Making Streets Safer: An Interview with Urban Designer Elizabeth Macdonald, Papers of Classical Philology

Download Making Streets Safer: An Interview with Urban Designer Elizabeth Macdonald and more Papers Classical Philology in PDF only on Docsity! http://www.tsc.berkeley.edu/html/newsletter/Spring04/macdonald.html 1 of 5 Online newsletter Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2004 Safety and a Sense of Place Urban designer Elizabeth Macdonald talks about making streets safer while meeting the needs of drivers and pedestrians Elizabeth Macdonald, Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, is perhaps best known for her research on the multi-way boulevard, a street model that accommodates both through traffic and slow-moving local traffic as well as heavy pedestrian activity. With Allan Jacobs and Yodan Rofe, she authored The Boulevard Book (MIT Press, 2000). In this interview with TSC newsletter writer Carli Cutchin, Macdonald discusses what works and what doesn't when it comes to making neighborhoods "walkable," and the barriers that prevent transportation planners and engineers from making these neighborhoods a reality. Q: There's been a move toward changing the built environment in such a way that people walk more and rely less on cars. As an urban designer, can you speak to the challenges that face designers and engineers as they work together to create new neighborhoods and alter existing built environments to make them safer and more convenient for pedestrians? Given that planners and engineers sometimes have very different priorities, how can they conceive and bring about a singular vision? A: I've come to understand that engineers and designers are coming from fundamentally different places. Engineers are coming from a more quantitative place. They're used to running numbers. If they have a traditional transportation engineering background they're probably focused on certain types of things like efficient movement and street capacity. Designers come at thinking about streets in a very different way, in a qualitative way. We weigh different types of values against each other, so movement might not be given the highest value. In fact, in some cases we might think about congestion as having a much higher value. http://www.tsc.berkeley.edu/html/newsletter/Spring04/macdonald.html 2 of 5 In the research that we did for The Boulevard Book we found that ways in which engineers analyzed situations tended to be abstract and removed. They might use analytic techniques such as potential conflict point diagrams. They might rely solely on such a graphic, instead of actually going out into the field and seeing, OK, well, maybe there are those potential conflicts, but are those conflicts really a problem or not? In other words, [they would use] these abstract diagrammatic methods of analyzing without going out and really seeing what happens. Q: Can you give me an example? A: The example I can give you comes from the multiway boulevards research work. A multiway boulevard is a street type that accommodates both fast moving through traffic and slow moving local traffic. The fast moving through traffic moves in the center in a wide roadway. One-way local traffic and parking occurs on side access roads. What you end up with is three different roadways within a single street entity. As you can imagine, that makes for rather complex intersections. Well, if you draw that intersection and then you think about all the many ways that people might move across that intersection, you end up with a potential conflict point diagram which has 50 conflict points, which is a lot more than a normally configured street, which has 16. [In a diagram] it looks really alarming. You start saying well, we can't allow that movement and we can't allow that movement and we can't allow that movement. Pretty soon, you have destroyed the natural functioning of the street. But if you go out and you look in the field and you see what's actually happening with multiway boulevards at intersections, you realize that if you put in appropriate traffic calming measures along the side access roadways, so that the people who are on the side access roads are moving really slowly, there are not going to be as many of those conflicting movements as it looks like on the diagram. We ended up drawing diagrams that were much more expressive of what was actually happening. When people saw those diagrams they started to understand that perhaps complex intersections were not so much a problem. Q: It makes sense that a complex roadway would call for more complex diagrams to understand what's going on. A: Yes, and another thing that I think still permeates engineering thinking today is the functional classification of streets which has been with us since the 1930s or 1940s, when streets were segregated into different types based on their movement function. The classifications that engineers use are oriented toward single use. It's similar to what happened with land use planning, where we have a legacy of single use zones. In land use planning we're just starting to think more in terms of mixed use. We need to start thinking in terms of streets as being mixed use streets as well. And that's where it starts getting scary in terms of safety issues, because once you're going to do that, how are you going to create safety for the pedestrians? So as a designer the