The Streets We Choose
An interesting Boston Globe Magazine article by Billy Baker looks at state-of-the-art information about how to design streets that are safe and inviting for pedestrians. I understand the journalistic considerations behind doing it this way, but I kind of wish Baker hadn’t led with the nutty-sounding Mondermanite prescriptions for eliminating pedestrian-vehicle separation and road striping altogether. I think those are interesting ideas that people should learn more about, but at the same time it’s worth emphasizing that the bulk of the relevant considerations here are pretty much commonsense.
But to make a long story short, a town or city needs to decide whether or not they really think that maximizing vehicle speed is the right priority for the design of their streets. If you decide to make it the priority, then you’ll wind up with a city that’s bad for pedestrians — narrow sidewalks, wider roads to cross, walk signs that only work if you press a button, intersections where walkers defer to turning traffic, etc. — and at the same time you’ll have fast-moving vehicles that tend to collide with human beings in a relatively deadly manner. If you decide not to make it the priority, then you get the reverse — wide sidewalks, narrow road crossings, adequate walk signals, and intersections where turning traffic defers to pedestrians. Cars will move slower through your city and there will be fewer car-person collisions and those that do occur will be less lethal.
There are some exotic considerations that get a bit weird, but the basic shape of things, as Baker makes clear down the road, is pretty simple. And to me it’s a pretty easy choice. Shifting resources in a pedestrian-friendly direction helps save lives directly. It’s also good for the environment and boosts public health. If you live in a city with a walkable downtown, it might be instructive to go to a block that has heavy automobile and pedestrian traffic and just look at the amount of space dedicated to cars versus what’s dedicated to people. Even in places like New York and Washington, DC where only a minority of city residents commute by car to work, more space is dedicated to the cars than to the people. And in DC, the central business district dedicates almost no space whatsoever to bikes. Not only are those choices that I think are mistaken, but most people barely even realize that the choices are being made at all — but it’s not like it would require magic for the central business district in DC to feature bike lanes on all streets, wider sidewalks, and fewer traffic lanes. And you can bet that people’s preferences about commuting methods would shift in response to a shift in space allocation.
31 Responses to “The Streets We Choose”
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August 19th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
You know, there are limits to a reasonable persons appreciation for these kinds of ideas. At the end of the day the goal is to get people where they need to go quickly, conveniently and at low cost. Sometimes you can focus on increasing the speed of commutes by improving transit options like bikes, cars or mass transit. Sometimes you can focus on designing cities with shorter distances between important points. But to just assert that walking is the best way to go misses the fact that people need to get around the cities that we actually have. And in the cities that we actually have, or in any cities we are likely to have, higher speed transit is a huge difference maker in quality of life by reducing transit time. Don’t forget the most important thing of all: transit time!
August 19th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
“But to make a long story short, a town or city needs to decide whether or not they really think that maximizing vehicle speed is the right priority for the design of their streets.”
This hits the nail on the head. But you often gloss over the fact that the people *inside* the cars are part of that town or city, and as such, they help to set those priorities. In many cases, people decide that maximizing vehicle speed is indeed the right priority. Why does this annoy you so much?
August 19th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Though I am in favor of more walkable cities, you’re mistaken in thinking that slowing traffic is necessarily good for the environment. That assumes that for every one minute you delay car travel you reduce demand for car travel by over a minute, an elasticity of over one. That isn’t supported by most studies.
Many cities of found that things such as improving the efficiency of light timing actually provides a net reduction in CO2 emmissions, even such reactionary towns as Portland, Ore. Via Tree Hugger:
August 19th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
The article speaks highly of bulb outs. I can’t stand those friggin things. The big problem is that when there is a bulb out, you can’t sneak alongside cars waiting to go straight through the intersection if you are turning right. It’s awful! This one particular neighborhood in Santa Monica is full of bulb outs, and stop signs everywhere, and speed bumps, and it makes me lose my mind everytime traffic makes me divert into it. Actually, based on the mailbox address on her site, it must be right around where Digby lives. But that doesn’t make it okay! I demand that the streets between Lincoln and Centinela, between Pico and Ocean Park, be reworked immediately to make them more automobile friendly!
August 19th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
DC’s traffic lights on main thoroghfares like Connecticut Avenue are notoriously poorly synchronized. As others have pointed out, this is bad for the environment. It’s hard to say how it’s good for pedestrians, either, except that it might serve as a means of spiting the drivers.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
And Portland lights are synched to something like 15 miles per hour. The traffic moves, but slowly.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
But you often gloss over the fact that the people *inside* the cars are part of that town or city, and as such, they help to set those priorities. Not so much. In most cases, they are people from other towns travelling through.
In many cases, people decide that maximizing vehicle speed is indeed the right priority.
I’ve yet to meet the person who said this about his own street.
August 19th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Actually, here in Nashville neighborhood pressure has made it a priority to slow traffic at least on some streets–my own, for instance. I live on a residential street that is very broad [it once had a streetcar line down the middle] and that has become an important conduit into the city from the ‘burbs to the south. Accordingly, the traffic engineers purposefully narrowed the street with bike lanes. The lanes themselves are of limited value [as usual, they begin and end rather arbitrarily], but they both make the street easier to cross and make it safer. I favored the change because I’m a biker; my next-door neighbors favored the change because they have young kids.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Re: I’ve yet to meet the person who said this about his own street.
There are streets and there are roads. Roads are mainly for vehicular traffic while streets are for mixed usage and in some cases pedestrians may dominate. Every city needs a few higher speed arterial roads to move traffic in and out of them in most cities the interstates play this role, however a few cities refused to allow the intetstates to come near their downtowns, so they have to have other arterial roadways for this function instead. However this is arranged, a city only needs a small number of roads, leaving everything else to be a street.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
We need to widen the streets of Boston and Philadelphia to make it easier to drive away to the utopia of the Phoenix suburbs.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Dunno if it’s still the case, but when I was there as a young man, Wurzburg Germany was a superbly walkable city — the central city was enclosed in a ring-shaped park maybe a block wide most places (IIRC, it’s where the medieval city walls stood until WWII bombing).
A green beltway for foot traffic, with the train station and streetcar hub directly adjoining.
August 20th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Get pedestrians out into the street by putting them in the path of automobiles? Huh?
August 20th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Where are the anti-urbanists telling us that development that emphasizes cars is the natural order of things brought to you by the invisible hand of the marketplace whereas development that emphasizes pedestrians and transit is wicked, communistic government interference in the lives of hard working Americans?
Seriously, these urbanism/transit threads are usually much more heated.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
On a specific point, the criticism of push-button signals seems a little silly to me, because there is no guarantee that a regularly scheduled right-of-way would beat the push-button system with respect to average waiting time (e.g., imagine replacing call buttons on elevators with just regularly scheduled stops–would that necessarily be faster?).
On a general point, I think Matt is indeed wrong to focus on vehicle speed per se. You really have to factor in things like how many vehicles travelling how many routes (i.e., a relatively few vehicles travelling relatively few routes could move at a relatively high speed and still have relatively little impact on pedestrians in the overall area). And that is part of why some “Mondermanite” suggestions can work, if limited to zones where by design the number of vehicles is expected (or encouraged) to be relatively low.
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