Key points below. Spread the word!

• Safety

  The problem:

  • Freeways are built for motor vehicles and speed while city roadways are slower, shared spaces for automobiles, bikes, and pedestrians. But we use the same manual to design both! Literally.

  • When we design city roadways to be “in-town freeways,” we encourage fast driving.

  New idea:

  • Design roadways for everybody: bikes and pedestrians, kids on their way to school and seniors with walkers, folks in wheelchairs, and commuters walking to the bus or train depot.

  • We slow down cars by requiring drivers to think. Picture streets with narrower lanes, trees closer to the street edge, parklets, or kiosks for local restaurants and businesses. Speed bumps? Maybe. The more the driver must attend do, the slower the speed. This is true for all of us!

  • This is one area where congestion is your friend. People drive more cautiously when streets are full and busy.

• Congestion

  The problem:

  • Arterial road congestion during rush hour. Think E. Washington street at 5 o’clock.

  • Arterials are like rivers; they’re going to fill up when all the feeder “streams” are dumping cars during rush hour. But only during rush hour.

  • We could build more, bigger arterials, but studies show that encourages more far- flung “tributary” development and saddles our city with crippling maintenance obligations. All for 45 minutes a day?

  New idea:

  • Build so people drive less.

  • Build more affordable, infill housing near where people work, so they don’t have to commute from out of the area.

  • Enable more live-work options so there is no rush hour commute at all.

  • Allow neighborhood commercial projects, so that corner stores and services can pop up where we need them. Picture walking to the corner store for a half-gallon of milk or meeting neighbors at the corner cafe for a chat. Forget the drive to the strip mall.

  • Don’t build congestion out of the system with wider streets and more of them. Congested streets are safer streets. (And they are only congested during rush hour!)

Poynton Regenerated (an example of an intersection redesigned to be a shared space)