A new manual helps designers make better streets

During the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ annual meeting in St. Louis in August, 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.