Paths In Which I Am Interested

Article Table of Contents

• Path Segment One: Voodoo <> Cheesman, down Franklin
  • Components
  • To make the spreadsheet people happy
• Segment 2: Ideal Market <> Cheesman Park, down 11th
• Interested entities

this is still in draft status

this page serves as a placeholder for various paths I’m interested in.

I hope to bring attention to “linear parks”, or a park that functions more in size and shape to a street, crossing blocks of distance, but maintaining park vibes throughout.

Path Segment One: Voodoo <> Cheesman, down Franklin #

Pardon my language. “segments”? “paths”? I’m referring explicitly to places that connect places, so it’s sorta hard to think about the ‘place’ directly, especially as a path. ¹

This is a simple extension of the existing closed street exiting Cheesman.

Here’s what it looks like, looking into Cheesman, at the current barricades.

I basically want to move the barriers “towards” the camera, there’s a few (not trivial, but very solvable) obvious issues that might need addressing, but I think this as a first move makes sense.

If it could be moved a few meters, and backfilled with something everyone agrees is nice, I say keep moving it, 10 or 20 meters at a time, down franklin:

Components #

• Moving barricades down an existing closed road
• making a little traffic path
• displaceable and non-displacable barriers, like art, play structures, benches
• much more

To make the spreadsheet people happy #

Heavy foot traffic corresponds with great business, all the time. More and more of Voodoo’s business would come from people who walk to it, from the park, or walk to it, on their way to the park.

I can do some magic number work + video footage of foot traffic, to show the value of someone walking/biking vs how much space someone takes when they drive, and fill a whole parking space for 30 minutes or an hour.

Segment 2: Ideal Market <> Cheesman Park, down 11th #

footage inbound, I’ve flown my drone around the area a bunch and am going to put a little video together, do a voice overlay, and add it to this page.

Thoughts about these two segments #

These paths, Voodoo to Cheesman, and Cheesman to Ideal, are paths that I use, personally, all the time, some days more than once a day. Take a look at my activity/mobility data, noting where these two paths overlay that data:

My actual map with the data overlay is devoid of labels, but if you can find Cheesman Park, you can find the segments I’m talking about. You can see in the data where I’ve walked all around the Ideal Market building, and the Voodoo Donuts building.

https://joshs-mobility-data-54dab943ebba.herokuapp.com/?zoom=16&latlng=39.735985, -104.971018

This is, admittedly, an unusual project, and some might call it audacious, but I say it’s audacious only in a very narrow sense.

Also, a huge thing I want to practice is getting buy-in and tacit or formal support from the exact right people, in the exact right way, to nudge through real improvements. If you’re even reading these words, that means so much has already gone right. :)

If we somehow get these two segments ‘fixed’, we’ve done distinctive, uncommon things, I say it’s comparable to even those who build buildings, and we’ll have done it accidentally, as a by-product of doing other, more interesting things.

Interested entities #

my guesstimates of people associated with entities that could ostensibly have aligned interests on this. This is who I am thinking about, none of this reflects anything others have said.

I come most recently from the software/computing/networking industry, some of my default ways of sharing information and building consensus might strike others as distinctive. :)

• Pando x2
• Voodoo x1
• Avanti x4
• Ideal/Wholefoods x2
• Cornerstone x >15

Bleh, more to talk about. I might direct potential traffic to this page if I expand here on certain best practices, and why there’s certain barriers to certain kinds of fixes.

I’ve spoken elsewhere about some of the root causes of all this, don’t really want to pollute this page with more of that energy.