Buchanan: Fort Worth missed opportunities to create a walkable city

By Kevin Buchanan

Special to the Star-Telegram

When Montgomery Plaza began towing noncustomers' vehicles from its parking lot, a number of issues that had been percolating in the background of West Seventh Street's renaissance bubbled to the surface.

Make no mistake: West Seventh has seen an impressive period of redevelopment. However, problems hold back the area's true potential.

Contrary to the common refrain, West Seventh's problem is not a parking shortage. Each new major development along the street has added hundreds of spaces.

Rather, the problem is that West Seventh isn't being treated like the walkable urban neighborhood center we have desired it to become.

Each development adds its own parking, closely hoarded by the development's owners. Meanwhile, there is little shared or street parking for visitors who wish to spend time and money visiting multiple businesses and developments.

This means that people visiting West Seventh must move their cars constantly, often only a block or two, or risk being towed.

This is incredibly wasteful. They're burning gas, polluting the air and clogging up the streets with car traffic in a part of the city where the streets should be focused on pedestrian traffic. After all, the feel of a city neighborhood is only degraded by cars and only enhanced by pedestrians.

Compounding this is the sorry state of West Seventh's pedestrian infrastructure and urban design. Because there's no unified design code to help shape development, as there is in areas like the Near Southside, developers are left to their own devices when building their projects.

Some do the right thing and design for pedestrians with wide tree-lined sidewalks and buildings with walkable storefronts, but others have built barriers to walking like large surface parking lots and shrubs between buildings and the sidewalk.

Where a place like West Magnolia Avenue is an ebbing and flowing assortment of individual businesses and residences knitted together by beautiful, appealing sidewalks that unify, West Seventh is a series of developer-born islands with little to no connective tissue.

This creates an environment that's inconsistent and unappealing to pedestrians, and further encourages wasteful car trips.

West Seventh businesses, property owners and city officials should take examples from successful urban places like Magnolia and Sundance Square. Come up with some shared parking solutions and implement consistent, pedestrian-oriented design codes to encourage people to leave their cars behind and explore the area on foot.

To help with this goal, the creation of a public improvement district, with property owners contributing to a common fund for infrastructure improvements, could help create a more appealing place for residents and businesses.

In the long term, the true solution will take a bigger effort. Places like West Seventh or Magnolia should be the centers of their neighborhoods, but because we spent the decades after World War II outlawing traditional urban neighborhood design in outlying neighborhoods, we have precious few places like these left for people to enjoy. People drive from all over to visit them. They're forced into double duty as neighborhood centers and regional destinations, cramming them full of traffic.

We as a city can correct this by building more wonderful, walkable, lovable neighborhoods all over.

To put it simply: everybody in Fort Worth should be able to walk to a great place.

Kevin Buchanan of Fort Worth is an IT professional, photographer, musician and the author of FortWorthology.com, which promotes the rebirth of walkable urban neighborhoods in Fort Worth.

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