---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 09:28:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Johnson Darrell <djohnson@osprey.csrv.uidaho.edu>
To: Robert Probasco <rcp@uidaho.edu>
Subject: Re: Michael Rheim's (sp?) presentation last night (fwd)
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 23:19:57 -0800 (PST)
> From: Greg Brown <gregb@uidaho.edu>
> To: vision2020@uidaho.edu
> Subject: Re: Michael Rheim's (sp?) presentation last night
>
> It is indeed, a very critical time for Moscow. From where I sit, I once
> again say to people in Moscow, you *really* don't know how good you
> have it. Carbondale, IL is a college town of about 35,000. Traffic is
> horrendous, one cannot safely bike or walk, personal safety is a concern
> in certain areas, the downtown area has been destroyed by the likes of Walmart,
> and there are strip malls spread out all over the place. I have been labeled
> a fear mongerer for raising growth issues about Moscow. That is not
> an accurate label. I'm a realist. Carbondale is what Moscow will
> be like without a concerted effort to preserve and protect.
>
Greg Brown pictures Carbondale as some sort of minor hell. This is very
inaccurate. There are a a few chokes points in terms of the traffic
patterns in that town. But the two main thouroughfares (one N-S the other
E-W) are almost entirely divided one-way 4 or 6 lane roads now. So
despite the fact that there is a great deal of traffic through town most
of it runs fairly smoothly. The claim that one cannot walk or bike
safely boggles my mind. Except for the fact that motorists tend to ignore
bicyclists there (as they tend to do everywhere) there is no particular
reason to claim that walking or biking is very unsafe. The town and
university have a very extensive system of designated bike paths - which
this city does not.
The claim that there are parts of the city in which one might be
afraid to walk could only apply to two areas as far as I can see. The
first is a patch of woods ON CAMPUS that is inadequately lit and which
the university refuses to light because it believes that even with
lighting it would be a hazardous place for sexual assault at night. So
instead they encourage people (especially women) to go around the woods
at night. City growth had no, and will have no, bearing on this issue.
The other area Mr. Brown may have in mind is the black
neighborhoods in the NE part of town. If this area is dangerous it is
because of long-standing racism practiced by the locals in southern
Illinois. In the town of Anna, 23 miles south, there are people who brag
that the name means ain't-no-niggers-allowed! And students in an off
campus class in a town 25 miles NW freely admitted to a colleague of mine
that a black who would stop in at the local country and western bar would
likely be harassed immediately. Moscow does not have a pocket of
disadvantaged minorities and probably never will so this comparison is
IS just a piece of fear mongering.
Carbondale's downtown business do have trouble competing with the
Malls (there are two large ones., one in Carbondale and one in Marion
only 14 miles away) and strip malls that include WalMart, K-Mart, Venture
etc... But Carbondale has that problem for the same reason that any town
with a strip mall has that problem - convenience and parking. It's just
more convenient to go to a strip mall where there are no meters and
where many shops are conveniently close together. Parking in the
downtown areas is almost always hard to find and when you do you have to pay
the meters.
Carbondale's growth problem (which it does have, but which are
not as bad as Mr. Brown makes out) are of course due primarily to the
growth in student population at the university. As more students show up
more housing is needed, more services are needed and more buying power is
available for more businesses to compete for. I understand that the
university population went from around 8000 to 11,000 in 3 or 4 years
recently. Unless Moscow knows of some way that it can reign in possible
university growth, it does not have much choice but to plan carefully
where new housing developments (principally for students) should go,
where more businesses (probably in new or expanded malls) will be, and how
its going to handled increased traffic in town that already has an
EXTREMELY inadequate traffic pattern through the center of town. If the
university does not grow, you won't need to implement the plans, but if
it does, you will at least be ready for it.
In my view the biggest problem this town will have if there is
much more growth is the traffic. It doesn't seem likely that that
problem can be resolved in the downtown. So the only way to solve it will
be to have 8 and 95 bypass on the edge of town and intersect either
NE, NW, SE or SW of town. And if it waits too long, there will be housing
expansion precisely where it needs to be and the bypasses will have to be
longer and further removed from the existing business areas.
Darrell Johnson