Toellner Tells it

Historic Hyde Park Homes Tour is Oct 2

 On October 2, Hyde Park is hosting its biennial Homes Tour.  The Homes Tour, along with similar tours in Scarritt, and Squire Park, are rare opportunities to tour some of Kansas City's more historic neighborhoods - -and Hyde Park particularly gives people a chance to tour one of the city's more diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods.

The tour is running from 10am to 6 pm on October 2, and includes tours of 6 homes (including a variety of sytes including Victorian, ShirtWaist and Arts and Crafts), a neighborhood business, a church and two of the recently remodeled historic apartment buildings along Armour Blvd.

Tickets are for sale online for $11 for advance tickets -- they'll be $13 the day of.

For artist renderings of most of the homes on the tour you can check them out here.

Ideas for improving downtown walkability

A frequent conversation at city hall is about improving neighborhood and downtown walkability. Walkability is good on a lot of fronts -- it increases foot traffic in front of retail locations (which should increase traffic within these retail locations), it decreases the amount of auto traffic on the roadways and it gives the city a vibrant energy with a lot of people walking about.

However, as someone who works downtown and walks regularly, it is not uncommon to be nearly hit by someone in a car who completely pulls into your crosswalk space.

One simple idea to improving the safety of walking is from Fast Company design - -where they have proposed the idea of redesigning crosswalk space to fit the way pedestrians really use it.   A side benefit just might be that the new design -- which is wider on the sides -- would also help slow down auto traffic that seems to frequently blow through crosswalks because they are seeking to turn right on red lights and don't slow down through the crosswalk areas (and are too busy looking for oncoming traffic to pay attention to pedestrians).

This is simple, and would cost the city virtually nothing to implement (they have to paint the crosswalk lines anyway).  And would likely help improve downtown walkability and the safety of doing so.

h/t: Good

Personal note: sorry for the long time between posts. A crazy-busy work schedule followed by a personal vacation caused me to not spend much time posting here recently. I'm back and will increase posting over the next few months.