Cities coast-to-coast are increasingly turning to arts-driven street redesigns—think colorful crosswalks, intersection murals and painted pedestrian plazas—to quickly improve city streets and make them safer and more welcoming, particularly to people walking or cycling.
Cities Paint The Way To Safer Streets: route-fifty.com
GNV has a traffic violence problem.
GNV is a city of the arts.
So how about we employ one of GNV’s best assets (the arts) to help solve one of GNV’a biggest liabilities (traffic violence)?
And how about we start with the liberal application of some, um, horizontal art…aka asphalt art.
Nothing celebrates GNV’s status as a city of the arts so much as the explosion of colorful murals virtually throughout the city over the past decade.
The City helped foster that explosion with financial backing. The murals are great, but they climb the walls and, if anything, detract attention away from busy streets.
Which brings me to Tallahassee.
Tallahassee has been hiring local artists and enlisting volunteers of all ages to paint colorful murals on strategic streets in the Greater Bond Neighborhood. Nestled between FSU and FAMU that neighborhood has increasingly become a traffic hot spot in recent years.
Tallahassee is the only city in Florida to secure an Asphalt Art Initiative Grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The Asphalt Art Initiative focuses on art and its ability to transform a city. The program helps cities looking to improve street safety, revitalize public infrastructure and engage residents to integrate visual art into their designs. Tallahassee distinguishes itself as a national leader in public art by partaking in this Bloomberg Philanthropies Asphalt Art Initiative. Tallahassee Democrat.
To date, the Asphalt Art Initiative has helped 64 U.S. and European cities paint their way to safer streets.
How does asphalt art help make streets safer?
The mere presence of artwork can remind drivers that these are people-centered spaces. But beyond aesthetic appeal, many asphalt art installations also include significant safety enhancements like curb extensions to shorten crossing distances and slow motor vehicles.
A study released through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative last year showed that rates of crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists dropped by an average of 50% after asphalt art was installed. Cities Paint The Way To Safer Streets: route-fifty.com
The logical place to experiment with asphalt art assisted traffic calming would be along University Ave and 13th St., where legions of UF students dodge cars every day. But state traffic bureaucrats tend to be notoriously suspicious of creative, low cost solutions to deadly problems and would likely veto the idea.
But the City can launch asphalt art initiatives on streets it controls – say, on downtown Main Street and along SW 2nd Ave, the UF-Innovation Square-downtown connector.
Who knows, maybe a few years of positive data on those corridors would help bring FDOT around.
Listen, GNV is a city of the arts! And Mayor Harvey Ward say’s he’s looking for ways to enhance and solidify the critical role the arts plays in this university city.
GNV also has a traffic violence problem.
So how about we deploy GNV’s mighty arts arsenal in the cause of safer streets?
FreeGNV 
Howdy!
I greatly enjoy your FreeGNV pieces and heartily cheer your clear and bold voice!
I’d welcome the opportunity to chat with you, and to amplify your perspectives on the cultural life of Gainesville, and in articular about the role of the arts in defining, transforming, and building a stronger community.
I especially welcomed your most recent pen on going horizontal with art!
My wife and I recently moved from Key West (30 years, Conch Republic!), bought a home, July ’19, a few doors down from Tom Petty’s on NE 6th Terr. We love it! We had thought we’d rent it out, and “someday” – maybe – migrate here from the Keys. Then…Covid. What were we to do? Long story, short: after doing all the renovations needed, back and forth, we made the full move, Jan, ’21.
How best to be part of the community? It helps that I had lived here, after school, from ’73 to ”86, yes, in those halcyon days. Quite a lot was being generated, then, as we young radicals gradually grew families, businesses, etc. But to the most recent time, and to my question, how best to serve?
In Key West, I have been, and am, very active in the arts community. I was the Founder of the Key West Film Society and built the Tropic Cinema, as CEO, Board Chair, all that. Over the span of time I sat on the Arts Council Board, and was the Chair of the Key West Art in Public Places Board (AIPP), Chair of the Monroe County Library Board, President of the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Theater, Executive Director of the Paradise Ballet Theater (producing the KW Nutcracker), producer of the Midsummer’s Night Dream Festival for 10 years, had a 3 1/2 year run on daily radio show, Artwaves, and as Java Studios, screened outdoor/indoor movies throughout the island for several years (rain or shine!).
But, currently, I’m also on the Board of the Key West Art & Historical Society, operating 4 museums in KW, and curate the film program there. I have been the Program Coordinator for Leadership Monroe County for the past 13 years , as well as a graduate of it, and am on the last year of my contract with the non-profit, conducting monthly immersive seminars/sessions for 22 (the sweet #) selective leaders from throughout the Keys on a year long experience, building bridges. The next class (#31) begins at the end of September, through April. Yeah. I “commute” to the Keys, monthly, for the one-three day sessions.. Whewww… (and thank Zoom for making Board meetings so much easier!). And can’t forget I sat on the local ACLU Board, too.
But…today’s FreeGNV piece really hit home. I created a terrific program, with the AIPP program: Poetry in Sidewalks. Hundreds of submissions to blind-judge select what became the first year of 17 poems, haikus, on city sidewalks. Openly copying what was a very successful program in the Twin CIties, MN, the poems were engraved on new city pavements, or existing ones, BECAUSE writers deserve honoring just as much as sculptors, muralists, musicians, etc. I also produced for three years a sterling Chalk Arts Festival, mirroring those held throughout the US, in particular Florida, which has several, world-class ones (Sarasota, Lake Worth, etc). Both of these initiatives can most certainly happen in Gainesville! I’d like to make it happen. I’ve looked at the various city/county Advisory Boards and lacking any openings, I think it best to learn the landscape and terrain, and where the resources are to produce these community building programs.
In the same vein, I got together with Glenn Terry, after I read your piece on him, about the upcoming Flying Pig Parade, and seeing the flyers around town, and am now on the committee with him to bring it to fruition. He clearly knows what it takes to produce a parade! And a delightful artist, too! AND…because I love cinema the most, got myself recently elected to the Board of “The Heart of High Springs” as they are embarking on the Sisyphean task of resurrecting, restoring the Priest Theater in H.S. Time and $. But what great fun!
SO…can we meet, over coffee, or whatever, and workshop this: sidewalk poetry and/or Chalk Fest…for starters? We have real challenges in the community…I think the arts are the road to reimagining the possibilities, as it inspires, motivates as well as defines who we are, and what we are becoming. I’d greatly welcome your help! And, how can I help you!?
Looking forward, THANK YOU! Michael Shields 1907 NE 6th Terr 305-394-3804