#completestreet

[newpublicsites]

#CompleteStreet advocacy foreshadowing against gabian stone piles awaiting cofferdam construction at the #druidhillpark lake. #newpublicsites #raggedrubble (at Druid Hill Park)

[stroadtoboulevard-blog]

Stroad Arterial, Complete Street, Multiway Boulevard

Slicing up a 98' arterial three different ways. I like the multiway boulevard (#3) because everything building to tree can be used by pedestrians. Note how the 'tree line' is closest together in this option: I think this helps the street feel less daunting.

Cycling advocates prefer the complete street, but I think it's not as politically pragmatic. The multiway boulevard offers more compromises to today's drivers (no parking in the central thoroughfare means smoother travel: nb, not necessarily faster, if narrowed) and pedestrians (the whole access lane is their realm) making it a more palatable.

The access lanes should be a different texture or even raised to sidewalk height, but Streetmix doesn't allow that yet.

UPDATE & Caveat: The complete street tree-line could be moved closer together, by spacing the trees among the parked cars. I welcome readers' nuanced thoughts on the pros and cons of this option.

[stroadtoboulevard-blog]

Jagtvej, Copenhagen, Denmark and King Edward Avenue, Vancouver, BC. Click the arrow on the side of the photo to compare. Click those first sentence links for the google streetviews to have a good look around.

Then let's talk about the transportation hierarchy, rhetoric and reality.

[stroadtoboulevard-blog]

Schiekade, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Schiekade, in Rotterdam, has a mixed-traffic access lane and parking on one side (like a multi-way boulevard) but a cycle track and an extra lane of vehicle traffic on the other side.

It also has two dedicated transit lanes in the middle.

[stroadtoboulevard-blog]

1e Middellandstraat, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Stroads discourage all transport modes but private cars. They are unpleasant for walking, cycling and transit use, which are all modes that accelerate more slowly and have lower top speeds than private cars.

With several decades of car-first land-use planning and traffic engineering, there is a large constituency of voters in North America that cannot imagine streets having space designated to any mode other than cars.

The focus of this blog is the multi-way boulevard, because this configuration of stroad-space improves the pedestrian realm and facilitates other transport modes (reducing friction in the centre, improving safety at the edges) without removing car lanes. It may therefore be more politically pragmatic. 

Nevertheless, it is rational to separate modes that travel and accelerate at different paces, so this is also an important stroad-retrofit option.

1e Middellandstraat has two transit-only lanes in the middle, two mixed traffic lanes, car parking, a cycle path and a sidewalk.

Parking is removed at transit stops: the platform goes where the car lane was, and cars wiggle to the right where the parking was. With short blocks, the 'wiggle' is performed at end of the preceding block.

1e Middellandstraat is the 100ft (30m) width of a standard North-American arterial, like Vancouver's Broadway or Kingsway. But Rotterdam's public servants have offered the street to multiple modes, unlike Vancouver's public servants, who clearly favour a car-first stroad.

Like many places in North America, Vancouver's streets were originally built with exactly this configuration, as Patrick Condon's story of Mr Campbell so eloquently describes. But even where there were never streetcars, on arterials outside the City of Vancouver, stroads could be reconfigured like this.