The picture above shows the urban space taken up by an equal number of single occupant automobiles, bus passengers and cyclists. For all you armchair urban theorists, Ped Shed’s Laurence Aurbach posts a three-parter about designing roads for better purposes than just driving faster and faster.

Towards a Functional Classification Replacement

In practice, functional classification results in three rigid postulates:

1: The longer the trip, the bigger the roadway 2: The bigger the roadway, the faster its traffic should travel 3: The faster the traffic on the roadway, the more isolated the roadway must be from its surroundings

The effect on transportation in America is obvious and immense: The large majority of traffic in urban areas is channeled into freeways and arterials.

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Meanwhile in the U.S. a pitched battle for control of urban streets was underway. Today we assume that automobile domination was the uncontroversial result of mass auto ownership. But until the 1920s, every street in America was a “shared space” street, where all pedestrians had the right to use the roadway at any time or at any place they desired. Many, including police, safety officers and traffic engineers, fought to keep it that way by strictly limiting autos to nonlethal speeds. The opposition — auto, oil and road-building industries — spearheaded a movement to ban pedestrians and dedicate streets to ever-faster motor vehicle traffic.

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The standard suburban arterial experience is long waits at a traffic signals, jack-rabbit races to next signal, followed by more long waits, repeated day after day. A better option is slower, more constant speeds. LaPlante (2008) points out that coordinated signals are easier to integrate into slow-speed networks and suggests that a 30 mph street with coordinated traffic signals can perform as well as a 45 mph street with stop and start movement.