Bryn Mawr Community Gathering Program

The Pedestrian Experience

Our gathering series on Bryn Mawr’s pedestrian experience met from March 29 to April 19, kicking off ongoing actions throughout our neighborhood.

Below you’ll find notes from each meeting.

April 19: ‘how’

Having aligned on our shared values and visions for the pedestrian experience in Bryn Mawr and brainstormed a number of interventions across multiple categories (see below!), in our final scheduled session as one big group, we signed on to particular interventions and formed teams to plan our actions.

Here’s what the agenda for the day looked like:

We broke up into three teams:

Team Community Garden Share

Connecting neighbors with gardening experience and space needs to neighbors with unused yard space (+ bonus harvest party planning!)

Team Paint the Pavement

A multi-pronged effort to improve pedestrian safety and walking experience with traffic-calming measures and pavement art.

Team Finding Our Way To Utepils

Improving wayfinding and accessibility for the forest route to Utepils.

These efforts are already bearing fruit!

The Community Garden Share team will have an article in the May edition of the Bryn Mawr Bugle calling for volunteers/sign-ups — they will be facilitating garden share matches for the upcoming growing season!

You can register your interest (as either a donor of garden space or as a gardener) here.

See their notes, below:

The Paint the Pavement team has now met with City Council member Katie Cashman and the city staff-person responsible for the Public Art Permitting program to start moving forward with the process for painting crosswalks (and beyond) in the neighborhood.

We’ve also been in contact with Council member Cashman about advocating for new crosswalk signage and other traffic-calming measures in the neighborhood through the City’s Vision Zero program, and we’ll be meeting on the same topic with Hennepin County Commissioner Marion Greene.

If you’re interested in joining one or more of these teams, email bengansky [at] gmail [dot] com to get put in contact!

April 5: ‘what’

After surfacing and prioritizing our shared values and visions for the pedestrian experience in Bryn Mawr at our first gathering (see below), during our second community gathering session we focused on what we could do together.

This was our agenda for the day:

Our neighbor Dave LaRose again welcomed us with music, after which we heard from Carol Ann Young on creative interventions for walkability. Here’s her presentation:

Feeling inspired to brainstorm potential interventions to pursue together, we generated ideas across three broad categories of interventions: social (e.g., a walking club), infrastructural (e.g., painted bumpouts), and time-based (e.g., winter shared snowblower program).

Then, we split into groups to organize the proposals by level of ‘permission required/suggested’. Finally, we prioritized potential actions to take by voting with stickers.

Here’s what that looked like:

And here are the proposals!

INFRASTRUCTURAL

Most-voted in infrastructure category:

  • Painted crosswalks at various intersections (9)
  • Pedestrian bridge to Utepils (5)
  • Bollards for a bump-out at Cedar Lake and Penn Ave (4)
  • Better way-finding and difficulty indicators for trails (4)

SOCIAL

Most voted in the social category:

  • Walking club/walking garbage brigade (5)
  • Open Studios/Open Art Bryn Mawr: pedestrian-only streets for event (5)

TIME-BASED

Most voted in time-based proposals

  • Community garden shares + collective harvesting (8)
  • Neighborhood workouts / tai chi / yoga on the boulevards (6)

TOP-VOTED PROPOSALS OVERALL

  • Painted crosswalks at various intersections in the neighborhood (9)
  • Community garden shares + collective harvesting (8)
  • Neighborhood workouts / tai chi / yoga on the boulevards (6)
  • Pedestrian bridge to Utepils (5)
  • Walking club/walking garbage brigade (5)
  • Open Studios/Open Art Bryn Mawr (5)
  • Bollards for a bump-out at Cedar Lake and Penn Ave (4)
  • Better way-finding and difficulty indicators for trails (4)

After we voted on proposals, former (11-term!) state rep Frank Hornstein closed us out (with a surprise guest appearance from City Council member Katie Cashman) with a discussion about how to find the right ‘front doors’ to government as we target particular interventions.

Frank looked around the room and said “Well, this is a mass movement!”, leaving everyone feeling energized and called to action.

To sum up: we prioritized 8 different social, infrastructural, and time-based interventions to improve the pedestrian experience in Bryn Mawr.

Next up, on April 19th, we’ll focus on ‘how’ we’ll take action together — we’ll narrow down the proposals, form groups to put in motion the actions we’re most excited about — and make specific plans for making these ideas a reality.

Some links to peruse in the meantime:

March 29: ‘why’

Our first community gathering session focused on why we care about the pedestrian experience in Bryn Mawr. Here’s what our agenda looked like:

After an opening performance by neighbor Dave LaRose (thanks, Dave!) we mapped out our individual experiences — what we see, hear, think, feel, and hope as pedestrians in our neighborhood (literally, mapped; see below!).

Then we heard presentations from neighbors Mike Tieleman and Benjamin Lester, who grounded us in good principles for walkability (Mike) and in the history, present, and near-future of pedestrian-relevant policy and interventions in Bryn Mawr (Benjamin). See their presentations below — tons of good info there.

We closed out our session by sharing our values and visions for Bryn Mawr’s pedestrian experience and voting on shared priorities — you can see some of the results below:

Most voted sticky note reads: “Interconnected, more pleasant, vibrant with PEOPLE, slower for cars”
Most voted sticky note reads: “I care about pedestrian crossing safety”
Most voted sticky note reads: “Inter-neighborhood connections”
Most voted sticky note reads: “In the future, the pedestrian experience will be a draw for people outside of Bryn Mawr to visit our neighborhood.”
Most voted sticky note reads: “In the future, the pedestrian experience will be more convenient than the driver experience.”
Most voted sticky note reads: “I care about… – inclusivity, – prioritization over cars passing through”

To summarize our exchanges in our first meeting: our values for the Bryn Mawr pedestrian experience prioritize inclusivity, accessibility, convenience, safety, and vibrancy.

Our visions for the future of the pedestrian experience in our neighborhood center prioritizing pedestrians over cars, having a vibrantly walkable downtown that makes Bryn Mawr a destination neighborhood, and nurturing walkable interconnections with adjacent neighborhoods.

Next up: on April 5th, we’ll focus on ‘what’ we’ll decide to do together — how we’ll intervene in the pedestrian experience in Bryn Mawr.

Carol Ann Young will present on creative interventions for walkability to open up the imaginative space we’re working in; Frank Hornstein will walk us through (ha) how to find the right ‘front doors’ to government as we target particular interventions and gauge the kinds of approvals/support we’d need to accomplish them.

Some links to peruse in the meantime:

“Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Changed my Neighborhood”

The Tactical Urbanists’ Guide

WaPo article on ‘walkability’ metrics (shared by Mike)

Minnesota Department of Transit (MNDoT) Active Transportation grant program (shared by Benjamin)

MNDoT Safe Routes to School program — the BMNA’s Active Transportation committee was just awarded one of these grants and is looking for participants/input (shared by Benjamin)

Meditations on walking (mostly but not only quoting from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking