Cities ask a lot of their streets.
Streets serve as public spaces, with public plazas, festivals, and neighborhood gatherings that reinforce community. They also provide space for trees and plants that filter and capture stormwater. Whether allowing people to safely walk to work, shops, and museums, or supporting morning deliveries for local business, streets balance multiple pressures and needs within a constrained space, brokering the often fragile contest between motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit.
In spite of these unique characteristics, city streets have for decades been designed to the same standards and within the same framework as rural and suburban highways. With the Urban Street Design Guide, our organization – the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) – cements a new direction for city streets as public spaces.
Based on an unprecedented collaboration between major city transportation departments around the country, the guide demonstrates how streets can be redesigned to be safe, livable, and supportive of economic activity and development.
“NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide is a toolkit for cities to create safe, multi-modal streets that meet the needs of all users, providing an alternative to existing design books that treat city streets as mini-expressways,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transportation Commissioner and president of NACTO. “The innovative strategies outlined in the Guide are transforming the streets of New York, advancing a people-oriented approach to transportation policies.”
The guide focuses on street facilities, ranging from boulevards to neighborhood streets, transit corridors to green alleys. The guide also covers street design elements, such as curb extensions, lane width, green stormwater infrastructure, and sidewalks; intersection design elements, such as crosswalks and traffic signal timing; and interim design strategies including parklets, open street events, and public plazas.
Six core principles govern the Urban Street Design Guide:
- Streets are public spaces
- Great streets are great for businesses
- Streets can be changed
- Design for safety
- Streets are ecosystems
- Act Now!
The sixth principle, Act Now!, is a distinguishing element. It gives cities a permission slip to innovate through the implementation of pilot projects and the use of a phased approach for major redesigns. By incorporating an interim design stage that uses low-cost, temporary materials, cities can better evaluate a project’s potential impacts while building support among communities. These interim materials can then be replaced by a permanent reconstruction once funding is available and the design is fine-tuned.
“These state-of-the-art guidelines demonstrate that cities are leading the way in designing inviting and functional streetscapes,” says Edward Reiskin, San Francisco Director of Transportation and NACTO vice president. “From parklets to green alleys, innovative transportation projects that are piloted in cities like San Francisco have spread to more and more cities across the country. The guide should be adopted as the new standard for street design.”
Guide users can view detailed plan drawings, renderings of the designs, and pictures of exemplary projects from around the country at NACTO’s website. The NACTO guide can be adopted by individual cities, counties, or states as either a stand-alone document or as a supplement to other roadway-guidance documents.