Little Rock neighbors given a taste of 'road diet'

Pop-up event puts focus on walkability

A map showing Markham Street.
A map showing Markham Street.

On West Markham Street in Little Rock's Capitol View/Stifft Station neighborhood, cars glide over roller coaster-like hills, speeding past the empty storefronts that lead up to the road's intersection with Kavanaugh Boulevard.

For a few weeks in the summer, things looked different.

Organizers of PopUp in the Rock, an annual event that aims to showcase neighborhood potential, filled the vacant buildings with a taproom, yoga studio and record store. The street was restriped temporarily, creating a narrower roadway and a wider sidewalk.

People weren't driving as fast. Those walking around were talking to their neighbors.

"You could walk down the street and maybe see someone you only see once a month," said Lauren Morris, president of the Capitol View/Stifft Station Neighborhood Association.

Morris said many residents of the area hope aspects of the event become permanent, especially a "road diet" that narrowed a section of Markham from four lanes to three, which she believes made the strip safer and more walkable.

But it takes work, time and neighborhood buy-in to make those aspirational changes last.

PopUp in the Rock is Little Rock's take on a national movement started by the Better Block Foundation in Dallas. The coordinators set up with string lights and wooden pallets, draw in local vendors, and for a couple of weeks, show people the promise that lies in old buildings and empty lots.

"It's not a party. It's a demonstration," said Mason Ellis, an architect at Witsell Evans Rasco and a member of the board at studioMAIN, a nonprofit design group.

Ellis was a co-chairman for the 2018 pop-up, along with Brandon Bibby, who is also an architect at Witsell Evans Rasco and a committee chairman at Create Little Rock, an organization that tries to retain and attract young people to Arkansas' capital city.

Since PopUp in the Rock started in 2012, the events have had different focuses. Some are more business-oriented, while some focused on making residents safer or seeing how a bike lane would work, Bibby said.

This year, walkability was especially important with limited parking in the area, Ellis said. Part of the Capitol View/Stifft Station pop-up's ability to attract a crowd depended on getting people to walk down from the Hillcrest neighborhood.

"I think they're just not used to it," Bibby said.

During the event, the number of lanes on a section of Markham stretching from South Maple Street to the intersection with Kavanaugh Boulevard was reduced from four to three. Currently, the road has two lanes going east and two going west.

People drive well over the 35 mph speed limit, Morris said. High speeds coupled with narrow sidewalks make people hesitant to walk around the area.

"The cars feel like they're right at your shoulder," she said.

It's a concern for parents whose children cross West Markham Street to walk to and from Pulaski Heights Elementary School, she added.

With the road diet, that part of Markham had one lane going east and one going west, with a turn lane in the middle. People actually drove the speed limit when the road was more narrow, Morris said.

"It slowed traffic down, because when a road is really wide, your point of focus is way down the road," she said.

With a road diet, maybe cars crashing into the Oyster Bar and Pizza D'Action, two of the businesses closest to the intersection of Markham and Kavanaugh, could be a thing of the past, she said.

"It's just a lot safer and helps traffic flow a lot better I think," she said.

The city has successfully reduced the number of lanes on other roads including 12th Street, Chester Street and South Main Street, Public Works Department Director Jon Honeywell said. The South Main Street road diet was inspired by the inaugural PopUp in the Rock event.

In July, the Capitol View/Stifft Station Neighborhood Association voted in support of a permanent road diet. Morris has also sent the city a letter of support for a parking variance, an exception to zoning restrictions that require new businesses to have a certain number of parking spaces, which sometimes means an old building has to be torn down to make room. A parking variance is a move Morris hopes will encourage more businesses to fill the empty storefronts on West Markham Street.

"Our neighborhood has been very supportive of the changes," she said.

The neighborhood gained at least one new business after the pop-up. The owner of Stone's Throw Brewing, which has a taproom on East Ninth Street, has signed a lease for a space on West Markham Street. The brewery had set up a temporary taproom at another location in the neighborhood during the pop-up.

Some businesses, after realizing that a bricks-and-mortar location worked well for them during the demonstration, might decide to set up shop permanently in a different neighborhood, Ellis said.

A narrower roadway also allowed for wider sidewalks. If the road diet becomes permanent, about 5 feet of sidewalk space would be added to either side, Honeywell said.

It would be a $1.7 million project in total, said Morris, who met with City Manager Bruce Moore and public works staff members in August. She plans to meet with city staff members again in early October.

It's a project the city is open to, but not one that it has set aside funding for, Honeywell said. The city has already chosen its public works projects for the next three years, so if Markham Street does get restriped, the change is at least three years down the road.

PopUp in the Rock is more likely to have lasting effects when neighborhood residents have their own ideas about what they want to see, Bibby said. A coalition of people to support the changes after the event is over is also a factor.

Ellis and Bibby consider the South Main pop-up to be the most successful one so far. The event stretched from Interstate 630 to 15th Street, filling South Main Street -- with its reduced lanes -- with food trucks, live music and a dog park.

After the event ended, more than 30 residents of the South Main neighborhood showed up at a city Board of Directors meeting, asking for the city to permanently restripe that section of the road, Ellis recalled. The city was repaving the road at that time anyway, so it made financial sense to restripe at the same time.

The next year's pop-up was held on a section of Seventh Street stretching from South Cross Street to South Izard Street. But since that area is more of business-based than residential, there wasn't a lot of community behind it, Ellis said. The same was the case for the 2015 event, which sought to re-create the once-thriving district of black-owned businesses in the area of West Ninth Street.

Once the event ends, it's up to the community to create lasting change. Ellis, a Capitol View/Stifft Station resident, has his eye on Markham Street.

"Probably the saddest thing was that Sunday afterward when they were pulling up the tape and everything, and we started having cars fly down the street," he said.

Metro on 09/09/2018

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