Chapter 20 - Tools, rules, and techniques: Planning, engineering, and design approaches to creating complete and livable streets and neighborhoods
This chapter details the most up-to-date, state of the art information for planning, designing and engineering livable and complete streets for pedestrians, bicyclists, and residents alike. This chapter builds on the previous chapters to guide us toward the physical manifestation of “A Charter for Humane and Equitable Streets” and the principles of Livability Ethics for Street Empathy, Equity, and Justice. Along these lines, this chapter operationalizes these principles by first presenting a series of overarching goals for livable and complete streets, such as the need for feelings of safety and comfort; access, connection, and convenience; a positive sense of place (importance of aesthetics); and the importance of people feeling they are in an ethical, equitable, just and caring street ecology. It then builds on this using a discussion of the tactical areas from A Charter for Humane and Equitable Streets, which frames the use of state of the art approaches, tools, and policies related to getting people across and along the street, safely and comfortably; calming traffic speeds and reduce flows, and finally how to apply ecosystem thinking to design and plan—from the human to regional scale—which is essential to providing access, connection, and convenience, as well as a positive sense of place, equitably. This chapter also provides dialogues around key issues, from the confounding findings around people being hit at higher rates in crosswalks, to the effectiveness of shared and “naked” streets, looking at aspects of non-physical measures, risk homeostasis, and the power of place for creating safe and livable streets. The chapter also looks at ways to achieve greater street livability through a variety of approaches from “tactical urbanism” to how a great regional land use plan, can be a great regional transportation plan for street livability.