Pedestrian and Cycle Count Project

Thanks to a grant from Active Transportation Alliance, we conducted a simple survey of travel habits to downtown businesses, wrote up a report, and hosted a forum discussion on how businesses would like to see their city streets designed and used.

We hosted seven downtown business owners, representatives from the Batavia Bicycle Commission, MainStreet and Karina Villa’s office for a discussion on the results of the survey and what can be done about. MainStreet USA had recently visited with ESRI Tapestry data providing great insight into the customer market in and around Batavia. We incorporated that data into the discussion from the perspective of how these different market segments used transportation and what accommodations might need to be made to get them to use active transit. You can read the full report here.

After the discussion, we broke the group into three teams and using a street design tool called Streetsketch, we asked them to redesign a block of downtown however they saw fit. We asked them to think about their target customers. We asked them what made them feel comfortable when in the public realm. We were quite impressed with what they came up with!

Each block contained an extra-wide sidewalk with street trees, way-finding signage, and a parklet. Without much hesitation, each eliminated the on-street parking and turn lanes. They dedicated more space to humans, and less to cars.