Thursday, December 14, 2006
Decaffeinated street design
Posted by Harold Henderson on 12.14.06 at 07:25 AM
"The asphalt street suddenly gives way to an urban oasis," writes Linda Baker in Seed magazine. "A pair of massive, granite planters with palm trees flank the entrance to the street, which opens onto a one-block space paved with concrete squares. There are no white lane dividers or sidewalks. Instead, rough-hewn granite columns distinguish places for pedestrians and places for cars."
This is 21st-century traffic engineering (in Portland, if the palm trees didn't give it away -- SEE CORRECTION IN COMMENTS), based on psychology more than engineering. It's supposed to alert drivers to unpredictability, causing them to slow down. Baker quotes Aussie innovator David Engwicht, author of Mental Speed Bumps, who wants drivers to (Baker's words) "lose interest in speed and identify themselves as part of the larger social landscape." Read the whole thing.
Would you like to see something like this in your block? Or is it the kind of thing that sounds good . . . somewhere else?
Comments (4)
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I want this in Lakeview. I think it could work great around Wrigley Field, where cars should be subordinate to pedestrians during games anyway. This would allow for a more organic transition between pedestrian-dominated ballpark plaza during games, and sidestreet during winter, particularly on Sheffield, between the park and the Red Line CTA stop. Right now they clumsily deal with the crowds using orange cones and traffic cops. Current street design standards seem to consider pedestrians as an afterthought, even in many places where they are the majority -- the disappearing crosswalks at Millennium Park as a prime example. Streets should be recognized as public spaces, not just as purely utilitarian automobile pipelines.
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It does appear promising, though if it were proposed for my street I'd want to find out more about it. Even cheaper, when my street was proposed for rebuilding, I suggested that the best traffic calming method would be to let it deteriorate further. The City did not agree. Another counterintuitive traffic finding, btw, is a recent study of cyclists, which "suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely..." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/5334208.stm)
As a father of a 5 year old, on a residential street where people sometimes use our street as a means of evading a stop light at a crowded intersection, I have made much use of the notion of a curb as a clear limit of safe movement. I'd like to slow down traffic but it is a hard sell. It's a bit like non-violence. The evidence exists that non-violence works at least sometimes, but it remains on the fringe. A harder sell really since you put your kids on the line for harm, not yourself.
