Upcoming 2026 Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, September 2nd 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

We will be going over a Strong Towns 101 presentation put together by myself. A great chance to get familiar with the ideas of Strong Towns if you are curious.

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, September 14th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

We will be celebrating the recent installment of curb bumpouts along Central Avenue in downtown Dover! Many members of Strong Towns Seacoast advocated for this to the city and put in time to craft a plan to get support.

Seacoast Social

Monday, September 14th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
La Festa
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Discussing Transportation Planning

The SRPC is an advisory body and planning resource for local governments. With Dover’s upcoming Master Plan Transportation Chapter update, they wanted to get feedback and ideas for this effort. The primary question that Colin and Stephen wanted to ask was, “What does a ‘strong’ Dover look like from a transportation perspective?” Our group spent most of the meeting discussing the Strong Towns approach with them covering topics like balancing public and private investment, prioritizing walkability and cycling, streets, roads, stroads, and more.

Measuring the Success of the Current Plan

One of the larger topics that we landed on was the success of Dover’s current Transportation Chapter, which is an important thing to understand if we are going to write a new one. Dover recently released a progress updated on their Master Plan recommendations. Something one of our members noticed was that since Dover adopted their Transportation chapter in 2016 less than half of the recommendations have been completed, and most are either “In Progress” or “To Be Reviewed”.

Now, I have been saying for a while that Dover is not on track to achieve its stated goals in any reasonable amount of time. In fact, of the four recommendations with an “Immediate” priority (1 - 2 years) three are still “In Progress” a decade later, and the last one was marked “Competed” just last year1. This pace is too slow to embrace the vision that Dover has for its future and perhaps they are trying to accomplish too much at once, preventing clear focus on in-progress items. Still, the City will need to get serious about accomplishing these goals if it actually believes in them.

Another issue with the current plan that we highlighted to the SRPC members is the confusing nature of terms used in the document. There are “Ongoing” priorities and “Ongoing” statuses that seem to be independent of each other. There are priorities such as “Intermediate” and “To be Reviewed” that are used and just aren’t defined anywhere. Finally, some action recommendations use vague language such as “Seek opportunities”, “Investigate the potential”, and “Consider strategies”. That language is difficult to know when the task is completed and there likely needs to be a tangible deliverable for each of these items. This might come off as nitpicky, and I want to be fair here and say that planning and communication can be a very difficult task. I’ve worked in some very professional environments that struggle with this stuff, and little changes in wording can help create broader alignment across groups.

Our recommendation here is to make the action recommendations clear and achievable directly in their language. They should leave little ambiguity as to what “Complete” looks like. We also recommend using “Priority” to indicate when an action recommendation should be completed relative to others. Removing “To be Reviewed” and “Ongoing” from the list of priorities would be helpful here as they don’t work well to communicate actual priority and are more suited to be a status instead. Also giving a time frame definition to “Intermediate” would be nice or if it isn’t needed then just remove it. Lastly, we recommend taking action and actually implementing the plan. Any plan without action behind it is a just daydream.

Conclusion

Thank you so much to Colin and Stephen for coming out to talk with us. We covered many topics, but this article needed to be somewhat focused so I couldn’t mention them all. Also a huge thank you to Eric Leaver who helped with the graphs and much of the conversation around the state of Dover’s current Master Plan. Honestly, I am hopeful for this new Master Plan Transportation chapter update and I hope to see Dover’s dreams become a reality. I want to help the city achieve them.

Why that spot, though? Why would so many families choose to take photos at the same location? After all, there are plenty of places in the city to take photos at, including professional studios with better lighting, air conditioning, and a great photo environment. The reason is the same as why our photographer didn’t want traffic to be a part of the photo. It’s because Rainbow Row is a beautiful place and people want to experience and capture that picturesque beauty unblemished.

Upcoming 2026 Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, August 10th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, August 10th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
La Festa
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, September 2nd 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

The Attraction of Beautiful Places

When my sister came to visit us in Dover, we travelled to Boston and she insisted on getting a photo of Acorn Street. We walked past dozens of other streets that day, but she specifically wanted a photo of Acorn Street. You have likely done this or something similar when visiting a place. Looking online and doing research to find the most beautiful spots of the city that you can go to during your stay. Sometimes it can even be the motivation to visit a city in the first place. How many people have gone to Paris just to see the beauty of the Eiffel Tower? People will hike or drive somewhere just for the scenic view overlooking the city. We seek out beauty in our lives. we search for it, and we will make large efforts to witness it.

Beauty is an important quality of places that people love, places that people care about. It moves us and inspires us. There has even been research done that shows people are happier when they live in beautiful places. What’s more is that it’s a driver for strong communities as it fosters passion for places. People are more likely to walk, socialize, engage, and participate when they think their community is beautiful. Beauty is an intangible quality that creates strong, emotional connections for people.

Ugly Places Create Ugly Feelings

So there are some good things that come with beautiful places, but making places like that can be difficult and costly. Maybe we should save our money and effort and just invest in them sparingly? Well, there is evidence that our environment and the way we feel about it can affect our health. If beautiful places can create positive feelings, then a lack of beauty in places can also foster negative emotions and mental health effects. Long drab walls with no adornment, wide stretches of empty asphalt, bland, repetitive buildings, and loud noisy areas can contribute to increased stress levels.

People generally don’t care about ugly places. They start to look elsewhere, they retreat into their homes, their phones, and social media. If we spend day after day in ugly places, it physically and emotionally affects us in negative ways. Over time that manifests as individuals living worse lives and leaves communities struggling with isolation.

Can We Build More Beautiful Places

What is beautiful, though? Of course, this trait is famous for its subjectivity and has even developed the common adage, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” However, there is enough overlap across our many beholders to identify several qualities that beautiful places have in common. For instance, most people would rather take photos at a city park than in a parking lot. This lets me confidently make some suggestions, but I fully understand that some readers may feel differently.

Greenery - One of the primary traits is the presence of trees, plants, and greenery. The inclusion of nature and the merging of it with other environmental elements.

Built to a human scale - Beautiful places are built for humans to interact with. Things are close by, walking is an option, and signage is designed to support pedestrian experiences.

Visual Variety - A variety of distinct elements for people to look at rather than stretches of blank or repetitive walls

Built for human comfort - An essential trait is people wanting to be at a place. Mitigating things such as noise, danger, and discomfort is vitally important.

Enclosure - Sometimes people refer to this as a “public room”, something that has clear edges and is contained. It gives boundaries, a beginning and an end.

Deflected Vistas - This is related to enclosure and focuses on shortening sight lines to create distinct areas that allow and encourage people to explore.

Taking Photos Around Dover

To explore this concept of beautiful places, I dragged my wife and a friend to do a photo shoot of different places around Dover. My goal was to take photos in places that feature built environments, and to capture a wide variety of places. My hope here is to showcase the types of places that we are building in our city and highlight the areas that are beautiful and the ones that aren’t, but I’ll let you come to those conclusions on your own.

Which of these stand out to you as beautiful? Which would you want more of in your city? Are there elements that add or detract from the beauty of these places? Most importantly, which of these places would you want to be in? A huge thank you to my wife Ting and friend Marc Fillion for doing this on a weekend during the heat of summer.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading. I’ve had the idea for this article for over a year now and I feel that beauty in our places is of great importance. It’s a difficult concept to express and even more difficult to highlight that importance. My hope here is that more people will look around at their city, their street, their grocery store, and the places they go to on a weekly basis and consider how they feel about them on an emotional level. Are you proud of these places? Do you care about them? Dover’s downtown is one of the oldest sections of the city and it is a source of pride for the community and people care about it. Let’s think about what kinds of places we will be creating and leaving behind for the next generation. Let’s try to build beautiful places that are worth caring about.

Thanks to Eric Leaver for helping me review my draft of this.

If you are interested in this topic I recommend watching the Not Just Bikes video ‘Designing Urban Places that Don’t Suck’

Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, August 5th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, August 10th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, August 10th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
La Festa
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

A Focus On Pedestrian Safety

At the July in-person meeting in Dover, I brought my freshly written policy to get feedback from group members and see where I could make some improvements. We had excellent engagement and I am thankful for everyone’s constructive feedback. The primary focus of my policy was facilitating safe crossings at crosswalks in Dover, and I think Dover can do this using a few different tools. Let’s talk about it.

Negotiation for Right-of-Way

The framing tool I use is similar to how people already think about intersections with a stop sign: negotiation for the right-of-way. A crosswalk should aid pedestrians in the negotiation for right-of-way. A successful negotiation means that any automobiles present have acknowledged the presence of a person looking to cross and yielded the right-of-way to them. This is the outcome that I think we all want, automobiles yielding to people in crosswalks. We should avoid building crosswalks that leave people struggling to be noticed by automobiles and hoping that traffic will stop for them. In the state of New Hampshire pedestrians lawfully have the right of way in almost all cases(source), and this framing aligns with that.

To accomplish this, we need to design the crosswalk and the surrounding street to be biased in favor of the pedestrian. The design should handle most of the negotiation for us. To elaborate on this, you may be familiar with the idea of a walk signal at a signalized intersection, a dedicated period of time for people to cross the street. That signal is handling the negotiation for the pedestrian and biasing that communication towards the people crossing the street. We can achieve that same effect at other crosswalks with clever design that embraces two concepts: reducing automobile speed and improving visibility.

Giving Plenty of Time to Stop

Speed is one of the most significant factors in any collision and can be especially deadly if a pedestrian is involved. As speeds increase the percentage chance of a fatality or injury dramatically rises with it. Furthermore, the stopping distance for a vehicle increases right along with it. That’s a double whammy! Higher speeds mean that it takes longer distance and more time for a vehicle to stop and higher injury and fatality rates if one fails to do so. This directly increases the cost of a mistake made by either a driver or a person crossing the street. We can reduce the risk of tragedy simply by reducing speeds to 20MPH or below at a crosswalk. This is a key part of my drafted policy.

In addition to slower speeds, we can also give more time for a driver to yield to someone looking to cross the street by improving visibility around the crosswalk. For example, visibility can be improved by removing obstructions and barriers that hinder sight lines around a crosswalk. This is often called daylighting and the intent is to maximize visibility for both drivers and pedestrians and improve the pedestrian’s ability to negotiate for their lawful right-of-way. Objects like parked cars, trees, signs, etc. can block sight lines and make it harder for people to see each other. Prohibiting parked vehicles within 20ft of a crosswalk near an intersection is actually captured in New Hampshire state law(source) as well as Dover City law(source), I’m recommending that Dover extend it to include all crosswalks and extending it as necessary to ensure clear sight lines.

Other Ideas

One of the other main ideas is the acknowledgement and inclusion of unmarked crosswalks for consideration. Many people think of a crosswalk and imagine zebra stripes on the ground, but legally crosswalks are present at every intersection(source). This policy captures that idea and includes unmarked crosswalks in the conversation and identifies the benefits and reasons to mark a crosswalk. Putting markings on the surface is a communication tool that is meant to tell motorists to expect crossings at this location and to tell pedestrians that this is a preferred crossing location. Markings by themselves don’t define a crosswalk, nor do they grant additional rights to the pedestrian. A pedestrians still has a legal right-of-way at unmarked crosswalks.

Dover’s current crosswalk policy suggests leaving a crosswalk unmarked can be used as a safety tactic because it encourages a pedestrian to use more caution when crossing than they would if it were marked. The policy I have written declares this as an invalid safety tactic because it decreases walkability, discourages pedestrian crossings, encourages risk-taking behavior, and ultimately shirks the responsibility of facilitating safe crossings from the city to the pedestrian. This idea demands a pedestrian’s vigilance instead of actually making it safer to cross the street. I directly state that this is not a valid approach to safety and that our walkability network should be safe enough that even a child can manage crossing the street safely.

Finally, I added an “Experimental Features” section with the hopes of encouraging Dover to look for safety patterns that are uncommon in North America, yet doubtlessly effective. Following Federal and State standards for the last several decades has created many of the crossings where we see a tragedy occur(source) and I think we should open ourselves up to more designs and ideas in our pursuit of a safe, walkable city.

Conclusion

When crossing the street is uncomfortable or feels unsafe, people walk less. If Dover wants to become the walkable city it dreams of being, then it has to confront this fact and prioritize walking as a primary form of transportation. Waiting at a crosswalk as traffic speeds down the street hoping for a driver to either stop for you or for a gap in traffic wide enough to dash across the street is not a comfortable form of walkability. Pressing a beg button at a signalized intersection then standing for minutes in the rain, heat, or cold for your 20 seconds of time to cross four lanes of traffic is not a comfortable form of walkability. Dover will need to prioritize comfort, dignity, and safety in crossing the street in order to meet its goals of being a walkable city. I hope that this policy can help bring that future closer.

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, August 5th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, July 13th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, July 13th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
La Festa
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

The Evolution of Epping Road

Epping Road is a critical connector for many points of interest in Exeter, including the historic downtown, municipal services, and a direct connection to NH-101. It has experienced rapid changes in development and uses over the past thirty years. The road now carries heavier traffic volumes, is home to new employment opportunities, and 750 new and existing housing units will join the mix of commercial and industrial uses on this distinct corridor. Representing one of the largest investments in multimodal transportation in the town’s history, Exeter’s Safe Street for All (SS4A) grant application will undoubtedly change the character of Epping Road. Given the rate of development and the critical link this stretch of road serves to access businesses, residences, and recreational attractions warrants additional consideration for the future of this corridor.

Epping Road currently has a number of problems which make travel in any form unpleasant and uncomfortable. Growing volumes of traffic now operate over roadway infrastructure which is inconsistent at best. Current roadway speeds warrant enforcement operations, sidewalks are not connected to the network, shoulders are inconsistently sized forcing pedestrians into fast moving traffic. The need to design Epping Road for pedestrians and bicyclists is not new. As early as the 2005 Epping Road Access Management Study, the Rockingham Planning Commission recommended that pedestrians and cyclists are best served by limiting driveway conflict points, narrowing crossings, providing bicycle-accommodating shoulders, and designing driveway tapers and turning radii based on pedestrian and cyclist activity. Presently, these safety measures are not uniform across the area, create stressful environments for cyclists, and are largely absent from the SS4A grant application. Streets should orient themselves to their constituents, not through traffic.

Exeter’s community and professional staff indicated through multiple policies and plans that Epping Road is a corridor with incredible promise to connect businesses, residences, and natural spaces in a manner currently hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. Despite the dangerous roadway conditions at present, pedestrians and cyclists are forced into narrow shoulders with no vertical barriers protecting them from oncoming traffic. The Town of Exeter’s 2018 Master Plan identified a need to rewrite how streets are reconstructed using “Complete Streets” principles. After undergoing many iterations, the Select Board unanimously adopted Complete Streets Guidelines which are frameworks identifying bicycle and pedestrian accommodations as a critical component to future roadway reconstruction projects in the Spring of 2026.

These plans and guidelines surveyed hundreds of citizens, included focus groups from various backgrounds, and provided the Town with recommended treatments for a variety of street classifications within town. Epping Road is designated as a “Gateway” corridor and should include the following treatments:

• Lanes should be narrowed between 10 to 11 feet wide.

• For pedestrian facilities sidewalks, buffered bicycle lanes, and sidepaths are considered high priority.

• Additionally, pedestrian refuge islands, bus pull offs, street trees, and lighting are also considered high priority.

These treatments are town policy, endorsed by both the Planning and Select Boards. Our major capital improvement projects should align with these standards. These recommendations create opportunities for all people to enjoy their streets, build community, and serve the people who live and travel on this corridor.

While Exeter pursued multiple planning and construction initiatives inclusive of the Epping Road corridor, the roadway earned a high injury network designation due to serious injuries and one fatality of non-vehicle users attempting to navigate the corridor. Nationally and locally, as identified by a recent crash analysis from the New York Times and Rockingham Planning Commission, separately raise alarms with increasingly harmful accidents between motor vehicles and vulnerable road users. The RPC’s Safety Action Plan recognizes that the “Safe System Approach” which notes:

Humans make mistakes and the transportation system should be designed and operated to accommodate certain types and levels of human mistakes and avoid death and serious injuries when a crash occurs

And

Humans are vulnerable and the transportation system should be designed and operated in a manner that accommodates physical human vulnerabilities.

As proposed, Exeter’s designs do not apply “Safe System Approaches” by choosing not to address the dangerous conditions for walkers, runners, and cyclists during the 2024 Epping Road reconstruction projects and Exeter is again poised to repeat the same mistakes.

Despite nearly two decades of incremental progress towards a corridor safely accessible to all modes of travel, a 2020 VHB proposed Mid-Term conceptual buildout (pages 409-414 prepared by VHB Engineering was submitted as a major project for the Safe Streets for All grant. This plan omits many of the multi-modal desires from town and contrary to the Complete Streets Guidelines adopted earlier this year.

The report, as submitted within the SS4A grant application, does not contain any of the Complete Streets guidelines with the exception of a sidewalk located on one side of the road. By adopting this roadway plan, Exeter rejects citizens’ call for safer facilities on Epping Road in the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan and fails to meet the guidelines outlined in the Complete Streets Guidelines adopted in 2026. This project eliminates the possibility of making Epping Road a “safe street for all” and fails to utilize the Safe Systems Approach highlighted by the Rockingham Planning Commission. The proposed plan leaves no room for human error and fails to address the same errors which took the life of a cyclist on this corridor. Check out Aaron’s article on the costs of mistakes.

Exeter’s application should focus on a full buildout of separate facilities for cyclists and pedestrians which everyone can feel comfortable using. The town of Exeter and the broader community have both expressed support through formal adoption of plans and policies and through community input on the desire to make Epping Road functional for all users and to compliment the growth witnessed on Epping Road as early as 2005. A multi-modal vision for this road has existed in some form since 2005’s Epping Road Access Management Study, again in the 2018 Master Plan, in multiple Capital Improvement Plans throughout the years, and reaffirmed in the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan (2025).

Safe Streets for All Grant

Safe Streets and Roads for All, or SS4A, is a competitive federal grant program created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help regional, local, and Tribal governments prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries. The program provides $5 billion in federal funding over fiscal years 2022 through 2026 and supports both Planning and Demonstration Grants and Implementation Grants. To date, SS4A has awarded approximately $3.9 billion to more than 2,000 communities across all 50 states and Puerto Rico, with roughly $1 billion still available for the next funding round. For communities like Exeter, SS4A is especially important because it can fund not only planning work, but also the implementation of proven safety improvements on corridors where pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, and transit users face elevated risk.

In May, the Town of Exeter submitted a Safe Streets for All (SS4A) grant application to access federal funds to advance a number of long desired and recently identified pedestrian improvements. The total project budget exceeds sixteen million dollars for twenty-one identified projects largely concentrated on the NH-27 corridor including Epping Road. Epping Road is the largest project by total project cost (37.5%) and is categorized as a Gateway Street in the Complete Street Guidelines, yet the proposed treatments fail to incorporate the treatments developed through public input, focus groups, and adopted by the Planning and Select Boards.

The Safe Streets for All Grant The projects can largely be sorted by three distinct domains; pedestrian improvements, roadway and intersection improvements, and bicycle related infrastructure improvements representing 24.6%, 74.9%, and .53% respectively. Despite the publication and adoption of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan which identified improvements to cycling related infrastructure in order to improve public participation and encourage mode-shifts away from vehicles, the proposed roadway designs omit separated bicycle lanes, sidepaths, and additional pedestrian elements identified in the plan.

In total, less than 1% of the grant budget is earmarked for bicycle lanes and shoulders with no commitment for separated features. The proportionally small number of dollars allocated to this domain are intended to be spent across the six mile NH-27 project area.

The majority of the requested funds, 68.8%, move cars faster through the project areas and in many cases ignore the Complete Streets design criteria which requires safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists. Primarily focusing on throughput fails to consider the everyday experience of those who live, work, and recreate in these areas and compromises Exeter’s community and connectivity.

Epping Road may undergo the largest transportation investment in the Town’s recent history and building out a space where people feel comfortable encourages users, connects our community, and saves what could become a costly retrofit down the way. The least expensive option is a buildout designed with protected bicycle lanes and separated pathways adjacent to the roadway as requested and reflected in public sentiment and policy. Epping Road has experienced incredible changes in the past twenty years, it’s now time to build the requisite infrastructure out to enable all ages and abilities to transit this growing housing and economic hub.

If Exeter is going to spend $16 million on roadway reconstruction projects, the results should respect citizen input and calls for safer street designs, reflect adopted policy, and act in the best fiducial interests of the Town and taxpayers.

A Buildout Fully Accessible to All Users Saves from Costly Retrofits Later

Two projects included in the SS4A grant proposal located west of the Route 111A/Brentwood Road intersection to Continental Drive total 4.23 million dollars, or 41.8% of the submitted project budget for the entire grant award. As written, both projects will reconstruct the roadway including curb lines, drainage, utilities, building of retaining walls, landscaping, and sidewalk extensions. Less than 1% of the proposed grant budget is dedicated to bicycle lanes or shoulders throughout the entire identified Route 27 corridor in the grant application.

Given the growing vehicle traffic numbers on Epping Road, ensuring compliance with the adopted Complete Streets guidelines, and the fiducial duty of the town, Exeter should complete a full buildout of separated facilities to ensure the greatest return on investment for Exeter’s taxbase.

Building out separated facilities on this corridor connects hundreds of homes, businesses, and connects many of the town’s recreational facilities. Without safe and comfortable access, most individuals living on Epping Road will opt to drive less than three miles to town and further exacerbate traffic and parking issues in town. As the number of age-restricted domiciles such as the Ray Farmstead continue to grow in Exeter, alternatives to private vehicles must be created. This is consistent with the Rockingham Planning Commission’s Age Friendly Exeter assessment. The lack of safe alternatives to driving on Epping Road encourage sprawl, increasing parking demand while limiting density in this growing corridor. Finally, Exeter’s Town Forest abuts much of this corridor and attracts walkers, riders, naturalists and more to trailheads with limited parking. Expanding interconnectivity to neighborhoods and existing networks saves on costly parking lot expansions and managing overflow parking.

The least expensive time to build out practical, comfortable, and multimodal infrastructure is during full roadway reconstruction when easements are secured, utilities are arranged, and the requisite engineering can create a space for all users. Mobilizing work crews, excavation, geometry alterations and environmental permitting become exponentially more expensive following construction. The addition of sidepaths through these project areas represents an opportunity to ensure our dollars are best utilized to deliver the greatest product with the least amount of economic impact for the people of Exeter.

Build for Today’s Safety Reality

Modern roadway design recognizes that perceived safety determines whether people actually walk and bicycle. People choose facilities where they feel safe. Today’s roadways are steadily growing more dangerous and can be attributed to a variety of factors and chief among the factors are changing vehicle types. A recent New York Times analysis underscores the startling rise of serious injuries and deaths of pedestrians and cyclists. Since 2009, the number of pedestrian fatalities in the United States has risen by 75%. The stark rise in deaths of vulnerable road users is attributed in part to changing vehicle designs which favor larger SUVs and trucks. These large vehicles, by a factor of design, typically create larger blind spots, incorporate taller grills, and have steadily grown in overall size.

The Rockingham Planning Commission’s Regional Safety Action Plan reinforces why Epping Road deserves more than incremental improvements. Across the RPC region, the High Injury Network represents only 7% of the roadway network but accounts for 35% of fatal, serious injury, and minor injury crashes. Pedestrians and bicyclists are especially vulnerable: 57% of crashes involving non-motorized vulnerable users resulted in a fatal, serious, or minor injury, and 89% occurred away from intersections. These findings point to a clear conclusion: safety on corridors like Epping Road cannot be solved only with isolated intersection upgrades. It requires corridor-wide design that reduces speed, improves visibility, provides safer crossings, and separates vulnerable users from motor vehicle traffic wherever feasible.

The proposed Epping Road design plans leaves vulnerable road users extremely exposed should a motorist experience an “accident”. The proposed Epping Road design leaves vulnerable road users extremely exposed and directly heightens the consequences of a motorist making a mistake. Something we would likely call an “accident”, but in reality there are easily avoidable flaws baked into the design that contribute to increased injury and fatality rates.

As currently planned, the Epping Road redesign does not go far enough to address the safety realities facing people walking and bicycling today. Nationally, pedestrian fatalities have risen sharply, while vehicles have become larger, heavier, and more dangerous to vulnerable road users. In that context, Exeter should not rebuild a High Injury Network corridor in a way that depends on driver caution alone. The corridor should be designed to reduce risk, lower speeds, improve visibility, and provide meaningful separation for people outside of vehicles.

Build for Human Behavior

Exeter’s adopted Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan makes clear that successful bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure is not measured only by whether people are legally allowed to use a road. It is measured by whether people feel safe and comfortable enough to actually walk or bicycle there. The plan identifies “Lack of Separation from Traffic” as the top bicycling stress factor among survey respondents, selected by 60% of respondents. It also found that traffic-separated bicycling and walking paths were the improvement most likely to increase walking and bicycling, with 52% of respondents saying those investments would make them much more likely to walk or bicycle. The plan further notes that survey respondents expressed a strong preference for facilities separated from traffic, and cites national findings that traffic-separated facilities reduce bicycling stress and increase bicycle trips.

This local finding is consistent with national guidance. The Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) bikeway guidance recognizes that higher-speed and higher-volume roadways require greater separation between people bicycling and motor vehicle traffic, and identifies separated bicycle lanes as appropriate on arterials and other roads with higher vehicle speeds and volumes. The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) All Ages and Abilities guidance similarly emphasizes that bikeways should be designed for comfort, not merely for confident riders, and that safe, connected, low-stress facilities encourage more people to ride. Locally, the Rockingham Planning Commission’s 2025 Regional Safety Plan calls for enhanced protections for vulnerable road users on high injury networks such as Epping Road. Together, these national references support the same conclusion reached through Exeter’s public engagement: on corridors like Epping Road where traffic speed, volume, corridor width, and crash risk create stress for vulnerable users, separated facilities are not an amenity. They are the design response most consistent with modern bicycle and pedestrian safety design practice.

Pedestrian comfort should not be a secondary or even tertiary design consideration. Designs should incorporate attributes which encourage people to use these spaces. The inclusion of street trees and benches into the final design reduces heat exposure, serves as a traffic calming measure, and meets the call for creating spaces that are “all ages and abilities’. A buildout lacking shade creates dangerous conditions as heat wave frequency increases and Exeter’s summers steadily grow warmer. Paired with street trees, benches offer respite for those pursuing active travel across the Epping Road corridor. If Exeter is considering spending millions of dollars on this corridor, the end product should be built for the broader community and the climate which Exeter faces in the coming decades.

Exeter’s Values Should Not Take A Backseat to Federal Dollars

The award of a Safe Streets for All (SS4A) grant would inject millions of dollars of federal dollars into Exeter’s roadways. In the rush to submit the grant proposal, Exeter diverges from adopted policy, longstanding planning reports informed by community input, and fails to recognize the growing danger to pedestrians and cyclists on today’s roads.

Epping Road projects represent 42% of the grant application, but prioritizes the throughput of motor vehicles to the detriment of walkers, cyclists, and those who volunteered their time to provide input in various planning documents. The VHB Mid-Term proposal was dated in 2020 in regards to national standards for bicycle and pedestrian inclusion. In 2026, the proposed plan fails to align with Rockingham Planning Commission’s Regional Safety Action Plan recommendations for high injury networks which encourages engineering solutions to improve the safety for vulnerable road users over the status quo: rolling the die on another serious injury or fatality on Exeter’s roadways.

The SS4A project represents one of the most significant transportation safety investments in Exeter’s history. This reconstruction provides an opportunity to strengthen multimodal connectivity, incorporate greater separation for vulnerable road users, and ensure that investments on High Injury Network corridors reflect the principles adopted through years of community planning. The discussion now is not whether the project should move forward, but how it can most fully realize the vision the community has already embraced.

Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, July 1st 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, July 13th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, July 13th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
La Festa
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Exeter’s Housing Woes

Megan Spencer has lived in Exeter for four years and has been on its Housing Advisory Committee for the last two. It holds once-a-month meetings that anyone can join. Ms. Spencer’s interest is in expanding housing diversity in Exeter, and allowing multi-family housing in single-family zoning. She came to talk about her role in the community and ask for ideas that could be beneficial to Exeter.

The meeting was quite a large gathering of people and many attendees were sharing their own stories of housing woes. A woman explained that her and her partner are both gainfully employed and still struggled to afford a house in the area. I myself know of several individuals who looked for housing for quite a while and ended up settling for a house that was far from where than they originally wanted to live.

While there is absolutely a policy challenge for Exeter, Megan also highlighted the cultural component present in the conversation around housing. Residents pushback on many proposed developments for different reasons and she wants to work to change the narrative on building more housing in her town. This is a big task, but the energy in the room was excited about finding a solution and discovering ways to move the needle towards more housing diversity in Exeter.

Dover’s Transportation Aspirations

We took a second look at the upcoming transportation chapter update for Dover’s Master Plan, this time with the chair of Dover’s Transportation Advisory Commission, Kean McDermott. Kean is also a member of the steering committee for the transportation chapter update, and the committee recently met to discuss the timeline of the update effort, review the current chapter, and plan public outreach efforts. A couple of Strong Towns Seacoast members attended this meeting and spoke about a few items that we would like to see in the chapter update. I also took notes on the meeting and we discussed these with Kean.

For his part, Kean said he wanted to capture the Dutch concept of “woonerf“, or “living streets“ in the chapter update. These streets are primarily designed to be a shared space for residents, cyclists, and the community at large. Automobiles are still welcome, but they are not the dominant participant of the street. A similar concept is the idea of “play streets“ where streets are temporarily closed down to automobile traffic to host community events and encourage gatherings. Something like this could be really beneficial for Dover as there are plenty of good candidates where this could be tried.

Conclusion

Engagement at our Exeter meetings is really growing. I’m very proud of what our leaders in Exeter, Ben and Silas, have accomplished. They are tackling big topics, bringing excited people into the conversation, and motivating them to participate in the local conversation. Our advocacy in Dover is maturing and we are improving our network and relationships with city officials. I will be delivering a presentation to city engineering staff about Strong Towns ideas later this month and we have several improvements in the city that we can point to as testaments to our successful advocacy. Thank you so much for reading! If you are in the Seacoast region and are interested in these ideas, I would love to hear from you or to meet you at one of our in-person meetings.

Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, July 1st 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, July 13th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
New Location
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, July 13th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
New Location
La Festa
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

What Fragility Means

Cities and towns are municipal corporations. To avoid getting into the legal weeds, I want to be direct in how this applies to our topic: this corporation is publicly owned and forms the governance of the land area that makes up a city or town or what we can refer to as a municipality. It is the custodian of the city, handles its operations, policy adoption, and all of the little things that we expect our local governments to do. For a municipality, fragility typically looks like a reduction in options and ability that can affect it’s fulfillment of obligations. In practice, fragility looks like having to raise taxes, triaging which infrastructure gets repaired and which doesn’t, lowering the quality of services or neglecting them, and also having poor leverage in negotiating deals. In short, it looks like a corporation that struggles fulfill its basic operations.

Municipalities Must Match Long-term Spending to Long-term Revenue

This framing points out that we need think about the municipality in a fiscally responsible way, or else it could fail. This failure manifests in different ways, bankruptcy is rare, and typically the failure is more subtle. It usually plays out with the municipality becoming a less and less pleasant place to live and the local government increasingly hamstrung to do anything about that. While the main goal of a municipality is not profit, it does need to make one in order to sustain itself into the future. If a city continuously operates at a financial loss, it will find itself in an increasingly fragile state where the promises of the past are coming due, but there is no budget to meet them. To avoid this, the decisions that municipalities make using the public wallet should ultimately create a return on public investment. It should create wealth, over time, for the municipality and its residents.

We need to ask these questions when we are thinking about publicly investing into new developments. Does this public investment motivate private investment that will translate into additional taxable value that offsets the cost? This is why Strong Towns cares about land productivity, because it is a signal for what is earning money and what is costing money. When you look at a value-per-acre map of Dover (or any city in the Seacoast) you can distinctly see where the downtowns are located because of their high value-per-acre. Whereas the further you get from the city’s core, the lower the values are.

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Consider that for a moment. That means that our centuries old downtown development pattern along with all of the historic buildings surrounding it are outperforming newly built developments on value-per-acre. This matters because public obligations increase with the amount of infrastructure that must be maintained whereas taxable value increases based on the amount of private investment present. This outperformance is evidence of how well the development pattern is working. When you consider the additional amount of infrastructure that surrounds new developments (traffic lights, parking lots, turning lanes, etc.) you can see that the number of obligations is increased relative to the more distributed private investments that are present. This increases fragility and municipalities should be pursuing development patterns that create strength over time.

The Signs of Fragility

You can start to see the signs of this manifest with the decisions that your municipality makes, the conditions of its built environment, and it’s socioeconomics. The obvious signs look like unmaintained infrastructure or a decline in service quality. However, there are less visible signs that can be more difficult to diagnose without looking into the financials of your municipality’s operations.

Surviving on Grant Money

We are all familiar with the pothole that hasn’t been fixed in years or the sidewalk that is crumbling apart. Municipalities often rely on securing state or federal grants before they will plan a street reconstruction and this can leave some streets in dire conditions. I had a discussion with Dover’s City Engineers who revealed to me that the city has a $30+ million backlog on just sidewalks alone, not to mention the rest of their infrastructure. This means that they have to triage where to fix things, and where to let things continue to decay. It also means that grant money is hugely helpful in relieving this stress.

However, grants typically come with strings attached and this means that a municipality must conform its projects to the grant instead of to the community. Decisions change, plans change, morals change, all to satisfy the grant. The direction that your city wants to move in, that residents want to pursue, is only permissible to the degree grants will allow. Your town’s identity is up for sale.

This is not a unique issue to Dover and lots of municipalities operate like this. Though, let’s ask the question: If a municipality’s infrastructure requires grant money to successfully maintain it, what happens if no grants can be secured? Can a municipality support it’s own weight if the crutches of external financing were taken away? The reason to build infrastructure, the reason to spend public money on this public good, is to grow the wealth of the public. If the infrastructure we are building is going unmaintained due to financial stress, then it is failing that job.

If you survive on grant money, you starve when it isn’t available. A poster child for this is the COAST Bus service. Around 80% of their funding comes from federal grants, with only 6% coming from ridership. This service could likely be eliminated with the stroke of a pen from the federal government. That’s a possible reality that is currently looming over our primary transit service. Without strong, financially independent legs to stand on, these projects and services are in a fragile state and our municipalities will struggle to save them if the need arises.

Necessary and Painful Growth

The housing crisis has gotten a little crazy over the last few years and municipalities everywhere (except for perhaps Newington) are examining ways to help alleviate it. Despite this obvious necessity for an increased housing supply, abutters and residents still regularly show up to push back on new developments. However, before we call them cold-hearted NIMBYs, let’s try to understand the several valid issues that they are bringing forward. “Character of the neighborhood” arguments aside, many opposing residents will cite traffic and parking concerns, water, sewage, drainage, snow removal, and a host of other genuine problems that an increased housing supply could bring. At our most recent Exeter meeting a member mentioned that our region is currently in a water ban and asked why towns should want new developments if we don’t even have enough water for our current ones.

These are important concerns to alleviate if a municipality wants to make cultural and political headway against opposition to housing and development. They need to be addressed in order to bring community support to resolving these issues. Adding more people, more housing, and more traffic to an area that isn’t set up for it is painful. Current residents expect to feel that pain and remember, most of our municipalities can’t even maintain their infrastructure without grants, much less expand capacity.

The municipality is between a rock and a hard place. It needs more growth to start to catch up on its financial woes. It needs those new developments to grow the tax base and increase land productivity. However, the current development patterns are stressed by this growth and threaten to degrade the standard of living residents are accustomed to. Imagine running a business where every new customer that you took on created losses or break even revenues to provide them service. Even if that business could figure out the break even point for every customer, the moment there was any challenges (a storm that causes damages or some other circumstance) it would create a crisis. Should we continue to use the same development patterns that have led us to this fragile situation?

The reality is that growth shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t be necessary. Growth should be the natural byproduct of a successful community, not a requirement to balance the budgets. More people showing up shouldn’t overwhelm our services. I had a conversation with the Director of Dover’s Community Services about their struggle to keep the sidewalks clear in winter compared to Newmarket and his response was telling. He said that Dover’s larger and more complex infrastructure network prevented it from being as effective in winter maintenance as Newmarket. His claim is that Newmarket’s smaller infrastructure footprint is beneficial to the town’s operations. However, if you look at size, Dover has more than 3x the population of Newmarket, yet it is not 3x more capable. Is that the mark of a successful development pattern? More people should mean more wealth, talent, skills, options, and contributions to the public wallet that finance our services. Instead those services are challenged and stressed by this growth.

Conclusion

The diagnosis of America’s dominant development pattern as the source of fragility is the heart of the Strong Towns message. Decisions of the past are what led us here, and most people that I know who work in municipalities are looking for a solution to these issues. They are genuine people who want to do well in their roles, but they are operating in a stressed and fragile system that is limiting their politically painless decisions. The Strong Towns Approach is attempt to push back on ideas that have led us to this situation. We are trying to advocate for a change in direction towards a system that creates strength instead of fragility. If that is something that you would like to be a part of I would love to have you at a future in-person meeting to help us advocate this message. Thank you for reading.

Meetings/Membership-Dover/2026-05-11-STS-Membership (Lower Central Ave)/Photos/Optimized/IMG20260511192041.jpg
Attendees to our Dover in-person meeting at the lovely, new Juniper Kitchen location

Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, June 3rd 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, June 8th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
New Location
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, June 8th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
La Festa
New Location
300 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Illegal Parking Spots

The parking spots that we are looking at today have city-provided markings to indicate that these spots are available to the public despite them being in violation of state law. One of our Exeter leaders put together a GIS tool to help us document issues like these and we will be using that to keep track of these issues. So, let’s go through the list.

Exeter

Front at Center

Water at String Bridge

Dover

Central at First

Central at First (Unmarked)

First at Central

Washington at Locust

St. Thomas at Locust

Central at St. Thomas

Hale at Central

Central Midblock near Williams

Lower Central Avenue Upcoming Reconstruction

At our Dover meeting we also looked at the upcoming Lower Central Avenue reconstruction project. Dover’s City Engineers were kind enough to share the designs with us prior to their presentation on the 19th (which Eric Leaver and myself attended). Overall the design is not too bad, but it also doesn’t seem focused on completely solving the traffic issues present with that section of the street.

There are lots of good things in this design, much needed reductions in lane widths, bike lanes, better sidewalks, bump outs for crosswalks, and more. There was a genuine effort here to consider these other modes of transportation and the design firm said that they wanted this to be considered a “gateway” into Dover. It should set up automobiles for entering into the downtown of the city. While there are some good things, there are some concerns that we have as well.

The most obvious issue is the presence of parking lanes while the eastern side of the street lacks a bike lane for most of its length. This is supposed to be a complete streets project, which means that it is meant to facilitate biking, walking, and driving, but nowhere in Dover’s Complete Streets Guidelines does it mention prioritizing parking. We brought this issue up with the city and are hopefully going to resolve it in favor of prioritizing bicycle infrastructure.

Conclusion

Looking at these parking spots, there seems to be either legal ignorance or an unwillingness to follow this law. Some of these violations are excessive, being less than 5’ in a few cases. If all of these parking spots were removed you would have lost about a dozen spots in Dover and X spots in Exeter. That might seem like a lot, but it is important to understand that the price of those spots is street safety. Their presence makes it more dangerous to cross the street in many instances, especially for smaller humans that are easily hidden behind a parked automobile. Many people are very sensitive to the loss of parking spots, but I think we should be even more sensitive to the danger and discomfort that these parking spots create in our communities. Let’s make the decision and choose safety first.

Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, June 3rd 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, May 11th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
New Location!
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH 03820

Seacoast Social

Monday, May 11th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Dover’s Housing Affordability Crisis

The tools that we will be using today are Zillow and Data Census. Our goal is to get a clearer understanding of how many rental and housing units are available in Dover, what do the income groups look like, and how does the price of housing match up to those income groups. Let’s start by establishing our household income groups.

Now that we know roughly what income groups make up Dover, we can look at the rental rates and supply to see how affordable they are to Dover’s population.

Housing Supply in Dover

Zillow supplies us with the number of rentals in Dover, what their bedroom count is, and what is the average cost. We can use this data to get an idea of Dover’s rental market.

Now, let’s do the same for housing listings on Zillow.com.

From these data sets you can easily see that Dover doesn’t have a ton of inventory on the market and what is there is quite expensive. Housing in particular is difficult with the vast majority of listings being an average of $800k or higher. Let’s find out just how expensive it is by comparing these prices to our income groups to see who can actually afford to live in Dover and who is priced out.

So, that is a picture of housing availability and cost in Dover. It is kind of grim outlook to be honest, especially considering that the average income in Dover is $94k. That means that most people who live here are below the affordability threshold. Also, out of Dover’s 33,000 residents and 15000 households, only around 200-300 units are available. Do family members from the upcoming generation even have the option of staying in Dover when they get old enough to move out?

Cost-Burdened Households

Let’s make one last graph that shows what percentage of Dover’s population can’t afford the current market.

When a household is “cost-burdened”, that affects many of the decisions that they can make in their lives. What jobs they can take, how often they go out to eat, and how much they participate in the local economy. When you combine this cost with the fact that living in Dover practically requires an automobile for every adult and you have even more burden for each household. This is a hardship that many people are facing and it is up to the City of Dover to do something about it. May I recommend the city try to implement our Strong Towns recommendations as a start?

Conclusion

This was a challenging article for me because it required a lot of research in areas that I am unfamiliar with and graphics to help effectively convey the problem. Again, a huge thank you to Nicole for helping with this. Those charts filled with Xs are so sad to look at and clearly shows that something is wrong with the housing market. One of the biggest surprises to me was just how few starter homes are available for sale. Less than 15 homes with 2 bedrooms or fewer are currently listed. While all of this paints a devastating picture for the immediate market, if this problem isn’t properly addressed the upcoming generation is going to be completely shut out from owning property and will struggle to even rent. That’s a serious blow to maintaining community as those children will be required to move away to another area or maybe fight their siblings over their parent’s estates. Though, as sad as things look, Dover recently held a workshop intending to help mitigate this problem and they have some decent ideas. Much of this problem is actually policy-based and Strong Towns Seacoast will be there to advocate for policy change to allow more housing to be built.

2026 May Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, May 6th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, May 11th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
442 Central Ave, Dover, NH 03820 (New Location!)

Seacoast Social

Monday, May 11th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

A Plan Needs Action to Succeed

Looking at the current transportation chapter that has been guiding policy in Dover I have mixed feelings, and it doesn’t just come from the document itself. Many of the ideas captured in this document are things that I agree with and advocate for frequently. There is mention of prioritizing walking and cycling, traffic calming, robust transit, and it even goes so far as to suggest that car-free life in Dover should be possible.

That’s great stuff on paper, but it needs action to actually happen. I’ve written in the past that Dover is daydreaming when it comes to building a cycling-friendly city and how their complete streets efforts have fallen short of their goals. Dover finds itself saying that it wants to accomplish features that align with our Strong Towns advocacy, however there are many cases where Dover staff have voted against bike lanes or crosswalks on certain streets. We have put together documents of recommendations only to see them watered down, voted against, or just narrowly succeeding at Dover’s Transportation Advisory Commission.

Becoming a walkable, bike-friendly city where car-free life is possible doesn’t happen by itself. It takes strategy and action. I want to be fair to Dover staff and elected officials and mention that they have been supportive of several of our initiatives and have even taken action that we advocated for at board meetings. I have had multiple meetings with them to discuss ideas, even one with Dover’s Planning Director to talk about these very concerns. I am convinced that Dover isn’t just talking, that they actually do want to see these changes. I believe they just don’t have the proper toolsets or the incentive to move quickly.

They use tools such as the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), grade streets using “level of service“, and use a functional classification system that implicitly describes the purpose of each street according to the automobile access it provides. All of these tools have been used for decades in designing automobile-dominant places and do not have a great track record of doing otherwise. They are not great tools to work with when wanting to build walking, bikeable places. Also, Dover operates with the pace of government efficiency, which is to make big plans, do a lot at once, and then do very little in between. The city has financial and liability incentives to wait until all of the pieces are aligned. This approach is slow, methodical, and leaves communities waiting for years, maybe even a decade for a known problem to be solved.

Ideas for Planning Transportation in Dover

We want to help address both the pace and misaligned toolsets that Dover operates with. So, we discussed three ideas that could help Dover move the needle in that direction.

A Budget for Demonstration Projects

Strong Towns is all about identifying problems and doing what you can with what you have. This is an approach that is lighter on planning and heavier on action and experimentation. The pursuit of federal grants to make big plans slows everything down, meanwhile the problems persist while Dover chases after funding. We shouldn’t have to wait for external money to solve our problems, Dover can take charge and address many street safety concerns with a installation of temporary materials with a demonstration project.

We think this should be an action item added to the Master Plan with “Immediate” priority. In our discussion, there was an uncertainty about where this demonstration project money should be located, such as the CIP or elsewhere in the budgeting process. We intend to reach out to a city councilor for advice on this.

Acknowledge that Automobile Speed is Harmful to Communities

The current Master Plan’s vision for 2023 indicates that “vehicular traffic volumes and speeds are well managed” and wants “traffic-calming measures to manage speed”. They even have a section where they highlight that a majority of streets (~66%) see excessive speeding above the posted speed limit when measuring the 85th percentile. There is a dedicated section to traffic calming and Dover even has a list of ways to implement these ideas.

After all this focus on speed and talk about traffic calming that we see in the Master Plan, how many chicanes do you see in Dover? Are speed bumps, raised crosswalks, or raised intersections common? The number of neckdowns in the city is probably in the single digits, much lower than the number of crosswalks in areas that are known for speeding. If you go on Facebook it isn’t uncommon to see residents complaining about speed on their streets. Dover knows that speeding is a problem and that residents don’t like it. Speeding is a frequent complaint to the police and one of the most discussed topics at Dover’s Transportation Advisory Commission. The city is aware of it, but there doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency in eliminating it.

That’s why we need to label it as something that is urgent. Automobile speeds above 20mph are harmful to our communities. It makes our places dangerous. It makes crossing the street a life-risking endeavor. It transforms streets from being walkable, bikeable places where people can feel comfortable and safe into hostile, anti-human environments. Streets should be connective tissue for our communities, not barriers to overcome. Dover needs to acknowledge the communal harm that high automobile speeds are actively causing in every neighborhood. There needs to be an urgency to resolving this issue and Dover needs to stop observing the problem and take action. Speed is harmful to our streets.

Robust Transit is Useful and Frequent

Dover is very lucky to be served by so many transit agencies in the region. The Downeaster, COAST, Wildcat, and C&J all have stops in Dover and there are people who use these services all the time. I’m not going to undercut any of the importance of these services, but let’s ask a direct question on them and be honest with our answer. Given the choice to drive or take the bus, which option is your preference?

In most scenarios, if someone has the option to drive themselves they will choose that option. This is the hurdle that transit in the United States struggles to overcome in many areas and the Seacoast is not unique here. The offerings of transit are expansive, you can take a bus from Dover to Rochester, Somersworth, Kittery, Portsmouth, Newington, and Durham. You can take the train to Boston, Portland, and beyond. Though, if you have the choice to drive yourself it is almost always the preferred option.

Cities spend millions of dollars building parking garages and making room for automobiles to be temporarily stored on their streets. Snow is usually plowed from street parking within 24 hours. Meanwhile, buses have an hour gap between each ride, the last bus to Portsmouth leaves Dover at 6:30PM, and the transportation center in Dover doesn’t even have benches sit on. Many of the bus stops are just signs in the grass with little else to denote their location. The Downeaster has five trains a day in each direction, which works out to about one every 3 hours over their 14-hour service window. This makes planning trips tricky and their prices rarely beat the cost of parking if you are traveling with at least one other person. This gap in usability is huge and contributes to many people who would normally be interested in transit just choosing another option.

For transit to be considered robust, it needs to be a competitive option for travel and that means it needs to be frequent and connect people to useful destinations. There’s a lot more to say here about what makes good transit, but the key factor is that it needs to be viable and comfortable. When provided the choice between taking the bus or driving yourself, there needs to be good reasons to choose transit. Dover can make some easy choices here to make transit more comfortable, such as providing benches at transit stops. Though, in reality the transit agencies themselves are going to have to close this gap. The issue here isn’t necessarily funding, and perhaps the funding sources are contributors to the problem. The fact is that the quality of the service they provide is going to have to step up. Again, there is a lot left unsaid here. Our first recommendation is to focus on making one strong, reliable route and build from there.

Conclusion

Dover has an opportunity to make the next decade of transportation planning positive and impactful. If they want to make actual progress on their goals they are going to have to confront reality head-on and deal with the fact that you cannot build walkable, bikeable cities by prioritizing automobile traffic flow and parking. The designs of streets need to shift their priorities to make sure that they are living up to Dover’s aspirations. This is a chance to reaffirm Dover’s vision for its transportation future and Strong Towns Seacoast will be there to help out where it can.

2026 Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, April 13th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, April 13th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Power of an Hour

Saturday, April 25th 9:30AM - 10:30AM
Located in Dover at Ward-Specific Locations
Event Details

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, May 6th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Moving a Mountain of Trash

First, let’s talk about the amazing accomplishments of the Power of an Hour event. In just its first year it attracted 280+ people who gathered one ton of trash! Each year large groups of people gathered to go out and clean up their city.

Remember, all of this is done in just a single hour. It really shows just how much people can accomplish if they put just a little bit of time into pursuing a goal. Dover has cleaner streets, parks, schools, and neighborhoods because of the hundreds of volunteers that show up to these events. While the Power of an Hour event may be special in its size, Don’t Trash Dover actually organizes one-hour trash pickups every single month. Sister organizations in neighboring Barrington, Rochester, and Somersworth do the same.

Creating Relationships and Community

Events like these get people to meet face-to-face, spend time with each other, and provide opportunities to regularly interact with one another. My wife and I have attended these events and made connections with people who live in our city that we otherwise would not have met. Now, there are more recognizable faces when we go to the grocery store or walk around downtown. All because we picked up trash together.

Deb has a history of inspiring people and getting them to show up. Recently she organized over a hundred people to visit and say goodbye to a beloved community member, Cliff Blake. Cliff was well known for his volunteering, and regularly attended Don’t Trash Dover events. I myself had met him once before seeing him at a trash pickup, but those monthly interactions gave me more of a chance to get to know him and actually connect. This kind of stuff is the intangible value of community, the type of thing that is difficult to measure and weigh.

Building Pride in Places

Another effect of events like these is that it calls on people to care about their city, their places. When people see litter covering streets, that affects how they think of that place and how they treat it. In an interview I conducted with a real-estate developer, he told me that his secret to preventing people from trashing up his developments was to not allow any trash to accumulate in the first place. He said that people hesitate to trash a clean area much more than a trashy one. It changes how people interact with that place. People can feel when a place is cared for, and when it isn’t.

This pride in our places is something that our built environments communicate as well. People seek out beautiful places. they are drawn to areas that are built for humans by humans. Well maintained streets, sidewalks, parks, and environments inspire people and move them. The harsh truth is that people don’t give a crap about crappy places.

Building Your Own Mountain Out of a Molehill

Believe it or not, this event wasn’t started by some large company or an established non-profit. It was started by one woman who just wanted to pick up trash where she could. Other people noticed and wanted to join in. She started inviting people once a month, and what started with just one person now attracts hundreds. Small actions can lead to big differences.

Conclusion

We need more events that connect people and built community. We also need more people to care about the well-being of their places if we are going to build strong towns together. Events like these are a huge win for a community and can do so much good. It’s also ok for things to start small, sometimes even with just one or two people. Doing what you can with what you have is the first step. With that in mind I will ask something of you: Do what you can to make your town a strong town.

However, this is no longer how our places typically develop. Today if a city wants to make a change to its infrastructure, it starts out by planning and seeking funding, usually from state or federal sources. Cities can spend years, sometimes decades doing this, then once the plan and funding are secured there is sudden and dramatic investment that pours into the city. Years of stagnation and decline are quickly paved over to implement a design that is meant to last 30+ years. This is not an incremental process.

This new method leaves our places in an extended state of decline and can leave known safety issues in place for years. The small, incremental investment pattern on the other hand, can address those problems much faster and bring new life to places without the need for a large funding source or large planning efforts. It can steadily improve over time, learning in each phase what the next step should be. We are proposing that Exeter apply these ideas to achieve better safety in their downtown sooner, rather than later.

2026 April Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, April 1st 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, April 13th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, April 13th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Exeter Meeting

Ben and Silas led this month’s Exeter meeting with an impressive presentation on a number of demonstration projects we are considering for the town. They have put together several projects that each consist of a four phase plan with lots of detail as to what defines each stage and images to visualize what it could look like. The approach of using phases as descriptions of investment levels and the permanence of the design isn’t meant to serve as a strict design or blueprint for the final result. It is more like guidance through the iterations of the project.

The goal here is to give each phase some breathing room to collect feedback after implementation. Starting with low-cost, easily moveable materials in phase 1, we can see what works and what doesn’t. Then in phase 2 you can make adjustments as needed while adding higher cost elements with confidence. This is incremental in both cost and design, letting the Town of Exeter move towards improvement instead of waiting for funding while safety concerns still haunt the city.

Phase 1

This phase is meant to be as quick and painless as possible. This strategy could be as simple as some brightly colored paint to extend curbs or marking bike lanes and low cost items such traffic cones can be used to help communicate the new design. The goal for Phase 1 is to demonstrate that low-cost solutions stand out enough to make a positive difference in safety. It is also a great time to collect public feedback about the new design. It is iterative and involves trial and error which lets cities quickly respond to feedback and use that to determine what the next steps for Phase 2 should be.

Phase 2

Using the feedback from Phase 1, we can start to increase our public investment into elements that feel more permanent, but can still be taken down if necessary. This can include flexible, vertical posts, crates, large planters, and other elements that improve safety and solidify the design.

Phase 3

Now we begin to introduce more concrete elements, literally. Flexible posts might be converted into concrete bollards, Jersey barriers can be installed in areas that need horizontal protection, and outdoor furniture can be used in areas to engage in placemaking. This stage reimagines what large areas of asphalt could become if it is dedicated to residents and people, instead of traffic.

Phase 4

The final phase is when permanent elements are put into place. Moving curbs, putting in signs, adding amenities, and cementing the project as a part of the community. All of the feedback, trial and error, and overall learning experience gained in the preceding phases can now be applied with confidence.

Applying this in Exeter

Ben and Silas deserve a huge shoutout here for the work that they have done and we already have some ideas for how to use this process to pursue safety in Downtown Exeter. We have put together images and documents to present to the town and are engaging in conversations and attending public meetings to push for this. I personally am really looking forward to seeing the results of these efforts and hopefully we can see some safer streets in Exeter relatively soon.

Seacoast Meeting

For our Seacoast meeting, we took a look at the work that Progress Portsmouth has been doing in advocating for housing reform in Portsmouth, NH. Myself and another member met with one of the co-founders of Progress Portsmouth, Gerry Duffy, to talk about their Housing Action Plan and look for opportunities for overlap in advocacy. Their plan is very well crafted and presented on their website and they are actively tracking each initiative. Very inspiring and impressive stuff.

We talked about the benefits of having a website to present a structured view of our ongoing advocacy, but ultimately the maintenance for such a project seemed to big of an effort. While it could be good for us to have a place to point people to, we started to think about what is really impactful about Progress Portsmouth’s project. After consideration, I think that their efforts to visualize the data have helped them to clearly communicate the gravity of the challenges they are facing. We think our group could engage in this as well, even without maintaining a website.

Visualize the Conversation

Being able to graphically represent the data helps align the conversation between people and focuses the discussion. It reduces handwaving problems and ensures that we are communicating in a way that is easy to understand and share. This type of communication takes effort, but much less so than a website and is more manageable for our group. I’ll be looking for opportunities for us to do this in the future and hopefully our readers and followers on social media will be able see some of that work in the near future.

2026 March Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, March 4th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, Monday 9th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, March 9th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Clearing the Snow

We went out on Saturday, February 21st and cleared snow along the trail at Scenic Drive. There are two wooden fences here where snow had collected and we set to work.

I was so thankful for everyone that showed up and to the members that planned the event. I was really proud of the work we did here. Just a few people, a snowblower, and an afternoon was enough to clear out weeks of built up snow and ice. This is the power of strong citizens, of people who care about a place. If you live in Dover, I hope you enjoy the cleared off Community Trail!

2026 March Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, March 4th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, Monday 9th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, March 9th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Dover Community Trail Snow Cleanup

Saturday, February 21st, 12:30PM
Meet where the trail crosses Folsom St

Exeter Mountain Bike Trails

At our Exeter meeting this month we had Toby Ferdyn with Fork Rock Riders come by to discuss their efforts in preserving mountain bike trails in Exeter and the challenges that come with it. With over 2,000 members, this group advocates, fund raises, and performs trail work on privately held parcels and with permission on town owned lands. to discuss their efforts in preserving mountain bike trails in Exeter and the challenges that come with it. Our hope was to identify overlapping goals between our two groups.

Recreation seekers are still mourning the loss of the Rugg Property which fell through at the last hour. Despite the deal falling through, Fort Rock Riders appealed to the town’s conservation commission to inventory and draft a master plan for Exeter’s trail network. Once complete, Fort Rock Riders, with the assistance of the town, look to build out a variety of different trails with various difficulty.

Of particular note, Fort Rock Riders is interested in establishing a network of easy or accessible trails to facilitate access to different parts of the network from different trailheads. As it stands currently, most of the trails are far too technical for anyone other than experienced mountain bikers.

One of the primary challenges we discussed was parking at the trail heads. Because Exeter doesn’t much bicycle infrastructure or safe areas to use bicycles as transportation, the safest way to arrive at this recreational spot is by automobile. We talked about ways of connecting nearby parking lots or even the downtown to this location. Connecting these trails to destination points combined with the group’s effort to make some easier trails would effectively create an accessible transportation network between Exeter and Newfields.

Exeter Complete Streets Update

Strong Towns Seacoast has been deeply involved in the steering Exeter’s Complete Streets Design Guidelines to ensure that all users, abilities, and modes are thoughtfully included in future roadway redesign projects. Although this document is not perfect, it represents meaningful progression for Exeter in accessibility, safety, and balancing automobile traffic throughput with other modes of transport. Exeter’s progress in finalizing a complete-streets plan reached a major milestone mid-February. After iterating on the Complete Streets Design Guidelines, Exeter’s Planning Board received feedback on their latest document draft from the Principal Transportation Planner at Rockingham Planning Commission.

The Planning Board gave a warm response to the document and recognizing that the streets in Exeter are not safe. During public comment, two residents called on the town to take action to remedy problematic intersections. Strong Towns Seacoast will continue to advocate for all users, all modes, and importantly, all abilities to be able to safely move through town. If you share these concerns we encourage you to share it with the Select and Planning Boards as well as the Department of Public Works via phone or email.

Clearing the Snow

After releasing our previous newsletter, we decided to step up and take action on clearing snow off of some of Dover’s pedestrian infrastructure. Along Dover’s Community Trail there is a section at Scenic Drive that weaves between two fences. It has been filled up with snow, making it difficult for pedestrians to pass, and fairly impossible for cyclists, strollers, and disabled users.. We will be out there this upcoming Saturday (February 21st at 12:30pm) with a snow blower and some shovels doing the work. If we make good time on the effort, we might also do the stairs that lead from the Community Trail to Silver Street. We welcome anyone to join us and help out and if you have extra shovels/scrapers, please bring them!

Dover’s Master Plan

At our Seacoast meeting we talked about Dover’s upcoming Master Plan updates for its Land Use and Transportation chapters. At the time of the meeting the Land Use chapter was going to a final public hearing the following Tuesday, so we discussed it and myself and one other member prepared remarks for that hearing. We asked the city to make a few changes, but ultimately, the Planning Board decided to adopt the document without our recommendations.

While we were hopeful for a different outcome, I took this as a lesson on how to handle influencing the Transportation chapter. I reached out to Donna Benton, Dover’s Director of Planning, and asked how Strong Towns Seacoast can be a part of preparing the document that will end up being voted on. With the information she provided, I applied to be on the steering committee for the Transportation Chapter update and will hopefully be one of the residents selected to be included. Instead of waiting for a public hearing to ask for changes to an already defined document, we are trying to be involved at a much earlier stage.

Dover’s current Transportation chapter has many ambitious goals such as multi-modal streets and being a city where car ownership is optional. Over the last decade of having this vision for Dover’s future, I don’t see much forward momentum towards meaningfully achieving these outcomes. I don’t blame Dover here, there are tools that have been embedded in the process and work against the outcomes that Dover is seeking. Perhaps I should write a more detailed article on this, but things like the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) and a hierarchical street classification both contribute to automobile-centric designs. Because of this, I suspect that any Master Plan document will struggle to overcome the inertia of federal and state transportation standards which primarily value automobile movement. Nonetheless, if I am selected for this committee I will continue to push for a transportation system worthy of a Strong Town.

Conclusion

Exeter is just starting its work towards acknowledging that streets should be designed for everyone, and Dover is over a decade into that effort. Sadly, it’s a difficult nut to crack and Dover’s present transportation system is still heavily biased towards automobiles, even in its downtown. It requires changing the conversation on who streets should serve and valuing the movement and safety of people first, not just automobiles. Even more challenging, you have to go against the grain of accepted standards and financing mechanisms. Even if a city wants to change, the momentum of current practices pushes against it. Changing policy is the work, but changing the way we talk about these topics is the challenge and Strong Towns Seacoast is trying to do just that. If you want to help change the conversation, please join us at one of our monthly in-person meetings!

2026 Upcoming Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, February 9th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, February 9th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, March 4th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Ice Hazards

I took a walk around Dover’s Downtown a week after the recent big snow storm to see how things were going. Let’s take a look.

Feeling Under The Weather

These are not some remote sidewalks that serve a small section of the community. These are in the middle of Downtown Dover where businesses and residents rely heavily on good walkability. They all feel the impact of these unsafe sidewalk conditions. The space becomes harder to navigate for everyone, especially people pushing strollers, the elderly, children, and people with mobility challenges. Granted, snow can be a tough challenge, but leaving our infrastructure covered in ice is hazardous, uninviting, and for some people unusable. Dover needs to have its downtown continue to be a safe and pleasant destination, even in winter.

Automobile infrastructure doesn’t suffer these unsafe conditions, and drivers are able to easily access downtown and parking quite safely. That comfort in driving strongly contrasts with the walking experience once the driver exits their car where they must confront the icy paths that lead to their intended destinations. Downtown is a heavily trafficked, high density area with a strong need for functional, pedestrian infrastructure and the sidewalks in these photos are critical to its success.

Looking For More Effective Approaches

Most of these photos were taken one week after the snow storm in Downtown Dover, which is the most valuable land in the city. One week seems like enough time for the city to have a chance to clear these areas. If the nearby streets are clear and dry for several days, then is is reasonable to expect the same for key pedestrian routes. I think that the photos clearly show that there has been work done here, and I have personally seen workers out in the early morning hours plowing the sidewalks along Sixth Street. The problem is not one of neglect or a lack of effort, the city has people who are working at this. I believe the issue lies in the method and tools being used which are leaving behind trails of ice. They are simply not effective enough to do a quality job.

Snow Melt

In a recent trip through Newmarket I noticed that their downtown looked well maintained and called their town to find out their secret to cleared sidewalks. The lady I spoke with told me that the town works really hard to clear the sidewalks of snow and (she believes) they are salted afterwards. Likewise, Third Street in Dover has a section of sidewalk near The Office Lounge that is perfectly clear and stands out from the other sidewalks in the city. They use a snow melting substance, salt or other, that clears the walkways all the way down to the brick.

Sidewalk Sweeping

Another effective approach is to sweep the sidewalks. These tools can handle uneven surfaces and will clear down to the pavement. I looked for good quality videos of cities using them, but they were very short in length or from a distance. The best examples I found were the advertisement videos.

Maybe this kind of tool is missing from Dover’s arsenal. It seems that something like this could handle getting closer to the sidewalk to prevent ice and also manage pedestrian areas such as Fish Ladder Park and the Community Trail Bridge.

Conclusion

I know that snow removal is challenging and I am thankful for all of the hard work the city has done. I admit that I am no expert on the matter and I spoke with Dover City staff about the issue to see if there were policy barriers, budget issues, or some other factor that is contributing to the conditions. I was told of a staffing problem, which I’m sure doesn’t help things. Dover is not the only one struggling either, many of the cities throughout the Seacoast (Newmarket excluded) have similar issues and that tells me that the problem is not unique or simple. That said, I can observe how prevalent this problem is and I think it deserves to be highlighted. I am aware that cities have to set priorities and manage a limited amount of resources to work on this task. However, pedestrian infrastructure shouldn’t be left in unsafe conditions or forgotten about for weeks during winter. I think that this is important to the success of our walkable spaces and there are clearly areas that can be improved here.

2026 February Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, February 4th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St, Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, February 9th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St, Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, February 9th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
OTTO Pizza
431 Central Ave, Dover, NH

Dover Transportation Advisory Commission

Monday, February 2nd 6:00pm
Dover Police Department Community Room
46 Chestnut St, Dover, NH

Our group has two items on the agenda. The first is to take advantage of the repaving for Bellamy Rd, Durham Rd, and Atlantic Avenue to implement bicycle friendly street designs. The second is for adding painted bike lanes on Horne St in Dover. We would love any community support for these efforts and invite you to come and voice that support.

Exeter Complete Streets

We reviewed a proposal from the town of Exeter for complete streets guidelines. They went page by page looking through it and identified some areas that they felt could be improved with the document and bring that feedback to the town. They were able to get some modifications made to the draft document including relabeling streetscape and pedestrian improvements from “not required” to “highly recommended”.

A complete streets policy is a good start to acknowledging that streets should serve more than just automobiles, but also all people in their many modes of transportation. This will hopefully give Exeter residents a chance to get better streets throughout the town. While the qualities of a good street can be fluid and context-sensitive, generally it will be oriented towards the needs of its constituents (the residents, businesses, and facilities along it) not just the needs of traffic. A good street enriches its community and provides a platform for collaboration and wealth to grow.

Durham Central Business District Height Restrictions

Maeve Nolan from the Workforce Housing Coalition of the Greater Seacoast attended our Seacoast meeting to talk about an upcoming discussion in the Town of Durham about height restrictions in their downtown. Currently their central business district zoning code restricts buildings to no higher than 3 stories on the easterly side of town, and 4 stories on the westerly side of town. The town is discussing two amendments that would relax these height restrictions. The amendments are mutually exclusive and our group favored the amendment that allowed 4 stories in all parts of the district with a maximum height of 50 ft.

The hope here is to incentivize private investment in the Town of Durham. Private investment needs to greatly exceed the amount of public investment. That is, public investment in the form of streets, sidewalks, water, sewer, lighting, etc. This is how the city continues to endure and maintain itself over time. If the town is struggling to find private investment it can mean that the town will struggle to maintain itself. By relaxing the height restrictions, the town will allow developers to build up instead of out. This is a much preferred outcome as building out requires new infrastructure (additional cost to the town) and building up typically leverages present infrastructure.

We sent a small contingent to the Planning Board meeting to speak in support of relaxing the height restrictions. The meeting was packed with standing room only and most everyone was there to speak on the proposed amendments. I’m rather unfamiliar with Durham and it was interesting to hear the stories of residents who care deeply about their town cite the problems of its present and hopes for its future. Most people spoke in favor of relaxing height restrictions and some even suggested that more needed to be done to incentivize developers and business owners to invest in Durham. There seems to be a lot of energy for change in Durham and I believe the Strong Towns message could benefit them greatly.

The planning board voted on our preferred amendment and it will go before the Town Council. If you would like to get involved with this effort, there will be future public hearings on the topic at Town Council where you can speak. Dates on these are TBD, so keep an eye on the town calendar.

Dover’s Forgotten Crosswalk Policy

Our group has noticed that several of Dover’s new crosswalk projects have been shy of the standards defined in its 2010 crosswalk policy and found that there are various crosswalks throughout the city that have traits that the policy clearly prohibits. At the previous Dover TAC meeting in November I mentioned this and suggested that the commission and City Council should re-affirm their commitment to a crosswalk policy that articulates Dover’s values regarding pedestrian access.

Refocus on Safety

The current policy states its intended purpose is to define criteria for the installation of marked crosswalks and provide design guidelines to support visual consistency for crosswalks throughout the City. We think this purpose should be changed to focus on promoting crosswalk safety and defining guidance for placement and design patterns with that goal in mind. This would include suggestions such as raised crosswalks, daylighting, rapid flashing beacon signs, increased pedestrian crossing times at signalized intersections, leading pedestrian crossing signals, when to forbid right-on-red, and other safety concerns that are absent from the current document.

Defining Standards for Unmarked Crosswalks

A crosswalk is legally present at any intersection, regardless of if there are markings or not. The current policy focuses entirely on the patterns and placement of marked crosswalks, yet has no recommendations for the unmarked crosswalks that are present throughout the city. Those crosswalks deserve recognition and safety guidelines. Especially when it is not uncommon for the City to provide pedestrian or transit infrastructure designed with an expectation that a pedestrian will need to cross the street, then provide minimal measures to make that crossing safe.

Marked or not, these crosswalks are an invitation to pedestrians and there is an expectation that people will use them. If the crosswalk policy in Dover is going to have guidance when markings on a crosswalk should or should not be placed, then it needs to have guidance for safety in both of those scenarios. The focus of Strong Towns Seacoast is on safety which we believe should be the City’s highest priority when designing its transportation network. Especially if the City wants to be walkable and bikeable as Dover has made clear in their Master Plan.

Meeting With Horne Street Community Members

According to community members and City staff, many drivers use Horne as a pass through to avoid Central Avenue and will outright ignore the 20mph speed limit during school hours, contributing to unsafe conditions on the street. This is an elementary school street where young children are walking or biking to school and parents need to feel comfortable with their children navigating this street safely. In our opinion there should be an open willingness from the City to slow down and constrain automobile traffic on this street, even outside of school hours.

In a first for Strong Towns Seacoast, we reached out to a concerned Horne Street resident who helped us organize a meeting with several people living on or around Horne Street. The goal was to gain community support for our proposal to paint bike lanes along Horne Street. We had a very productive meeting with these residents and are actively reaching out to as many community members as we can to help our proposal find success. Our goal is to provide a dedicated place for community members to cycle, especially children making their way to school. We also believe that the reduced travel lane width for automobiles will discourage speeding along Horne, which is a primary concern of several residents that we spoke with. The final benefit would be to gather feedback to inform the design of Horne Street’s upcoming reconstruction.

The bike lane proposal will be on the agenda for the upcoming Dover TAC meeting on January 26th at 6:00pm. If you want to see bicycle safety for children and reduced travel speeds on Horne Street, then I invite you to come to the meeting and voice that support. We are looking to gather a crowd of people to be present and share their concerns and hopes for Horne Street. I would love to have you join us in advocating for this change!

Conclusion

Lots of stuff going on, lots of work to do, but also lots of excitement! I have a lot of ideas and hope for Strong Towns Seacoast in 2026 and I hope that more people in the region will become interested in making their place a strong town. The Strong Towns organization has shared an inspiring set of ideas that focus on transportation safety, financial resiliency, and community-first initiatives meant to guide municipalities away from dangerous, insolvent, and isolating development patterns. I hope to see you at a future meeting and maybe even at the podium at a city meeting. Thank you for reading.

Why does action take so long? Dover has the resources, or can acquire them relatively cheaply compared to many of the larger projects the city undertakes. Our proposal was unanimously supported, then stalled, then sidelined in favor of pursuing federal money in the form of a Community Development Block Grant (CDBG). For our group, this was a reminder that small plans which cities can make happen in a few months are better than pursing big plans that take years of coordination.

2026 January Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and let me know if you want to bring a topic of your own.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, February 4th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St
Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, January 12th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St,
Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, January 12th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
Cara Irish Pub & Restaurant
11 Fourth St
Dover, NH

The Quick and Dirty Method

Our advocacy was to use a concept called ”Tactical Urbanism” to quickly implement a low cost solution that the City could reasonably pursue within a few months. It isn’t meant to be pretty or considered a final design, but it does get the city moving towards a safer downtown. You will see such tactics used when there is extended construction on a street.

Tactical Urbanism is intended to be a sort of “try before you buy” toolkit that lets cities affordably try out new designs without having to commit to them in an expensive project. Results are achieved fast and feedback from residents comes with it. We knew that the design would be a little rough looking, but if it didn’t work the city could easily modify it or take it down. However, if it did work then the city could see those designs in action and get the safety benefits much sooner.

Stalled and Compromised

City staff told our group that they would be pursing federal money to make the downtown crosswalk changes more permanent and filed for CBD grants to do this. They even expanded the scope of the project to include the crosswalk at Second Street and Central Avenue as well, which was exciting to hear. We were supportive of this and the city filed for the grants while we spoke at city council meetings to cheer them on. Once the grants were confirmed the city took the project out to bid and... found out that the money would only cover just one of the three crosswalks.

This is unfortunate and let me make it clear that I don’t believe city staff intended for this outcome. However, I want to note that during this process we asked the city to continue with the effort of placing temporary changes in place while we wait for the CBD grant project to finish, but were told that part of the restrictions on the grant is that they can’t be used on projects that have already been started. The pursuit of these federal dollars cost Dover the ability to solve its own problems, which is the larger narrative that I want to highlight. Federal money takes time to acquire and comes with strings attached.

There’s No Need to Wait

So Dover has been working on getting the federal funding for around a year, and it is going to fall drastically short of their ambitions. Now what? Well, there’s no reason to consider this a defeat. The original option to engage in tactical urbanism by building temporary bumpouts is still an available option. The City can use their federal grant money for the one crosswalk it will afford, and then get to work on the other two using cheaper, faster solutions. There is no reason to sit around and wait for another year for improved crosswalk safety, we can achieve it much sooner and for less cost.

In my experience there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm towards engaging in temporary solutions despite the speed and cost benefits. There is a preference towards the established method of getting things done, though is slow and leaves our cities in a known, unsafe state for years at a time. Let’s do away with waiting for safety and ask that our cities take the initiative here. City leaders, I encourage you to observe and determine what is the next, smallest action we could take towards making your city a better place. Then do that action. Do it sooner, rather than later.

Conclusion

I’d love to see Dover and other municipalities in the Seacoast Region become more comfortable with tactical urbanism and experimenting with safer street designs. I hope that our group can still work with Dover to address the remaining crosswalks this year. A lot can be achieved with a little bit of paint and a few bollards.

2026 January Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and if you’d like to bring a topic of your own, just let me know.

Exeter Meeting

Wednesday, January 7th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St
Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, January 12th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St,
Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, January 12th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
Cara Irish Pub & Restaurant
11 Fourth St
Dover, NH

The Opportunity In Repaving

Dover’s Transportation Master Plan included an action item to leverage regular street maintenance as an opportunity to improve paint-based bicycle and pedestrian facilities. This manifested as Dover’s Bicycle Friendly Streetscapes Guidelines (BFSG), which our group reviewed last year and recommended changes which were largely endorsed by the Dover’s Transportation Advisory Commission (TAC). Changing painted lines might seem like a small change to a street, but much of the functional intentions of a street are dictated by paint alone. Turning lanes, shoulder and lane widths, crosswalks, bike lanes, sharrows, and other features of a street are just paint. This is incredibly cost effective for the city as they effectively spend no additional money to achieve safer and more productive streets with just the swipe of a paint brush. We are taking this as a chance to reimagine these streets and what sorts of designs would slow down traffic while also promoting walking and biking.

The list of streets up for repaving in 2026 that the city has shared with us includes 13 streets, and is subject to change. Most of the streets are unstriped residential streets that we don’t have much comment on, but there were four streets that we believe could benefit from a change in paint.

• Atlantic Avenue

• Horne Street - Ash to Glenwood

• Durham Road - Mast to Bridge

• Bellamy Road - Alumni to Durham Road

Atlantic Avenue

Atlantic’s Current Conditions

A typical two lane street with very narrow shoulders. There is a sidewalk on a small portion of the street, but for the most part there is no walking infrastructure on the street. The BFSG recommends sharrows for a street like this, and Dover’s Transportation Chapter in their Master Plan recommends widening shoulders in lieu of sidewalks.

At Dover’s most recent Transportation Advisory Commission (TAC) Dover City Councilor Robert Warach had an item on the agenda pertaining to Atlantic Avenue and traffic speeds. GPS data was showing that the street regularly experienced speeds between 31mph and 36mph, which is above its posted speed limit of 30mph. The TAC recommended reducing travel lane widths to 10’ in the upcoming repaving effort. Narrowed travel lanes on streets with 30mph - 35mph traffic show a reduction in crashes according a Johns Hopkins study.

Recommendations for Atlantic

Even with these reduced lane widths it doesn’t leave much room for residents to walk or bike away from automobile traffic. Because of this, Strong Towns Seacoast (STS) wants to propose an edge lane design that would hopefully be able to facilitate walking, biking, and slower traffic.

Edge lane designs are streets with a single, bi-directional travel lane and wide edge lanes separated by dashed lines. The aim of the edge lane design is to provide infrastructure that is multipurposed on several levels. The wide shoulders provides a dedicated area for biking and walking along the street and the bi-directional travel lane can be used by automobiles. If two automobiles meet in the travel lane, they can yield to other traffic by pulling over into the edge lane. There are a few examples of edge lanes around New Hampshire and Maine and we think that Atlantic Avenue could be a good case for one due to the restricted width of the street.

There are some challenges to consider with edge lanes, though. First, they are usually only recommended for streets with low automobile traffic volumes which reduces the chances that they will need to yield to other traffic. This could warrant a traffic study to determine what the current traffic numbers for Atlantic are presently, but there are previous studies done that indicate that numbers a low enough for this design. Second, sharp curves and broken sightlines can prevent oncoming automobile traffic from seeing each other. Atlantic Avenue does have a few gentle curves, but other examples of implemented edge lanes have similar curves and are still successful. We would also want the community of Atlantic Avenue to give their feedback on the edge lane design and we have reached out to their city councilor to see if he can put us into contact so we can discuss it with them.

Horne Street - Ash to Glenwood

Horne Current Conditions

Currently there are no shoulder lines or a centerline on Horne Street. The width of the street varies by a few feet. There is also an elementary school along the street. The BFSG recommends sharrows to this street.

Similar to Atlantic, at Dover’s most recent TAC meeting several families showed up to discuss an agenda item for traffic speeds along Horne Street. The TAC recommended raised crosswalks at Ash Street and Roosevelt, but these will not be implemented likely until the next reconstruction of the street. Though, there is more that can be done here to slow down traffic. Currently there are flashing lights to indicate a speed limit of 20mph during school drop off and pick up, but really we should be trying to maintain those speeds all of the time. Not just during special events in the day.

Recommendations for Horne

Considering the school on this street and the age of students, we feels that including dedicated bike lanes on either side of the street would have multiple benefits. First it would introduce a constraint on the width of the travel lanes for automobiles. Second, it would give dedicated space to bicycle riders using this street. We believe that these changes would reduce traffic speeds along Horne and also provide a safe place for students to bike to school.

Another similarity to Atlantic is that STS again wants to work with the community. Many parents showed up at the TAC meeting to voice their concerns that the current design of the street is resulting in unsafe and uncomfortable traffic speeds. I have already reached out to a resident of Horne Street and we are trying to set up a meeting with community members to discuss our proposal and get feedback from them to take to the TAC.

Durham Road - Mast to Bridge

Durham Current Conditions

This is a long stretch of repaving that has various widths and street designs. There really isn’t a single design to point to or recommend and we will taking a step-by-step approach on recommendations here when we present to Dover’s TAC. There are many areas that we intend to highlight, but for brevity in this newsletter I want to focus on the lack of dedicated bicycle infrastructure along the designated Wildcat Bike Route. Durham Road is mentioned multiple times in the BFSG, with conflicting recommendations.

Recommendations for Durham

A bike route needs to be friendly to cyclists and this one features 30mph - 40mph traffic next to a shoulder that isn’t always wide enough for a cyclist to use. Since this is a transit corridor as well, recommend narrowing the lanes to a consistent 11’. This will make any extra width available to be used to widen the shoulders into dedicated bike lanes. The width of the street varies and in some places there is just enough room to add in the bike lanes, but not buffers. However, in some areas there are turning lanes or even empty areas that take up width and we encourage the city to evaluate the usefulness of these accessory lanes to consider using that space for buffered bike lanes.

One turning lane in particular only seems to serve a driveway to a private business, and not access to a street. The real problem is that for this lane to be added, the shoulder width of the street was reduced to an unusable state for cyclists. Keep in mind, this is a labeled bike route, with signs along it claiming it as such. How are we to expect cyclists to use this infrastructure safely if we are compromising what little safe space they have available to them? Putting up a sign that says, “Bicycles come here!” without actually giving bicycles a safe place to be is ineffective at best and dangerous at its worst. STS believes that this repaving is an opportunity to refocus Durham Road’s priorities, and actually provide a viable bicycle route.

Bellamy Road - Alumni to Durham Road

Bellamy Current Conditions

A simple street with 11’ wide lanes and 1’ shoulders. It does connect to Alumni Drive which is where Dover’s High School is located. The BFSG recommends sharrows on Bellamy Road.

Recommendations for Bellamy

There isn’t really much room to work with here, and definitely not enough space for dedicated bike lanes. Since this is a school route for students who may not have the ability to drive themselves, we feel it is important that bicycle transportation be included. This can be done by adding a sharrow to the street to indicate to cyclists and motorists that the street is a shared space. We also want to recommend narrowing the travel lanes to 10’ for the purposes of traffic calming.

Conclusion

Even though it is just some paint on the ground, the layout and design of a street strongly affects how people interact with it. For decades streets have been designed with a primary focus on free flowing automobile traffic. By simply changing up how the paint is laid out, we can take a street that was built for automobiles and is hostile to people outside of one, and change it into something that is both safer and more versatile. Add in the fact that this can be done with minimal extra cost to the city and there is a lot of opportunity here. I am very excited about that and about the outreach that we will be doing to engage residents of these streets. People are aware of the problems on our streets and constantly point out the dangers that they present to our everyday lives. STS wants to help showcase solutions that address those problems and we will be advocating for these changes at Dover’s next TAC meeting in January; hopefully alongside community members of these streets.

It was hosted by the Moving Maine Network and was focused on highlighting how even simple tasks are dangerous or impossible for people who don’t drive. These are millions of individuals, by some counts up to 30% of our population. While I was listening to these individuals share their hardships it was eye-opening just how inconsiderate and borderline discriminatory our transportation system is for these individuals. I felt inspired to help share these stories and highlight the areas where our transportation system is failing our neighbors.

2025 December Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our local towns and progress we have made on active projects. Our meetings are open to the public so join in for the conversation and bring a topic of your own if you would like.

Exeter Meeting - Cancelled Due to Weather

Tuesday, December 2nd 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St
Exeter, NH

Look at opportunities for tactical urbanism and quickly setting up traffic calming initiatives in downtown Exeter.

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, December 8th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St,
Dover, NH

Review upcoming repaving and restriping plans for Dover’s Atlantic Ave, Bellamy Rd, Horne St, and Durham Rd (NH-108) and discuss design changes for these streets.

Seacoast Social

Monday, December 8th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
Cara Irish Pub & Restaurant
11 Fourth St
Dover, NH

The People Left Behind

Let’s get a clear picture on just how many people don’t drive in our country. The U.S. Department of Transportation counts the total population and compares it to the number of state-issued drivers licenses, which adds up to roughly 30% of American’s being non-drivers. That’s a large portion of the population, nearly 1/3 of people, that are legally not licensed to drive a car, especially when our transportation system is primarily designed for drivers and automobiles. Though, that’s a relatively simple method of determining who is and isn’t a driver. In a more detailed approach the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that as many as 36% of Americans over the age of 10 do not have reliable access to a personal vehicle to meet their daily needs.

Some of these numbers do include children, roughly 11% of the population is below age 10, and I want to defend that a bit. In the U.S., it is pretty common for children, including teenagers, to be driven to all of their destinations. These individuals need access to transportation, yet due to their age are unable to drive and must rely on adults in their lives to provide it for them. This lack of agency in children and teenagers is not as prevalent in countries where viable alternatives to driving are present. In my trips to Taiwan it is common to see groups of children walking or riding public transit to get around their cities and my wife (she is Taiwanese) recounts doing the same during her childhood. So, let’s confront the question directly, at what age should someone be counted as a non-driver? On the extreme end, children as young as first grade have schedules to keep and are capable of walking and navigating their neighborhoods. I’ll let you answer that question for yourself, but I think we can all agree that people younger than 16 deserve access to transportation without having to rely on a licensed driver.

So who makes up the rest of the list of non-drivers? First and foremost, there are many disabilities that affect someone’s ability to drive. As people age, their ability to operate a vehicle can diminish as health complications can arise. People who can’t afford to drive as car ownership can be expensive. Some people have anxiety about driving and choose not to drive, my wife actually falls into this category. Others can have their licenses suspended and have their access to transportation legally stripped from them. There are many different reasons why people can’t or don’t drive, and these are the people who get left behind by our transportation system.

Stories from Non-Drivers

Anna Zivarts

The learning session I attended was introduced by Anna Zivarts, author of When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency, who was born with a neurological condition that affects her vision and prevents her from driving. Anna recounts her experience growing up without being able to drive and says it limited the choices of where she could comfortably live because she relied on transit to get around. She also recounted her grandmother who developed a condition later in her life that caused her to periodically lose consciousness, but because she lived in a rural area she continued to drive with her condition occasionally passing out while driving. Anna has become a strong advocate to other non-drivers like herself.

Kristi Woods

Kristi, a resident of Augusta, ME, discussed her illness which causes many kinds of symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, dizziness, and is exacerbated by driving. While she can technically drive short distances, she says that if she overdoes it she will be so feeble afterwards that she is bedridden. Due to her condition, she requires care from specialized medical providers every week that can be as far away as Boston (a three hour drive) or in many cases in areas that don’t have transit access. Because of this she has trouble finding reliable transport to these destinations. She previously relied on a Medicaid ride service which required her to schedule pickups that were sometimes cancelled with short notice, but she has since lost eligibility for Medicaid and also access to the ride service. Now she says that she relies on family and friends to drive her to these appointments.

Sadie Donnell

A blind resident of Maine, Sadie was advocating for awareness of Maine’s White Cane Law. She described the many challenges of walking around her city. Audible cues are of the utmost importance to her with safety and she mentioned that crossing the street can be very dangerous if she can’t hear that traffic is stopped and it is safe to cross. Along many streets the speed limit is 30mph or higher, making it very dangerous for people to cross. People mowing their lawn, loud trucks, or even silent electric vehicles all contribute to making a dangerous task even harder. She relies on transit to get around and in another video interview she describes the difficulties in identifying bus stops that are only marked by signs because she can’t read them.

Driving Should Be One of Many Options

As I was watching this learning session, my wife was listening to it in the background and she pointed out that each of the speakers were explaining the reasons why they can’t drive a car. Maybe they feel they need to justify their lifestyle or perhaps they are trying to explain that they would absolutely drive if they were able. In any case if someone doesn’t drive, even they just don’t want to, that should be a valid choice. People should be capable of making that choice without becoming a burden on others.

A robust and resilient transportation system prioritizes the movement of people, not just movement of automobiles. Navigating your city or town by walking, biking, or transit should be just as viable of an option as choosing to drive, but these other methods are pushed to the side to make room for drivers. Think about your schedule and imagine not having access to an automobile for one week. Would you be able to make appointments? Shop for groceries? See a doctor? Drop your kids off at school? How many routine tasks would suddenly become daunting efforts, just because you lost reliable access to a vehicle? There are people who live that life every day.

We can change that though. We can make better decisions in transportation going forward. Slowing down traffic to 20mph makes it safer and more compatible with walking and biking. Prioritizing streets for people instead of for traffic creates beautiful places that add vibrancy to our communities. Added dedicated bike infrastructure to productive routes lets people choose to accomplish their daily tasks on bike. Refocusing and enhancing transit to be a viable navigation choice facilitates inter-city travel and speedy access to important places. All of these things can be done. We just have to decide that we want it.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading, I appreciate your time. This learning sessions moved me and helped me feel confident that the Strong Towns message is important to a wide audience of people. Our group, Strong Towns Seacoast is advocating for a better transportation system in the Seacoast. We are engaging Dover on traffic calming, crosswalk safety, and bike routes. In Exeter we are advocating for crosswalk safety in their downtown. We are a group of individuals who want better transportation for our communities. If this message resonates with you, we would love to have you join one of our monthly meetings and help us deliver this advocacy to the many cities and towns around here. If you have observed a problem and want our help in advocating for change, bring that with you to the meeting and we will be happy to discuss it and support you. I hope you will join us.

2025 December Meeting Details

Our in-person meetings are where we gather to discuss issues that we observe in our communities as well as progress we have made on active projects. Join in for the conversation and bring a topic of your own if you would like.

Exeter Meeting

Tuesday, December 2nd 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St
Exeter, NH

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, December 8th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St,
Dover, NH

Seacoast Social

Monday, December 8th, immediately following Seacoast meeting (~8PM)
Cara Irish Pub & Restaurant
11 Fourth St
Dover, NH

Exeter’s Downtown Crosswalks

Several of our members who live in Exeter identified three crosswalks in their downtown that have visibility issues and wanted to discuss some potential solutions using tactical urbanism. Each of these crosswalks is along Water Street, one of the main sections of downtown Exeter. Any improvements here for safety would be of great benefit to the town, residents, and visitors. After a discussion of solutions for these intersections, the group took a field trip and walked to each of them to observe them in action.

Water Street and High Street

Water Street and Center Street

Water Street and Swasey Parkway

Crosswalk Discussion

Members commented on how terrifying these crosswalks are to use for pedestrians, especially at night. We discussed using tactical urbanism to move the curbs and daylighting to remove obstacles that block visibility. The group ended up deciding to focus on the intersection at Water and Center Street where the hope is to advocate for removing a parking space in order to daylight this crossing. Cars moving west down Water Street cannot see pedestrians until they are well into the marked crosswalk due to parked cars.

In order to fix this situation with temporary measures, the group proposes extending the curb out to the edge of the travel lane using a pedestrian crossing sign and several large traffic drums to mark out the “edge of curbing”. In the area of the removed parking space, the idea is to add in outdoor dining space for one of the restaurants in the vicinity. The existing handicap space and van aisle would be shifted one space to the east. These measures will add more community space, reduce crosswalk lengths, and increase visibility for everyone.

Seacoast Meeting Details

Dover’s Ward 1 City Councilor April Richer attended our meeting in Dover where we shared with her the Strong Town’s Housing-Ready City Toolkit and our observations of where Dover is falling short. Dover is in the process of reviewing a report from an ad-hoc housing needs committee and lots of ideas on how to address housing are up for discussion right now. We are trying to add some Strong Towns solutions to that conversation and encourage Dover’s leadership to soften their zoning codes and allow incremental, local development.

We also discussed the relationship between transportation and support for housing. An observation that we’ve made is that a significant portion of the political opposition to new housing is based on impacts to traffic. To be clear, these are concerns for automobile traffic specifically, and a good summary would be that current residents are worried that new residents will bring their cars with them and overwhelm the transportation network. To be honest, this is of a reasonable concern, but to be more honest it is only reasonable if automobiles continue to be the only viable transportation option in the city. If Dover intends to add thousands of housing units, then it will need to get serious about making bicycles, walking, and transit productive, safe, and dignified choices for transportation.

Co-Op Housing

A concept that Councilor Richer brought to our discussion was “co-op housing”, or multi-family housing that is cooperatively owned by the residents. The idea here is to distribute the price of housing ownership to multiple people and lower each member’s individual costs. The difference between this and something like a condo is that the residents have partial ownership of the whole building, not full ownership of a single unit with an HOA fee. This is done through establishing a corporation that is charged with maintaining the property and each resident can have share of ownership. This video explains some of the ideas, pros, and cons if you want to learn more.

This seems like a decent idea for people to work together to afford housing, but the primary money savings technique is to deliver housing “at cost” without respect to market rents. This technique doesn’t necessarily lower rents, as an expensive building could easily be a co-op, but it has a tendency to stabilize them over time. Also, once the debt for the building is paid off by residents, the cost can fall dramatically as the mortgage is no longer in the yearly budget. This may not be a great tool for increasing the number of housing units, but it can be an effective tool for enabling ownership and local investment into your community.

Pre-Approved Plans

One way of increasing supply is to make it super easy, barely an inconvenience to get approved to build new housing. We highlighted earlier this year that a project that was aiming to provide an additional 3 housing units in Dover was delayed for 7 months over a dispute on whether or not 2 of the parking spaces were adequately useable. In the end it was approved as New Hampshire state laws were changed to restrict how many parking spaces could be required for this type of housing. These headaches in the approval process create barriers that artificially limit how much housing people are able or willing to build.

Enter the pre-approved plan. Some cities in the US have been providing housing plans that are already approved by the city and it simplifies the entire approval process for residents who are looking to invest in their communities. Strong Towns has written an article on it for the city of Kalamazoo, MI. This effort is done in the name of making it easier to give local people the permission to help with the housing crisis.

Dover Capital Improvements Plan (CIP)

As a final note we discussed upcoming CIP hearings and several of the proposed projects within. There are fantastic projects that are low-cost, with a high return for the city such as the replacement of the Ash trees in downtown Dover, sidewalk repair and maintenance, and extending the community trail. However, there are numerous projects that look like the would contribute negatively to the city, specifically a proposal for a second downtown parking garage. Our group spoke at these public hearings to highlight these projects and bring attention to them, hoping to encourage expanding the street trees initiative and community trail expansion while discouraging the city to pursue a parking garage. Why should Dover invest in an expensive parking facility in downtown, where land has the highest value-per-acre, in the pursuit of cheap parking while the city struggles with a housing crisis?

Join Our Monthly Meetings

I am so thankful for everyone that attended these meetings and it has been inspiring to watch the number of people grow over the years. If you are interested in Strong Towns ideas in your neighborhood I invite you to attend a monthly meeting and bring your observations with you. We would love to discuss local issues for any city in the Seacoast region and offer our help in addressing them. Remember, humbly observe where people are struggling, identify the next smallest thing that we can do to address that struggle, do that thing right now, repeat. Hope to see you at a meeting soon.

2025 November Meetings Details

Exeter Meeting (NEW!)

Wednesday, November 5th 6:30PM
Exeter Library
4 Chestnut St
Exeter, NH

We will be meeting to discuss Strong Towns topics with a focus on safer streets, bicycle networks, and opportunities for tactical urbanism. Please join us!

Seacoast Meeting

Monday, November 10th 6:30PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St,
Dover, NH

We are expecting to be joined by a Dover city councilor to discuss housing issues and solutions for the city. Members will also be discussing upcoming public hearings on Dover’s Capital Improvement Program. We hope to see you there!

Seacoast Meeting After Party

Monday, November 10th, immediately following Seacoast Meeting
Cara Irish Pub & Restaurant
11 Fourth St,
Dover, NH

After the Seacoast meeting we will be hanging out at Cara Irish Pub for anyone who would like to join.

Bridging the Communication Gap

During a recent TAC a resident of Arch Street in Dover brought up “speeding” concerns to the board claiming that many drivers are “speeding” down her street. A city staff member looked up the 85th percentile speed (more on this later) for the resident’s street using an online tool that measures the speeds of a sample of automobiles using GPS. The staff member cited from the tool that automobile speeds were only 2-3 miles above the posted speed limit of 30MPH and that the claims of “speeding” were not accurate. I use quotes here to highlight that each member of the discussion is using the same word, but I believe that they are saying two different things.

• What the resident mean by speeding: An automobile drove down my street at speeds that made me feel unsafe and uncomfortable.

• What city staff mean by speeding: An automobile exceeded the posted legal speed limit on a street

The staff member is correct in the use of the word speeding to mean that most drivers are not exceeding the posted speed limit. In this context, most drivers are indeed not speeding down this street and there is nothing that the city needs to do here as there are no behaviors to correct. However, if we consider the resident’s use of the word speeding, they perceive that automobiles who are following the speed limit are unsafe and uncomfortable. If both individuals feel justified in their responses, then what is the issue that we are actually trying to solve here?

20 is Plenty

I would like to offer that the issue lies with the speed limit itself. Automobiles traveling at 30MPH is too high along streets where people live or we expect to also have pedestrians and cyclists. Instead we should be targeting speeds of 20MPH or less. Studies have shown a strong relationship between traffic speeds and the frequency and severity of crashes, especially to people outside of an automobile. Furthermore, slower travel speeds decrease driver reaction distance and stopping distance, both important factors in preventing a crash.

The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes has made a very compelling video as to why 30 kilometers per hour (19 miles per hour) is a great speed limit for streets within cities, and he discusses safety (for both drivers and non-drivers), noise reduction, crash prevention, human vision, impact on traffic, and more. He really covers the argument in depth, so if you are interested in learning why slower speeds in cities is good for pretty much everyone, then check out the video. Suffice it to say that I agree with him and believe that our target speed within cities and along streets that have residences should be 20MPH.

So let’s go change all the signs and lower speed limits immediately, right? Well, there are some other things we need to deal with. First, we have a bit of a legal obstacle in the way. The state of New Hampshire has a law preventing local municipalities from posting speed limits lower than 25MPH and creates friction for going below 30MPH. This legal barrier leads to a default minimum speed limit that is too high for many city streets. So what can cities do to resolve this? It’s rather simple really, just don’t post a speed limit sign and instead change the design of the street until the vast majority of drivers are traveling at 20MPH or lower.

Change Street Designs, Not Street Signs

The posted speed limit has a small effect on how drivers behave and if it is not compatible with the design of the street it can actually be dangerous. This happens because most drivers don’t actively choose to speed, they are instead driving the speed that feels comfortable and safe. So, even though the state makes it difficult to reduce posted speed limits below 30MPH, it actually wouldn’t make a huge difference even if we could. The fact is that pretty much everyone ignores a speed limit if it feels “wrong”. So, even though we may all agree that speeding is risky, people are still gonna do it anyway. What gives?

For there to be a change in behavior we need to accurately communicate the real-world risks involved with higher speeds in a perceivable way to drivers. This is the actual reason drivers travel at high speeds along so many streets in our cities, because the design of the street is communicating safety, instead of risk. In order to effectively slow down traffic, we need to modify the design of the street so that drivers perceive these risks and feel uncomfortable and unsafe when driving at higher speeds.

Perhaps some readers are considering that increasing enforcement of our speed limits will be an effective approach to slow down drivers. Honestly, it probably would help because when drivers see a police officer the risks become very visible. However, because NH municipalities legally cannot post speed limit signs below 25MPH, enforcement is incapable of achieving 20MPH speeds. Though, even if it could accomplish this, design is still a better choice here because as soon as enforcement is relaxed, your speed problem would return. A cheaper, consistent, and more permanent solution is to use the design of the street. Elements such as speed bumps, raised crosswalks, narrow lanes, chicanes, bollards, and just general obstacles that physically and visually communicate risk to drivers will leave a lasting impact on the street without the need to pay someone to watch over it all the time.

This is commonly referred to as “Traffic Calming”, and Dover has released not just one, but two documents for this going back to 2011. They even cite many of the benefits that I am discussing in this very article. The city knows how to do this, and all the reasons why. I encourage them to embrace these tools to target street speeds of 20MPH or lower. Safety and comfort in our neighborhoods should be prioritized above traffic speed.

Measuring for Success Using the 85th Percentile Rule

A common concept in setting speed limits — the very same one that the city staff member used to check speeds along Arch street — is the 85th percentile rule. The idea is to conduct a speed survey of all drivers along a street, and set the speed limit based on the speed that 85 out of 100 drivers are driving at or below. Easy, simple, and controversial in some circles.

There are many criticisms for this rule, primarily that it doesn’t have any considerations for pedestrians, cyclists, or the context of the street. Apparently they just are not included in the equation of how to determine a speed limit. Strong Towns has written an article about the application of the 85th percentile rule on city streets, suggesting that it is an inappropriate approach to use. However, I think that there is an area where we can find this concept useful.

The main value that this rule gives us is that it let’s us know the speed that the vast majority of drivers perceive as “safe”. That is a very valuable insight that can help us achieve our goals of slowing down traffic. Instead of using it to determine what the speed limit sign should read, we can use it to determine if the design of the street is working. By changing our response to the results of measuring for the 85th percentile, we can transform the rule from one that provides little (possibly even negative) value for street safety into one that informs us on if we have succeeded in our street design. If we find that drivers are regularly still exceeding 20MPH, we know that the street design has failed and needs to change.

Conclusion

Speeding is such a common complaint to the TAC and residents are perceiving the issue differently than city staff. Hopefully, by pointing out the communication gap we can start to have more effective conversations around the issue. If you are reading this and are tired of speeding in your Seacoast neighborhood, then I invite you to share this article and these ideas with others. I am on Dover’s TAC as an alternate member and will be pushing for these kinds of changes on that board. Join in and help advocate for slowing down traffic to 20MPH on city streets to create safer cities.