Make Broadway Great Again!

In 2016, there was a contest in San Antonio, Texas called "Build Your Own Broadway" with a prompt to do the following:

Imagine Broadway, from Hildebrand Avenue to East Houston Street, transformed from a busy commuter street to a boulevard with less vehicle traffic, teeming with cyclists riding in protected bike lanes and pedestrians strolling wide sidewalks shaded by tree canopy.

Broadway is a corridor in San Antonio, Tx that will receive approximately $50 in transportation infrastructure investment thanks to the 2017 bond, as well as state funds. The idea for the contest was to try to make it a pleasant corridor instead of a traffic sewer.

The contest rules involved 3 components:

1. Project Image - 11” x 17” minimum, 300 ppi (in JPG, TIFF, or PNG format)

Upload one image that captures the heart of your idea. This image may be used online and within the awards night physical exhibit, where the People’s Choice Award winners will be selected in-person by event attendees.

2. Slideshow – 10 pages or less, 25 MB maximum, 1024 x 768 px (in PPT or PDF format)

Upload a slideshow of up to 10 slides to explain your concept with drawings, photos, video, or text. Selected finalists will use this slideshow to give a pecha kucha style presentation at the Build Your Own Broadway awards show. We encourage the applicant to keep the length of any captions under 50 words, or a few sentences, per slide. A template is provided online as a suggested starting point. No team identifiers (names, faces, address, or organization name) are allowed in the filename nor in the slide content. Do not hyperlink to online content - all content should be embedded within the slideshow.

3. Project Story – 400 words or less

Tell the story of your idea.

The following is the essay I submitted:

Broadway should preserve San Antonio’s history of prioritizing automobile throughput on city streets. By enriching San Antonio’s car culture, we can activate Broadway with new traffic. Furthermore, it will help sustain our suburban core.

Currently, Broadway is a “busy commuter street.” However, Broadway has the potential to be a “busy commuter superhighway.” Freeways enliven urban spaces. All it requires is providing unmitigated mobility for motorized users.

To help induce sustainable automobile demand, a so-called “car shed” should be created. A car shed is a route that encourages auto use. There are four crucial elements of a car shed as noted in Jeff Spack’s book “Drivable City”:

1) The useful drive

2) The safe drive

3) The comfortable drive

4) The interesting drive

A "useful drive" is one that is direct and convenient. Current motorists traveling Broadway have no alternative motorway nearby that runs parallel. Therefore, there should be no tolerance for any impedance of vehicular flow on such an important corridor. It should also be made free to drive on via equitable taxation of all San Antonians.

Regarding the “safe drive”, it’s quite clear that the more time San Antonians spend driving on the road, the more car-related casualties there are. Expressways allow for faster automobile movement, thus limiting the time motorists spend on the roadway. Also, the driver is safe from being slowed down from non-motorized users as they will avoid places with cars rocketing past just inches from them. Therefore, this design will help achieve any initiatives or visions for zero deaths of non-motorized travelers.

To ensure the “comfortable drive,” abundant parking will be ubiquitous adjacent to the corridor as most of the developed land will be devoted to it. Furthermore, since areas adjacent to the expressway are likely to see a boon of car-oriented development, free or affordable parking is imperative in order to ensure no cars are displaced from such gentrificartion. Form-based codes for car-oriented development, whereby parking is well integrated with the building can be used to achieve the density and convenience of parking needed.

As for the “interesting drive,” since the right of way is significantly constrained, sidewalks and bike lanes will instead be incorporated into the motorway. Brave souls who trek without a car will find that this configuration resembles a high-speed version of a woonerf, a design popular in Europe.

In short, let’s make Broadway great again!

Below is the powerpoint presentation I submitted:

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I did not win the contest, but my project was referred to as "a sarcastic hallucination" by Robert Rivard of The Rivard Report.