At the American Planning Association's Jan. 30 workshop—a follow up to their 2007 effort—lessons were shared from around the country on how to design streets for multiple modes of transportation.

Complete Streets policies ensure that the entire right of way is routinely designated and operated to enable safe access for all users, says Barbara McCann, who serves on the National Complete Streets Coalition.

Perceptions of Boulder, Colorado as a bastion of progressive ideas are long standing, but it took decades before the city got Complete Streets off the ground. In 1984, the city revisited a 1920s era plan for a bike trail along Boulder Creek. In 1989, the trail was built, and a plan was made to connect it to on-road bike corridors. In ’96 the plan was revised and finally in 2003 the city began implementation by retrofitting Broadway, a street in a more established, densely woven part of town, with bike lanes and pedestrian amenities like wider sidewalks and better lighting. Today, Boulder is working on a dozen bike/pedestrian projects as part of resurfacing or new construction and has large planning efforts such as the Boulder Transit Village. The goal in Boulder is ten bike corridors, even though current funding only allows for a few such corridors.

Not every street in Boulder has or will get bike lanes and bus stops because of the city’s Complete Streets policy. The policy is driven by the context of the street and area before deciding if amenities are appropriate, says Martha Roskowski, City of Boulder. Boulder proves that two decades of planning and incremental policy change along with grassroots support among a growing cycling community, especially around the University of Colorado campus, can influence a slow-to-change bureaucracy.

Implementing complete streets presents a huge challenge in states where departments of transportation are not aware nor trained in the implications of the policy. Design manuals and trainings can help, McCann says, but city planners and advocates face an uphill climb because transportation funding greatly favors a monoculture street design for cars.

Cities like Chicago, Louisville, and Charlotte, North Carolina are paving the way with street design standards and then working with their metropolitan planning organization (MPO) to adopt policy such as including sidewalks on all new street construction.

Our area’s MPO overseeing transportation funding, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), has an internal policy that supports complete streets in all new construction, according to the American Planning Association. NOACA determines if the projects accommodate bicyclists and if they don't, make recommendations for improvements.

During the Q&A, a participant in this national teleconference asked if complete streets are in conflict with making streets narrower or reducing stormwater? It’s a myth that complete streets are wider, says urban planner Christopher Conklin, in fact many of them adhere to “Road Diet” guidelines to keep them in scale. “(Andres) Duany says if you build areas that are dense and walkable, the water impact will be less.”

Exhibit A, the before and after photos above of Frontage Road in Boulder, CO (notice how the shoulders are converted to bike lanes but the right of way is the same. There are lessons here for Northeast Ohio, such as the design of the proposed Innerbelt frontage road.).

Resources

• Thunderhead Alliance’s Complete Streets report (pdf 450 KB)
• Steps to a Healthier Cleveland
• EcoCity Cleveland’s traffic calming pages
• Cleveland’s Slavic Village Active Living by Design program
• 2010 campaign for active transportation