[B’ Spokes: There is no doubt that there should be more diverse types of streets available in urban areas, yet standards and planning tools are trying to make everything as freeway like as possible. If you are into this stuff then read the attached article, otherwise I just show the highlights:]
from Streetsblog Capitol Hill by Gary Toth
Images: Andy Singer
Good approach, wrong setting
I’m not going to look back and quibble with the general philosophy of how the interstates and the associated high-speed freeways were planned and designed. On many levels, the approach made sense.
But it became increasingly less persuasive when applied to the rest of our road network. Unlike interstates and freeways, most roads exist not just to move traffic through the area, but also to serve the homes, businesses, and people along them. Yet in search of high LOS rankings, transportation professionals have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other inappropriate strategies. In ridding our communities of the weeds of congestion, we have also pulled out the very plants that made our “gardens” worthwhile in the first place.
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Let me repeat: Contrary to what you may hear, there is no national requirement or mandate to apply LOS standards and targets 20 years into the future for urban streets. This thinking is a remnant from 1960s era policy for the interstate system, and has erroneously been passed down from generation to generation.
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Creating balanced standards for roadway design will benefit transportation as well. In the Netherlands, the “Livable Streets” policy led to a remarkable improvement in safety on their roadways. They started in the 1970s with a crash rate 15 percent higher than in the U.S., and now have a crash rate 60 percent lower.
https://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/02/07/los-and-travel-projections-the-wrong-tools-for-planning-our-streets/
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