Narrow roads often work better than wide ones
During the Institute of Transportation Enginers' annual meeting in St. Louis last week, Heather Smith, program director for the Congress for the New Urbanism, hailed the response that a CNU-ITE manual — Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach — has generated.
Smith says that the manual has been downloaded more than 1,500 times from the ITE website, and is being used by transportation planners, public works departments, city leaders, and community members. It's helping them to "design better streets, mitigate traffic, spur economic growth, and act on public health concerns," says an account posted on the CNU website.
In her dispatch about the conference, Smith also told about "several counterintuitive and overlooked points," which were presented by John LaPlante, chief transportation planning engineer in the Chicago office of T.Y. Lin International. Those points, Smith says, were:
Designing wider roads means more time for pedestrians to cross, which in turn means more wait times for cars.
Designing more wait times for pedestrians means most cars will go 45 mph on major thoroughfares and stop for 2 minutes instead of going along at 30 mph with less stopping time.
In scenarios with narrower streets engineers can actually increase car capacity because there is less time for pedestrians to cross the street.
Mid-block crossings are safer for pedestrians because there is traffic coming from 2 directions instead of 4 at intersections.
LaPlante, Smith, and Jefferey Riegner of Whiteman, Requardt, and Associates discussed complete streets and multimodal level of service as part of a panel discussion at the conference.
How can many roads be made safer? LaPlante said that installing signal countdown timers at intersections reduces the crash rate by 25 percent. The new MUTCD manual is requiring these signals.
Smith also reports:
LaPlante pointed out that completes streets are a must and showed the benefits of designing speeds to Level of Service D. LaPlante also pointed out that we need better ways to measure non-motorized travel. He referred to TRB's latest Highway Capacity manual (due out in September) that contains more advanced methods of analyzing pedestrian level of service.
Another session, presented by Jim Daisa and Brain Bochner, discussed two new case studies — one on Lancaster Boulevard in Fort Worth, the other on a transit-oriented development near the Pleasant Hill Bart Station in the San Francisco Bay Area.
To read more about Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares, click here.
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Another point for mid-block
Another point for mid-block crossings, especially on suburban arterials: these roads often add turn lanes which make the road extra-wide at intersections, making them the worst place to put ped crossings.
Of course, the crossing has to connect to where pedestrians want to go. Can't have people walk to the middle of the block, cross, walk back, only to repeat at the next intersection.
Narrow Roads Maim Bicyclists
If roads are to be deliberately narrowed, then they need passageways at these narrows for bicyclists to pass through. I'm grieved that non-bicycle roads continue to be designed and built.
Re: narrow roads maim bicyclists
That's a provocative title, Paul, but I don't think it's backed up by any evidence. Do you have any study to show that narrow roads are more likely to harm bicyclists compared to wide roads? A better response, however, is that it depends on what kind of thoroughfare. Streets where traffic travels below 25 mph, and I am talking about design speed, not speed limit, are very safe for bicyclists. High-speed roads, above 45 mph, with no shoulder and no separate bicycle lane/path, are very dangerous for bicyclists and I would suspect bicyclists would stay off of them. Streets in the middle need some kind of treatment to make them bicycle-friendly.
^ This Gentleman is Correct
Narrow roads do not implore any more chance of harm on cyclists -- and actually it's quite the contrary. Roads with lower design speeds (and speed limits) are exponentially safer than wider roads with higher speed limits. The wider the road the faster the cars move which leads to a series of more dangerous situations for law abiding cyclists to encounter.
Agree, adding a bike lane makes the street wider
As a regular commuter cyclist, I avoid cycle lanes, placed as they mostly are right in the 'door zone' for parked cars. It is much safer - and recommended for cyclists by Transport for London - to ride at least 1 metre away from the parked cars, in the traffic stream. Only where there is no on-street parking you can ride out of the traffic stream, but there is always the risk of pedestrians stepping onto the road without looking.
I fear that the inclusion of a cycle lane simply makes the roadway seem wider, which inevitably means that cars and trucks drive faster. There must be a better way. Cycle lanes in Holland are on the sidewalk: that leaves a narrow roadway which slows traffic.
A very important inclusion in any bicycle friendly city is the 'advanced stop box' which puts cyclists in front of cars at junctions. That way there is no chance that you can be cut down by a motorist turning left at traffic lights without indicating.
The key to cycle friendly cities is to slow all traffic on city streets. Bicycles can play a useful part in this. Indeed, the latest evidence shows that mingling bicycles in low speed urban traffic makes all road users safer: http://www.planetizen.com/node/50020 And lower speeds also mean more capacity and fewer casualties too.