Street Design Reprioritization (Coming Soon)

Prioritize Complete Streets: To create safer streets, planners should design for all users: pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, drivers, transit passengers, ride-hailers, and micromobility riders. Complete streets allow multiple modes to activate the entire right-of-way and all lanes of the road simultaneously. To design complete streets, stakeholders of our built environment should reference road diets and consider future flexibility of use. Complete streets also manage the competing demand for the ROW by allocating space for autonomous vehicle (AV) loading/unloading, electric vehicle (EV) charging, micromobility parking, and other emerging technologies.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Integration: As deliveries of goods increase and more people rely upon transportation services that drop them off at the curbside, demand increases for loading zones. Clustering individual loading zones together, having designated pick-up and drop-off (PUDO) points for passenger loading, and designing these areas with the flexibility to be used by different types of delivery/PUDO users can help accommodate current and emerging needs.

Right-of-Way (ROW) Allocation vs. Number of People Served: Currently, the majority of space in the ROW is dedicated to vehicles, with only a small number of cities giving priority to high-occupancy vehicles (HOV), like bus-only lanes in San Francisco. This impacts the efficiency of streets in terms of how many people can move on or through them. Reprioritized streets dedicated to transit, HOV lanes, wider sidewalks, protected lanes for bikes, and micromobility could move significantly more people in the same amount of space, thus maximizing street efficiency and capacity.

Environmental Impacts of Street Stormwater Runoff: Prioritizing the movement of cars has resulted in significant amounts of impervious surfaces. In addition to preventing precipitation from being able to flow through and recharge in underground aquifers, streets contribute to water pollution as the oil and debris deposited on streets contaminates stormwater runoff, eventually ending up in rivers, lakes, and oceans. Rethinking the relationship between streets and the environment, and incorporating bioswales, trees, and permeable pavers could help mitigate some of the environmental impacts of streets while benefiting the natural water cycles that people and animals depend on.