Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities

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Copyright © 2003 Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Southworth, Michael.

Streets and the shaping of towns and cities / Michael Southworth, Eran Ben-Joseph.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781610911092

1. Streets—Design. 2. City planning. 3. Streets—Standards.

I. Ben-Joseph, Eran. II. Title.

TE279.S58 2003

711’.41—dc21

2003009945

British Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available.

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper e9781610911092_i0002.jpg

Manufactured in the United States of America

09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION - Street Standards and the Built Environment

CHAPTER ONE - Gritty Cities and Picturesque Villages

CHAPTER TWO - Orderly Streets for Healthy Cities

CHAPTER THREE - Streets for the Motor Age

CHAPTER FOUR - Bureaucracy Takes Control

CHAPTER FIVE - Streets for Living

CHAPTER SIX - Tomorrow’s Streets

Appendix A - Chronology of Events in the Development of Residential Street Standards

Appendix B - A Graphic Survey of Street Cross Sections

Appendix C - Narrow Streets Data

Chapter End Notes

Other References

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for research grants and other assistance from the Institute of Transportation Studies, the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, the University of California Transportation Center, the Committee on Research, and the Farrand Fund of the University of California at Berkeley. Ray Isaacs, Mathew Henning, and Adrienne Wong provided graphic assistance in several of the original maps. Portions of this book are related to research by the authors published as articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association and working papers by the Institute of Urban and Regional Development and the Institute of Transportation Studies.

INTRODUCTION

Street Standards and the Built Environment

There has been a decided tendency on the part of official street planners to insist with quite needless and undesirable rigidity upon certain fixed standards of width and arrangement in regard to purely local streets, leading inevitably in many cases to the formation of blocks and lots of a size and shape ill adapted to the local uses to which they need to be put.

—Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., 1910

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.’s critique of street standards more than nine decades ago is, surprisingly, even more relevant today as cities worldwide grow at an unprecedented rate. Most of this growth, as in centuries past, is at the edges of older towns and cities on open land that until recently was used for agriculture or simply left as natural open space. Cities have always grown at their edges, with new residential quarters taking root on established urban nodes. Suburban enclaves and rural villages that once seemed to be at the outer limits of urbanity often have found themselves swept into the inner metropolis over time. London, a classic example of such growth, is today an agglomeration of independent towns, suburbs, and rural villages that were caught in this net of outward expansion. The same process can be seen in the historical growth patterns of Boston, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, and indeed of most large cities.

Each era of urban expansion has had its own conceptions of the good city, its own processes and standards for city building. A key element in the shaping of cities has been ideas of what the residential street network should be, since streets are the public framework that structures neighborhood and city life. What should be the character, pattern, and materials of streets, and how should one street relate to another? What activities should the street accommodate? How wide should streets be, and how should they be furnished and planted? In less than a century, American conceptions of the good residential street network have shifted dramatically, from the interconnected rectilinear grid of the turn of the twentieth century to the fragmented grid and warped parallel streets of the 1930s and 1940s to the discontinuous, insular patterns of cul-de-sacs and loops that have predominated since World War II until now.

In this book we examine the origins of ideas for the design of residential streets, focusing on the suburban subdivision. We question the standards that have in large measure created the modern suburban residential environment that comprises so much of the metropolitan area. As not only the fastest-growing part of the American city, but also the home for the majority of Americans, areas of new growth would be most affected by changes in street standards.

Today cities like Los Angeles have absorbed rural villages, towns, and suburbs in the rush of outward expansion. (© William Garnett)

Rethinking of suburban street standards is needed today to create more cohesive, livable, and energy-efficient communities and metropolitan areas. Yet attempts to do so meet with resistance from many quarters: engineers, financial institutions, government regulators, the road building industry, and police and fire protection services all have vested interests in the street regulations as they have evolved. Efforts to reshape the form of the American city are often thwarted by these standards and procedures that have become embedded in planning and development. Particularly troublesome are standards for streets that virtually dictate a dispersed, disconnected community pattern providing automobile access at the expense of other modes. The rigid framework of current street standards has resulted in uniform, unresponsive suburban environments that ignore the local situation. Why did the design process and built environment come to depend on these criteria and regulations? How did residential street standards come to be? Who has been responsible for their formulation? How have they changed over time? Do existing suburban spatial patterns justify adherence to the rationality of standardization? These are some of the issues we need to understand and evaluate as a prelude to new consideration of the developing urban environment. There are also subjects we do not address, namely, the design of major arterials, boulevards, highways, and streets in commercial areas, as well as of streets in the older inner residential neighborhoods of cities, although each of these is important and deserving of similar investigation.

THE POWER OF STREET STANDARDS

Street standards may appear benign, but they are powerful in the way they shape the environments in which we live. The public commonly credits—and blames—designers, planners, and developers for the sprawling, monotonous form of suburbia today, assuming these people have full control over the quality of the built environment. In fact, the design and building professions must usually work within a framework of controls and standards that specify many aspects of subdivision layout. Simple dimensions for minimum street width, sidewalks, or planting strips may seem innocuous, but when applied to miles of streets in hundreds of subdivisions occupied by millions of people, they have an enormous impact on the way our neighborhoods look, feel, and work for us. For example, a modest change in pavement width can have large consequences for energy consumption, comfort and convenience, sociability, the time and effort we must spend in local trips, and the costs of construction and maintenance. Land devoted to the street right-of-way takes away from the area devoted to residential units, thus reducing the size of lots. An increase in street width also increases construction and maintenance costs proportionately, lowers densities (assuming the same lot size and housing type), and increases travel times between points.

This does not mean we should abolish standards. Obviously, design and engineering standards can and often do assure a minimum level of quality and performance, as in many plans and construction standards designed to protect our health and safety. The problem arises when standards intended for health and safety overstep their bounds and lose a grounding in objective measures of goodness or a connection with the original rationale for their existence. We believe this is what has happened with residential street standards today. The residential environment is being shaped in major ways by standards that are no longer questioned and have become part of a rigid framework that is closed to change.

Over the past century American conceptions of the residential street network have changed dramatically from the interconnected rectilinear grid of the turn of the century (a), to the fragmented grid and warped parallel streets of the 1930s and 1940s (b), to the discontinuous, insular patterns of cul-de-sacs and loops that have been preferred since the 1950s (c). (© Michael Southworth)

Simple standards for street width and alignment have an enormous impact on the way neighborhoods look, feel, and work. In the course of the twentieth century, design and layout of residential streets have become increasingly regulated in the United States. (©William Garnett)

Through the years, the design and layout of residential streets in the United States have become increasingly regulated. Methodical administration of public works, the centralized supervision over land development beginning in the 1930s, and the rise of the road and transportation engineering professions have established street standards as justifiable absolutes.

As car ownership and mobility have grown, engineers have assumed that streets must be enlarged accordingly. The result has been regulations and standards that are often in excess of actual traffic requirements. Design of the residential street network is based on statistical information and research that is primarily oriented to facilitating vehicle movement on large-scale streets and highways. Such standards have then been mechanically adopted and legitimized by local governments to shield themselves from any responsibility for road performance. Federal funds for street improvements have further entrenched uniform standards. Local agencies have been required to adhere to minimum geometrical design criteria in order to be eligible for monetary assistance. Modifications have been discouraged, and because higher governmental agencies have not openhand-edly allowed flexibility, lesser agencies have been reluctant to do so.

Additionally, financial institutions and commercial developers have embraced conventional suburban street and parking layouts. Lenders in turn have been hesitant to support a development outside the mainstream, particularly when it does not conform to established standards and regulations. Commercial developers have favored segregated land use patterns based on the drive-park-shop model. As a result, they have required standards specifying wide streets, ample parking, and ease of movement in return for taking on a project.

THE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF STREET STANDARDS

As designers and planners reassess the physical form of the urban edge, many are beginning to recognize the physical and social impacts of standardized streets on the environment. Cumulative figures suggest that, worldwide, at least one-third of all developed urban land is devoted to roads, parking lots, and other motor vehicle infrastructure. In the urban United States, automobile spaces—streets, highways, and parking areas—consume close to half the land area of cities; in Los Angeles, the figure has been estimated at two-thirds. ¹, ² The street and highway right-of-way alone, exclusive of off-street parking, consumes 26 percent of the land area of cities like Berkeley and Los Angeles.³ Moreover, much of the built road space is actually wasted considering that local residential streets constitute 80 percent of the total national road miles while they carry only 15 percent of total vehicle miles traveled.⁴

Waste of street space and the economic impact of this waste have been a prolonged phenomenon. Since the 1930s, suburban subdivisions have been dominated by single-family residences fronting extensive paved streets. The prevailing right-of-way width for a residential subdivision street, as specified by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, has remained at 50 to 60 feet (15.2–18.3 m) for the last 30 years.⁵ Designating this generous space for an exclusive monofunctional land use within a residential environment has created suburban environments that unnecessarily waste land, energy, and materials.⁶ In a typical suburban subdivision with 5,000-square-foot (450 sq m) lots and 56-foot (17 m) rights-of-way, streets amount to approximately 30 percent of the total development. When typical 20-foot (6 m) driveway setbacks are included, the total amount of paved space reaches about 50 percent of the development. At present, with the cost of land representing 25 percent of the cost of a single-family house in most of the country (up from 10 percent in the 1950s), one would assume that a shift toward efficient and compact subdivision planning would occur.⁷ Yet street standards as well as land allocated for street use remain excessive.

An amazing amount of land is devoted to roads, parking lots, and other vehicular infrastructure in the United States, particularly in post–World War II developments. On the average, the automobile consumes nearly half the land area of cities in the United States, and in some cities, such as Los Angeles, it approaches two-thirds. (© William Garnett)

Excessive street standards that require wide streets and large setbacks have major social and economic impacts. They waste land, drive up home costs, and negate the essence of residential livability. The functions of streets have been diminished by the emphasis on motorized accessibility. (© Eran Ben-Joseph)

The extensive allocation of land for circulation purposes in residential suburbia not only has resulted in the depletion of land and an increase in the economic burden for all, but also has had social consequences. Street codes and standards that were established to facilitate vehicular travel have undermined residential livability. The use of streets as settings for social interaction has often been compromised, if not prevented, by the emphasis on motorized accessibility. The Urban Land Institute stresses this point: It was often forgotten that residential streets become part of the neighborhood and are eventually used for a variety of purposes for which they were not designed. Residential streets provide direct auto access for the occupant to his home; they carry traffic past his home; they provide a visual setting, an entryway for each house; a pedestrian circulation system; a meeting place for residents; or a play area (whether one likes it or not) for the children. To design and engineer residential streets solely for the convenience of easy automobile movement overlooks the many overlapping uses of a residential street.⁸ The concept of the street as a physical and social part of the house and its surroundings is critical both to the physical design of the neighborhood and to the design and operating philosophy for the local street system. However, the paradigms of traffic-oriented streets have been directed toward expanding street manageability and traffic capacity.

TRENDS IN STREET DESIGN AND REGULATION

Since the first edition of this book was published in 1997, important efforts have been made to amend street standards. The Skinny Streets Program, which started in Portland, Oregon, in 1991 (see Chapter 6), has enjoyed a high level of support from both residents and state officials. It has won various awards and has generated such interest that Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission adopted a code encouraging other jurisdictions within the state to adopt the program. The concept of skinny street design is also gaining acceptance across the country. At present, more than 30 jurisdictions in 16 states allow some form or another of narrow street standards (see Appendix C). Some of these localities allow for streets as narrow as 26 feet (8 m)