Project for Public Spaces » Rightsizing Streets Guide

Expanding the Rightsizing Streets Guide

Project for Public Spaces — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:37:56 +0000

Milwaukee’s Park East Freeway during demolition / Photo: Milwaukee Department of Development

Today we are unveiling several new resources within the Rightsizing Streets Guide. We’re excited to share with you an interactive map featuring more than fifty successful rightsizing projects from around the US. We’ve also added two new full case studies to the guide. The case studies, contributed by the Congress for the New Urbanism, both illustrate the benefits of the removal of urban freeways—rightsizing at a grand scale!

In 2002, removal of the Park East Freeway in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, opened up 26 acres of centrally-located land to redevelopment. The project increased property values by more than 45% in less than four years. The freeway was replaced by a new surface street, McKinley Avenue, and a restored city grid.
In 1992, a portion of San Francisco’s towering double-decked Central Freeway was replaced by the tree-lined Octavia Boulevard and a new public square. The boulevard safely provides space for bicyclists and pedestrians, while slowing traffic exiting the freeway and dispersing it onto the road network without gridlock. Since the conversion, property values have risen, transit trips are up 75%, and retail and restaurants have returned to the neighborhood.

You can read more about CNU’s Highways to Boulevards program on their website.

While the Rightsizing Streets Guide’s case studies are meant to focus in on projects that illustrate certain key aspects of the rightsizing process, we also saw a need to highlight the countless rightsizing projects happening in communities large and small, all across the US. To accomplish this, we’ve created an interactive map of rightsizing projects within the Guide.

Click here to check out our new interactive rightsizing project map!

As of today, the map features 58 examples from communities in 22 states, everywhere from Georgia to Oregon, California to Iowa. By clicking on the pins, you can find basic information about each project, such as the type of conversion, (i.e. 4 lanes to 3 lanes), or what design elements were used (i.e. bike lanes, mid-block crossings). The most important feature of the map that it connects you directly with the agency that oversaw the project, allowing practitioners to reference precedents and seek out colleagues to provide guidance and support.

The rightsizing project map is intended to grow with your help. If you or your organization has been part of a rightsizing project, we would love to feature your success story. On the map page you can find a link to our project submission form. Simply fill out this short form and PPS will add your rightsized street to the map.

The last addition to the Guide is a new resources section with further reading on rightsizingto help connect you with the leading technical research and reports from trusted organizations like the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). These resources provide additional evidence of the safety, traffic, and economic benefits of rightsizing.

Before we lose you to the many hours you’re undoubtedly about to spend diving into all of this new rightsizing material, we want to thank the Congress for the New Urbanism for their contribution to the Rightsizing Streets Guide project. Remember that, if you have a project that you believe is particularly illustrative of a key aspect of the rightsizing process, we’re always open to adding more case studies to the Guide. Just email us at transportation@pps.org, with “rightsizing” in the subject line.

Rightsizing Streets to Create Great Public Spaces

Seth Ullman — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:03:46 +0000

I’m a pedestrian before I’m a driver, a rider, a passenger, a worker, or a shopper. I have to walk through public space to get anywhere, and I prefer walking where there are other people, comfortable sidewalks, and crossable streets. Plants, diverse businesses, and the possibility of running into friends are bonuses. Streets built just for cars undermine all of these elements of great walks and great places.

Via our Rightsizing Streets Guide, Project for Public Spaces promotes rightsizing as a means of improving streets for all users and creating a sense of place. Rightsizing improves safety and accessibility for walkers, bikers, and drivers by reconfiguring the street’s space to match the needs of the street’s community. Rightsizing is often critical to the cultivation of streets as places, in which streets provide for safe and enjoyable human experiences and foster inclusive, healthy, and economically viable communities.

The Porch in Philadelphia before and after rightsizing / Photo: University City District

These case studies illustrate that rightsizing can help activate a corner by creating a plaza, transform a corridor for blocks or miles by encouraging pedestrians and bicyclists, and improve access to local businesses, neighbors, and other attractions.

The Porch at 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia and Broadway Boulevard in New York City transformed poorly utilized road space into active pedestrian plazas.
When University Place wanted to create a main street in their newly incorporated municipality, their rightsizing effort included installing sidewalks where there had been only road shoulders, improving the ability of pedestrians to cross the street, and beautifying the formerly overwhelmingly car-oriented Bridgeport Way.
East Boulevard in Charlotte was also rightsized in response to the community’s desire for a safer and more vibrant pedestrian environment with increased opportunities for outdoor dining. They brought the ‘Boulevard’ back to East Boulevard with slower car speeds making for a safer, quieter street, and infrastructure to make that street navigable on foot and by bike. Edgewater Drive has a similar story.
In Poughkeepsie, rightsizing Raymond Avenue included streetscape improvements that encouraged pedestrian access to local retail and dining establishments.
Main Street/US 395 in tiny Bridgeport, California was rightsized to increase parking and support pedestrians’ access to local businesses.
Prospect Park West in Brooklyn was transformed by the inclusion of a traffic-separated two way bike lane and pedestrian refuge islands. The result was a safer street for all users, and much easier access to Prospect Park.
Rightsizing Nebraska Avenue in Tampa and Stone Way in Seattle reduced traffic crashes, and improved the experience of the street for pedestrians and bicyclists.

East Boulevard Overview / Photo: City of Charlotte

East Boulevard Crossing / Photo: City of Charlotte

Each rightsized street was improved for pedestrians, and most created bike lanes as well, with minimal adverse—and often positive—impacts on vehicle operations. While vehicular transportation is important, our streets should welcome people using many different modes. Youth, some elderly, and many in between are unable to drive, but happy to walk and bike when it’s safe and pleasant. Further, many may prefer to walk or bike for their health, convenience, environmental concerns, or social reasons. By allowing a child to bike to school, a bike lane provides autonomy for the child (and the parent), and improves the atmosphere of that corridor. By calming the traffic next to that bike lane, the street is made safer for all. Of course, street design is not all there is to Placemaking, and not every rightsizing effort is perfectly aligned with its neighborhood’s desires or needs. However, rightsizing is often a critical component of a community’s Placemaking strategy.

East Boulevard Outdoor Dining / Photo: City of Charlotte

Rightsizing projects tend to use before and after measurements of success that come from traditional traffic engineering priorities like reducing injuries, the number of speeding cars, or travel delay. Rightsizing succeeds by these measures, but they only hint at the fundamental place-centered outcomes of such projects: enabling thriving communities. Safety and mobility offer support to, but are different than, our more basic and fulfilling daily activities: shopping, socializing, eating, learning, recreating, game-playing, bench-sitting, people-watching, and all of the many other experiences that are more frequent and better in successful public spaces. We would be well served by more documentation of these activities in addition to the standard safety and mobility metrics. Streets and sidewalks are our most common public spaces. Rightsizing is a major way to activate these spaces and build communities.

Click here to visit our new Rightsizing Streets Guide to learn more about how rightsizing can help a street near you!

Welcome to the Rightsizing Streets Guide

Gary Toth — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:30:21 +0000

Many of our streets haven’t changed in decades, even when they’ve proven dangerous, or the surrounding communities’ needs have changed. When the roads have been altered, they have often been made wider, straighter, and faster, rather than more livable.

Our Rightsizing Streets Guide aims to help planners and community members update their streets to make them ‘right’ for their context. The centerpiece of the guide is a set of ten rightsizing case studies that highlight impressive outcomes using before and after data on mobility, crashes, and other parameters. These are just a few of the projects that have been built and many more are being planned all over the country. Our glossary of common rightsizing techniques and our best practices guide to street selection criteria and before and after measurements can help facilitate similar changes in your community.

Nebraska Avenue (Photo Credit: Florida DOT)

Rightsizing in Context

Rightsizing’s approach is not new to PPS or the larger transportation community. The emergence of the Context Sensitive Solutions movement in 1998 accelerated transportation professionals’ reevaluation of the presumption that wider, straighter, and faster roads are universally better. This paradigm shift has been glacially slow, but as with the glaciers, this movement has reshaped the landscape of transportation. The fact that wider, straighter, and faster isn’t always better has been the topic of several PPS articles.

This approach has momentum. Context Sensitive Solutions opened the door in ‘98; a few years later, the Complete Streets movement swept through it. These approaches emphasize that streets are not solely for moving cars at high speeds, to the detriment of other possibilities and the physical health of community members.

But these approaches created a new problem. As more and more people began to realize that streets don’t always have to be designed exclusively for high speed travel by cars, the public clamor for streets designed for people intensified. This clamor, rooted in years of frustration, was vented at professionals with little or no experience or any sound engineering practice on how to design streets for all users. If anything, awareness amongst the public that their streets don’t have to be just for cars increased the communication gap between engineers, planners, and community members.

New knowledge is needed about how to design roadways differently, and also the ramifications of doing so. This information is important both to stakeholders and transportation professionals, which is why I wrote the Citizens Guide for Better Streets several years ago. Professionals need to be comforted with data demonstrating that new approaches work within their transportation metrics, and stakeholders need to see case studies describing how and where innovative street designs have been launched.

Credit: Andy Singer

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of communities undertaking projects that reverse the trend of wider, straighter, and faster streets. I collected a number of these case studies during presentations by transportation professionals around the U.S. Thanks to a grant from the Anne T & Robert M Bass Foundation, PPS went further and spoke with folks who have championed rightsizing. The first results of our research are presented in our Rightsizing Streets Guide on the PPS web site.

Why ‘Rightsizing?’

It has become fashionable to call projects that reallocate street space to accommodate bikes, pedestrians and transit, “Road Diets.” This term resonates with advocates who have been frustrated with bloated overdesigned roads for years; I share their frustration.

But after working inside the transportation establishment for 34 years, I believe that Road Diet is often a polarizing term. When citizens walk into the City Engineer’s office and ask for a road diet, the outcome they have in mind is already clear, before any conversation takes place, and before any analysis of the problem and data takes place. This can put professionals on the defensive and drive them deeper into the comfort of their automobile-centric training. It is like having the message delivered on a note wrapped around a rock that hits them in the head.

Credit: Andy Singer

Rightsizing, on the other hand, opens, rather than narrows, the conversation. It avoids putting the transportation professional on the defensive and shifts the conversation from debating the solution to working together to define and then solve the problem. The decades of experience vested in our professionals can then be applied to solving a different problem: creating a road that serves all users, not just cars.

Much of the time, this will mean shrinking the road (aka putting it on a diet). Almost all of the time, it will involve reallocating existing space between the modes. Sometimes, we might all come to agree that the ‘right’ size could actually be an expanded roadway. In some circumstances, more cars, trucks, transit, or pedestrians may demand more space. Hey—if we are going to demand that our engineers have an open mind, then so should we, right? After all, isn’t the ultimate goal to accommodate all users adequately and safely, rather than to just shrink roads indiscriminately? If the preferred solution is sensitive to all contexts and modes, and is not smaller, that should be okay.

In accordance with this philosophy, what you will find in our new Rightsizing guide is a depiction of all sorts of projects that recast roads in order to accommodate all users. Changes described in the case studies include not only vehicle lanes converted to bike lanes, sidewalks, and medians, but also the creation of public spaces, and roundabouts in place of traffic lights.

Explore the Site, Help It Grow

PPS hopes that this will be the beginning of a larger set of resources with information on more projects that can lead to Livability and Streets as Places. We want this to be a project created by and useful to everyone—professionals, community members and advocates alike. We don’t want this resource to be static as of January 2013; we invite any and all of you to submit additional rightsizing case studies so that we can continually expand our highlighted range of solutions for our streets.

Click here to explore the resources in our Rightsizing Streets Guide, and let’s make this approach standard practice!