 2022, Hope Street business owners wrote a letter to Mayor Elorza, demanding that the temporary trail be called off, fearing that fewer people would frequent their stores with more limited parking. They wrote that “Hope Street is a narrow, commercial corridor that needs to attract customers from far and wide to survive.”

A remarkably similar series of events played out a year earlier. In October 2021, Brown University and several businesses along South Water Street, such as Plant City and Hemenway’s Restaurant, sent a letter asking the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) to intervene and stop the removal of a lane of traffic to create the South Water Street Trail. At the time, the trail was already under construction.

The university and businesses cited concerns about the impacts on traffic flow, saying that with the removal of the lane, South Water Street “will not be able to handle this current volume of vehicles.” In an email obtained via a public records request, Plant City CEO Kim Anderson urged the city of Providence to move the South Water Street Trail into the park that runs along the river, rather than constrict traffic outside her business, causing a “backed-up mess.” She said that the city had used faulty traffic data to decide to make the trail and warned that with a reduction in lanes and parking spots, “No one can predict what will happen to these businesses when locals avoid the whole scene.”

Despite initially taking no issue with the trail, RIDOT intervened on Brown and the business’s behalf, asking Mayor Elorza to stop construction. Elorza refused. Now, the South Water Street Trail has been up for over a year, without major incident. The College Hill Independent reached out to businesses along the street to ask what the impact of the trail has been one year later. They did not respond to requests for comment. A 2020 meta-analysis from researchers at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis on the impacts of bike and pedestrian infrastructure in the U.S. and Canada shows that it “generally has positive or non-significant economic impacts on retail and food service businesses abutting or within a short distance of the facilities.”

City Roads, State Roads

RIDOT’s opposition to the South Water Street Trail is part of a wider pattern of resistance by the state-level department to urban trails. Though the Providence Streets Coalition works closely with the city, it’s been tougher to advocate for infrastructure from the state. “What I hear from people in communities that reach out to me, is that they struggle with the biggest widest arterials,” Burkin says. “Most of those are owned by the state and will require state cooperation, which they have really not been open to so far.” Fomenting political will on the state level to create streets that are safe and climate-friendly is an obstacle for the coalition.

Charles St. Martin, Chief Public Affairs Officer at RIDOT, told the Indy that the vast majority of roadways in Providence are owned by the city, not the state. He said that with the exception of highways, where pedestrians and cyclists can’t travel because of safety reasons, “There is only a small number of roads RIDOT maintains and all are busy principal arterial roads that are not suited for lane reductions necessary for an urban trail.”

St. Martin emphasized that the department had spent significant sums of money on dozens of walkable, bikeable infrastructure projects such as the Providence Pedestrian Bridge and the Redman Linear Bike Path on the Washington Bridge over the Seekonk River. “Since 2016, RIDOT has invested more than $200 million on bicycle and pedestrian enhancements,” he said.

Built for Cars

Today, with two highways that slice through its center, Providence is a city built for cars. But, it wasn’t always this way. Seventy years ago, the city was made up of the dense patchwork of city and residential blocks connected by streets and roadways. In 1956—in what was then the largest public works project in American history— President Eisenhower signed legislation that paved the way to make an expansive nationwide highway system, laying the concrete foundations for a Providence segregated by highways.

“Providence is just like every other American city in the 20th century; we decimated many of our neighborhoods in favor of bringing suburban commuters into the heart of the city by car, rather than having neighborhoods where people can walk,” says Burkin.

In Fox Point, hundreds of people, many of them part of the Cape Verdean community, were displaced to construct Interstate Highway 195. In Lippitt Hill, on the East Side of Providence, a thriving African American neighborhood was razed to build University Heights apartments and a massive shopping center parking lot. The construction of another highway, I-95, physically segregated neighborhoods in the south and west of Providence from Downtown and wealthier areas. “This happened to Black and brown communities, on purpose, all throughout the country from the 50s to the 70s, and we are still dealing with the ramifications of that,” Burkin says.

As we walk along Broad Street, Burkin points to where the street was “cut off in two places by the same highway.” On one end, I-95 disconnects Broad Street from Downtown, and on the other, it loops around to cut it off from wealthier neighborhoods like Edgewood and Pawtuxet Village. “To take walkability away by building highway infrastructure that literally blocks up neighborhoods is an injustice,” says Burkin.

The health risks of living so close to highways and busy roads are high. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, people who live, work, or go to school near busy roads or highways are more likely to develop asthma, heart disease, and impaired lung development. There are higher rates of infants born pre-term, childhood leukemia, and premature deaths. It’s not a risk that is felt evenly. “Neighborhoods near polluting industries and highways in Providence have the highest rates of poverty and non-white populations,” according to the Providence Climate Justice Plan. These same neighborhoods have the highest rates of asthma in the state.

Real Access

There are dozens of issues with Providence’s streets and sidewalks that keep them inaccessible for disabled people, Tina Guenette Pedersen, president and founder of nonprofit organization Real Access Motivates Progress (RAMP), told the Indy For example, she highlighted the sidewalk outside the Providence Place Mall. “I’m there all the time and getting my wheelchair, I get stuck in cracks and crevices and it’s just inaccessible,” she said. “There are so many problems, they have accessible parking on the wrong side of the streets where our ramps would deploy into oncoming traffic.” Pedersen also cited telephone poles in the middle of supposedly accessible curb cuts and wheelchair signs on doors that lack openers.

According to Burkin, protected bike lanes improve mobility for wheelchair users. “Everything that we do to promote better public transit, cycling, and walking includes rolling via wheelchair and using walkers and scooters,” said Burkin. However, Pedersen said that the protected lanes are focused on bicycles and tend to overlook wheelchair accessibility. “I like all of these bike lanes that they’re putting in, but there needs to be rules of the road. A bike is faster than a wheelchair or a wheelchair is faster than a walker,” she said. “There has to be a way for everybody to be included.”

RAMP has worked with the Providence Streets Coalition on several projects across the city to make streets accessible, but Pedersen said that the coalition often ignores her recommendations.

“We’ve had somewhat of a successful relationship. The problem is that I’ll do the assessment and then they go ahead and do what they want,” Pedersen said. “Like on Hope Street, [the Providence Streets Coalition built] a brand new accessible parking spot, which they think is accessible. And it was the only spot I told them not to put it because there’s a bike rack there and a trash can. So I couldn’t use that spot.”

Pedersen continued, “I don’t want to be placated and talked to and then they just do whatever they want. That doesn’t make access. They’re gonna have to go back and spend more money to redo it later. We’re trying to save money by doing it upfront while they’re fixing things.”

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A few days after my walk with Burkin, on a bright morning that was far too hot for November, I cycle along the unprotected bike trail on Allens Avenue. I am careful to avoid shattered glass in the lane and keep vigilant with massive trucks hurtling by to a nearby scrap yard.

Allens Ave, running along the industrial Port of Providence, is one of the most polluted places in the city. Burkin says that route is also a “really popular walking and biking route, because it’s flat to Downtown,” connecting neighborhoods in South Providence with the center of the city. Converting the bike trail on the road into a two-way, protected urban trail with accessible sidewalks and crosswalks is a priority for the Providence Streets Coalition.

Allens Ave is owned by the state, not the city. Charles St. Martin, of RIDOT, said that the department would not support the creation of a protected urban trail on the roadway. “Allens Avenue is a principal arterial roadway and a diversion route for I-95,” he said. “We will not be reducing the number of travel lanes.”

As I cycle along Allens Ave, I count four cars parked in the bike lane, pushing me into the road. I turn into a quiet street in Washington Park and reach the Broad Street urban trail. It’s a relief to pedal along a street made for humans.

MARU ATTWOOD B‘24 wants you to join a monthly party on wheels, the Providence Bike Jam. 7 p.m. leaving from Burnside Park, the last Friday of every month. @PVDBikeJam