Bad Urban Design Updated

ALL URBAN DESIGN should be about making good places. Too much of the new traffic calming isn't. It's a problem we have to solve.

Cleveland's City Planning Department has a pretty good illustrated glossary on their website. But under "traffic calming" they show the roundabout above. Here are some reasons why that's a bad choice of photos:

• My BMW could take that corner on the left 85 mph, and that's not traffic calming. This is a design by a traffic engineer who has put the easy flow of the car above the comfort of the pedestrian. For the mental and physical well-being of the pedestrian crossing the next street in the roundabout, the geometry of the corner radii should force the car to slow almost to a stop as it comes into the roundabout.
• The traffic lanes are very wide: that's good for speeding cars, bad for pedestrians crossing the roads, and bad for making the street a space where pedestrians feel comfortable.
• The yellow striping is much too visually aggressive.
• The %*^#! traffic engineer has removed all FHOs, i.e., "Fixed Hazardous Objects," otherwise known as trees. Pedestrians are know as MHOs, "Moveable Hazardous Objects."
• It is better for placemaking if the circle is not a perfect circle and has something more interesting to look at than dying grass.
• It is better for placemaking if the pedestrian islands are shaped for people rather than cars — rectangles rather than lozenges, for example.
• The curves on the outside of the traffic circle have no visual relationship to the circle at the center, because the traffic engineer was thinking about moving cars rather than shaping a place. One goal should be shaping space: the simplest way to do that with the circles the engineer has used is make concentric circles. But the shapes don't have to be circles. What's imortant is that the shapes define and make comfortable spaces for the pedestrian as well as the car.

In the way we build today, traffic engineers are among the most important urban designers, always given great authority by towns and cities. But traffic engineers think about engineering rather than design. They need courses on placemaking and civic art.

UPDATE - Design-by-fire-truck: A commenter comments that we need to accommodate the fire truck (I wonder whom he's been talking to). Of course we do. But we don't have to let the Fire Chief design our towns and cities.

Big streets for big trucks is always presented as a safety issue. Big streets have been proven to be more dangerous than smaller streets. We have 40,000 traffic deaths a year in the US, and we owe many of those to the "bigger is better" philosophy of the traffic engineer and the fire chief.

I live in New York City, where we have very big buildings and relatively small streets. We have big trucks to serve our big buildings, and our trucks navigate our "sub-standard" streets just fine.

Below are some photos of a big fire truck navigating a 20' rear alley in Kentlands, a New Urban development in Maryland. The truck got through here just fine too. The fact is that one can design streets for large trucks without the gross excess in the photo above. There's even software that automates the process now.

There's also a "Boys With Toys" factor here. Do small towns need giant trucks? No. Do their firemen like big shiny trucks? Yes. But smaller, less expensive trucks get the job done. Mayors and town managers should keep that in mind.