AN OPEN LETTER REGARDING THE PROPOSAL TO TURN MINNESOTA STREET INTO A PEDESTRIAN MALL.
There is a proposal, apparently already in the works, to turn Minnesota Ave. in downtown Bend into a pedestrian mall.
First all, a little personal history. I’ve been in my store, Pegasus Books, for 37 years now. I’ve watched downtown Bend come back from the brink and it’s been a wonderful thing to see.
As it happens, in my first year downtown (1984) a pedestrian mall was proposed. I was too new
to have an opinion, but my neighbors were opposed. I did remember that a friend of mine, Wes Hare, (recently retired city manager of Albany, OR) while still at Bend High School, had been part of a city council committee to explore this idea. In visits to merchants in Coos Bay and Eugene, they were warned against doing it.
My first point is that researching this is an easy matter. I would ask our city councilors to ask their counterparts in cities who’ve had this experience. I’m going to quote research papers and articles on the subject when I talk about this, but I would encourage you all to go online and check it out yourselves. At the end of this, I’ve written down some pertinent links for you. There are literally pages and pages warning against this idea.
But to sum it up, most of the pro-pedestrian mall proposals look good on paper to people who haven’t actually studied the matter. This isn’t an opinion: study after study has come to the same conclusions. Closing streets to traffic is bad idea. City thrive on flow, not on people hanging out.
But how about we start with the basic Wikipedia entry on Pedestrian Malls? Three paragraphs in it says the following:
HISTORY: “Today, pedestrian malls are relatively rare in the U.S., except for areas with many tourists and other visitors. They were more closely tied to the success of retail than in Europe, and by the 1980s, most did not succeed...” Almost all of this generation of pedestrian malls built from 1959 through to the 1970s, have disappeared, or were shrunk down in the 1990s at the request of the retailers.”
The good recent example of a pedestrian mall is Fresno, California. I’m going to quote a couple of paragraphs from the introduction of an abstract by Cole E. Judge of Fresno State for the Downtown Fresno Partnership.
·Pedestrian malls in the United States have an 89% rate of failure. Most have been removed or repurposed. Only 11% have been successful.
·Cities that have embraced the Main Street and Complete Streets models…” (what Bend currently has) “…have experienced turn-arounds in their downtowns with more investment, higher occupancy rates and more pedestrian traffic.
It turns out that having car traffic is good for business. Pedestrian streets feel emptier—the same number of customers walking sidewalks while cars are passing are dwarfed by the space and lack of motion. They are also a magnet for loiterers, panhandlers, and buskers. I think this would be a big problem at night.
How long before the city allows permanent or seasonal retailer booths? Who pay nowhere near yearly rent merchants pay, who have minimal overhead, and who only add to the competition in our spaces for customers?
Even the Old Mill District and Cascade Village have kept streets open to traffic. I guarantee you that they consulted with city planners who know that pedestrian malls aren’t a great idea.
Why does this idea keep coming up? Well, it sounds good. I admit, if it actually worked—or wasn’t a huge risk for failure—it would seem attractive and welcoming. But in fact, this isn’t how it usually works.
Finally, I see this as a precursor to turning the entire downtown area into a mall, which I believe would be a disaster. After all, we were promised that the parking spaces taken away from us for Covid would be “temporary.” Have you noticed that they appear to have become permanent?
The experience of all these failed pedestrian malls is that they are much harder to reverse than to put in place. I would encourage you not to mess with success. Leave well enough alone. Honestly, sometimes success is success. Bend has done a great job.
Again, I encourage all of you to Google all this—and pay particular attention not to the “pie in the sky” plans, but the actual experiences of downtowns who have already done this.
Thanks for listening. Links on the following page:
Duncan McGeary
Pegasus Books
105 N.W. Minnesota Ave.
Bend, Oregon.
LINKS (Note: these were all on the first page asking the simple question: are pedestrian malls a good idea?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_malls_in_the_United_States
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2013/07/25/16th-street-among-a-rare-breed-most.html
http://www.placemakers.com/2012/07/09/pedestrian-malls/
https://www.governing.com/assessments/the-strange-troubled-history-of-pedestrian-malls.html
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