The streets of Providence belong to all of us. They are the veins that pump our community, economy, and family life.
Currently, our streets are primarily designed for people who drive personal vehicles. This leaves many others without affordable, reliable, and safe transportation – including children and youth, people who cannot afford cars, people who cannot drive due to disabilities, new immigrants and refugees, people who are legally barred from driving, and people who simply choose not to drive.
Recent increases in traffic congestion and people using bicycles, scooters, and other mobility devices are resulting in unsafe, uncomfortable, and frustrating streetscapes for everyone, including drivers. Better street design, informed by our community’s lived experience, can solve these problems for everyone.
The Providence Streets Coalition is an alliance of community organizations, local businesses, schools, institutions, civic leaders, and engaged individuals advocating for people-friendly streets in Providence. We support providing safer streets, more transportation choices, and policies that advance mobility justice to improve safety, equity, sustainability, prosperity, health, and quality-of-life in our city and region.
We believe in constructing streets where all people can move safely and easily, no matter how they travel – whether driving, walking, biking, skating, taking buses, using wheelchairs, or other mobility devices.
More mobility choices and people-centered roads will result in less traffic congestion and air pollution, fewer crashes, and a more healthy and just city. There’s peace on the road when everyone has a piece of the road.
The City of Providence released its Great Streets Initiative and Urban Trail Network Master Plan in January 2020, which envisions that every street in Providence should be safe, clean, healthy, inclusive, and vibrant. The plan also proposes the creation of a “spine” network of urban trails that will connect every Providence neighborhood. The City also released its Climate Justice Plan in October 2019 – a vital roadmap for creating a truly equitable, low-carbon, climate-resilient city. In December 2020, the Division of Statewide Planning, RIPTA, and RIDOT formally adopted the state’s first Transit Master Plan and Bike Mobility Plan. The Providence Streets Coalition supports implementing these plans as quickly as possible in the most effective way possible.
The Providence Streets Coalition seeks to operate with accountability to and solidarity with marginalized communities to break down systems of violence and oppression. We work to resist displacement, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, ageism, ableism, religious intolerance, and xenophobia. We embrace change, growth, and the challenges that come with it, and welcome constructive feedback when we have fallen short in upholding cross-movement solidarity. Most of our work will be conducted on the ancestral territory of Narragansett people, in the city now known as Providence.
The Providence Streets Coalition is fiscally sponsored by Grow Smart Rhode Island.