I love it when the research gets legs!! The City of Ranson, WV was able to take a neighborhood street from 45 mph to 20 mph by striping out on-street parking and Strong Towns did a video on it!!
Let’s do a deeper dive on this:
Here’s what it looked like before:
That’s 25 feet from gutter to gutter folks!! There is no good reason for this in a neighborhood, even if it is the main drag. Do you really want to have a 4-lane road in people’s front yards? Here’s what it looks like today:
It does help that the trees have filled in, but what will help even more over the long haul is the on-street parking—and if the neighbors don’t figure out they need to use that parking to get the speed control, the speed drop is not going to last. When these pictures were taken, this was still a quiet street at the back of a subdivision. It will not stay that way. It’s now the main connection between the north side of the town, the interstate and the grocery store—which means it’s going to get a bunch of cut-through. As long as they keep using the street well, speeds will stay low. One catch is that the garages are all on back alleys behind the houses. I’m all for back alleys in general, but the way they get used may end up short-cutting the gains they need.
This might have been easier on them if they had done a real network, but knowing the elevation changes in WV, I suspect they were lucky to get the one road through.
How not to do this:
Here’s nearly the exact same cross section on a completely different kind of road:
It’s also the main spine road that connects up neighborhoods with the main commercial node, but this one has no historic grid on it at all—just subdivision walls and fences. The road has multi-use paths that make it perfectly safe for pedestrians and cyclists and the high speed traffic isn’t actually going to cause any trouble as long as any crossings are really obvious. It’s probably even safe for e-bikes on the trail a long as they behave themselves.
Very few of the buildings address the street directly, and even the few that do have that beautiful multi-use trail between the building front and the road—pushing the human interaction potential into the “occasional, nearly never” category. Here’s where the Optical Narrowing strategy goes horribly wrong (or doesn’t really work the way they think it should).
Instead of narrowing the road for the on street parking—which wouldn’t make much sense here because of the regional nature of the roadway—they just tack it on the side and post the street at 35 mph. The on street parking (if it ever gets used) guarantees that there WILL be pedestrians climbing out of their vehicles right into oncoming traffic that absolutely cannot and will not see them in time to respond appropriately. This amplifies the downsides to both arterial roads and on street parking. It’s going to annoy through traffic because it’s not a realistic speed expectation. It’s going to invite people to legally do dangerous things.
This is a failed attempt at an urban form. The architecture on each individual street is beautiful. The land use doesn’t have a tight enough resolution for active transportation to realistically function.
The problem with 35 mph
The range between 30 and 40 mph is the absolute worst. Posting at 35mph is what I like to call a fantasy speed limit because you’re living in la la land if you think that anyone is actually going to go that speed in a corridor like this. It’s also a speed that does help anyone. From a safety standpoint, 35 mph is about the absolute worst speed for human interaction. It’s a posting that’s slow enough that pedestrians and cyclists may believe that the local government is welcoming them there, but high enough that they are never going to be seen by the drivers.
It’s like overdriving your headlights at night. Drivers are over-driving their ability to interact face to face with the people they see. Remember, you have a 90’ range for interacting with pedestrians and cyclists (the dark orange area). Past about 30 mph, drivers are focusing farther ahead than their eye to eye range and they are going to drive on a tool-to-tool basis instead. I’ve seen data that tells me this behavior shift happens closer to 20 mph than 30 mph. Between 20 mph and 45 mph, the odds are about 50/50 that a driver will see the pedestrian around them. Below 20 mph, that jumps to 80%.
Takeaway:
Let a road be a road and don’t mistake it for a street. The prerequisite for a street is a walkable scale land use mix with street fronting uses. Once you get to 4 lanes, you’re nearly out of the range that multimodal interaction is going to go well. If you don’t have very intense street fronting uses, it’s too wide for drivers to treat it with respect. Adding the on-street parking to a regional scale corridor will not slow the traffic down at all and only puts the people at risk as they get out of their cars.
Up Next:
I really am going to start that new series soon. This is also the last call before I send out the mental frameworks report to all the new subscribers on Thursday.
Re the wide neighbourhood street optically narrowed by the painting of parking lanes, I take your key point as "if the neighbors don’t figure out they need to use that parking to get the speed control, the speed drop is not going to last." We have a similar street that I bike on frequently. There is a wide parking lane on each side, but since nearly every house has a double-wide driveway and large garage, there are seldom any parked cars. Drivers seemed to quickly learn to ignore that parking lane stripe and resume their previous high speeds.
On balance, though, I'm still glad the parking lane stripe is there. As a cyclist I can usually regard the empty parking lane as a wide though unprotected biking lane. The cars are going by fast, but they seldom veer more than a few inches into the lane I'm using.