Urbanists hit the street

New urbanists have always been interested in street design. Since the New Urbanism was founded, its practitioners have experimented with street patterns, widths, and adjacent buildings. However, most of these efforts have resulted in one-time exceptions to the typical engineering product: big, straight streets designed for motorists’ speed and safety. Now a joint project of CNU’s Transportation Task Force and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) is underway to make streets that support urbanism the rule rather than the exception. Since 1996, CNU’s Transportation Task Force has been advancing the state of the art in street design. The group’s best-known effort was its 1999 publication of six Transportation Tech Sheets, still available on-line at cnu.org/aboutcnu/index.cfm/formAction=initiatives. In April, CNU released Civilizing Downtown Highways. It shows how California municipalities and the state highway department, despite often conflicting objectives, have made some surface highways serve as real main streets. The book, which features the work of CNU members in California communities, can be ordered online at www.cnu.org. Transportation Engineers Interested The transportation engineering profession has been reluctant to adopt new urbanist practice. Despite pressure from activists, engineers are slow to change their practice. Concerns about professional liability, combined with the power of the status quo, make street design practice highly reliant upon industry design manuals (such as AASHTO’s “green book”) and standard practice in each locality. Despite this inertia, the ITE has been a member of the Smart Growth Network for the past several years. According to longtime ITE member and leader Brian Bochner, institute leaders now understand the concept of reducing demand for road space through land-use strategies. They also recognize the need for improved conditions for walking, cycling, and transit. ITE takes part in the Smart Growth Network to learn how to actually implement these concepts. “We wanted to move toward a new approach to designing the transportation system,” says Bochner. Through the Smart Growth Network, CNU heard that ITE was working on Smart Growth Transportation Guidelines. The organization was writing the guidelines as a recommended practice, which is a way of formally endorsing a practice without making it a mandatory standard. These guidelines are now almost completed and could be published by the end of the year. While useful, the guidelines are oriented toward policy and planning, not toward actual network or street design. CNU’s Director of Policy and Research, Ellen Greenberg, met with Bochner and staff of the US Environmental Protection Agency, at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in San Diego in January 2002. The EPA subsequently agreed to provide seed money for CNU and ITE to work together on a street design manual for implementing Smart Growth and New Urbanism. In related activity early in 2002, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation brought together the CNU and ITE executive directors in direction-setting meetings for its project to create “active communities,” where routine exercise improves public health. Now the two organizations are jointly pursuing federal money to fund the development of new street design guidelines. Through these various channels, CNU is entering into a longer-term partnership with ITE. Jointly, CNU and ITE members will determine the scope of a combined set of street and network design guidelines. Though the exact scope of this new project will not be finalized until late this year, it appears that it will cover the full range of street and network design issues, from streets in TNDs to regional networks. The new guidelines will be written so that local and state agencies can adopt them directly into their local or state design manuals. This unprecedented opportunity for CNU to work jointly with major engineering organizations demands that we work to advance our internal understanding and agreement about new urbanist street and network design. This effort is being advanced by members Rick Hall, Rick Chellman, and Peter Swift (all also ITE members), who met for 10 days in September to begin work on a new urbanist street design manual. Their work, as well as that of other practitioners, will be presented for review at an internal CNU Transportation Meeting to be held December 10 and 11 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The results from that meeting will form CNU’s input into the joint process with ITE. If CNU or ITE members are interested in taking part in this project, they should contact the Transportation Task Force’s Initiative Leader Fred Dock (fcd@iteris.com), Ellen Greenberg (egreenberg@cnu.org), or ITE’s Lisa Fontana (lfontana@ite.org).