Tag: Ashland

Team Ashland Learns to Count!

Posted on by Julia Havens

Coming to you live, from the streets of Ashland, Oregon is CPW (Community Planning Workshop) analyst Taylor Eidt.

cars-numbersThe “Ashland Sustainable Transportation Team” continues to move forward in its attempts to bring progressive planning strategies to the world, and more specifically the City of Ashland, Oregon. As it does so, these future planners constantly learn skills that will assist them in their future careers. One of these skills was honed on an April 9th trip to Ashland, which intended to develop concrete data with which the team can back up the policies they suggest to the Project Advisory Committee. What is this skill you may ask?

Counting.

On this particular trip, our objective was to count the number of cars parked in the Downtown Ashland area at multiple points throughout the day. This task was intended to obtain a definitive rate of occupancy for the Downtown area, allowing us to move forward with our policy options. While it may sound mundane and simple, counting parked cars under the beating sun of a beautiful 75-degree Ashland day is no easy task, and requires intense concentration and focus. This task required both personal and professional growth.

Team member Amanda D’Souza is confident that this “monitoring session gave an unparalleled opportunity,” for her to build upon her fieldwork and counting skills. While having previous knowledge of counting as a big Sesame Street fan, she viewed this as a chance to enhance these skills through new strategies such as “tally marks, finger-counting, and group addition.”

Team member Eli Tome walked nearly a mile during each counting rotation, resulting in a total of approximately three miles walked over the course of the day. By getting a ground level view of Ashland, Eli was able to combine healthy habits with fieldwork, while collecting data that is of extreme value to both the City and our study. Some members of the team found this work to be an opportunity to look into the soul of Ashland, such as Andrew Dutterer.

“While pounding the pavement conducting parking monitoring surveys in Ashland, one characteristic of the city that quickly became apparent was the pulse of ‘performance’ surging through the community. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is ubiquitous throughout downtown, from colorful banners adorning street lamps to crossing paths with an OSF actor that I had seen in a promotional brochure earlier that day. During monitoring loops through the Downtown Plaza I heard Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and a host of other musicians recreated in song by an assortment of guitar-clad street musicians. I even encountered two women dressed head-to-toe in Elizabethan costumes exit a building as though they had just stepped out of a time machine. The performance community in Ashland is strong, and it creates a lively and inspiring atmosphere throughout downtown. “

Now that you’re familiar with the strenuous activities of a day of fieldwork in the planning profession, it should be noted this post is not intended to scare any potential planners away from the profession. As team member Nestor Guevara states, this work provides many benefits when combined with other elements of this study, such as surveys, meetings, and the formulation of principals to guide our work.

“The City of Ashland has identified that there is a parking problem during peak tourism season (i.e. the Oregon Shakespeare Festival). Analyzing the parking patterns on an off-season, as we did in the April monitoring session, and comparing this data to previous data gathered during peak season, will help provide a clearer picture of the problem at hand.

The information gathered here today will be used to formulate new policies vetted by the Project Advisory Committee in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of the “Ashland Sustainable Transportation Team’s” work in Ashland, as we continue to monitor the results of our second survey, examine parking policies of similar cities, analyze the amount of traffic generated by Ashland’s downtown businesses, and refine the policy options that will be recommended to the PAC!

Now it’s back to Bob Parker in the office for more on CPW’s top stories.

 

Taylor Eidt Ashland Sustainable Transportation CPW Community Planning WorkshopAbout the Author: Taylor Eidt is pursuing a master’s degree in Community & Regional Planning. Taylor is a native of Denver, Colorado by way of his undergraduate degree in Geography at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Team Mission: To Find Parking in Ashland

Posted on by Julia Havens

Andrew speakingCPW’s Ashland Team Facilitates Parking Management Progress 

Visiting Ashland, Oregon is such a pleasure that on Wednesday, March 5 the Community Planning Workshop’s “Ashland’s Sustainable Transportation Team” embarked on their second expedition to that magical place of joy and unity. While there, the team embraced the spoils and character that Ashland’s downtown so aptly provides, including its illustrious pizza parlors, coffee shops, and a delightful stroll along the banks of Ashland Creek. Yet, the Ashland Team was visiting with purpose. The team was on a mission to find parking.

While the team was successful in finding parking that day, the primary mission is to assist the city in ensuring that all visitors, local residents, downtown employees, and business owners will have available and convenient parking throughout the year, particularly during the summer tourist season. Although the Ashland Team was not able to see Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Richard III on this trip, these plays and others draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in this town of 20,000 residents each year. Thus, the downtown parking situation in Ashland from June through September can be more of a midsummer night’s nightmare than a dream.

How will the Ashland Team help rectify this parking predicament? By guiding the Ashland Downtown Parking Management and Circulation project through several phases of research, culminating in the development of several policy packages. This process will be conducted collaboratively with the mayoral appointed Project Advisory Committee (PAC).

The PAC is composed of knowledgeable and dedicated Ashland city staff members and residents who won’t settle for just another set of planning options that will eventually collect dust on a shelf in the city’s archives. This group is committed to this project from planning through implementation phases for the benefit of Ashland’s downtown users. The Ashland Team’s role is to support the PAC’s decision making with in-depth research and analysis, and to escort the PAC through an organized, strategic, and publicly transparent policy development process.

And that brings us back to the Ashland Team’s second voyage to Oregon’s little city with big parking problems. On that day, the team came prepared to facilitate a meeting with the PAC, and facilitate they did! The meeting was highly productive as all participants came to the table ready to evaluate the findings from the project’s first Survey (which solicited an impressive near 800 responses) and discuss revisions to a draft of Guiding Principles compiled based on the survey results and other resources.

Team Ashland headed back to Eugene that night with important new insights. First, the PAC is composed of motivated and sophisticated individuals who care deeply about making a positive impact in their community. Second, with only a month between meetings the Team has a lot of work to do: composing a second survey, formalizing the Guiding Principles, planning an on-the-ground parking and bicycle monitoring effort, and beginning to craft the project’s policy alternatives.

Stay tuned next month for a report on our parking and bicycle monitoring effort!

Andrew Dutterer Ashland Sustainable Transportation CPW Community Planning WorkshopAbout the author: Andrew Dutterer is pursuing concurrent master’s degrees in Environmental Studies and Community & Regional Planning. At heart, Andrew is a trout and steelhead fishing bum who loves to spend time on any river, but he now realizes that parking is an interesting subject as well.