Livable Streets 2.0

By Bruce Appleyard

Livable Streets 2.0 offers a thorough examination of the struggle between automobiles, residents, pedestrians and other users of streets, along with evidence-based, practical strategies for redesigning city street networks that support urban livability. In 1981, when Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets was published, it was globally recognized as a groundbreaking work, one of the most influential urban design books of its time. Unfortunately, he was killed a year later by a speeding drunk driver. This latest update, Livable Streets 2.0, revisited by his son Bruce, updates the topic with the latest research, new case studies, and best human-centered practices for creating more livable streets for all. It is essential reading for those who influence future directions in city and transportation planning, urban design, and community regeneration, and placemaking.

• Incorporates the most current empirical research on urban transportation and land use practices that support the need for more livable communities
• Includes recent case studies from around the world on successful projects, campaigns, programs, and other efforts
• Contains new coverage of vulnerable populations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780128160299

Bruce Appleyard

Bruce Appleyard, PhD is an Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Design at San Diego State University (SDSU) and the Assistant Director of Active Transportation Research (ATR) where he helps people make more informed decisions about how we live, work, play, and thrive. He specializes in pedestrian and bicycle planning and design and is an expert at working with people so they can celebrate the humanity of their streets and communities together. Dr. Appleyard has authored dozens of publications including the nationally lauded Handbook for Building Livable Transit Corridors (National Academies Press, 2016) and The Transportation/Land Use Connection (American Planning Association, 2007).In 2006, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named Bruce as one of their Top Ten “Active Living Heroes” for his work helping communities, alongside other notable figures including Barack Obama. He is passionate about helping people create joyful and enriching communities that reflect their spirit and identity, are economically vibrant, and yield environmental and health benefits for all. Dr. Appleyard holds a Doctorate (as well as a Masters and Bachelors) from the University of California, Berkeley. Affiliations and Expertise

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Introduction

The incessant night traffic and the hum of noise condemned the Roman to everlasting insomnia. What sleep is possible in a lodging? he asks. The crossing of wagons in the narrow, winding streets, the swearing of drivers brought to a standstill, would snatch sleep from a sea-calf or the emperor Claudius himself.

Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome

No street lights. Nobody stirs outside if possible, unless accompanied by friends or slaves with lanterns or torches, and it is no harm to carry heavy bludgeons, for despite the watch there are all too many sneak thieves, cut-purses, and even open bandits.

… at night there is no small peril of being harassed by loose tiles which rattle down from the lofty housetops, or less dangerous but most disgusting, of being drenched by buckets of filthy slops flowing recklessly from upper windows into the streets. Then towards dawn your sleep is ruined by the incessant rumbling of the wagons with timber, brick, building stone, cement, and all kinds of food supplies, which have to be excluded from the city in daylight hours.

Davis, A Day in Old Rome

Nearly everyone in the world lives on a street. People have always lived on streets. They have been the places where children first learned about the world, where neighbors met, the social centers of towns and cities, the rallying points for revolts, the scenes of repression. But they have also been the channels for transportation and access; noisy with the clatter of horses’ hooves and the shouts of their drivers, putrid with dung, garbage, and mud, the places where strangers intruded and criminals lurked.

The street has always been the scene of this conflict, between living and access, between resident and traveler, between street life and the threat of death. This is the conflict we shall deal with in these pages.

In the nineteenth century the streets of European and American cities were no better than those of ancient Rome, although outside observers saw dirt and overcrowding as the main problems. The middle-class Engels was appalled at the streets of Manchester: And as for the dirt, everywhere one sees heaps of refuse, garbage and filth. There are stagnant pools instead of gutters and the stench alone is so overwhelming that no human being, even partially civilized, would find it bearable to live in such a district (Engels, 1844).

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Nineteenth-century Rome: the streets were muddy but safe from traffic. They had a sense of place. People could walk anywhere. Painting by E. Roesler Franz, Museo di Roma.

Boston and New York were similar, according to Rudofsky (1969). Boston’s streets were first cleaned in a systematic way in 1823. It took one month and remained of only temporary benefit. Problems of traffic and noise were mentioned less in descriptions of these cities, perhaps because they were written by visitors.

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This scene of the lively urban street for people was taken from the front of a streetcar as it travelled along San Francisco, California's Market Street. It is believed that this was only days before the 1906 earthquake and fire. Densities were high and people used the whole street space. Source: Courtesy of the Prelinger Archives. http://sanfranciscofilmmuseum.org.

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Turn-of-the-century New York: apartments above the stores, masses of children on the street, and garbage too, in the Lower East Side. Lewis Hine. Naomi and Walter Rosenblum Collection.

In the twentieth century streets are cleaner than they used to be. They are better paved, too. But the paving has encouraged the intrusion of a new menace—the motorized vehicle. Today, traffic and its by-products have steadily and inexorably invaded the streets of our cities.

The dangers of traffic and the role of streets have been a matter of debate in modern planning since the beginning of the 19th century. The Garden City movement sought to make streets safe through cul-de-sacs, residential squares and neighborhood units, with safe pedestrian pathways to the schools. They also tried to separate out uses so that people would not have to live with nuisance created by commercial and industrial activities. Modern architects freed their buildings from the street by placing them at right angles to develop quiet green spaces. But both sets of responses underestimated the problem. Most people in existing cities continued to live along streets; increases in car ownership resulted in more traffic than ever predicted; and parking lots and roads replaced the safe green spaces.

Then, in 1961, Jane Jacobs launched her famous attack on modern housing and planning (Jacobs, 1961a,b). She glorified the intricacy and diversity of the old city, and called above all for the return of life to the street. The lively urban street, with its residents’ eyes always on the alert, she argued, was the safest place in the city. Criminals could be identified on it, while in the parks and anonymous grounds of modern housing projects no one took it upon themselves to look out for others.

The intensive street life that marked her Greenwich Village street was Jane Jacobs’ ideal of an urban environment, a place that city planners should protect and strive to attain. Her critics might point out that the diversity of Greenwich Village was dependent more on the social mix of a residual Italian neighborhood in the course of gentrification, but the image took hold. Streets became once more a popular cause, and street life has become an ideal of post-modern urban planning.

Jane Jacobs did not worry much about the traffic on her Greenwich Village street, though she talked a lot about traffic elsewhere. She did develop one important idea about traffic, however. She argued that just as traffic increases to fill newly provided highway space, so traffic congestion can lead to its own attrition. Like most of her ideas, this was a hunch supported by the evidence of one case around Washington Square, but it is a theory that intuitively seems possible. This depends, of course, on the elasticity of the demand for driving which, in the US context, is often inelastic and insensitive to changes. But there are policies that show promise. For example, a major factor that can move people away from driving is mixing land uses and the lack of free or cheap parking.a

The next salvo in the battle for livable streets was published in 1963 when Colin Buchanan in England produced a prestigious and influential government report, Traffic in Towns, that forcibly drew the British government’s attention to the traffic problem. He documented the effects of traffic, but the study concentrated much more on solutions. It introduced the concept of zoning cities into environmental areas, where the environment would be of dominant concern. Large numbers of cities subsequently developed plans for these environmental areas. However, in the years that followed, the emphasis in British transportation planning was more on the other side of Buchanan’s coin, the necessity of channeling traffic along major highways in order to create the environmental areas. Buchanan was not against traffic; he saw it as inevitable and wanted to organize it. He became increasingly concerned with major circulation schemes, and environmental area planning was left for individual neighborhoods and cities to undertake. We shall discuss some of these first efforts in Part Two.

Empirical sociology has given some attention to the street block purely as a sociological phenomenon. The role played by face-to-face neighboring in the social networks of urban dwellers has been the primary interest. Debate has focused on the role of propinquity in neighboring, an attribute found to be influential in an early study by Festinger et al. (1950), but questioned by Herbert Gans in a number of papers that emphasize the dominance of social homogeneity in neighborly relations (Gans, 1968a,b). Gans, too, accused Jane Jacobs of engaging in the fallacy of environmental determinism when arguing that the design of housing and streets could in itself bring diversity to urban street life.

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Children making the best out of a small amount of street for a game of cricket in Bangalore, India. Notice the batter’s expression at seeing the ball roll into the passing traffic. Source: Michael Ronkin.

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Children using the only open-space available to them—a traffic island at night to play cricket. Old Delhi, India.

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A child dashes into the street after a ball in the face of oncoming traffic. Old Delhi, India.

Fried and Gleicher (1961) and Gerald Suttles (1968) have described the nature of street life in slum and working-class streets of Boston and Chicago. Sidney Brower (1977) in Baltimore found that far more recreation takes place on streets than in the parks. These descriptions begin to deal with the primacy of street life in lower-income neighborhoods, and detail the interrelation of private and public territory, the street as the mediator between the wider community and the private world of the family. Neither of these studies, except Brower’s, mentions traffic or other environmental nuisances, although Suttles does describe the role of major commercial streets, the impersonal domains of slum Chicago, on which few dare to venture at night, for they are no one’s territory.

At the time of the original book, environmental concerns had only recently begun to emerge from studies that look at overall residential satisfaction. A wide range of qualities is reported on, including the house itself, privacy, neighbors’ upkeep, appearance, social status, suitability for children, and well-paved streets. Strangely, traffic has not emerged in these studies as a major issue. One reason is that many surveys have concentrated on suburban environments or new housing projects, where traffic is often planned to be of slow speed or low volume. Another reason is the way in which the research results are coded. In one study, traffic was coded under the heading street activity; in another, all attributes of a house’s external setting, found to be an important factor in residential choice, were grouped under one category (Michelson, 1977).

At the time, there had been one significant study in the United States, however, that suggests the dimensions of the problem: the 1973 US Housing Survey, published in 1975 (Table 1), based on interviews with 53,800 households. A remarkable 45.8 percent reported street noise as an undesirable characteristic of their neighborhood, and 29 percent reported heavy traffic. Fewer complained of inadequate lighting (20 percent), the need for street repairs (14 percent), and the presence of undesirable commercial and industrial uses (13 percent); and only 13 percent complained of street or neighborhood crime. Trash and litter and odors were each mentioned by 12 percent.

Table 1

Note: Percentages do not add up to 100% because of the multiple-answer question.

Here is a set of conditions which many people have on their streets. Which, if any, do you have?

Source: US Annual Housing Survey 1973, based on 53,800 sample units.

Traffic is therefore seen as a much more widespread problem than crime, although crime captures the media headlines. In central cities and among minority groups, the incidence of traffic is even more severe. Crime also rises, but not so much. In central cities, 34 percent complained of heavy traffic, 51 percent of street noise, and 22 percent of street crime. Of these, 40 percent of black households experienced heavy traffic, 49 percent street noise, and 28 percent reported street and neighborhood crimes. Perhaps the most poignant issue is the large number of children injured or killed by traffic. In a study of over 2000 pedestrian crashes in 13 US cities (Snyder and Knoblauch, 1971), slightly over 50 percent of all crashes involved youngsters under 15 years of age. Some 2180 children under 15 were killed as pedestrians in 1975 (National Safety Council, 1975).

Other countries report similar findings. A random survey of Tokyo inhabitants reported that traffic hazard, experienced by 25% of the sample, was the most common neighborhood problem, closely followed by the shortage of parks and green belts. In a nationwide sample of 5600 in the United Kingdom, 64% reported being bothered to some extent by traffic, 21% being bothered very much or quite a bit. One quarter of the British sample reported being wakened in the mornings by traffic noise! At the Twelfth International Study Week in Traffic Engineering and Safety in 1974, it was reported that 84% of children under ten in Britain were injured within 800 meters of home, and 70% of all crashes in the Netherlands involving children under six occur on streets carrying less than 3000 cars a day. In Europe and Japan, narrower discontinuous street systems have accentuated congestion, noise, and air pollution, and in US cities wide continuous gridiron street systems have allowed traffic to permeate neighborhoods indiscriminately.

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Mexico City: an old man crossing a traffic-choked street with the help from his grandsons.

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Typical scenes of cities in countries throughout the world when the first edition was published, and today.

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Modern day examples of decades-old problem: Elderly Woman Crossing Street in Mumbai, India.

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Modern day examples of decades-old problem: An elderly Woman Crossing Street to wait at an inadequate bus stop in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Invited to speak to a group of elected and appointed officials in Lawrence, KS, about how to create Great Communities, I was put up for the evening in a beautiful historic hotel, near the 100% portion of their Downtown, which I was told was very walkable.

My father and I shared a love of photography, and he taught me the art of observing people as they interact in public space and taking pictures to capture how a place may, or may not work for them. (Often, he would give me his camera to take the pictures he wanted, as he believed people would act more naturally if a kid had a camera.) So as soon as I arrived in my hotel room, I literally started hanging out the window observing how the street was working for people out and about enjoying a wonderful autumn evening.

Indeed, the main street of Lawrence’s Downtown seemed very walkable, with generous sidewalks, trees and furniture, interesting buildings and other amenities. But the intersections were atrociously large!

The curb radii were huge, and the crosswalks non-existent. In sum there was a lack of clarity as to how drivers and pedestrians should negotiate and choreograph, on the fly, how they crossed paths—who should have the right of way?

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As I was observing people I noticed a group of families with children moving towards this intersection to cross it. Curious to capture how they may navigate these treacherous intersection, I immediately ran down to the street into a position where I could observe things without being noticed.

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A mother and two children are readying to cross. There is 10 seconds on the crossing light. The red car, on the left is readying to make a right turn.

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Within 5 seconds, the mother yelled to her children to Run. Clearly and uncomfortable situation, and not the sign of a truly livable street.

The next morning these images were shown to the elected and appointed officials to show them how their main street was not working as well as it could to be truly livable. They took notice.

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The spectre every parent fears.

Meanwhile, citizens have not waited for surveys to discover what their problems are. They have become increasingly active in opposing traffic. Often this opposition is catalyzed by a collision, usually involving a child. In both the San Francisco Bay Area and London, residents have been known to mill in the street to stop passing traffic as a protest against its dangers. In San Francisco, after a small child was killed near one of the original survey streets, residents erected their own stop sign. On one street in London, furniture and other personal belongings were placed in the street to form a barricade, but this was only after the fourth child had been killed on that same street, an extreme case.

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A memorial where a young child was sadly hit and killed in a crosswalk. Berkeley, CA. The median was named in Zachary’s honor.

Most protests against increasing traffic have been mild and more political. However, active street and neighborhood organizations in many cities are now demanding control of traffic through their neighborhoods. At the time of the First Edition, planning agencies and public works departments in numerous scattered places were starting to install devices, often individually designed to meet particular street problems, and an increasing number of cities were developing more comprehensive traffic management schemes. A then recent inquiry found about twenty cities in California experimenting with various devices, and several large cities across the United States and Canada engaging in efforts to manage residential traffic. An article in Sunset magazine (Jensen, 1976) on street diverters brought over 1000 enquiries from cities and neighborhood groups across the country.

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Residents protest against traffic in England. Camden Journal.

Beyond the shores of our own continent, efforts to control the negative effects of traffic are more advanced. In April of 1975, countries participating in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) held a conference in Paris entitled Better Towns with Less Traffic (OECD, 1975b). This conference in many ways symbolized a change of heart in transportation planning, a change forced upon it (though not acknowledged) by small groups living in neighborhoods that straddle transportation routes. The conference heard case studies from cities as far apart as Bologna, Singapore, Uppsala, Nottingham, Munich, Besançon, and Nagoya, which were pioneering in new ways of making more livable cities. They were only a few representatives of what is now an active movement in the developed countries.

The protection and creation of livable streets is not simply a matter of increasing the comfort or safety of urban living. The street has other functions. As the place where most children grow up, it is a crucial mediator between the home and the outside world, where the child learns to confront strangers and environments on his own. It should be a receptive and reasonably safe environment that the child can explore, manipulate, and use as a setting for all kinds of activities. The street has personal and social meaning for adults and old people, too. It symbolizes one’s position in the world almost as much as the house one lives in. And the social relations that take place on the street, its potential for neighborliness and street life, are values of urban life to be treasured—when they are wanted. We need not romanticize street life to be willing to protect it. Some things that go on in the streets are threatening and antisocial, and some urban dwellers prefer anonymity and privacy, but there are inherent values in encouraging people and families who live in propinquity to work out their relationships without having them suppressed by the presence of passing strangers in motorized vehicles, a thesis that will be familiar to those who have read Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder (1970).

Finally, if cities are to retain their populations, and if energy shortages force us back into concentrated cities, ways must be found in which city neighborhoods can be havens of rest after the day’s work rather than precarious perches in a sea of noise, fumes, and dirt.

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A European prediction from Sight-Seeing 2000, Erik Ortvad (Flamberg Verlag, Zurich, 1971).

The attraction of traffic control devices is that they can solve a problem on a particular street easily and cheaply, with a sign, a street bump, or a temporary barrier. Traffic can be cut down or slowed down at minimal cost. Whereas most urban problems take immense and unavailable amounts of money and effort, traffic control is simple and yields immediate concrete results. The problem is that the side effects of a traffic change are more complex than expected. Motorists may become resentful, a proportion of the street’s residents may be surprised and unhappy at the change, merchants may be apprehensive about likely threats to their sales, and emergency services will view any traffic constraint as a problem; finally, those on the streets that gain traffic as a result of the change may stand implacably against any such schemes. Secondary effects can lead to the invasion of an area by higher-income groups or to a stabilization of middle-income residents in an area of lower-income intrusion. Land values and land uses can change dramatically. Even when schemes result in the greatest good for the greatest number the opposition is frequently powerful enough to force modifications or even abandonment. It is not unusual to find, however, that many of the protesters themselves live on quiet, protected streets. Residents who want to protect their neighborhoods must organize themselves well, but the search for more livable streets must not be achieved at unacceptable costs.

Because of these complications we will look closely in this book at some of these controversies to learn what the problems have been, and how traffic can be better managed. This is a planning problem for which there are several possible solutions. At the time of the first edition, there existed over fifty devices that could control traffic behavior, from excluding certain vehicles to controlling speed, hot-rodders, or overall traffic volume. Some devices are hard, preventing movement by physical barriers, and others are soft, using more subtle or psychological means of influencing driver behavior.

In the 1st edition Donald Appleyard states:

although this book does not pretend to be a manual of these devices, many alternatives will be mentioned in passing in the text

For this new edition, some of the most up-to-date information on principles, processes and prescriptions (tools, approaches, understandings—as Speck might say, rules) are provided on how to comprehensively plan and design for more livable and complete streets and communities. A unique aspect of this edition is that it provides a pathway to physically realize A Charter for Humane and Equitable Streets and the Livability Ethics for Empathy, Equity and Justice Principles presented in Part 3—where we discuss the promise of our