Streets are key to urbanism in Kendall

With the drawing of the streets and blocks during the charrette, the battle to reclaim human-scale streetscapes had just begun. Transportation engineer Rick Hall designed the street sections four years later. Now the streets are under construction — construction that will take decades. Developers are responsible for building the portion of the network that pertains to their project. Nevertheless, Hall cites several advancements in the street design process in Downtown Kendall. • The 338-acre area is considered to be a special pedestrian-friendly sector in which walking, bicycling, and transit are encouraged. Rules that don’t apply to most of the other hundreds of square miles of Miami-Dade County can therefore apply to this area. This allows planners, who want to encourage mixed uses and walkability, and public works officials, who are concerned about traffic capacity, to come to terms with each other’s concerns, Hall says. • Travel and parking lanes were fully defined by Hall. Most street sections in downtown Kendall are described as 8-10-10-8 (two 8-foot parking lanes and two 10-foot travel lanes). “Before, there was a tendency to just report the total street width,” he explains. “The intent was, in a subtle way, to cover up the lane widths” to reduce conflict with engineers who were used to wider lanes. • Public officials accept the reality that the qualities that will make Downtown Kendall walkable and supportive of transit also will result in peak-hour motor vehicle traffic congestion. In a highly unusual step, the county did not require Hall to run the typical automotive “level of service” models to see how the internal streets would perform at build-out. • Miami-Dade County decided to permit development in downtown Kendall as long as commuter trains still have capacity — regardless of the capacity of Rt. 1. “They took a bold and proper step, utilizing the government investment in the rail system,” says Hall.