Editor’s note: David White is the current Director of Planning and Zoning for the City of Burlington, Vermont. Over the past 30 years, David has played a major role working in the public sector at both the regional and local level within the state of Vermont.
STVT: What does it mean to be a planner in Vermont? How important is sustainable transportation in your day-to-day work?
DW: Before I came to Burlington, I worked for the Lamoille County Planning Commission in Morrisville where we worked for VTrans doing regional transportation planning and transportation-specific plans. Burlington is a bit different in how we're organized. But still, you can't think about any sort of land use and development without also considering transportation.
STVT: What were some areas of concern that you took into consideration with the re-design of City Hall Park?
DW: Well, there were a number of challenges, you know, from varying different directions:
Soil Compaction and maintaining/preserving vegetation
There were some important design challenges upfront, the first being the ability to maintain the vegetation in the park. The trees and the grass were a mess. Soil compaction was a serious issue because the park was being loved to death, you know, particularly every Saturday morning when we would invite thousands of people to come in and trample all over the grass and pack soil even further. That was an important design challenge. How do we kind of reorganize things specifically relating to physical improvements and human activity within the park in order to allow us to maintain the vegetation there and introduce other functions?
Stormwater runoff
Really closely related to that was stormwater runoff. Due to soil compaction in the park, every time it rained, we would lose more soil down into the sewer drain, which creates a whole set of other problems as it then makes its way into the lake and contributes to all of, you know, urban stormwater challenges that we have. So we needed to do a better job of managing stormwater. And the soil compaction and the stormwater runoff were inextricably linked.
Accessibility
One of the other physical challenges that we were confronted with was simply accessibility. The site is sloped. So some of the walkways within the park were kind of steep if you had a mobility impairment. So how do we kind of soften that steepness in order to make it more accessible for folks with mobility challenges?
STVT: What are the next steps for Main Street, in relation to The Great Streets Initiative?
DW: So we have done some kind of conceptual design work around aspects of what Main Street redesign could be and could look like. The halt of this project is due to a lack of funding. It will be a matter of knowing that we have the necessary funding to move ahead. You know, Great Streets is is ultimately the umbrella design of how we see the future of all of our downtown streets looking like and functioning.
I think there was an alignment of opportunities that took some of our attention away from Main Street and instead shifted our focus on St. Paul Street because we had a tangible project that had funding and a timeline that we could accomplish. The emphasis came down to let's make sure we get this done and get this done well and right so that people can really begin to appreciate what it is we're talking about when we talk about the Great Streets Initiative in Burlington.
But, you know, Main Street is a different animal, so much because of its length. You know, where do you stop and where do you start? You could take a block or two out of the heart of the downtown and make some important changes. But some of the bigger changes, you know, like a cycle track, you know, we don't want it to be discontinuous, so, you know, that's a nut that we have to be able to crack and think about if we do put this into some smaller steps, how do we maintain kind of a logical cycling experience on the street?
STVT: What attracted you to form-based code and what has been your experience leading the creation of planBTV: Downtown Code?
DW: So form-based code is just a really useful tool to kind of separate some of the subjectivity around urban design that can be applied when you have a very discretionary review process because folks can read an urban design standard in the ordinance and apply it in different ways to properties differently. That's the only way we will get all the things that we love and enjoy about our community.
Places to live, places to work, places to eat, and places to entertain ourselves and recreate are all done by the private sector for the most part. So we want them to develop these properties and we want them to be successful. So we need to give them a very clear path forward to what we want so that they can then provide that to us. With form-based code being very objective, there are specific standards that need to apply but they're focused on the basic elements of good urban design. It's not about architectural style and it's not about whether you think the building is pretty or not, but it's about the basic characteristics of bringing the building to the street. So that's the beauty of form-based code, it focuses on the most important physical characteristics of an urban space and it's very clear and objective.
STVT: How could form-based code help reduce parking?
DW: We use arcane tools like lot coverage requirement limitations and density to regulate how much happens on a given site. Well, neither you, nor I, nor anybody else really understands what 20 units to the acre actually looks like when the coverage is 40 percent or 80 percent. It doesn't mean anything to us.
But if I can show you a picture of a building, you know, like all the other buildings, does it really matter what those numbers say? If you like what's here then we want to continue to allow what's here to exist. That's the objective. We're trying to protect and preserve the character of Burlington while also allowing us to accommodate more dwelling units and more people in a more sustainable way.
And if we get rid of the parking requirements, we don't need to have all of this additional lot coverage in places where people don't have, don't want, and don’t need multiple cars. Some will, but not everybody. These minimum on-site parking requirements have been the bane of my existence for 30 years. Everything comes down to parking. God, you know why? Why the car is so damn important? I mean yeah I have one and I need one but. I have long argued that there is no public interest here that we ought to protect other than yes, we don't want to spill over into other neighborhoods. But that's a parking management problem. That's not an everybody's got to build two spaces just in case they have a visitor.
