Robert Steuteville is editor and executive director of Better Cities & Towns.
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As evidence mounts, drumbeat for walkable streets grows
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The evidence keeps piling up to support reform in street design and traffic engineering.
Recent research adds to volumes of studies that say walkable streets will make us safer, healthier, and improve the economy and communities. …
A study of 24 medium-sized California cities is … hard to challenge. Half of the cities are built with street grids, and the other half have modern suburban layouts. Norman Garrick and Wesley Marshall found in 2008 that the historic grids produce one-third of the traffic deaths per capita compared to the sprawling suburbs. That strength of association is impossible to explain in any way but this: The streets themselves are to blame.
Garrick, Marshall, and Daniel Piatkowski examined these same cities in 2014 and found that the historic grids are associated with lower obesity, blood pressure, and heart disease. …
And that’s not all: The manuals that transportation engineers use overestimate traffic from new development by 55 percent, according to an article published this month inAccess Magazine. Overestimates lead to overbuilt roads, less walking, more driving, and less sense of place.
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Pretty much anywhere
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How did the transportation planning and engineering professions go so wrong? In the Journal of the American Planning Association, Eric Dumbaugh of Florida Atlantic University explains how some tenets of modern street design grew out of conjecture, not science, that seemed reasonable at the time. Research that did not fit with the prevailing model was disregarded as aberration. This thinking was not questioned as long as US real estate markets and public opinion favored suburban expansion.
Now the market and public sentiment has shifted and new tools like Walk Score are breaking the foundations of conventional traffic engineering. After trillions of dollars invested, this must be embarrassing.
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Portland, of course
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Transportation engineering is resistant to change, yet the drumbeat of reform is getting louder and more difficult to ignore.
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Good article.
Vancouver has a long way to go here, as many sidewalks, especially downtown, are far too narrow, for the volume of traffic. Where is the vision to change that downtown Vancouver ? 50% of its. streets ought to be closed in its entirety for cars, and the other 50% need to have sidewalks twice as wide. Street side parking needs to be reduced or its price increased 4-10 fold. Where is this in the mayors’ weak transportation plan ? Post 2040 ?