Public Thoroughfares

[mishalak]

An idea from the mind of Mishalak

Cities would be a great deal more friendly towards people in general if at least every seventh street were designated for the primary or exclusive use by pedestrians, bicycles, and/or public transit vehicles. With often minimal changes to traffic laws and street signage the flow of mass transit vehicles and bicyclists could be greatly facilitated, reducing costs associated with mass transit and encouraging the use of both.

In the most basic form it would be an alternate stop sign, perhaps with a very obvious boarder of a color other than red or the addition of a sign instructing mass transit vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians that they need not stop in the through direction on a side street parallel to a major one or though an area that is not frequently used by cars. Another sign would be placed bellow the stop sign in the crossing direction indicating to motorists that they must yield in all cases to the same. Motorists could still turn onto the street but would be required to go no further than one block on it, parking at the side of the street should probably only be allowed on one side to emphasize that this street is not primarily for cars and to provide more room for the three modes of transportation that may be sharing the route.

To maximize their usefulness they would need to be designated with an eye towards providing routes without many steep grades that would impede bicyclists and pedestrians alike and would make it difficult to upgrade the transit route from bus to tram/trolley. Or else the route would need to be graded to make it more bicycle/pedestrian friendly. Areas where steep grades are impossible to avoid would have to be handled on a case-by-case basis I suspect.

There should also be changes to the laws to require that bicyclists minimize the use of streets in areas where such public thoroughfares exist to reduce automobile/bicycle accidents and help the flow of motorized traffic. Perhaps small blue arrows could put up pointing the direction to the nearest public thoroughfare. Where they cross more crowded streets I suggest stoplights be erected that would be either timed to maximize both car and non-car throughput or in some cases would be triggered by public transit vehicles approaching so that they could go through without coming to a complete stop.

In especially traffic dense areas I think it would be best to ban motor vehicles from public thoroughfares completely and use the parking lanes freed up to limit the sharing of lanes by mass transit vehicles with pedestrians and bicycles. It might also be useful in such areas to use sensors to detect the number of bicyclists and pedestrians approaching or waiting so that the proper tradeoffs can be made in the traffic signaling to allow the maximum number of commuters to pass a given point.

I had this idea on a MUNI train that was waiting at a stoplight waiting for a few cars to pass while sixty or more transit riders waited.

Comments

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Working downtown, I've been walking up and down the 16th street mall a lot during lunch, and I love it. I think it sounds like a great idea.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The idea certainly owes a lot to pedestrian malls like the 16th Street Mall, but I hope that it would go a bit further. The mall is beautiful and comfortable to walk on and the local bus service is great, but there is no connection to where people live and it would not be the best of places to try to ride a bicycle.

In Denver I would start with some side street one or two over from a major boulivard like Colfax, perhaps 16th Avenue and perhaps a street downtown like California where trafic already shares the street with light rail. My pick for north/south would be Acoma or Bannock Street.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

This sounds a lot like the Sparks Street Mall in Ottawa. We have a street here in Toronto as well (I forget which street it is, but it's part of Kensington Market) which is closed to vehicular traffic on one Sunday per month, I think it is. By all accounts, it's extremely popular and the vendors in the Market are doing very well.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I was certainly inspired in part by various pedestrian malls, but I would hope that if actually implemented in some form that public thoroughfares would extend far into residential neighborhoods. It wouldn't just be along a commercial strip, but allow people to get from their neighborhood or even suburb to somewhere within four blocks of their workplace or where they want to go shopping. Plus many commercial streets are often major car thoroughfares and it could be quite problematic to relocate the traffic off of them. (As well as being politically difficult since there are, to be perfectly frank, more motorists than bicyclists and transit riders in most cities.) And the pedestrian malls are frequently good for foot trafic, but not so good for bicycles and buses.

[tharain.livejournal.com]

This was frequently done back in the 70's as an urban planning deal, and was pretty frequently a disaster from a traffic standpoint. One of my hometowns, Bethlehem PA, tried it with two blocks of one of its two streets, and, twenty some years later, undid it. If the streets closed are minor throroughfares, it can be very nice (I'm thinking Maiden Lane, off Union Square), but it can be a wreck as far as traffic goes on the main streets. And here in SF it's already a nightmare to drive around the City.

We on this evening? =)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Well my assumption was that it would be streets parallel to vehicle main arterials. I corrected my text to reflect that.

I would imagine that blocking off two blocks wouldn't work very well, particularly if they did it as a failed 1970s urban renewal program when everyone was trying to get out of the hearts of cities. However in Denver they blocked off 16th Street downtown from one end to the other and it has worked out very well. It is now a thriving district where people love to go, walk, and shop.

The alternative to that is to move the car traffic onto one way streets to either side of the public thoroughfare. That would probably help get more cars moving as one way streets are more efficient than two way boulevards. However from a residential point of view it would be less desirable as car traffic would bring substantially more noise than bicycle traffic with the occasional bus.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

And yes San Francisco is a nightmare to use a car in, but that's going to be the case no matter what I suspect. There just are not enough or wide enough streets for the number of people who want to use a car here. Unless the people who live here were willing to have several buried freeways built or carve through some proper boulevards that's not going to change. But I think that the city could be made substantially easier to navigate without a car without making things much worse than they are.