Creating Complete Streets

By Josh Stephens

In many ways, it is easier to describe what a complete street isn’t than what it is. A non-complete street primarily serves the through-put of automobiles. If pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and diners at sidewalk cafes can use streets too without risking bodily harm or aesthetic offense, so be it. But those uses are, on the vast majority of American streets, incidental.

A new movement has been fighting against this transportation myopia. The complete streets movement calls for streets to be designed—or redesigned—in order to accommodate a broad range of users and uses. Bike lanes make streets more complete. So do enhanced crosswalks, lands aping, and sidewalks that accommodate disabled people. The possibilities are endless for cities that want to save lives and choose to view their streets as more than just thoroughfares. 

“Every time you touch the transportation system, you should consider complete streets,” said Emiko Atherton, executive director of the National Complete Streets Coalition (NCSC). “It’s about changing the way we look at transportation planning.”  

Traffic calming measures like bumps, humps, curves, bollards, roundabouts, and chicanes—obstacles or curves deliberately placed in the flow of automobile traffic—can make streets more complete. So can dedicated lanes for transit and enhanced stops. Improved signage and pavement markings make streets more complete. In commercial areas, widened sidewalks and shade trees make them more complete. Two-way streets are preferable to one-way streets.   

At its most extreme, a complete street might be a woonerf. Devised in the Netherlands, a woonerf does away with all features that privilege the automobile over other forms of transportation. Usually narrow and intricately landscaped, every centimeter of a woonerf can be occupied by any type of user. Traffic does not necessarily flow quickly, but it flows pleasantly and safely.  

But streets don’t have to go full woonerf to be more complete. There is no such thing as “a” complete street. No single street is “complete.” Complete streets encompasses more of an idea—and an attitude—than a typology.  

Even in the United States, that attitude is catching on.  

To read the full article, click here to visit InTransition magazine's website.