Seen in the neighborhood

Place audits update

Despite the rain and cold last week, DTNA Transportation Committee members have been doing place audits of three sites within the project areas: the N-Judah Duboce Park stop, the intersection of Steiner and Duboce Streets and the mega-intersection of Church and Duboce Streets. A place audit has two parts:

1. After first walking through the full site, each auditor quickly rates the place on a scale of 1 to 4 on specific indicators within four broad categories:

• Comfort & Image
• Access & Linkages
• Uses & Activities
• Socialibility

 2. The group comes together and collaboratively answers the following questions and prompts:

• What do you like best about this place?
• List ideas that you would do to improve this place that would be done right away and that wouldn’t cost a lot.
• What changes would you make in the long term that would make the biggest impact?
• Ask someone who is in the “place” what they like about it and what they would do to improve it. Their answer:
• What local partnerships or local talent can you identify that could help implement some of your proposed improvements? Please be as specific as possible.

A fully supported place audit has more components. But we’re doing the quick and easy version.

In addition to the place audits, a group of volunteers will be going out on Saturday between 12:30 and 1:30 pm to count and analyze pedestrian activity. This is to help us understand two things: how many people is the place currently attracting and how are they using the place? For example, we may find that there are 20 people at any given time using the Duboce Park train stop area, and that, over the course of an hour, three of them tried and failed to find a place to sit. Or something totally different. By using the place audit score and the pedestrian activity counts, we’ll be able to have a “before” with which to judge the success of the track replacement and station upgrade projects.

If this sounds like fun to you, please join us on Saturday. We’ll be meeting at 12:30 at the Duboce Park N-Judah stop, and will be using clipboards or some equivalent. Ask for Kit. 

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Waiting for the N-Judah. The MTA’s plan calls for the expansion of this platform.

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Signs of positive street life.

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Winter in the park.

Neighborhood images

What should go in this dead space, if anything?