Open Streets festival could hold future of “Bull-evard”
A portion of 700 North running through campus was closed to traffic and open to pedestrians and businesses for three hours Tuesday. This could be the future for the section of the road known as “Aggie Bull-evard.”
The event that shut down the road was called Open Streets Festival. As a part of the festival, clubs and organizations both on and off campus set up on the asphalt for the entertainment and education of the Utah State University campus.
“It is pretty much a national movement going on right now,” said Stephanie Tomlin, organizer of the Open Streets Festival. “The idea is that you are creating kind of a paved park, if you will. It’s an envisioning opportunity for people to think about the streetscape a little bit differently.”
The businesses and entertainers were all local or on campus groups.
“We tried to get local vendors of different sorts and also interactive things,” said Alexi Lamm, USU’s sustainability coordinator. “We wanted to try to get things that were focused on active transportation, but also things that were just local to Logan.”
The festival acted as an experiment to see what Aggie Bull-evard would look like if it was closed to cars and open to foot and bicycle traffic.
“The goal for this is to get people to think about the street a little differently, but also right now we are fortunate that we have a couple of master plans going on at the time,” Tomlin said. “So Logan city is doing a bike master plan and then Utah State University is doing a full transportation master plan. This really is an opportunity for us to look at seventh north and consider if we want this maybe to be what it permanently looks like.”
An advising group for the university had a booth at the festival and they were taking opinions about closing the portion of the road.
“There is sort of three camps,” said Julie Bjornstad, a consultant working with facilities. “There is the people who really like the idea because there is a lot of conflicts that are happening between pedestrians and bicycles. Then there is another group that wants to keep it open because it is one of the main routes through campus and there is pick-up and drop-off that happens. The third group is sort of unsure about it, they see the benefits but they are kind of concerned with where certain traffic would go.”
The feedback from Open Streets Festival will be combined with data collected on the road over the last few weeks.
“We collected data about two weeks ago about how much traffic was using it and how many pedestrians were crossing during the peak periods of the day,” Bjornstad said. “So depending on sort of what the feedback is about public opinion mixed with what that would do to traffic around campus.”
While the feedback was an important part of the Open Streets Festival, Tomlin said a large purpose was simple.
“We just want it to be fun,” Tomlin said. “Obviously it’s kind of a difficult thing for a lot of organizations because it does kind of create a headache, but it’s also a cool way for people to think about the street just a little bit differently. So it’s a fun atmosphere and it’s a good time.”
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