Reports: Streets

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 1/1/2009
Road diets, a streetcar to the airport, and transit-oriented development are all being pursued by North Carolina’s largest city.
It wasn’t terribly long ago that Charlotte, North Carolina, was a typical Sunbelt city, happy with highways, office parks, and cul-de-sacs. But over the past several years, Charlotte’s Department of Transportation (CDOT), with support from elected officials, has started adopting techniques associated with smart growth and New Urbanism.

New Urban News Article with images, graphs, tables, 6/1/03
Since the 1980s, new urbanists have been trying to persuade state and local governments to approve narrower, slower-moving streets — key elements in walkable places. Considerable progress has been made toward this goal, which is central to the development of sociable, human-scale communities. But state transportation departments — powerful arbiters of much that gets built — have a long way to go.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The alley offset, described in the last Technical Page, is a way of modifying alignment of alleys from one block to the next. It is used where baroque excess in vehicle size and speed would otherwise result in corrosion of the alley system’s multiuse flexibility. A similar effect may be gained by varying adjacent block alley types — changing from a C pattern, to an H pattern, a T pattern and so on. While even more effective in slowing vehicles, this tactic has disadvantages for the continuity of underground utilities.

New Urban News Article with images, graphs, tables, sidebar, 9/1/2008
New research could lead to more favorable regulatory treatment of projects that generate fewer car trips.
New urbanists have long contended that mixed-use projects are treated unfairly by the transportation-engineering establishment. The “trip generation rates” promulgated by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) fail to recognize that when offices, retail, housing, and other uses are brought together in walkable settings, people may drive substantially less.

New Urban News Article with images, 9/1/2005
San Francisco’s newest multiway boulevard will be completed by mid-September, further aiding the revival of what had been a bedraggled portion of the Hayes Valley neighborhood southwest of downtown. The four-block thoroughfare, known as Octavia Boulevard, replaces a part of the Central Freeway that was damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Allan B. Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald, two of the co-authors of The Boulevard Book (see Sept. 2002 New Urban News), designed the new roadway with the staff of the city’s Public Works Department.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Every component of urbanism possesses both technical and social dimensions. While there are always good reasons for a traditional component or relationship of components to assume a standard form, there are also times when some widespread alteration of social circumstance licenses, indeed demands, technical reinvention.

New Urban News Article with images, 12/1/2005
Forum planners focus on improving transit service and creating multimodal thoroughfare designs.
The Mississippi Gulf region consists of 11 cities, strung out in a single line along the coast, a condition that would appear to support transit. Yet the area is one of the most car-dependent in the US, planners say, with 95 percent of workers commuting via autos and only 0.5 percent via buses, the only transit choice that was available prior to the hurricane.

New Urban News Article with images and table, 1/1/2009
A review of fatalities in 24 cities shows that safety grows as street networks become denser.
Transportation researchers Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick fed the facts from more than 130,000 vehicular crashes into their computers in recent months, hoping for a systematic answer to a life-and-death question: How can America’s streets and roads be made safer?

New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2008
Cities in the western and eastern US are starting to let motorists and pedestrians deal with one another more intuitively.
Up and down the West Coast and in parts of the East Coast, a select group of streets is going through a radical makeover. The street surfaces are being raised to the same level as the sidewalks. Curbs are being eliminated. Trees and vegetation are extending into what had been the domain of the automobile.

New Urban News Article with images, table, sidebar, 9/1/2006
Proposals for planting rows of trees along the roads — a traditional technique for shaping pleasing public spaces — are often opposed by transportation engineers, who contend that a wide travel corridor, free of obstacles, is needed to protect the lives of errant motorists.
Increasingly, however, the engineers’ beliefs about safety are being subjected to empirical study and are being found incorrect. Eric Dumbaugh, an assistant professor of transportation at Texas A&M, threw down the gauntlet with a long, carefully argued article, ”Safe Streets, Livable Streets,” in the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. A follow-up article by Dumbaugh, in the 2006 edition of Transportation Research Record, will present further evidence that safe urban roadsides are not what the traffic-engineering establishment thinks they are.