I am faulting the idea of *complete streets*. It's a pretty good, but not a great concept from an urbanist's perspective. The strength is resonance. *Complete* is a positive concept, and critiquing streets for being less than complete sounds less grumpy than the alternatives. In addition, the idea that we add something to what is already there makes street configuration appear to be non-zero-sum problems from a modal perspective. The appeal is obvious and it was a great framing for unifying activists, and it's easy to articulate.
However, the shortcoming of complete streets as a concept is that wide streets are problematic from a comfort perspective and a safety perspective. When we keep adding functions to streets, we either lose space for other functions or it leads us to making streets wider, and when the existing ROW accommodates every function, that should tell us it's too wide. We need narrow streets.
Yep. It's an idealistic failure to recognize the genuine tradeoffs that multimodal systems require. You can't work towards throughput and slow things down to keep peds and bikes safe in the same space. Access management is great until you are trying to create connections at a human scale.
I will let you claim the multi-modal hill because it’s not worth defending. Paris has been making different choices over the last thirty years. Residents are eating and breathing cleaner air because they favor active transportation.
I don't know that it's always the hill we want. It feels like a set of little hills--stairs, if you will--that are missing in our current systems. We've had 80+ years of thinking big and fast. What we have feels like 3 foot tall stair steps: great if you're a giant or have a jetpack but not so great for Jack and impossible for the frail. The tables and chairs are too large to function, and a lot of people are getting their bones ground up for bread.
What Ann Hidalgo has done in Paris feels nothing short of miraculous. They're also struggling with huge sections of civil unrest--and have been for years. Is this the modern equivalent of Von Haussman's cannon shot streets or does it further intensify the localized discord? I don't know. I heard a disaster preparedness leader once talk about never wanting to be completely car free because it limits your options to flee when there's a problem.
I am faulting the idea of *complete streets*. It's a pretty good, but not a great concept from an urbanist's perspective. The strength is resonance. *Complete* is a positive concept, and critiquing streets for being less than complete sounds less grumpy than the alternatives. In addition, the idea that we add something to what is already there makes street configuration appear to be non-zero-sum problems from a modal perspective. The appeal is obvious and it was a great framing for unifying activists, and it's easy to articulate.
However, the shortcoming of complete streets as a concept is that wide streets are problematic from a comfort perspective and a safety perspective. When we keep adding functions to streets, we either lose space for other functions or it leads us to making streets wider, and when the existing ROW accommodates every function, that should tell us it's too wide. We need narrow streets.
Yep. It's an idealistic failure to recognize the genuine tradeoffs that multimodal systems require. You can't work towards throughput and slow things down to keep peds and bikes safe in the same space. Access management is great until you are trying to create connections at a human scale.
I will let you claim the multi-modal hill because it’s not worth defending. Paris has been making different choices over the last thirty years. Residents are eating and breathing cleaner air because they favor active transportation.
I don't know that it's always the hill we want. It feels like a set of little hills--stairs, if you will--that are missing in our current systems. We've had 80+ years of thinking big and fast. What we have feels like 3 foot tall stair steps: great if you're a giant or have a jetpack but not so great for Jack and impossible for the frail. The tables and chairs are too large to function, and a lot of people are getting their bones ground up for bread.
What Ann Hidalgo has done in Paris feels nothing short of miraculous. They're also struggling with huge sections of civil unrest--and have been for years. Is this the modern equivalent of Von Haussman's cannon shot streets or does it further intensify the localized discord? I don't know. I heard a disaster preparedness leader once talk about never wanting to be completely car free because it limits your options to flee when there's a problem.