Check this out. Not a couplet, but a triplet.
It’s your basic five-lane commercial strip through a residential grid, only it outgrew itself and now there’s a three-lane one way on each side, for a total of five lanes in each direction. And there’s bike lanes. Sensibly, they’re on the one-ways – all these houses have alley-fed garages, which minimizes bike-vehicle conflicts.
This is about the lower-density bound of what I call “goldilocks urbanism.” A grid of flat, residential streets is bike- and bus-friendly, although the development isn’t really compact enough for walking, at least not without a connection to some form of wheeled transport. Streets aren’t particularly zoomy – these are posted at 35 – but they’re relatively uncongested, and there’s plenty of places to park. Basically, it’s comfortable.
You know what else? ELEVATED BIKEWAYS. There’s a decent network of rail-trails here, and wherever they hit a major arterial they just soar right over that thing. Why wait to push a stupid button? Why risk getting run over by an inattentive soccer moo? Down here, major bike routes get the same easy, nonstop ride that freeway drivers have been enjoying for half a century.
keephoustonhouston
It certainly looks like a comfortable place to commit suicide. Given that all three of this triplet are overbuilt – based on these traffic counts (http://www.pced.org/download/document/20100729_152556_24362.pdf) Central could easily work with 3 lanes and the 1sts could work with two each – at a posted speed of 35 the average speed is probably 45mph. That means for pedestrians or cyclists, death is guaranteed and probably pretty much instantaneous. These roads are just as dangerous for motorists due to the difficulty of judging the speed of cars going that fast, especially in the context of an urban arterial, but of course they have that protective exoskeleton. With roads like these, it’s not surprising that Tampa-St Pete leads the nation in pedestrian fatalities.
Nice map.
Obviously I’d want to see the peak hour factors, but if they’re in the normal range of .10-.15 then you’re indeed right, Central could be three lanes. That gives you continuous parallel parking on both sides, which is good for business, good for urbanism.
As far as ped fatality rates go, Alon covered this one…
In a huge sprawling urban area without a lot of freeways, you need arterials with 85th-percentile speeds in the “kills pedestrians instantly” range. The question then becomes, do you build ped-hostile “loops and lollipops” development, or do you build a walkable/bikeable grid? You’re gonna get more deaths with the latter setup, but it’ll be a nicer place to live.
The necessity of high-speed arterials is a value argument that I don’t think we’ll see eye-to-eye on. I don’t know how many ludicrously high number of miles the average trip in a sprawlsville like Tampa-St Pete is, but I’d like to point out that it only takes 4 minutes more to traverse the 5 mile length of Central Ave at 25 mph than it does at 35 mph. Is it worth trading increased pedestrian survival chances for 4 minutes of time savings? Obviously Florida DOT thinks so, but many would disagree.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding him or you, but Alon’s stance about ped fatality rates seem to be saying they disfavor cities with higher pedestrian traffic. Tampa-St Pete would be in the opposite camp, I think – their rate is even higher than the #2 slot in the country would suggest, according to that line of reasoning.
Yeah, that’s pretty much Alon’s stance.
My point was that underneath the big arterials, Tampa-St Pete is basically one continuous irregular street grid, and so is more pedestrian-friendly than a lot of other suburban locales where streets are largely discontinuous. You could theoretically zigzag your way from Pinellas Point to Clearwater using entirely locals and minor collectors, something you can’t do in most other places of a similarly low density.
Certainly, when I was down there I saw a lot more bike and ped activity than I do up here, even though sprawl is basically sprawl. I think being flat and warm helps, as does the fact that Floridian arterials with 120′ ROWs all have sidewalks, whereas NJ-PA-MD shit is usually packed into 70′ or 80′, no sidewalks, and there’s jughandles and other retro traffic engineering features that are actively ped-hostile.