“Walkable” communities are the hot concept in real estate development these days. Certain elements are necessary for building them. The communities must contain a finely grained mix of land uses — houses, shops, offices, civic buildings — within walkable distances of each other. These land uses must be integrated with one another, not separated by physical and psychological barriers. And the streetscapes must invite pedestrian activity.
There is an art to designing inviting streetscapes. There’s a lot more to it than installing brick sidewalks and paving fancy crosswalks. Buildings should abut the sidewalk, and they should present a varied and visually interesting face to the street. There should be on-street parking, with parked cars acting as a barrier between vehicles on the street and pedestrians on the sidewalk. And local streets, as opposed to arterial or collector roads, should be designed for slow driving speeds.
How do you slow traffic speeds? You can post speed limit signs for 20 miles per hour, but if the street is designed to accommodate 40 miles per hour, you’re going to find a lot of people ignoring the speed limit. The key, according to the New Urbanists, is narrow streets. When streets are narrow and corners are tight, people have no choice but to slow down.
People living in residential neighborhoods prefer slow traffic: They don’t like the idea of their children playing in the streets and getting flattened by zooming cars. That’s why we have so many cul de sacs — dead-end configurations that prevent motorists from hauling butt through the neighborhoods on streets so wide that they could host the Daytona 500. But cul de sacs are not walkable. The only people you see walking in cul-de-sac subdivisions are getting their daily exercise. They aren’t using the streets as a means to actually get anywhere. Neighborhoods built around cul de sac streets rule out walking as a transportation mode, rely upon bottleneck-prone collector roads for access, and hard-wire the region for traffic congestion.
As Virginia seeks solutions to traffic congestion, why don’t we encourage developers to build neighborhoods with narrow streets instead of subdivisions served by dead-end mini-freeways? Short answer: Because of fire department regulations. Narrow streets supposedly make it more difficult for monster fire trucks to gain access to houses on those streets.
New Urbanists insist that there are ways to design around the problem. But they raise a more fundamental issue: When it comes to public safety today, what’s the bigger problem — people dying in fires, or people getting killed in automobile accidents? Traffic fatalities are the larger problem, and the desire of fire-fighting professionals to rush around in bigger, flashier fire trucks should not trump the design of safer streets.
The design-by-fire-truck issue surfaced recently in Virginia during a charrette for Tree Hill, a proposed New Urbanist development south of Richmond. In my latest column, “Design by Fire Truck,” I describe New Urbanist guru Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk negotiating with Henrico County deputy Fire Marshal David Seay for some flexibility in the application of the rules. Once again, we demonstrate the point that our problem in Virginia is not a failure to give local government sufficient regulatory power — it’s the misapplication of the power they already have.
(Photo credit: VA Fire News.com)
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