Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ On Tuesday Salisbury’s City Council signed its downtown’s death warrant when they approved an anti-motor vehicle and anti-chain store initiative based on the Complete Streets Plan.
If I was to devilishly devise a street plan to further obliterate the already vacancy strewn Downtown and its chain retail and restaurant tax base, I’d say the excessive traffic calming Complete Streets Plan would be my top choice. Yesterday City Council voted 4 to 0 for Complete Streets with Brian Miller wisely missing-in-action.
When and if the Complete Streets Plan is completed, Downtown will be reduced to a few pedestrians and an occasional bicyclist. The traffic calming on East Innes will effectively slowdown traffic to a half-crawl and drive motorists away from going anywhere near the downtown area.
The downtown area may become more attractive between the curbs of its empty streets, yet its an easy prediction to imagine skyrocketing vacancies and plummeting property values as shoppers will surely stay away. The Complete Streets will put a hurting on chain stores and restaurants who would be forced to consider picking up and leaving Salisbury due to traffic being diverted on East Innes and chain store and restaurant entrances being made more difficult to access. This move could trigger some suits.
The corporate retailers and restaurants are the downtown’s bread and butter tax base and actual draws. They are the only reason why some people from the county and Salisbury ever shop Downtown at all. Only a miniscule handful of people show any inclination to visit the “shop local” ghetto of bric-a-brac and junktique stores on lonesome Main Street.
In reality Complete Streets programs are far more tailored for thriving downtowns in major metropolitan areas like where I am living: Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is a city of 250,000 people with much spendable income and Downtown and university streets perfect for medians and wide bicycle lanes. Madison does NOT leave out motor vehicles. It is an extremely well-planned city. Its schools are excellent, it has little poverty and that is homogenized throughout the city so poverty isn’t packed into economically segregated areas like “gentrified” Salisbury. Crime in Madison is miniscule. There is no make believe vibrancy in Madison and their city motto isn’t: “To Seem Rather than to Be.”
Yesterday Salisbury’s city council was once again packed with its downtown shop local merchants and their “friends” to give the illusion of a groundswell favoring Complete Streets. So Salisbury! And so very self-defeating. Anyone can see where all this bogus clamor has gotten Salisbury: the 300th ranked city/town in North Carolina (Area.Vibes.com) and an increasingly must to avoid. City Hall runs the same game year after year with their downtown merchant contingent creating the same weary illusion of a groundswell. They pushed the envelope for “Toxic Taj” at 329 S. Main, the Fibrant debacle, and other embarrassing initiatives. A few city hall cronies score taxpayer grant money–but the city’s residents are left with an empty bag.
Reality check: small cities thrive on attracting motorists. They don’t thrive on pedestrians, on occasional bicyclists, or even rickshaws. In a place like Salisbury the majority of “pedestrians” arrive downtown by car and truck. They don’t magically appear out of the ether. And those infrequent pedestrians will arrive their less and less when people become frustrated by the increasingly congested and traffic calmed East Innes. East Innes is a travail now without “traffic calming”.
Safety on East Innes? Those folks who get mowed down on East Innes tend to be jaywalkers crossing in the vicinity of Wilco-Hess . If someone imagines jaywalkers, who impulsively dart out into East Innes, are going to avail themselves of crossover bridges, they best reimagine what intoxicated individuals do when they desire to find the quickest way between two points.
So much for safety and appearance when its an ill-fitting and poorly thought out plan for the wrong city.
The Long Street Complete Streets Plan appears equally daft.
Who is paying for this “bouquet” of roadway narrowing, lush medians, new lighting and landscaping. Did I hear someone in City Hall holler: “Let them eat cake!” Beauty trumps direly needed improvements.
Somebody’s going to score some taxpayer money on the city’s latest desperate bid. $4 million dollars is the price tag. Instead of taking a decade to recover from the last 15 years of Salisbury’s mismanagement and cronyism, add an additional 5 years to levitate the corpse.
I enjoyed yesterdays talking points about community. However, the only community that counts in Salisbury is basically those dwelling inside of “8 block”. It does not include the city’s other neighborhoods. They are left silently outside of the pie and some are indeed suffering through deliberate “shrinking” and “gentrification.”
Dee Dee Wright, a West End advocate, sagely noted during public commentary that Complete Streets was a form of gentrification and bypassed the best interests of the black community. I agree–it bypasses the interests of a lot of Salisbury’s communities outside of “8 block”.
Bicycles and pedestrians, after subtracting motor vehicles, is a bad tasting recipe for Salisbury.
I love bicycles, but they are not how most people get around in this world.
