YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW RAY DELAHANTY, but if you are one of his hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, you certainly know him by his moniker, ‘CityNerd’.
During the pandemic, this longtime city planner took a sabbatical and started a channel crunching figures and sharing opinions about what makes cities work – how to build sustainable communities that people love to live in. With a focus on walkability, transportation, and good zoning, CityNerd soon became one of the most popular channels in a thriving culture of online urbanism. His snarky humor and data-wrangling skills have made him a public authority on what we’re getting right and wrong in urban America.
This pedestrian-loving, monster-truck-hating, freeway-ridiculing enemy of shitty design now spends much of his time touring the country, speaking to governments and civic groups about how to make cities better.
Last year, he visited Santa Fe and made a popular video about our city. During a subsequent visit, Ray and I took a bike ride around town to talk about what Santa Fe is doing right and what we could do better.
The video you made last year about Santa Fe has 170,696 views. That’s more than the entire population of Santa Fe County. Why did so many people watch it?
That’s something I think about a lot. Why do people watch? – it’s a combination of things. There are some people who just watch everything I do because they’re big fans. They like the way I talk about things and my sense of humor and my observations.
We had the first historic preservation zone in the country in the 1920s. Out on the edges, the rules are a little looser – there’s a Taco Bell a block away.
Sure, but is it an adobe Taco Bell?
I think we can call it adobe-ish. We have a challenge with a shortage of housing. How do we keep the city looking good while having enough housing?
I don’t even want to say it’s a national issue right now, it’s really an international issue. It’s intensified in Santa Fe because of how unique and characteristic the designs and the architectural styles are, and that is so important to the city’s economy as a tourist draw. I’m sympathetic to all that because you want to keep the things that make the city a great place to visit and to live. But at the same time, like a lot of Western US cities and probably more so than most, you’ve got serious affordability problems because of the lack of supply. I think there are certain things that should be no-brainers.
In planning, we often talk about missing middle housing. It’s not a high-rise, and it’s not a single-family home, it’s something in the middle – duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes. I think that’s a great kind of solution for Santa Fe.
I’ve been through Santa Fe enough to know that there’s more going on here than that. There is dense housing. There’s four-story residential, which is harder to get to match that kind of vernacular. But I think that kind of missing middle piece is pretty easy, like courtyard apartments, fourplexes, things like that.
What’s the impact of our failure to fix the housing problem?
This generation can’t afford to move out of their parents’ houses. They could be college-educated and get a job, but their job doesn’t pay enough to afford rent in a place that they want to live. That leads to all kinds of knock-on effects related to people falling off the bottom of the housing ladder. You’ve got unhoused folks in a lot of our more expensive cities – look at the correlation between how much housing costs and whether you have a problem with unhoused folks in the city and that correlation’s extremely strong. Somebody has got to be laser focused on finding ways to address those issues through incentives and zoning changes and things that we’ve just been bad at getting traction on.
My viewership skews young, in their late 20s. People care about this stuff right now because they can’t afford to live in the kind of places they want to. They want to live somewhere where they can walk or bike or take transit and drive as little as possible. Also, I think of the generational part; these are people who’re going to be alive to face some of the worst consequences of climate change.
What’s the biggest hurdle in doing this?
The normal way to live is to have a single-family home that doesn’t have to be near anything – you’re going to drive because you obviously have a car. But Santa Fe dates from the 17th century. For most of Santa Fe’s history, that has not been the reality, the parts that make Santa Fe, Santa Fe. All that stuff pre-existed the automobile, not by decades, but by centuries.
You’ve spent a lot of time in Spain and Portugal. How would a European city similar to Santa Fe handle this?
There are some streets that are, you can call them pedestrianized, but that’s a misnomer because they’ve always been pedestrian streets. That’s what they were when they were built. They are just naturally free of the noise and the issues of cars. But in other cases, you do have wider streets. And I went to a lot of different cities on the Iberian Peninsula with removable bollards…
Bollards? What the hell are bollards?
They’re these metal posts on some of the most popular commercial streets where there’s a lot of pedestrian activity. The bollards are retractable, so if a delivery truck pulls up, they can activate it and then they can get in and make their delivery. Or, it’s accessible by car and then around 5:00 or 6:00 PM the bollards go up and its pedestrian only, because it gets too busy in the evening and they don’t want any cars there.
That sounds like a miracle solution for Santa Fe.
Yes! It’s a problem that’s got a technological solution that’s implemented widely, not just in Spain and Portugal. For whatever reason, you just don’t see that treatment in the US. That’s especially unfortunate and frustrating in Santa Fe, which has so many similar characteristics to those older European cities.
New Mexico has the highest level of pedestrian deaths in the country. Someone gets killed on the roads of Santa Fe County about every six weeks. What can we do to change this?
Any time you do any kind of traffic or transportation study, one of the first things you do, you look at the crash data to try to find out where the hotspots are. Almost without exception, they’re on we call stroads, a five or seven lane arterial road that’s signed for a 45 mph, which means people go 60. It doesn’t have appropriate pedestrian crossing treatments and often has narrow sidewalks, if at all. All those things contribute to a lot of pedestrians getting hit. Now, there are a lot of parts of Santa Fe that have those sorts of characteristics.
Cerrillos Road, Airport Road, St. Francis.
Right? There are lots of ways to mitigate those conflicts. You can change the cross section of the street to shorten pedestrian crossings and give more space for a buffer between people walking or biking and the general traffic. There are all kinds of tried-and-true safety measures, engineering solutions that are well known. But often they’re just difficult to implement politically because you may take away a general travel lane or a few parking spots.
What’s the problem then?
Well-known tools are in the toolbox to address a lot of this stuff, but it just never gets done because nobody wants to inconvenience drivers by reducing the speed limit from 35 to 25 or by taking away a travel lane that probably only solves a congestion issue for a half an hour a day. The solutions are out there. It’s just a question of, do the decision makers feel like reducing fatalities and serious injuries is important enough to make those moves?
It’s more of a political problem than a design problem.
I hate to cop out like that. Politicians do things mostly for rational reasons and in response to what they hear from the public. I’m not trying to put it all on politicians or elected officials. They need the support and the advocacy of people in the community who care about those things. It’s cultural. When decision makers don’t do this or that, they have rational reasons for that.
We’ve been building roundabouts in the newer parts of the city.
I did a lot of work in Central Oregon where there’s been a lot of recent growth. Bend, Oregon has grown very fast and it’s the roundabout capital of the Western US. There are things you may not like about them; they may not be as great for bikes for example, but there’s no question they’re a huge plus for safety. They slow you down, they eliminate conflict points, they have pretty good capacity relative to signal intersections. They can handle quite a bit of traffic volume and so generally you don’t stop at all, you just merge in into the flow.
There’s a learning curve.
I get that. Especially if you have a lot of out-of-town visitors who are from places that don’t have them, that could be annoying, but they’re a slam dunk for safety, so it’s better to get people up the learning curve sooner than later.
What else should we do to make our city better?
It’s central to the success and the long-term livability and economic vibrancy of the city to make sure it’s as safe and enjoyable and comfortable for people to get around by foot as possible. It is a great walking city as it is. I wouldn’t say that it’s not, but it can be so much better.
There are a lot of streets in the central, historical part of the city that are open for traffic. There’s so many more streets that you could close to traffic.
Someone I know started doing that with the Canyon Road Summer Walks.
Exactly. It’s really such a compact core. I realize not everybody can take transit or bike to the central part of the city, but you’ve got all kinds of parking capacity around the perimeter, in structured parking and lots.
People are going to come there and walk anyway because it’s a great walking city, so does it really make a difference whether they park exactly in front of the one place they want to go?
They’re probably going to walk around and go to a few places. That’s what the city wants. They don’t want people to just come and go to one restaurant and leave. Why organize the limited right-of-way you have downtown in a way that prioritizes people storing their cars for a few hours? There are other places they can do that that make a lot more sense and won’t impact the pedestrian environment. Look, there’s a lot of great weather here. There should be way more outdoor street seating. A lot of cities do that. There’s a little bit of that here, but there could be so much more.
That’s just an easy number one for me, and from a transportation perspective that would be one, two, and three.
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