Jeff Speck has a great new book, Walkable City Rules, which is a prescriptive follow up to his terrific Walkable City. As the title Walkable City Rules suggests, the new book is a set of crisp, clear rules for achieving a healthy, walkable city. He’s been tweeting one rule every day or so since May. He recently tweeted what may be my favorite (certainly as it applies to Newton): Rule 50.
Here’s RULE 50: BUILD SLOW-FLOW AND YIELD-FLOW STREETS, in my new book, Walkable City Rules. I’m tweeting the whole book out May – July, one rule a day. Enjoy! Or go to: https://t.co/LVNgGNusqo pic.twitter.com/MCb9ickk48
— Jeff Speck (@JeffSpeckAICP) June 28, 2019
Speck conveniently provides the full text of Rule 50 in the tweet. Basically, it says to build narrow streets in residential neighborhoods.
The insight of Rule 50 is that residential streets don’t need to be designed to allow continuous side-by-side travel. In fact, designing streets to require traffic traveling in opposite directions to slow is a feature, not a bug.
Speck calls such streets yield or “yield-flow” streets, where there is a single, shared travel lane of 12′ or so. Cars coming in opposite directions have to yield, usually by one ducking into a parking lane. We actually have yield streets all over Newton, though the yield-ness of a particular street may depend on the parking at any given time. Behind my home is Walter St. It’s about 28′-wide. When cars are parked on either side — or, better yet, both — it is uncomfortable to impossible for two cars to pass without slowing significantly or stopping.
What possibly could Rule 50 have to offer Newton? We’re not building new residential streets. And, given the prohibitive cost, we’re not comprehensively rebuilding them either. Sure. But, press a little on Rule 50 and it provides the necessity and logic for evaluating our residential streets. Press a little harder and it provides guidance on how to make our streets safer and more livable.
While Speck’s framing of this rule suggests that it applies to building (or rebuilding) roads, it doesn’t require much of a leap to apply the rule to evaluate existing roads. If your road has peak volumes below 150 cars per hour, your road, according to Speck, should be 26′ (with parking on both sides) or 20′ (parking on one side). If it’s an existing road with volume below 150 cars per hour and it’s not 26’/20′, it’s too wide!
Applying such clear, objective criteria to our existing roads flips the script on how we think about investing in safety and livability. We shouldn’t have to force neighborhoods to submit an application for complete streets traffic calming. We shouldn’t put the burden on neighborhoods to make the case that their streets are dangerous and need some sort of remediation. By taking a tape measure to the street and counting volumes for a week, we can determine if a road is poorly designed. And, poorly designed roads should just go on a list to get fixed.
There are volumes and volumes on how to design roads and intersections properly, but there’s very little specific criteria to identify roads and intersections that are non-compliant with modern safety standards and should, therefore, be automatically considered for remediation. While he’s not doing it directly, Speck is providing very clear criteria to identify bad residential roads, of which we have tons in Newton. This is profoundly important.
Speck’s rule, while apparently a guide for building (or rebuilding roads), also gives us guidance on how to remediate our bad roads without rebuilding. The key is that Speck’s objective is not design for design’s sake, but changing behaviors. His insight is that the design of yield streets forces desirable behavior: cars slowing down. We can create the behavior of yield street, even if we can’t feasibility convert all of our residential streets to full-length yield streets. Arguably, you can build yield streets by building a little yield into each street. For residential streets with peak volume less than 150 cars-per-hour it’s probably enough to create a single section per block with a 12′, bi-directional shared travel lane. There are lots of ways to do that. Create mid-block bump-outs, which would also have the virtue of protecting the parking lane. As is done on Lexington Ave. in Cambridge, retain the existing width, but add bike lanes to reduce the width for cars to only 12′ for a shared, bi-directional travel lane. Put in bollards. Dig greenswales to mitigate stormwater runoff.
Newton has a bunch of 32-36′ residential streets, most of which appear to have been built in the middle of last century. They were designed to accommodate both good-sized parking lanes and side-by-side, uninterrupted two-way travel. They were, intentionally or not, designed for speed. To make matters worse, the homes on these mid-century streets often have two- or three-car garages and plenty of driveway, so cars don’t need to — and don’t — park on the street much. These streets are wide and largely empty. They are like residential freeways.
As residential roads are scheduled for repaving, they should be measured and any with peak volumes below 150 cars per hour and lacking a yield pinch-point should be identified as non-compliant. Those non-compliant roads should have a yield moment built, as a matter of course.
Measure. Evaluate. Fix.
Sounds like a riveting read.
One has to wonder who buys these books and how economically viable they are. Now if Mr Korf happens to be sponsoring the book it makes sense. Probably less than a quarter of a new housing unit would cover costs.
Mean while he gives his advocates in Newton a new tune to sing.
@Simon: Nice of you to be concerned but I don’t think you need to worry about the Speck household.
Speck is an internationally renowned urban planner. He’s consulted on projects all over the nation and teaches at Harvard.
I imagine he does quite well for himself and that his books are “economically viable” because he’s writing about problems and offering solutions that many people find compelling.
Just pave the roads. When the main roads are over loaded
drivers will use side roads. Enforce speed limits on them.
I really enjoy driving my Cadillac Escalade ESV (OPEC limited edition) up and down narrow residential streets in Newton, because I never move to the side – I simply force the oncoming drivers onto the berm and continue on my merry way. It sounds like this road-narrowing initiative will significantly increase my amusement. Hooray!
A residential street has to be wide enough to accommodate emergency vehicles. A 24 ft wide road with parking on both sides does not (learned that when an ambulance couldn’t get up a street in a medical emergency when cars were parked on both sides) which leads me to question whether a 26 ft wide street is able to. I’d like to hear what first responders think of any plan to restructure residential streets.
There is an argument that our reliance on large equipment when it comes to emergency response leads to unsafe roads. This piece (2014) from a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors makes that specific case (https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/05/fire-departments-are-standing-in-the-way-of-good-street-design/371200/).
I know several decisions around street design in Newton have been adjusted to specifically accommodate the needs of public safety. Specifically, the West Newton redesign eliminated parking-protected bike lanes in large part because public safety worried about whether fire trucks could fit.
This also comes up when designing street corners that allow for easy pedestrian crossing. Fire trucks (as well as larger delivery trucks) need a wider area to turn, thereby creating longer stretches of road for a pedestrian to cross.
This means that we are pitting two aspects of public safety against one another. On the one hand, we have pedestrian safety, on the other, we have the safety of property (homes) and illness within those homes.
A comprehensive solution will look at both of those issues and find a much broader solution, which may include new smaller and more nimble vehicles for certain types of emergency response.
Jane, a couple of thoughts.
First, in most (but certainly not all) parts of Newton, street parking is sporadic. Narrow residential streets that regularly have parking on both sides are a relatively small fraction of our roadway stock. We can identify the places where width most contributes to dangerous driving and prioritize from there.
The suggestion of narrowing streets with planters, street trees, or specially designed chokers are usually met with some comment about snow removal. We should figure out how to address that issue at on operational level, but other (snowier) cities do it. We can too. Emergency vehicles, same way.
Many long-time Newton residents remember the days when kids (and their families) felt safe biking, walking, and playing in their neighborhoods. This was commonplace in cities and towns across the US fifty years ago. If we make progress restoring that ability, that level of comfort, we make progress on a bunch of practical and social dilemmas that we face while keeping our social fabric strong.
To achieve that goal, we need new engineering, enforcement to encourage better driver behavior, and a shared city-wide effort to return our streets to our residents and well-behaving visitors.
“This also comes up when designing street corners that allow for easy pedestrian crossing. Fire trucks (as well as larger delivery trucks) need a wider area to turn, thereby creating longer stretches of road for a pedestrian to cross.”
This is emphatically not true. I live on a street with a 34′ pedestrian crossing at a T intersection with an arterial. We get school buses, garbage trucks, oil trucks, delivery trucks, the occasional semi, and, yes, fire trucks. Trucks need a wider area to turn, but not as wide as you think. And, not as wide as is used to justify some horrendously wide crossings.
What Chuck Tanowitz sais.
I like Rule 50. In West Newton, I see signs asking drivers to go slow or drive like their kids live there all the time. Some of those streets, e.g. Eliot, Randlett Park, Fairway, Warwick, are used as cut throughs between Watertown and Waltham Street at rush hours and drivers get going pretty fast where kids are walking or biking to school. The NPD often advises residents to park on the street to get the traffic to slow down on streets like these and it works. So do neck downs and other traffic calming measures. Making residential streets wider only encourages speeding.
I agree with Ted, but necking down streets (and other methods) is just tools. We need strategies.
Right now, we have a small amount of money city-wide to address the most egregious traffic calming issues. We also now evaluate these resident-originated complaints systematically. Those are improvements over the last administration.
But we aren’t looking at how we want traffic to behave beyond a street by street basis. We can fix one street, but nearby residents worry traffic will shift to their street. We shouldn’t put neighbors against each other. That’s what happened when making Derby one way came up to Traffic Council.
We need a mechanism and funds to change things at the neighborhood, not the street, level, and Traffic Council has no ability to do that. But since TC is the most accessible mechanism for citizens to get their complaints addressed, we keep using it and getting piecemeal results using essentially no traffic calming tools (TC controls signs and parking, and has no money to allocate).
Why do drivers cut through from Waltham to Watertown? Because there is no left turn at Waltham and Watertown/Washington. Why do they cut through from Watertown to Waltham? In part because the lights at West Newton Square are horrible (soon to be fixed).
And on top of that, they city’s traffic and civil engineers are maxxed out on projects. Every neck down, speed hump, diverter, and even many crosswalks need to be designed. Our city has a huge backlog to fix from years of neglect. We simply must ramp up our capacity through staff or hired consultants.
There is no bright line between transportation and quality of life.
We should be looking to innovative communities like Portland OR that under the direction of (now former) Fire Chief Mike Myers embraced creating safe, walkable and bikeable communities as key to reducing the need for fire and EMS services. Much like the efforts in the 20th century to improve building codes to reduce fire risk, Vision Zero efforts will lead to fewer crashes AND make people healthier and less isolated. This webinar is worth the watch.
First half is Chief Myers. Second half reviews how emergency response vehicles are built in the US vs. Europe. https://nacto.org/event/fire-trucks-and-vision-zero/
What Alicia said.
‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them’ – Albert Einstein
Taller buildings are going to require larger ladder trucks for the fire department to reach the top floors safely.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/03/22/retired-fire-chief-make-american-firetrucks-fit-city-streets-not-vice-versa/
European cities have ladder trucks for tall buildings. They are just designed differently. Bonus, trucks are not custom designed as they are in the US. Custom cost more money.