Study: Bad Arterials Poison Good Residential Streets

Across the country, it's common to find leafy, pleasant residential streets marred by the traffic-ridden, crime-friendly, unwalkable arterials linking them together. New research from the University of Colorado Denver examines this proximity effect as it concerns dysfunctional major roads. 

Building on Donald Appleyard's 1970s research on traffic versus quality of life, the report finds that "high traffic on your street isn't the only type of traffic affecting what you think of where you live. Researchers Wesley Marshall and Carolyn McAndrews found that living near, but not on, a wide, high-traffic arterial can also reduce residential satisfaction."

Rather than overloading arterial roads and highways to create pockets of artificial suburban calm, a more even distribution of vehicle traffic could increase overall quality of life despite higher use of some smaller roads. 

Angie Schmitt writes, "In some cases, the study found, people who lived on relatively high-traffic residential streets, but near well-designed low-traffic arterials, had better quality of life than those who lived in the reverse scenario, on a low-traffic street but by a big, badly designed arterial road."