[B]urlington plans to experiment with a new urban planning concept this weekend in which transportation projects debut for a short period of time as a sort of test run.
Among other things, the city will set up a series of so-called pop-up projects, including one that will create temporary buffered bicycle lanes in a section of the North End.
Two types of “buffered” bicycle lanes will go up Saturday on North Union Street and North Winooski Avenue, thanks to a partnership between the city and a bicycling advocacy group.
Scores of volunteers will set up planters as a buffer between cyclists and vehicles on North Union, while North Winooski will get newly painted lines reshuffling the parked cars along the curbside into the middle of the roadway. Both arrangements create a buffer for cyclists protecting them from traffic.
Adjacent to those, a stretch of Grant Street will test-run a “neighborhood greenway,” according to the city’s website.
Such projects are seen as an alternative to traditional transportation infrastructure projects that can take years to plan and execute.
“One of the major goals for the city of Burlington in the years ahead is to become a more friendly biking and walking city. This is something that we have committed to as an administration,” said Mayor Miro Weinberger, standing at the corner of North Winooski Avenue and North Street on Tuesday afternoon.
He said the City Council’s approval this spring of planBTV Walk Bike, which will supply the city with a master plan for transportation alternatives, was evidence of that effort.
“That document will lay out the vision for infrastructure investments that the city is going to make to become an even better city for the walkers and bikers,” Weinberger said.
The experiment will give Burlington residents the opportunity to see what the projects could look like without making a permanent commitment, city officials say.
For example, city transportation planner Nicole Losch said that while the bike lanes will be repainted, it’s just temporary.
“It should just wash away with a good rain,” she said. Local Motion, the cycling advocates, would mobilize ranks of volunteers to do the painting and arrangement of the cars on the roadway.
“This is a really solid partnership where we’re providing a design that is safe and functions well, and they’re going to recruit the volunteers to actually do the installation,” Losch said.
“The community has really [been] kind of itching to get these things installed so I think it’s great to let them get out there, and put them in, and see what it takes to make this happen,” she added.
Weinberger said the use of pop-up planning “is really a new model” for the city, which is adopting it for the first time. “We wanted to have the event today, to draw attention to this new way of doing business. And we expect there to be future pop-ups and additional demonstrations in the future, but we want to test this out, see how it goes, and tweak our systems based on the results,” he said.
Other traffic pop-ups
Another pop-up, on Pine Street at the intersection with Kilburn Street, will extend curbs, and using planters and chairs will create a “parklet” as a calming mechanism for the roadway. The unveiling will coincide with the South End Art Hop on Friday and it will stay through the weekend.
Lastly, on Sunday, as part of the national Open Streets Project, while not soley a pop-up, the city will shut down vehicular traffic on 3 miles of city streets to allow cyclists and pedestrians to “have the opportunity to think about these large public spaces that are our streets in a different way,” Weinberger said.
City officials and Web searches showed that pop-up urban planning has taken root in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Buffalo, Birmingham, Cleveland, Memphis and Vancouver.
“The list just keeps growing and growing of the cities that are trying these demonstrations and pop-ups,” Losch said.
Weinberger said Burlington was an early adopter of pop-up planning, in a way.
“You see that in our own history, Church Street started as weekend experiments,” he said, that then transformed into summer-long pilots.
When asked how the planBTV Walk Bike pop-up experiments, which will feed into the master plan for traffic alternatives, would interplay with the city’s recently released residential parking plan, Weinberger said that both are being considered, in tandem.
“They’re different plans. … we do think they’re related,” he said, and all played into making the city “outstanding.”
