So the title pretty much explains what I'm trying to say. On January 13th 5PM at the County Courthouse, our Florida legislator/ representative of our district Don Gaetz:
Will be visiting us to hear from the locals. I plan to present to him this whole new urbanism thing I'm doing and try to convince him that cities need more funding for local projects and that the state's DOT needs to butt out and that they're ripping apart the hearts of our city. Here, I'm just going to start off by leaving basically what I plan to say in my speech of mine:
Hello my name is Dylan Gentile, I am a student at Walton
high school, JROTC cadet, academic team member, part of the Defuniak springs
business and professional association, community activist, founder of the “New
Urbanists of Defuniak Springs” organization and future city planner. You
probably have heard of me senator as you sign my scholar awards every year and replied to
one of my emails. ONE of them. Today I would like to speak to you about the importance of
sustainable and pedestrian friendly development within the district and
intensive smart growth policies. This may not appear as high on your list of
priorities because you don’t exactly see lobbyists and protestors coming up to
you and saying “ Mr. Gaetz we demand more compact walkable environments and
policies that promote it in our district!” but I assure you that it is much
more important than you might think.
what is
walk-ability you might ask? It is the ability of a person to get from point A
to point B within a community by walking. people who walk to shopping, schools, work etc. tend to be happier, healthier and actually save 8%
of their income.
(this is because the average American spends 8% of their income on
transportation), and let’s be honest in this district it’s not exactly spent on
a bus pass or a train ticket.
The
average American also spends 4 hours a day in a car commuting from point A to
point B. I am sure that’s even more in this district, because in almost every
community that’s not Defuniak Springs in the district you absolutely need a car to get
anywhere, think about it you get into
your gas guzzling SUV, back out of your driveway, to the exit of the
subdivision, drive on the collector road to the highway, wait in traffic, park in
a massive concrete lot, stop at the local walmart to get the groceries for the
whole week, get back on the hiway, drive to either (in the state of Florida)
the office park or resort you work at, park in the giant concrete lot, go
back onto the hiway, wait in traffic again, drive into the subdivision and into
the driveway of your home.
This is apparently obvious in
Niceville, south Walton, fort Walton, panama city, and Destin.
Before this unhuman pattern of development we
had adopted you could walk out your door ask little jimmy to ride his bike to
the local grocer to pick up dinner, to ask one of the neighbors a couple bocks
down the tree-lined street for some eggs, and tell him to walk to the theatre
downtown with the leftover money with his friends and see a movie, without
worrying about little jimmy dying and
crushed by a 1 ton piece of metal barreling down this road at 65 miles per
hour, because the state permitted the speed limit to be higher even though it
was in a mainly residential neighborhood because it was zoned mixed use and no
one ever thought of what it would actually look like if you were on a ground
level view and the DOT decided to add 3 more lanes .
This is a place no-one would ever attempt to walk
in.
In fact it’s
downright suicide to try to walk to school or work or to shops in places like
this, in 1990-1994 in the state of florida 2,625 pedestrians were killed in
fatal traffic incidents and 41,916 pedestrians were injured according to the
Florida department of hiway safety and motor vehicles.
This is probably also why Florida’s obesity rate among adults is 26%
it’s because we spaced everything way further apart than it needed to be,
provided no pedestrian or bicycle infrastructure, and legally required that
each city be designed completely around the car.
This is downright
negligence on behalf of the state and
cities in which they occurred.
You see there are many things the state
does that make it more difficult for cities to get proper infrastructure
to
support bikes and pedestrians, and makes it harder on local businesses
on the
two-lane roads with street trees that are a key factor in walkable
communitiesand making it easier for places like walmart and mcdonalds on
the sides of
the 8 lane hiways splitting our community in half. Heck, it took several
months just to get funding from the state for a sidewalk on 21st street
here in
town.
BUT THERE IS A SOLUTION TO
THIS STATE-WIDE PLANNING CRISIS, it is called smart growth! Smart growth
policies are policies that encourage higher density mixed-use developments,
where streets have trees, bikelanes and sidewalks, where homes, apartments,
offices, shops, schools and churches are all closer together and there are
multiple modes of transportation to get from point A to point B, like trains or
streetcars and not just cars! A great local example would be seaside, Florida.
Back in say the 1850-1960’s this was the typical American town, but as cars and
oil got cheaper we just demolished and spread over all the rural farmland and
forests with giant hiways and subdivisions , this became the American dream,
but now a new generation of young people is graduating college, and high school
looking for jobs and places to live, but this generation’s version of the
American dream is different than those of the former, they enjoy living closer
to other people, prefer alternative modes of transportation over driving, and
don’t want the big lawns and the picket fences, and as older generations pass
away, the subdivisions and retirement communities begin to fade away and become
abandoned while the walkable, multi-modal downtowns thrive and get bigger,
communities are going to have to appeal to these new generations as to not fade
into the history books.
Those retirement and subdivision communities make up the majority of the district,
and as the price of living rises because of the wealthy developers on the
coast, the poorest people will be forced to move away and as the people move
away from the subdivisions and into the walkable inter-cities , these
communities that make up the majority of the district will fade away too, but
that doesn’t have to happen.
This is why, with large amounts of other reasons I don’t
have time to talk about, I urge you to try and get more smart growth policies
passed and urgently encourage cities in the district to start becoming more
walkable and multi-modal. The smart growth America website has numerous numbers
of policies adopted by states and cities that you could look at. Oh also I
handed out surveys to all my teachers because I promised I’d at least get the
issues they feel are important to them some attention from someone in the state
government.
*READS TEACHER SURVEYS*
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