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We need to protect neighborhoods
Neighborhoods are the reason people live in the city. Preserving the character and integrity of neighborhoods protects the investment of people who have lived here for years. It also attracts young families, who will help keep our schools open and raise the children who will take care of our city decades from now.
Cut-through traffic
The number one problem neighborhoods have had – for at least the past 20 years – is cut-through traffic. We cannot stop cut-through traffic, but we can slow it down. Slowing it down will also help deter it. As we fix our streets we need to go the extra mile and install traffic calming measures in those neighborhoods with cut-through traffic problems. Proven measures include traffic circles, speed humps, speed tables, and chokers. Studies show such measures slow traffic through neighborhoods. Studies also show that property values in residential areas increase as traffic speeds decrease.
Calming primary roads
Another thing we can do about cut-through traffic is to calm the primary roads adjacent to neighborhoods, to reduce their impact on those neighborhoods. Traverse City should be a place where people live first, and a place people drive through on the way to somewhere else second. If we slow the design speeds on all our roads, then more drivers will understand this is our home, not just a highway corridor, and their expectations about how quickly they should be able to buzz through our town will change. Reducing design speeds on primary roads will reduce the noise burden on adjacent neighborhoods. Every 1 mph reduction in traffic speed reduces noise by 0.2 decibels. Reducing design speeds will also make us safer. A person hit by a car traveling 20 mph has an almost 95% better chance of surviving than a person hit by a car traveling 50 mph.
Commercial activities
The other thing you hear about protection of neighborhoods is the encroachment of commercial activities. Commercial uses should be restricted to the periphery of neighborhoods. In the portions of commercial districts next to neighborhoods, we should regulate noise, size, hours, traffic, etc., to reduce the influence of the edges of commercial areas on the edges of residential areas.
We must fix our infrastructure. We neglected streets, sidewalks, and bridges for too long. Now we find ourselves in a hole, and we have to dig out. To do that, we have to make infrastructure spending a priority, not the thing we spend money on once everything else is funded.
We are doing better on this front than we used to. Where just two years ago we budgeted $100,000 for street repairs, this past year we budgeted about $1.2 million. We committed 10% of that to sidewalks, rather than asking residents to pay for sidewalk repair through assessments.
To get to a point where infrastructure funding can be stabilized, however, we need to spend $2 million a year for the foreseeable future. That’s a big number if you compare it to what we’ve spent in years past. On the other hand, it is less than 15% of the city’s $14.5 million general fund budget. This will require cuts elsewhere, but a city should spend at least 15% of our money maintaining the infrastructure we all use. That is one of the city’s most fundamental functions.
When we make this investment, we need to do it right. We need to include sidewalks, bike lanes, and safe crosswalks on all streets, and traffic calming measures on neighborhood streets. This topic is discussed in the section of this plan on transportation choices.
Traverse City belongs to the people who live here. The job of city government is to serve city residents. If we make our city a better place to live, it will also be a better place to work, to run a business, and to visit.
Twenty years ago, city residents created a group called the Residential Retention Task Force. This group went to the neighborhoods and asked four questions:
Why do you choose to live in the city?
What is it about your neighborhood that attracts you?
What problems do you experience?
What is your “wish list” for the future?
From the residents’ answers came three consenus priorities: calming traffic, improving downtown, and preserving recreational resources.
A lot of progress has been made downtown, though ensuring its continued uniqueness in a world of malls and big box stores will require vigilance and creativity.
When it comes to the other two priorities – traffic and recreational resources – there has been some progress but not enough. Addressing these two unfinished tasks will require ingenuity, money, and determination. But addressing them will – by leaps and bounds – make our city more liveable.
That is what we think the next few years should be about.
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