After owning a retail business in the city I can honestly say that one of my dreams was to see heated sidewalks installed along commercial districts. The 24-hour store located at Elmwood and Bird had them installed when the streets and sidewalks were dug up a few years back. I was amazed that the process had become affordable and practical. Installing the heating system was a smart move for any landlord who either owned a shop within the building, or wanted to market the storefront in a very shopper-friendly way.
Can you imagine if all of the sidewalks were heated from City Hall to the Gallery District? These heated walking lanes do/should not stop at the street either. The crosswalks are all part of the equation if there is to be no disruption of pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares installed in commercial district. It may be too late for Elmwood (until the sidewalks are torn up again), but is it too late for Main Street?
Being a business owner in a commercial district, you tend to see things that other people might miss. Like people wiping out at the corners because the property owner or the business owner didn’t shovel their walk that morning. By noon the foot traffic creates a compact sheet of ice that gets more and more dangerous as the day goes by. Add a dripping gutter to the formula and it,Aeos a recipe for one angry shopper. Shoveling laws are not enforced, and even if a business owner is diligent about taking care of his or her walk, there is little or no attention paid to the street crosswalks that are vital to getting people from one block to the next.
Honestly, can you blame a customer who doesn’t want to shop due to the hazards of treacherous walking conditions? If you don’t think that this is an important issue, then ask any business owner in any shopping district how their sales are when the crosswalks make it impossible to cross in the dead of winter. And the residential districts that can be found in-between the business districts? Forget it! Good luck if you want to walk past those stretches.
I Googled ‘Heated Sidewalks’ earlier this morning and was excited to find that there are cities and colleges all over the world that are looking into the idea.
Moscow Times reports that the sidewalks outside of City Hall will be heated.
The University of Idaho in Northern Idaho provides heated sidewalks throughout the central campus.
Steam tunnels below ground heat the sidewalks.
And the list goes on. Another discovery that I came across this morning was a PDF from the city,Aeos site that was, in essence, a survey for business owners along the Main Street corridor that will soon see traffic return to the streets. From what I understand, the business and property owners have been made aware that the feature is available:
This survey is directed to property and businesses representatives on Main Street along the Buffalo Place pedestrian-transit mall. Please take a few minutes to fill out this questionnaire so we will be sure to include all property and business concerns in the design process for the Cars Sharing Main Street project. Main Street between Edward/Goodell Streets and the Erie Canal Harbor is being re- designed to allow automobile traffic to share the trainway with Metro Rail. This survey is being conducted by DiDonato Associates under contract with the City Of Buffalo, in cooperation with NFTA and Buffalo Place, Inc.
Property and business representatives are asked to complete one survey for each of their separate properties on Main Street.
TRAFFIC ON MAIN STREET QUESTIONNAIRE
If heated sidewalks could be installed as part of the current project, would you be interested in having that done, bearing in mind that you would be responsible for all maintenance and that the utility hook up would have to be linked to your building?
This an unbelievable opportunity for the business district (what remains of it) to do something truly innovative. The city should be playing up this feature that they have come across and instead of polling the property and business owners planners should be looking into the viability of making all new sidewalks heated. This would be a feature that would attract new businesses to Main Street, draw shoppers to the area who want to walk on unobstructed sidewalks, allow downtown residents the ability to utilize neighboring services without worrying whether businesses have shoveled the walkways or not. I know that Buffalo Place has snow removal strategies in place to make it easier for mobility of urbanites, but it is impossible to keep the snow and ice off the sidewalks like heated walkways do.
Some may say that heating the walkways would be expensive. Maybe. But to know that we are neighbors to an incredible power source the likes of Niagara Falls? We were the first city to offer electricity en-mass to the public. This is a golden opportunity to show the world that we are forward thinking and creative again. Imagine what a difference heated sidewalks would do to the city’s image? Even if it just started with Main Street. A feature like this would help to make Main Street the dynamic street of yesteryears.
Lead image: Across the city there is a problem when it comes to clearing snow from the public sidewalks, as seen with this image of Elmwood Avenue