Closing Carytown to traffic may be a neat idea, but the merchants association says it isn’t widely supported by local businesses. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Don’t believe the hype: Carytown won’t be doing away with the cars anytime soon.
“Every few years, the notion comes up,” says Heather Holub, president of the Carytown Merchants Association, “but it seems to me this time that it’s coming mostly from the media.”
The proposal to turn the shopping district into a pedestrian-only area was given prominence by candidate Paul Goldman during the 2008 mayoral election. It’s now resurfaced, thanks to a T-shirt charity drive organized by a handful of neighboring residents, the RVA Street Team, who were inspired by the Watermelon Festival held every August. For that one-day celebration, West Cary closes to traffic and “the mile of style” is turned into an open-air market of vendors and music stages.
“The Watermelon Festival is Carytown’s marquee annual event — it also provides a real-world example of how Carytown is much more accessible, enjoyable, and safer when it is dedicated to people instead of cars,” reads the RVA Street Team’s website, urging donors to show support for a no-car policy by buying a T-shirt that reads “Cars Ruin Carytown.”
“I hoped it would start a larger conversation about the space we dedicate to cars throughout the city,” says Doug Allen, the T-shirt designer. “Walking down Carytown today can be unpleasant and dangerous.” Cars take up most of the right of way, he says, and intimidate pedestrians at crosswalks. “I wanted people to think about how it could be different.”
The vehicular discourse took off on social media. “It’s an idea worth exploring,” wrote former Richmond City Councilman Jon Baliles on his RVA 5x5 blog. “There are ideas, there are options, and there are possibilities. Is there the will to set something in motion?”
One advocate for a carless Carytown, Cassi Patterson, is the co-chair of Richmond’s Safe and Healthy Streets Commission, which advises City Council on transportation improvements. “I think it’s always been a topic on people’s minds, especially people who use bikes or walk,” says the urban planner, who works in the Richmond office of VHB, a large civil-engineering design firm. “We shouldn’t look at it as getting cars out of the way as much as it is promoting other transportation modes ... creating bike lanes, widening sidewalks.”
She admits that any transformation would be an uphill battle that would take time — at least five years, much of that spent on traffic studies and gathering community input. She also advocates starting slowly, perhaps creating a hybrid streetscape that includes sectioned-off walkways and raised roadways, incorporating public transit and bike lanes. Like many on the pro side, she cites Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall as an example of a shopping district successfully transformed into a pedestrian mall.
As for the parking issue, Patterson says that adjoining residential streets would need permit parking. “If you increase public transportation to Carytown and enhance the stops,” she says, “more people would use it and be less reliant on automobiles to get there.”
Patterson and Holub do, however, agree on one thing: The traffic on West Cary is unsafe. “There’s been talk of lowering the speed limit of Carytown to something like 15 miles an hour,” says Holub, who also works as manager of Merrymaker Fine Paper, a specialty stationery and gift shop. “A lot of businesses would be on board with that.” When she heard about the “Cars Ruin Carytown” campaign, the association president reached out to business owners. “Almost everyone I talked to had an example of a nice carless street in another city but didn’t think it would work in Carytown.”
The problems are many, she says. “We don’t have the public transit system required to support it. We don’t have enough surrounding areas for the people to park, so we’d have to construct new multistory parking decks behind our buildings. And a lot of stores require truck access for deliveries to their front door. The alleys in Carytown are simply too small and narrow to accommodate them.”
Proponents also may want to think twice about using the Watermelon Festival as an example of utopian Carytown, Holub says. “A lot of people are upset when Carytown is closed for the Watermelon Festival. There are stores that traditionally close during the festival, an event which hurts their sales because people can’t easily access them.” That’s why, she adds, Carytown doesn’t close off the street for more festivals, even though the one-day watermelon celebration brings as many as 115,000 people to the shopping district.
All of this is a moot point, says City Councilwoman Stephanie Lynch, who represents the area. “It’s a great concept. I’m in favor of open streets generally. The problem is, unlike Charlottesville, which has three supporting parking decks with its mall, and cities like New York, which have excellent public transit, Richmond’s Carytown butts up against a very residential neighborhood on both sides. And something like 10,000 cars a day go through that area. It’s heavily trafficked as people use West Cary to travel across the city.”
It’s also a matter of priorities, Lynch says, and equity.
“This would be a huge budget [drain] on the city,” she says. “I don’t want to be a buzzkill on this, but when it comes to all of the priorities we have in the city, when I have 1,600 people on the eviction docket, closing down Carytown streets is really not a priority.”
