Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [30]
PREREQUISITES FOR STREET LIFE
MEANINGFUL DESTINATIONS
The first rule is that pedestrian life cannot exist in the absence of worthwhile destinations that are easily accessible on foot. This is a condition that modern suburbia fails to satisfy, since it strives to keep all commercial activity well separated from housing. As a result, the only pedestrians to be found in a residential subdivision belong to that limited segment of the population which walks for exercise. Otherwise, there is no reason to walk, and the streets are empty.
There are three other significant factors in the provision of successful pedestrian environments. First, the street space must not only be safe but also feel safe; second, the street space must be comfortable; and third, the street space must be interesting, as safety and comfort alone are not enough to get people out of their cars. Let’s examine each of these in turn.
SAFE STREETS VERSUS DANGEROUS STREETS
The problem with current street design standards is not that engineers have forgotten how to make streets feel safe but that they don’t even try. Streets that once served vehicles and people equitably are now designed for the sole purpose of moving vehicles through them as quickly as possible. They have become, in effect, traffic sewers. No surprise, then, that they fail to sustain pedestrian life.ah
How did this happen? Certainly, the proliferation of automobiles in this century, along with our often blind faith in technology, has led naturally to cars taking priority over pedestrians. But part of the responsibility lies with the modernist architects of the twenties and thirties, who advocated an urbanism without streets. As Le Corbusier put it: “The street wears us out. It is altogether disgusting. Why, then, does it still exist?”4 The result of the modernists’ towers-in-the-park approach was not that streets ceased to exist but that architects stopped designing them. Left to the engineers, streets came to reflect little but engineering criteria.
The desire for increased traffic volume—“unimpeded flow”—has resulted in wider streets. While travel lanes on old streets are often only nine feet wide or less, new streets are usually required to have twelve-foot lanes, which take longer for pedestrians to cross. “Unimpeded flow” also has another name—speeding—adding all the more to pedestrian risk.
There are two other important factors behind the widening of America’s streets. The first was the Cold War, and the second was (and still is) the requirements of fire trucks. The influence of the Cold War was profound. In the 1950s, the Civil Defense Committee of AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, was a dominant force in the determination of street design criteria. Its prescription was straightforward: street design must facilitate evacuation before, and cleanup after, a major “nuclear event.” At the time, this objective may have seemed crucial, so its effect on pedestrian safety was never considered.ai
Of those streets that have somehow escaped the widening influences of the traffic-flow and Cold War lobbies, many are currently falling prey to the access requirements of the fire departments. Their new standards, which shorten emergency-vehicle response time at the expense of all other criteria, are typically designed to accommodate the most ambitious of maneuvers: the jockeying of a pair of high-rise ladder trucks on a dead-end street. As a result, even single-family suburban cul-de-sacs are now typically paved to a width of thirty feet, often with asphalt circles ninety feet across at the ends, all in order that a large truck can turn around without shifting into reverse.aj One of the most important aspects of our new towns is being shaped around an extremely unlikely emergency, with the result that they function inadequately in non-emergency situations.
When