Walking and Painting Downtown.

Right on cue, here are a few posts I found while perusing Facebook that vastly improve upon what I wrote earlier today.

Worcester is a scary place to bike and walk. I know, because I do it all the time. All future development needs to take into account a few developing trends: the rising price of gasoline, the expense of owning/insuring/parking a car in a downtown area, and the increasing use of bicycles.

While this post focuses on suburban sprawl, these lessons on pedestrian access are vital for Worcester. There are some pretty wide open and well traveled roads in Worcester that need fixing.

This post focuses more on what we need in Worcester, and says it better than I did in my last post. All the author lacks is a few details about Worcester's neighborhoods to get it right.

I especially liked the point about blank walls and surface lots breaking up pedestrian views and interactions with the areas that surround them.

From a Kansas City parking garage:

Book Stairs in Greenville, South Carolina:

From Indianapolis, where a hotel hired an artist to 'vandalize' their garage:

From Lucerne, a creative way to discourage littering:

 Designs for blank walls in Open Walls Baltimore:

A creative way to liven up sidewalks from Sao Paolo:

In Madrid, an artist named SpY created this skate ramp:

SpY's streetlight is awesome, and could even point the way to other attractions:

Imagine if the new City Square/Theatre District encouraged art like this? It certainly would brighten up the proposed pedestrian areas and our many concrete bridges that surround the area.