It's be expensive, but the solution should be to create "safety lanes" for cyclers and pedestrians so that they are protected from motor vehicles.
Posted on 05/14/2006 11:53:43 PM PDT by Lorianne
If you think the highest and best use of a street is to move as many cars as fast as possible, shrinking the pavement probably seems counterintuitive, if not downright loony.
But it's starting to happen here and there, in Madison, Milwaukee, suburban Green Bay and neo-traditional subdivisions around the country. Hooray for the "skinny streets" movement. It's helping to make neighborhoods safer for children and pedestrians, encourage more compact development and save resources. If only the boomlet would expand into our own sprawling metro suburbs, with residential streets as wide as airport runways.
"It's not anti-car; it just makes it easier to travel on foot as well as on bikes, giving people more choices beyond the car," says Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, whose city recently extended its 8-year-old skinny-streets ordinance to denser subdivisions. The ordinance now allows for 28-foot-wide thoroughfares, as opposed to the usual 32-foot width, in neighborhoods of five or more units per acre.
Cieslewicz fondly recalls the intimacy of the narrow byways around his grandparents' home at S. 31st and W. Rogers streets on Milwaukee's south side. "It's a venerable concept, and it has served cities well," he says of skinny streets.
Madison figures it will save 15% on road construction and maintenance in affected areas. Other anticipated benefits include more green space, reduced storm water runoff, slower traffic and fewer accidents. One national study, comparing injury accidents per mile on 24-foot vs. 36-foot-wide streets, found a 300% increase on the wider streets.
'Skinny Streets'
Centennial Circle, in the new Cherokee Point subdivision on the south side, is one of the narrower streets being built in some cities as a way of calming traffic, improving pedestrian safety and saving money on road costs.
Still, even in the progressive capital city, skinny streets were not an easy sell with the Fire Department, public works officials and traffic engineers. Cieslewicz says they went through "a lot of angst," fearing that emergency trucks, snowplows and other service vehicles would have difficulty negotiating the narrower widths.
Those concerns seem overblown, since most homes in new subdivisions have two- and three-car garages, leaving fewer cars parked on street. But to appease the critics, a review of the Madison program will get under way after a few years. If there are problems, on-street parking may be eliminated in some areas.
Waukesha County developer Bill Carity says that in this neck of the woods, suburban officials weaned on 1950s engineering ideas have stymied the push for skinny streets by advocates like him. "They have a template, and it's going to take years to turn this battleship around," he says. "The streets are so wide in some of these subdivisions, you could launch an ICBM without rattling a window."
Still, Carity is optimistic that change will come as the current crop of officials retires and newcomers trained in neo-traditional planning concepts take their place. Aging baby boomers looking for more walkable neighborhoods could also have an impact, he says.
Those trends are already being felt in Milwaukee, in neighborhoods such as still-developing Cherokee Point on the far south side. Told Development's sensitively planned New Urbanist enclave, with its lovely open spaces and houses close to the sidewalk, is laced with skinny streets, some just 24 feet wide, and they seem to work just fine.
City Engineer Jeff Polenske, who lives there, says it can sometimes be tricky for garbage trucks to maneuver around construction vehicles, "but on the whole, the benefits outweigh the challenges." He says the city may skinny up some existing streets when they're reconstructed.
Narrower streets (generally, 28 feet wide) are also cropping up in suburbs around Green Bay, including Ashwaubenon, De Pere and Howard. Even on streets as thin as 24 feet, with cars parked on one side, "you can still move traffic efficiently," Cole Runge, principal planner with the Brown County Planning Commission, insists.
So why did we build such yawning streets in the first place?
Jim Charlier, a Boulder, Colo., transportation consultant, chalks it up to the power of pavement-oriented civil engineers, concerns about liability and rules written before modern-day subdivisions were built. Some street widths in Western states, he told me, "were drawn up back in the days when you had to be able to turn a four-horse team around."
Civil defense concerns Other experts cite civil defense concerns left over from the Cold War era: In case of an invasion by an enemy power, streets were supposed to be wide enough for Army vehicles to pass.
But spokesmen for the Urban Land Institute and the National Association of Home Builders said these attitudes are yielding to the influence of New Urbanism and the Smart Growth movement, both of which stress compact development.
And, as Charlier notes, people are beginning to figure out that the money you spend on too-wide streets can be put to better use, such as drainage swales and other natural forms of storm water management, more trees and more thoughtful public spaces. The things, in short, that make for enduringly beautiful neighborhoods.
Skinny streets don't work that well here in Hawaii.
How? It seems to me that it would be more dangerous to ride a bike on a narrower street. There's less room to stay of the way of cars.
Liberal loons at work. Next they'll tear out the asphalt and turn them into even skinnier dirt footpaths.
Well, just glad I live in Texas - those populist (aka socialists) upper midwesterners can have a ball with their "skinny streets"...
This is just controlled growth!
A socialist dream
The way some people drive, they need as much pavement as they can get. This is not a good idea.
What a great idea - we've had these new-fangled skinny streets where I live in England for two millenia, well before socialism was invented!
If it's 28' streets with sidewalks, vs. 32' streets without, this *may* work OK.
Otherwise, if it's just replacing 32' streets without sidewalks, with 28' streets without sidewalks, this is a terrible idea.
It's be expensive, but the solution should be to create "safety lanes" for cyclers and pedestrians so that they are protected from motor vehicles.
I grew up on a skinny street. I don't think it was by design, rather it just turned out that way. With parking on both sides of the street (no driveways), only one car could get through at a time. Luckily it was a fairly traffic-free street and, when two cars were using it at the same time there was always a spot into which one of the cars could pull to let the other pass.
This was back in the 60's and 70's so it's not like everyone was driving small cars either.
Skinny streets don't work that well here in Hawaii.
What happens in winter when the ice and snow piles up at the edges? Streets get narrower in bad winters already. This will make it even worse.
It would appear that the thinner streets will just allow your land rapists to squeeze more onto less land.
Had this been about restoring boulevards I might be a bit more enthused.
Sounds like a term someone made up to get a promotion.
Oh, but we're just doing this for the children.
My goodness! How do the north-easterners ever survive winter in their historical villages?
"If there are problems, on-street parking may be eliminated in some areas."
Typical "liberal" response: when liberal policies fail, liberals ask for more of the same policies that failed, instead of questioning the failed policies.
New Urbanism and Smart Growth are synonyms for "government controlling private property".
The left never gives up. They want your private property!
In a newer neighborhood, with a greater amount of off-street parking and no multiple family dwellings it might work.
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