7 ways to make pedestrian friendly streets

[Drake]

7 Simple Ways to Make Every City Friendlier to Pedestrians
September 30, 2014 | Jordan Golson | Wired Magazine | Link

San Jose is expected to grow faster than any city in the Bay Area in the next few decades. The local government is working to meet that demand with mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. To help it out, the non-profit San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) wrote a 67-page report looking at building and design techniques the city should encourage developers to use to better promote walkability—a fancy term that basically translates to pedestrian friendliness—and better use of mixed-use spaces.

For those who don’t have the time and inclination to read through dozens of pages of case studies and design advice aimed at policymakers and architects, SPUR has drilled the piece down to seven principles that make for better urban design.

It’s difficult to retrofit existing cities and suburbs if redevelopment projects don’t present an opportunity to change up the infrastructure, but small-scale interventions can make a difference. “There are ways to get better. You don’t have to go right from suburbia to Manhattan in one fell swoop,” says Benjamin Grant, an urban design program manager at SPUR who helped write the guidelines. “There are steps you can take to improve the walkability of the environment in modest ways that have a real impact on the ground.”

So here’s what cities should be doing to make public spaces healthier and more navigable for their two-legged residents.

1. Create fine-grained pedestrian circulation
A quarter mile walk across a gigantic big-box store parking lot may seem daunting, but if that walk is instead down a sidewalk lined with shops and cafes, it becomes a much nicer idea. It’s all about perception of distance. Cities should avoid taking up entire blocks with massive, impenetrable edifices, and partition streets into smaller chunks that feel easier to walk.

2. Orient buildings to streets
Rather than building a grocery store back from the sidewalk with a huge parking lot in front of it, the report suggests locating the main entrance right on the sidewalk, encouraging pedestrians to step in. Putting buildings on the street “creates a kind of coziness and sense of enclosure,” Grant says. “It’s a classic attribute of traditional, walkable cities where the streets are all lined with buildings.”

We humans tend not to feel comfortable in environments where we’re exposed on all sides, Grant says, a residual instinct to watch for predators. Enclosed spaces, like a traditional European town square, make for more comfortable environments.

3. Organize uses to support public activity
The best cities have bustling centers where people want to spend time. Grant says it’s important to find a good balance between active spaces and retail outlets like an outdoor cafe or a grocery store, without setting aside too much square footage for selling stuff. “The world is full of empty ground-floor retail space,” he says. A gym, outdoor climbing wall, or community meeting space can do a lot more to bring an area to life.

4. Place parking behind or below buildings
If you put a building behind a parking lot, the pedestrian feels like a second-class citizen. So the report strongly recommends putting parking lots underground or behind a building. “There is no bigger driver of form in a suburban environment than parking,” Grant says. How a developer treats where vehicles are stored (remember all those drivers become pedestrians when they step out of their cars) can do more for walkability than anything else.

A large underground parking lot can deliver a more vibrant and functional walking community—if it’s done right. Finding the right balance for parking across multiple use cases (commercial, office, residential) is tough to perfect. It also requires more money to build, and careful planning to ensure that entrances and exits for cars and pedestrians are logical and convenient.

5. Address the human scale with building and landscape details
Buildings may loom over pedestrians, but effective signage and entrances can brings things back to the human scale. Grant says the Empire State Building is a good example of a massive structure that’s well designed for ground level pedestrians. No matter how high a building is, frontage with street trees and small-scale signage and entrances can make a huge difference.

6. Provide clear, continuous pedestrian access
Pedestrians should have easy ways to move through plazas, parks, restricted-access delivery streets, and other places cars can’t go. Clear signage explaining how to navigate around a complex is important, especially for tourist-heavy areas.

7. Build complete streets
“In the last 80 years,” Grant says, “we have stripped our streets of every function except the movement of vehicles.” Now, cities are looking to accommodate and encourage other uses. The premise is called complete streets: Urban development that focuses on all the functions a street can serve as a social and commercial space, as well as a way to get around for bikes, public transit, and personal vehicles. Including places for people to get a cup of coffee, read the newspaper, or have an outdoor meeting next to a fountain can go a long way toward enriching a neighborhood.

More information on SPUR’s Design for Walkability project is available on their website and in the much longer Getting to Great Places urban design report released last year.

[urbanist]

Great principles - Here is a website devoted to Canadian Complete Streets that include:

St. George St. in TO (a personal favorite)
Kitchener King Street
Yonge St. in TO
Laurier Avenue in Ottawa
Davenport Ave. in Waterloo
102 Street in Grand Prairie
Assiniboine Ave. in Winnipeg
Burrard St. Bridge, Vancouver

New: I would personally add Dundas Street in Yorkville for peds...

Site: http://completestreetsforcanada.ca/examp...ets-canada

[Markster]

New: I would personally add Dundas Street in Yorkville for peds...

... where exactly do you mean? I am not aware of those being remotely close to each other.

[jgsz]

We were in St. Augustine Beach, Florida, and I was impressed by the safety of some of their pedestrian crosswalks along highway A1A Beach Blvd.  Pedestrians had the option of using bright orange/red flags when crossing the road.

   

Cars approaching crosswalks see a familiar pedestrian crossing sign.

       

On the sidewalk pedestrians are given an option to use a flag for increased viability. 

   

Pedestrians cross the busy road safely.  On the other side pedestrians place their flag in the flag holder.  Once in a while I saw all the flags on one side of the road.  This is bound to happen but cars have to stop whether or not pedestrians use these flags.  

I noticed that cars slowed when they saw pedestrians near one of these crosswalks in anticipation that they will have to stop. 

I'm sure something like this would work here too.  There would be some issues with snow and ice in the winter months but I think this is an example of safe street crossing worth pursuing. 

[zanate]

I'm sure something like this would work here too.  There would be some issues with snow and ice in the winter months but I think this is an example of safe street crossing worth pursuing. 

"In many communities, people traveling by foot are often stigmatized as poor or mentally ill. Expecting people to carry flags so they can cross without getting killed—in the words of Kirkland’s campaign, expecting them to “Take It to Make It”—only increases the sense that being a person on foot is somehow weird or embarrassing. Cities should instead be doing everything they can to advance the radical notion that walking is a perfectly normal thing to do."

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/09/w...er/379878/

Edit: Here's my commentary. Flags for pedestrians crossing the road are not a solution, but a symptom that all hope for a walkable city is lost. They shame, marginalize and stigmatize pedestrians and will serve as a disincentive for someone who would be so presumptuous as to dare take in their city on foot. If they have some small effect in decreasing collisions by inattentive drivers at crossings, this must be weighed against the damage they can do to people's willingness to walk, and cities' willingness to come up with real, permanent solutions instead of bandaids.

[panamaniac]

We are fortunate to be living in a city that, even if it is overwhelmingly car dependent, attaches no stigma to a person on foot. The flags, however, seem like overkill.

[nms]

I'd prefer to see jurisdictions adopting mandatory "stop and let the pedestrian cross" bylaws (or laws). I was surprised in both the United States and elsewhere in Canada to have traffic stop for me at a pedestrian crossing even though there was no stop sign for the vehicle traffic.

[mpd618]

We were in St. Augustine Beach, Florida, and I was impressed by the safety of some of their pedestrian crosswalks along highway A1A Beach Blvd.  Pedestrians had the option of using bright orange/red flags when crossing the road.

I've also seen an interesting treatment of crosswalks in Florida - in Naples there are these crosswalks that automatically flash when you start crossing. Of course, that city's transportation network primarily consists of mega-wide arterials that are uncrossable by any means (and terrible to walk along), so the impact of those crosswalks is moot.

Florida is at the top of the list of the most dangerous places in North America to be a pedestrian. It is too bad they don't fix the road systems that make things like what you highlighted not absurd.

[Pheidippides]

I'm sure something like this would work here too.  There would be some issues with snow and ice in the winter months but I think this is an example of safe street crossing worth pursuing. 

This is just normalizing a car-centric behaviour and environments by ostracizing a segment of the population. Really it comes down to what the population and society puts value and priority on.

Christopher Hume had an interesting, albeit hyperbole filled, article about this in the Toronto Star recently.

Toronto's killing streets as deadly as ever: The recent spate of pedestrians killed shows how willing we are to accept death as part of crossing the road
"If, for example, 22 seniors were murdered on the streets of the GTA during a single year, there would be outrage across the land. But when that many pedestrian seniors are killed by cars, as was the case in 2013, we wring our hands and carry on."

"In fact, there were more traffic fatalities in Toronto in 2013 (63, two-thirds of them pedestrians) as there were homicides (57), according to Toronto police. One form of death is considered accidental and, therefore, no one’s fault. Homicide, on the other hand, is a crime and blame must be apportioned."

For comparisons sake here are the statistics for Waterloo Region 2009-2013:
Sources:
http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/gettin...eports.asp
http://www.wrps.on.ca/node/2951
http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca//uploads/...202515.pdf
http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/region...0304.1.pdf

Pedestrian Deaths
2009 5
2010 2
2011 2
2012 6
2013 3

Cyclist Deaths
2009 0
2010 1
2011 1
2012 2
2013 0

Motorist Deaths
2009 5
2010 5
2011 13
2012 2
2013 7

Homicides
2009 4
2010 4
2011 7
2012 4
2013 8

"Active transportation" deaths (pedestrian + cyclist)
2009 5
2010 3
2011 3
2012 8
2013 3

"Transportation" deaths (pedestrian + cyclist + motorist)
2009 10
2010 8
2011 16
2012 10
2013 10

Regional Operating Budget:
$303,251,994

Regional Policing Operating Budget:
$145,609,556, (~32%)

[ookpik]

This is just normalizing a car-centric behaviour and environments by ostracizing a segment of the population. Really it comes down to what the population and society puts value and priority on.

Ya think? More than 270 000 pedestrians killed on roads each year

270,000/365 ~= 740 deaths per day. That's several wide body commercial airlines per day--every day. Yet how often does this make the news, let alone for several days per incident.

Also FWIW The World’s Most Deadly Cities For Pedestrians. It's interesting that Copenhagen came in at 12 and beating New York City. [Must be all those damned cyclists   ]