Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [121]
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Indeed, the design of most traffic-calming devices acknowledges this fact. These devices introduce tighter minimum center-line radii for streets that are too straight and too wide, forcing drivers to slow down.
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Paul Box, Traffic Engineering Consultant, P.E., Fellow of the Institute of Traffic Engineers (I.T.E.). Mr. Box has been chairman for several decades of the Committee for Guidelines for Residential Subdivision Street Design. His comment is from a September 1991 letter in response to an inquiry from I.T.E. member Chester Chellman, P.E. Given the current standards of residential roadway design, it is not surprising that, according to Bicycling magazine, the number of American bike riders has dropped 23 percent over the past seven years (Peter T. Kilborn, “No Work for a Bicycle Thief: Children Pedal Around Less,” A21).
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In truth, these alternatives are an available option only about half of the time. Even though they have been named a “recommended practice” by the national Institute of Transportation Engineers, they are routinely rejected by local municipal engineers, many of whom still believe that wider is safer.
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Defensible Space was written in 1969, and the efficacy of many of its ideas has been well demonstrated. These ideas are now promulgated under a new imprimatur, CPTED: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. More information on the subject can be found in the book Safe Cities: Guidelines for Planning, Design, and Management by Gerda Wekerle and Carolyn Whitzman, or at the National Crime Prevention Institute at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.
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This has been demonstrated time and again by the disappointing performance of modern housing projects, whose public realm consists of a continuous field of landscape and pavement. The lack of geometric definition of these spaces impedes their residents’ ability to develop a sense of ownership for them, and they are inevitably used improperly or not at all, and poorly maintained as a result.
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Camillo Sitte’s turn-of-the-century treatise, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, effectively illustrated techniques for enclosing a full range of urban space types. Sociologists have recently come to recognize the importance of street space in the formation of society. The latest studies on the relationship between human behavior and the physical environment refer to a hierarchy of community ranging from the family to the neighborhood, through something called the face-block, which is simply the shared street.
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The lack of backyard privacy is largely responsible for the suburban obsession with large lots. In the absence of a well-shaped backyard, size is the only known instrument for achieving privacy. Of course, this approach is futile unless the lot is enormous.
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In high-density downtown situations with skyscrapers flanking a narrow thoroughfare, there is legitimate concern that the violation of this ratio in the opposite direction can result in a dark and unpleasant street space. This problem is best mitigated by requiring buildings to step back from an ideally sized sidewalk-hugging base to a narrower tower above, as was required by the original sunlight code of Manhattan.
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Of course, despite all of the apparatus of suburban life, alleys need not be ugly. In older suburbs such as Baltimore’s Roland Park, the rear lanes are favored as pedestrian ways between backyards, and have been known to become social centers. In Kentlands, the residents have even formed a flower-plantingAlley Beautification Committee.
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Some of the most useful documentation of the relationship between land use and transportation comes from the publications of the Surface Transportation Policy Project in Washington, D.C., and also from LUTRAQ (“Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection”), a national demonstration project of 1000 Friends of Oregon, comparing the costs and benefits of roadways versus transit.
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Actually, the rules of good transportation planning were not exactly forgotten—they were simply overruled