It is coming up to the end of the year and time to seriously think about who will be getting the “Gordies” for the best urban Vancouver news story, the most disastrous, and of course the most odd. Meanwhile the very good folks at Strong Towns have been doing some thoughtful thinking too about how to create better roads and streets. And they have come up with some direct principles and some pointed facts.
Quoting Chuck Marohn: “Most cities right now just give their street design work to their city engineer or (worse) public works office and let them run with it. You get the engineering value system; it’s built in, despite being contrary to the community’s values. Then there is all this tension when the design is despotic or expensive. Public hearing processes have been set up to (superficially) diffuse the tension, but it doesn’t get at the core problem: we should not start street design with the values of the engineering profession”.
My recommendation on street design is to delegate it to the member of your staff, or the department, that is best at working with people. Let them work with everyone on the street to identify common values and objectives, as well as constraints and concerns, and then come up with a conceptual design. Only then bring in the engineer and only to work out the technical details (eg. pavement thickness). Street must be designed by everyone. “
By involving people from different disciplines to work with the engineers who are building a street to be-well, as street, get someone else that is great at public process and building the thematic purpose and programming that will be occurring on a street. It was the concept that was used by the City of Vancouver in instigating greenways, which was a multidisciplinary team that looked at how to advance the practice of bio swales and ecological demonstration projects, traffic calming, and championing walking/ biking for over one hundred kilometers within the city owned portion of the streets, parks and public spaces.
Chuck Marohn’s principles are as follows:
1.Roads connect productive places, streets are “platforms for building wealth. On a street, we’re attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobile) are the indicator species of success”.
2.Streets that produce wealth are complex and organic, and the property use around them is not static.The property use also will dictate the width of the street and how the street is used by all road users.
3. If people are the indicator species of success, design the street so it is leafy and beautiful and people choose to recreate and hang out on it.
4. Streets are not car serving roads-they are a collective endeavour that incorporate “the people who live on it, those who own property on it, those who traverse it as well as the myriad of professionals who have expertise they can lend to the discussion”.
In short, Strong Towns is asking us to think of roads as organic places that are activated by the community and by the land use surrounding it, responsive and dynamic, ensuring that they are people friendly and constantly updated to reflect property owners’ needs. “When you are trying to build a street — when you are trying to make your city wealthier and more prosperous — make your engineer one small voice in a larger chorus of people whose words and, especially, whose actions dictate what your design should be”. It’s a paradigm for a new way of looking at streets as if they truly did belong to all users in a community.
I like the clear thinking presented above on the defined differences between roads and streets. It doesn’t really take a lot of public resources to nibble away at the incomprehensible last century priority to provide efficient through-commutes by private vehicles in order to promote the human scale by a modicum.
I was very impressed at how far a $6 million budget went with the Main Street Showcase project several years ago. Pedestrians were suddenly able to safely cross mid-Main at several new pedestrian and cyclist-activated signals almost overnight, and there has been a corresponding increase in sidewalk and retail activity ever since. That fairly modest budget only provided rather plain bus and crosswalk bump outs, new trees and the crosswalks, but the bang for the buck was very good.
Think of the human potential for Broadway once the subway is completed. The impetus to maintain car access supremacy will be greatly diminished with (eventually) 200,000+ people a day arriving by universally accessible rapid transit in Central Broadway. In my view, the Central Broadway streetscape needs all the humanizing it can get while accommodating commercial and emergency vehicle traffic. With high quality rapid transit the curb-oriented parking lanes will become almost irrelevant and the focus would then be justified to shift to bump outs at every intersection and transit station and bus stop, to provide additional signalized mid-block crosswalks, to allow limited commercial loading zones and permit parking for people with disabilities, and so forth. I think it’s possible to add at least 50% more sidewalk space.
On Broadway one can also imagine adding several layers of unique paving, street furniture, tree planting and public art treatments to generous sidewalks, perhaps well-programmed mini plazas at stations that are ringed with pedestrian-oriented cafes and shops. There is no better way to animate public open space than by using such means (small shops, purposeful pedestrian routing, provision for performance, orientation to sunshine and shade …) to attract people to inhabit and treasure them. One of our great mistakes here in at least half our plazas is to start with meaningless left over space (often on private land that can be appropriated) in the absence of any activity program that will attract people to stay a while. In some cases, public squares are as important as the buildings that surround them and possess certain basic social and design factors that make them a success.
Broadway is currently a commuter road. Let’s make it a High Street in every positive sense of the term. And follow up on many other roads.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.