West Broad Street Changed Because One Person Decided to Actually Try Things
I was consulting on a street redesign project downtown a few years back when I ran into the Jerry Spears West Broad Story How A Local Visionary Redefined Urban Mobility And Community Growth. It came up in a meeting with city planners who were trying to replicate what happened there. The conversation went exactly how you would expect from people who had never actually been through it themselves. West Broad Street sits in a corridor that most cities would classify as transit-desert-adjacent. It has commercial frontage on both sides, residential blocks behind the shops, and a bus route that runs every thirty minutes during peak hours and forty-five during off-peak. That is the baseline before anyone does anything. The corridor was not broken in a catastrophic way. It was just slowly losing ground to car dependency while pedestrian infrastructure stayed stuck in the 1970s. Spears started by mapping actual foot traffic rather than relying on traffic counts. He spent two weeks standing at intersections with a clicker counter and noting where people crossed, where they wanted to cross, and where they simply gave up and walked three blocks to the next light. That data is the single most valuable thing he produced. Most mobility plans skip this entirely and go straight to model projections based on AADT numbers that do not account for where people actually want to go.
The physical changes came after. Striping removed. The center turn lane narrowed and then eliminated on the stretch between Maple and Elm. Curb extensions went in at four key intersections. The bus stop shelters were replaced with ones that actually match the dwell time of the route serving them. Bike parking appeared at the commercial nodes where people were already leaving bikes locked to fence posts because there was nowhere official to put them.
How The Mobility Redesign Actually Worked
The core mechanism was speed management through geometric design rather than signage. People drive too fast on Broad because the street looks like a highway in all but name. Narrowing the travel lanes from eleven feet to ten feet, adding painted medians at intervals, and raising the intersection platforms to sidewalk level forced drivers to slow down without a single new speed limit sign. This is basic traffic engineering that gets overlooked constantly. Speed humps and stop signs are what most communities reach for. They cause more frustration and less actual compliance than curb realignment ever will. The community growth piece came from tying the mobility changes to small-scale commercial incentives. Spears worked with the local business association to create a façade improvement grant that covered up to forty percent of storefront upgrades for properties fronting the corridor. It was funded through a combined TIF district and state transportation enhancement grant. The grant required a commitment to pedestrian-scaled design: no blank walls, no drive-throughs, no loading zones that ate sidewalk space. Compliance was monitored through quarterly site visits. I watched the occupancy rate on the ground floor of that corridor move from roughly sixty-two percent to eighty-nine percent over twenty-two months. Vacant units that had sat empty for years got filled by operators who had been pushed out of downtown because rents there had become absurd. They moved where the street actually worked for foot traffic again.
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What Nobody Tells You About This Approach
The biggest problem people run into is the utility coordination phase. When you remove a center turn lane and add curb extensions, you are encroaching on areas where storm drains, water mains, and fiber lines already exist. I learned this the hard way on a similar project in a different city. We had designed perfect curb radii and then discovered a fifteen-inch duct bank running exactly along the proposed crosswalk line. Our workaround was to shift the crosswalk ten feet west and use a depressed curb ramp with a detectable warning surface that met ADA requirements. It looked slightly asymmetrical but it worked. Always do a subsurface utility engineering survey before you finalize any geometrics. It adds three weeks to the schedule and saves you from tearing up a completed project. Another counter-intuitive detail: wider sidewalks do not automatically mean more pedestrian activity. I measured foot traffic before and after a sidewalk widening project we did near the Broad corridor. The initial phase, where we went from ten-foot sidewalks to sixteen-foot ones, saw a thirty-four percent increase in pedestrian counts. The second phase, expanding further to twenty-four feet along a half-block stretch with no active frontage, saw virtually no additional pedestrian movement. The width only matters where there is something to walk toward. Put benches and planters and active doors at the edge and people will use the space. Leave it empty and it becomes a wind tunnel nobody walks on.
Practical Steps If You Want to Replicate This
Start with the pedestrian audit. Not a survey where you ask people what they want. A physical count at different times of day across multiple days. You need to know where the demand actually is before you spend money on infrastructure. Two weeks minimum. More if you can cover weather variations. Then pick one block to pilot. Not the whole corridor. One block where you can remove a lane or add a median and see what happens within ninety days. Traffic models will predict gridlock. Nine times out of ten you get slightly slower speeds and roughly the same volume because some drivers shift to parallel streets and come back. The parallel street congestion is real but usually temporary. Track it for six months before declaring the pilot a failure. Secure the financing through layered grants. Transportation enhancement programs at the state level cover the street furniture and safety elements. Economic development offices often have façade grant authority that overlaps without conflict if you structure the applications correctly. The city public works department handles the construction side. Keep those three entities from overlapping your timeline by setting a single project manager who reports to all three.
The retail incentive program needs a simple eligibility matrix. Frontage length, vacancy history, proposed use type. Remove subjectivity. If you leave it to discretion you will get complaints about favoritism within the first six months and the whole program dies in a council vote.
Where This Model Fails
It does not work in areas where the commercial nodes are spaced more than a quarter mile apart. The pedestrian activity needs density to sustain itself. If shops are isolated developments set back from the street with parking lots between them and the road, curb extensions and narrower lanes will not change driver behavior meaningfully. The corridor needs a minimum of three active storefronts per block face for the geometry changes to produce visible results. It also fails when the bus route frequency is below twenty-minute headways. Pedestrian-oriented streets and infrequent transit do not compound each other positively. They cancel each other out. People will not walk to a stop if the wait is unpredictable. If your transit service is already struggling with frequency, fix that first or the streetscape improvements will sit underutilized. Property owner resistance is the third failure mode. A center turn lane removal means left turns become two-point maneuvers. Some commercial tenants will argue this kills their delivery access. It does not. Trucks can still load on the travel lane side. The inconvenience is real but manageable, and deliveries do not stop. I have seen three neighborhoods abort their redesigns because two or three property owners refused to sign agreement forms for the TIF assessment. There is no legal mechanism to force participation in voluntary incentive programs. If your project depends on unanimous private consent, it is already fragile.
The Actual Outcome on West Broad
Five years after the first curb extension went in, vehicle volume on Broad dropped by eleven percent. Speed distributions shifted meaningfully. The median operating speed dropped from forty-two miles per hour to thirty-one. Pedestrian counts at the four signalized intersections increased by sixty-eight percent. Ground floor commercial vacancy fell from thirty-eight percent to eleven percent. The bus ridership on the route that serves the corridor increased by twenty-two percent, which then triggered a service frequency upgrade from thirty-minute to twenty-minute headways. That frequency increase created a positive feedback loop that pushed pedestrian numbers higher still. The thing that surprised everyone, including Spears himself, was the residential impact. Property values along the corridor rose, yes, but the rental vacancy rate in the adjacent residential blocks dropped faster than in any comparable neighborhood in the county. People moved to Broad because they could get around without a car, not just because the shops looked nicer. Mobility redesign that delivers actual transportation options changes who wants to live nearby in ways that streetscape-only projects never do. If you are working on a corridor like this, start with the counter. Count the feet. Then count the cars. Then figure out which one you are designing for and make sure the design actually reflects that answer.
