Narrower streets to slow down drivers?
By Rob Zaleski
November 4, 2002
We do, Steve Steinhoff agrees, live in a society that is obsessed with speed.
But that obsession, he argues, isn't the chief reason people refuse
to slow down while driving through residential neighborhoods, as one
of my recent columns suggested.
People speed, he says, because the streets in most residential
neighborhoods built over the last few decades actually encourage them
to speed.
"It's common sense, really," says Steinhoff, community development
coordinator for Dane County. "Studies have shown that people drive at
speeds they feel comfortable with. And when you have wider,
straighter streets - the kind you find in most modern subdivisions -
people feel comfortable driving at faster speeds."
It's taken a while, but many traffic experts, government officials
and developers are slowly beginning to accept this notion, Steinhoff
says. They're also beginning to realize, he says, that the solution -
at least for new subdivisions - is actually a simple one: narrower
streets.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Some say a return to narrower streets
is impractical. Others think it's downright goofy.
Steinhoff wasn't here in 1994, but he's heard stories about the
resistance the late Marshall Erdman encountered after he unveiled his
proposal for his new urbanist Middleton Hills development, which - to
the shock of Middleton officials - featured streets that were 26 feet
wide (or six feet narrower than what the city normally allowed for
new developments).
How, some City Council members wanted to know, would firetrucks and
garbage trucks get through? Or, for that matter, snowplows?
When the city balked at approving the project, an exasperated Erdman
threatened to take a hike.
"It just throws them into a tizzy when you come up with something
different, you know," he told me during an interview at the time.
The city finally relented. Middleton Hills could have its narrow
streets. But parking would be restricted.
Steinhoff, who's pushing for narrower streets as part of County
Executive Kathleen Falk's Better Urban Infill Development (BUILD)
program, says he can appreciate why some people refuse to accept the
idea and insist it's a step backward.
"You're asking people to change the way they've been doing things,"
he says, "and depending on how you approach that, it can be
threatening to people."
As for the charge that firetrucks and garbage trucks can't function
on narrower streets, Steinhoff says it's just not valid. And if the
skeptics insist otherwise, he suggests they check out the response
times for emergency vehicles called to neighborhoods on Madison's
near east and near west sides, where most streets are in the
26-foot-wide range.
"Do houses burn down more frequently there? Does the garbage get
picked up?" he asks. "There are neighborhoods throughout the country
that have been functioning with narrow streets for more than half a
century without major problems."
Granted, you might need to limit parking on such streets to just one
side, Steinhoff adds. But he says traffic experts "are increasingly
recognizing that especially with a residential street there are other
objectives besides moving cars through efficiently."
Objectives like improving safety, Steinhoff says.
He notes that a study of 20,000 police accident reports in Longmont,
Colo., showed a definite correlation between street design and
accident rates.
A typical 36-foot-wide residential street had 1.2 accidents per mile,
while 24-foot-wide streets had 0.3 accidents per mile. The safest
streets in general had widths ranging from 22 to 30 feet.
To be sure, little of this new wisdom will benefit neighborhoods that
already have wide, straight streets, Steinhoff says. However, he says
some of those neighborhoods have had marginal success against
speeders by installing traffic calmers such as circles and curb
bulb-outs. (Speed humps, on the other hand, often damage vehicles and
contribute to slower emergency response times, he says.)
The encouraging thing, he says, is that many neighborhoods of the
future won't need to resort to "traffic calmers." He notes that
Madison four years ago revised its street width standards to allow
for narrower streets and that there are several New Urbanist
neighborhoods being developed in Dane County with street designs
similar to those built in the 1930s and '40s.
What we've discovered, Steinhoff suggests, is that bigger and wider
isn't always better. And that the old-timers knew a thing or two
after all.
Published: 8:27 AM 11/04/02
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