Street Design

This report looks at the potential impacts autonomous vehicle deployment could have on parking demand and how that might impact urban development. The study focused on three distinct areas of San Francisco. The research found that, contrary to headlines about AV impacts on parking, achieving large reductions in parking demand based on AV deployment will not be easy. To achieve significant parking reductions, AVs would need to be shared (not privately owned), pooled (riders willing to pick up other passengers along the way), have widespread geographic deployment (across entire metropolitan areas), and would need to complement high-capacity transit. Without all or most of these factors, parking demand may only by marginally impacted by AV deployment. The study also found that if parking demand could be reduced, different areas of the city would see quite different results. While many areas in San Francisco would see minimal development impacts as parking is not currently a significant driver or limiter of development, more auto-dominated areas could see substantial impacts if parking demand could be reduced by more than 40%. This raises interesting questions of how these levels of parking demand reduction might impact more auto-dominated and suburban areas throughout the country. This research was funded by Waymo.

Many studies have noted that denser and more accessible environments with higher level-of-service (LOS) tend to encourage higher levels of walking and bicycling activity. As streets are increasingly designed to facilitate safe cycling through built environment interventions, little has been done to evaluate perceptions of safety on different typologies, particularly one vs. two-way corridors. Theory would suggest that many individuals frame their commutes based in-part on the perceived safety of the environment, yet little research looks at varying street design and this perception. This study uses a moving camera approach to evaluate the perceived cycling comfort for drivers and cyclists on different roadway designs (multi-lane, one way; two-way, bidirectional street; single-lane, one-way).

Re-allocating space on streets to accommodate new uses – particularly for walking, biking, and being – is not new. COVID-era needs have accelerated the process that many communities use to make such street transitions, however. Many communities quickly understood that the street is actually a public place and a public good that serves broader public needs more urgent than the free flow or the storage of private vehicles. This book captures some of these quick changes to city streets in response to societal needs during COVID, with two open questions: 1) what changes will endure post-COVID?; and 2) will communities be more open to street reconfigurations, including quick and inexpensive trials, going forward?

Before the pandemic, Urbanism Next developed a framework organizing the disruptions to cities caused by emerging transportation technologies on land use, urban design, building design, transportation, and real estate. COVID-19 has disrupted the trajectory of these emerging technologies and will, in turn, change some our original assumptions. This paper revisits the original Urbanism Next framework, taking into account the cascading impacts of the pandemic. This report is one of two reports completed by Urbanism Next on the impacts of Covid-19.

Urbano has been developed by Cornell University and other organizations. This software has some special features like download geospatial data, import and aggregate data, lookup and modify metadata, routing in different modes, analyze amenities and streets, integrated cad workflow, etc. Also, is useful to quantify urban parameters like amenity demand, streetscore, amenityscore and walkscore. It has a friendly interface to visualize different urban planning parameters.

Make pedestrian ways, particularly sidewalks, first class members of an open data transportation network. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has made available extensive, user-contributed open data on transportation networks, providing the basis for many use cases and downstream activities, including rich analytics, travel route optimization, city planning, and disaster relief. Sidewalks in the built environment have generally been treated an addendum to streets, failing to serve people with limited mobility.

Townscaper is an experimental community simulation and town-building game where the user can draw a series of buildings to obtain a town and represent urban spaces.

With the rapid growth of ride-hailing services, e-commerce and on-demand deliveries, demand for curb space has increased in urban areas.

This report studies how the use of Transportation Network Companies are increasing the demand for curb space and the potential related issues such as access, circulation, and safety.

Cities around the world are beginning to prioritize people over vehicles by closing major streets to traffic and opening them up to pedestrians, cyclists, public transit.

San Francisco’s emerging trend of transforming parking spots into “parklets” has sparked residents, businesses and nonprofits from around the city to come up with creative ways to turn parking into public space.

San Francisco’s “parklet” trend of transforming parking spots into small public spaces has mixed reviews among residents. Some people think that they are provide spaces for neighborhoods to come together, while some believe they exacerbate gentrification.

With the rise of e-commerce, Americans are demanding more deliveries. However, with declining warehouse availability, congested streets and limited curb access, the U.S.’s infrastructure may not be able to handle the increasing demand.

This is a fact sheet suitable for use as a printed handout on Urbanism Next's topline research findings regarding micromobility.

This framework provides an overview of the work Urbanism Next does and how we approach our research.

This purpose of this report is to help the cities of Gresham, Oregon and Eugene, Oregon understand the potential impacts of new mobility technologies – with an emphasis on autonomous vehicles (AVs) – and prepare a policy response. While Gresham and Eugene are case studies, it provides communities of all sizes information on how new mobility services could impact their communities and what they can do about it, from broad strategies to specific policy responses. While this work focuses on the various new mobility and goods delivery services that currently exist, the framework that is discussed here is also applicable to emerging technologies that haven’t yet been introduced, such as AVs.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a near future reality and the implications of AVs on city development and urban form, while potentially widespread and dramatic, are not well understood. This report describes the first order impacts, or the broad ways that the form and function of cities are already being impacted by forces of change including⁠—but not limited to⁠—AVs and related technologies.

A blueprint for designing 21st century streets, the Guide unveils the toolbox and the tactics cities use to make streets safer, more livable, and more economically vibrant.

Urban Footprint provides a cloud-based urban planning software built by urban planners and designers who truly understand planning needs. Service includes actionable data, scenario building, and multi-metric analysis.

The purpose of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide (part of the Cities for Cycling initiative) is to provide cities with state-of-the-practice solutions that can help create complete streets that are safe and enjoyable for bicyclists.

The Transit Street Design Guide provides design guidance for the development of transit facilities on city streets, and for the design and engineering of city streets to prioritize transit, improve transit service quality, and support other goals related to transit.

Open source and free, web-based street design platform.

Open source and free, web-based street design platform, specifically cross-sections of streets for multiple uses.

Urban population movement simulation tool for strategic planning.

Provides a platform to design and manage your city's transportation future, specifically bus and micromobility services.

Open source and free, web-based urban design platform.

This scorecard shows the criteria and point values that make up the BRT Standard, including a description of each category.

Open-access scenario planning package that allows users to analyze how their community's current growth pattern and future decisions impacting growth will impact a range of measures from public health, fiscal resiliency and environmental sustainability.

Surveyor app from Coord to collect accurate curb asset data in half the time with the power of augmented reality.

Provides a platform to analyze, share, and collect curb data.

Citilabs offers a number of analytical and visualization products to aid in modeling population movement, scenario planning, and transit operations.

Guidelines for cities to implement sustainable and environmental mobility strategies for people and goods.

BikeAble can use mapping technology to model the low-stress bike route options available from any origin to any destination. Doing this for a large number of origins and destinations allows us to aggregate the results to show not just how connected one household is to key destinations, but how well connected an entire community is.

This is an exercise that deconstructs an urban and a suburban streetscape using the Restreet.com participatory design tool. Restreet was created by William Riggs, Mike Boswell and Ryder Ross in 2016 as a code fork from the Code for America project Streetmix. The idea was to democratize the way we plan streets and synthesize that data for policy and decision-making. The streets depicted show right-of-way needs eroding due to the prevalence of autonomous vehicles creating efficiency or the policy decision to do so in advance of their adoption. The final two slides show the submissions from the over 6,000 users since September and the related summary statistics. All suggest that policy that supports traffic calming and lane reductions to support multimodal transportation might be appropriate in the immediate future.

Riggs, Boswell and Ross describe their pilot street design project deploying Streetplan, a version of the opensource tool Streetmix. As part of the City of San Luis Obispo downtown revisioning project, their efforts inform the process, currently underway, of revising the Downtown Vision Concept Plan.

This policy paper focuses on the primary concept of the street as space that can be repurposed – real estate that can be allocated in similar or different ways than done currently. Cities generally refer to this publicly owned and regulated space from one side of the street to the other as the right of way (ROW). Our focus is on the centrality of the ROW in dictating many other community functions and values – transportation and otherwise. And our particular bias is to focus on the opportunities that AV technology is likely to create to rethink how the ROW is allocated, so that our communities can meet their substantial and unique environmental, social, and economic challenges.

The Mobility Hub Reader’s Guide is meant to provide guidance and inspiration for city staff, property owners, developers, designers, transit agencies, and community members for enhancing project developments and public right-of-way improvements in proximity to existing or new transit stations with amenities, activities, and programs to support multi-modal connectivity and access.

This article describes the changing driving landscape in New York City. The city is making efforts to return the streets to the people and also optimize public transportation options. The pushback is steep again the community where the traffic is being pushed as well as with the business owners.

This blog talks about how the autonomous vehicles will change the built environment such as street design, parking infrastructure, public space, etc. It also mentions how different modes can be integrated with the change of built environment.

This Blueprint outlines a vision for cities in a future where automated transportation is both accepted and widespread as part of the built environment. It is a human oriented vision for the potential of city streets, intersections, and networks-one in which automation can serve the goals of safety, equity, public health, and sustainability.

We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buildings, and transportation options. We provide new estimates of the environmental impact of low-connectivity roads, characterized by cul-de-sacs and T-intersections, which we dub street-network sprawl. We find an elasticity of vehicle ownership with respect to street connectivity of –0.15—larger than suggested by previous research. We then apply this estimate to quantify the long-term emissions implications of alternative scenarios for street-network sprawl. On current trends alone, we project vehicle travel and emissions to fall by ∼3.2% over the 2015–2050 period, compared to a scenario where sprawl plateaus at its 1994 peak. Concerted policy efforts to increase street connectivity could more than triple these reductions to ∼8.8% by 2050. Longer-term reductions over the 2050–2100 period are more speculative, but could be more than 50% greater than those achieved by 2050. The longer the timescale over which mitigation efforts are considered, the more important it becomes to address the physical form of the built environment.

This book is designed to communicate how communities of all kinds are making these changes all the time. It is our hope that this will make it easier for new projects to get built and that the examples will make it possible for a “new normal” to take hold, where all streets are revisited and assessed to see whether they can be doing more. This is similar to a post-occupancy analysis–do our streets perform the way we want given all of the needs and uses we have of them? If not, then this book provides many examples on how to move forward and ‘remodel’ our streets.

Cycling advocates have proposed a network of bicycle paths connecting the suburbs and city center, comparing their plan to the region’s rapid transit system.

This edition of the Blueprint is organized into three parts, taking the reader through the principles and political structures that underscore and shape our vision of the future, key policy choices around transit, pricing, freight, and data that can reshape our cities, and finally, exploring the sweeping vision for city streets of the future: Shaping the Autonomous Future Today, Policies to Shape the Autonomous Age, and Design for the Autonomous Age

With this paper, RMI hopes to (1) offer cities and other mobility and built environment stakeholders an experimentation toolkit that puts them in a position to more quickly unlock the full potential of new mobility in cities designed to shape and enable it, and (2) engage stakeholders in further codeveloping and exploring a concept for living, flexible, and collaborative experimentation sites we’re calling MOD Cities.

Urban Mobility in a Digital Age is a transportation technology strategy designed to build on the success and innovation of the City of Los Angeles and its Department of Transportation (LADOT) as regulator and transportation service provider in a complex and evolving ecosystem of public and private services.

"This Mobility Hub Features Catalog is a resource for regional agencies, local jurisdictions, transit operators, and private service providers as they collaborate to design and implement mobility hubs around the region. It describes the kinds of services, amenities, and technologies that can work together to make it easier for people to connect to transit, while also providing them with more transportation options overall. These mobility hub features may include various transit station improvements such as enhanced waiting areas with landscaping and lighting, complimentary WiFi and real-time travel information; wider sidewalks, pedestrian lighting and trees for shade; bike paths, designated bike lanes, and bike parking options; dedicated bus lanes and supporting signal improvements; service facilities for shared cars, scooters, and electric vehicles; smart parking technology; and more. Each feature can be tailored to the unique needs of an individual community."

The full story of autonomous vehicles is yet to be written. We created four scenario planning stories that explain how cities could shape the driverless future: tap taxi to tackle isolation, weaving a microtransit mesh, a human touch on robot delivery, reprogramming bus, bikes and barriers.

The Global Street Design Guide is supporting practitioners to redefine the role of streets in cities around the world.

"CurbFlow is one of a few curb-focused groups that believes it has part of a solution: reorganizing and eventually finding ways to dynamically charge companies for curb space."

Everyone—from ride-hailing cars to delivery trucks to bikes and scooters—wants a piece of the curb. How can smart cities map and manage this precious resource?

As private mobility services such as car-sharing, ridehailing, and micromobility have rapidly expanded in cities, the public sector has historically had limited access to data on how these vehicles are changing travel patterns and the movement of people. Populus has launched a platform to change that.

With Mayo Clinic defining its landscape, Rochester has always been a place where health is front-and-center. But a primary goal for the Destination Medical Center is to transform Rochester into America’s City for Health where residents and visitors will, literally, walk the walk when it comes to wellness. The Design Guidelines that the Design Center at the University of Minnesota has developed with the staff of the City of Rochester and the Destination Medical Center show, in very specific and concrete terms, how to achieve that goal.

This University of Washington (UW) study focuses on a strategy to manage TNC driver stops when picking up and dropping off passengers with the aim of improving traffic flow in the South Lake Union (SLU) area. SLU is the site of the main campus for Amazon, the online retail company. The site is known to generate a large number of TNC trips, and Amazon reports high rates of ride-hailing use for employee commutes. This study also found that vehicle picking-up/dropping-off passengers make up a significant share of total vehicle activity in SLU. The center city neighborhood is characterized by multiple construction sites, slow speed limits (25 mph) and heavy vehicle and pedestrian traffic.

This paper provides examples of how cities have successfully changed curb use to support transit. It is focused on the types of busy, store-lined streets where high-ridership transit lines often struggle with reliability. These key curbside management strategies support reliable transit and safer streets in one of two ways: either by directly making room for transit, or supporting transit projects by better managing the many demands on the urban curb.

In many cities, distinguishing between parking spaces, loading zones, and passenger drop-off sites is headache-inducing (and complicated for AI to understand). This new digital tool that maps curb use in real time will help.

"While recent policies directed toward multimodal or complete streets have encouraged increased funding for bicycle- and pedestrian oriented projects, many streets are still plagued by unsafe conditions. This is especially true for one-way streets, which studies show often create unsafe crossing conditions. This study evaluates changes to street dynamics after a two-way street conversion in Louisville, Kentucky. We find that traffic flow increased after implementation of two-way flow, but traffic accidents decreased. We also note other ancillary benefits, such as increase in property values and reduced crime. These results provide evidence that conversions can promote mobility, safety, and livability."

This study looks at the potential for a shift away from curb use focused on street parking to more flexible allocation that includes pick-up and drop-off zones for passengers and freight. It presents the results of quantitative modelling of alternative curb-use scenarios and discusses their relative efficiency, contribution to wider policy objectives and implications on city revenues. The work builds on a workshop held in September 2017, and outreach to numerous experts. It also provides insights from a modeling exercise to quantify the impact of re-allocating curb space from parking to pick up and drop off zones.

With AVs on the brink of roll-out, what is next? How do our streets evolve and where does our capital begin to go? This article discusses some possibilities on the ways we may be able to better our streets without widening the roads to fit more cars.

This report analyzes traffic impacts from the 2015 implementation of a pilot “road diet” on Lincoln Avenue, in the City of San Jose, California, comparing data on traffic volumes and speeds from before and after the road diet was implemented. The analysis looks at impacts on both the road diet location itself and on surrounding streets likely to have been impacted by traffic diverted off the road diet segment. The results within the road diet zone were as expected, with falling volumes and numbers of speeders. The all-day data aggregated by street type (e.g., neighborhood streets, major streets) showed limited overall negative impacts outside the road diet segment. These summary results do not tell the entire story, however. Individual locations, particularly among the neighborhood streets, saw more noticeable negative impacts. The report ends with recommendations for best practices in designing and conducting road diet evaluation studies.