Putting Complete into Complete Streets

I took these pictures in London several weeks ago - - Exhibition Road between the Science Museum and the V&A.  No curb. No gutter.  Parking, biking, driving, walking -  on the surface, it looks and feels like a seamless integration of the many purposes of a road.

This is a good article from The Atlantic Cities website (this site is a true gem - engineers and planners need to look at the material regularly!!) - - Making Complete Streets More Complete.  From the article:

"From about 1920-1970, streets and roads in America meant mostly one thing: moving cars and trucks quickly and safely – that is, "throughput." All else was secondary, including pedestrian mobility, aesthetics, other vehicles (like bicycles), or how those roads and streets really "fit" or served a particular setting. Thirty or 40 years ago, interest in streets as integral parts of "place" increased, and road engineers and planners began the process of trying, at least, to humanize them. In the last decade or so, in addition to safety, functionality, and fit, issues of environmental, social and economic costs and benefits of particular urban transportation solutions have come to the fore. But even during most of this latter period, a road’s purpose was still chiefly perceived as making cars very happy indeed."

Also -

"The good news is that many dozens of communities around the country have seen the wisdom of some of these ideas, and have made changes that are transforming the former single-minded nature of their streets and roads into a more multi-purposed and nuanced system: one that safely and adequately accommodates all forms of travel, including pedestrians, bicycles, public transit, and of course, cars and trucks. Just look at Chicago’s ambitious new street design guidelines, centered around the new big idea there: pedestrians are now number one. While all transportation modes deserve fair treatment in Chicago’s city streets as they are redesigned or upgraded, walkers now rule. Wow.

These kinds of changes are welcome and long overdue. Communities as diverse as the Borough of Woodbine, New Jersey, or Charlotte, North Carolina, have brought Complete Streets into their public policies, so that, over time, their streets and roads will begin to take on new characteristics. It is a tribute to a smart and original idea with staying power, and hard work, that it is becoming more and more mainstream across the U.S. A number cities and urban counties are finally tackling head-on the very difficult problem of pedestrian safety, and mobility through all modes of travel.

Now that these mobility and safety ideas are starting to take hold, it doesn’t seem too soon to suggest an update of the "Complete Streets" concept, one which brings environmental and economic issues squarely within its ambit. Kaid Benfield has already written about how the concept of "smart growth," now fully into its third decade, could be modernized and improved. Such a "renovation" would more completely reintegrate the environmental attributes that gave smart growth its impetus in the 1990s but may since have faded. Primarily, this would involve the idea of bringing nature back into urban communities, in order to invest them with a crucial dimension of livability that has been left out of some of smart growth’s better known attributes, such as density, walkability, or mixed uses."