Urban Street Design Guide
192 pages
8.25 x 10.75
44 photos and illustrations
Book Description
The NACTO Urban Street Design Guide shows how streets of every size can be reimagined and reoriented to prioritize safe driving and transit, biking, walking, and public activity. Unlike older, more conservative engineering manuals, this design guide emphasizes the core principle that urban streets are public places and have a larger role to play in communities than solely being conduits for traffic.
The well-illustrated guide offers blueprints of street design from multiple perspectives, from the bird’s eye view to granular details. Case studies from around the country clearly show how to implement best practices, as well as provide guidance for customizing design applications to a city’s unique needs. Urban Street Design Guide outlines five goals and tenets of world-class street design:
• Streets are public spaces. Streets play a much larger role in the public life of cities and communities than just thoroughfares for traffic.
• Great streets are great for business. Well-designed streets generate higher revenues for businesses and higher values for homeowners.
• Design for safety. Traffic engineers can and should design streets where people walking, parking, shopping, bicycling, working, and driving can cross paths safely.
• Streets can be changed. Transportation engineers can work flexibly within the building envelope of a street. Many city streets were created in a different era and need to be reconfigured to meet new needs.
• Act now! Implement projects quickly using temporary materials to help inform public decision making.
Elaborating on these fundamental principles, the guide offers substantive direction for cities seeking to improve street design to create more inclusive, multi-modal urban environments. It is an exceptional resource for redesigning streets to serve the needs of 21st century cities, whose residents and visitors demand a variety of transportation options, safer streets, and vibrant community life.
Review Quotes
"a highly-functional, well illustrated manual to transforming ugly, underperforming streets into popular boulevards....NACTO has managed to hit a sweet spot, presenting street design in a form that an engaged layperson could understand but with enough meat that a transportation engineer wouldn't feel insulted. This is a book that you might very well use as a reference on a regular basis."
Planetizen's Top 10 Books of 2014
"The National Association of City Transportation Officials has produced Urban Street Design Guide, a book as visual, legible and appealing as the improved streets the group hopes to foster."
Planning
"NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide has already empowered cities around the country to embrace protected bike lanes and other innovative designs that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has shied away from in its engineering bible, known as the 'green book.'"
Streetsblog DC
"...takes a deep dive into street design elements, intersection design and designing for safety."
Untapped Cities
"As for the guide itself, it's a comprehensive resource that covers everything from facilities on arterials to neighborhood streets and design elements ranging from crosswalks, parklets, street closures and public plazas."
Bike Portland
"It has been forty years since Americans first walked on the moon. Now indeed, focus has come to walking on US streets. This book is a much needed, very readable, and well-illustrated design guideline for all types of people-friendly streets. Well done."
Jan Gehl, Professor and Urbanist, Copenhagen; author of "Cities for People"
"Cities are our future, economically and environmentally, and the design of our streets is essential to urban vitality. This design guide gives planners and engineers around the United States solid urban standards they can rely on, and we as policy makers can count on for sustainable, safe, inviting and therefore business- and people-friendly streets for current users and future generations."
Gabe Klein, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation
"The Urban Street Design Guide is an easy-to-use playbook for building safe and sustainable streets. The guide captures state-of-the-art practices to meet the huge demand for urban streets that reflect and promote the inherent social, economic, and sustainability advantages of cities."
Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation and NACTO President
"...remarkably thoughtful, thorough, and useful contribution to the holistic reimagining and remaking of urban space."
Choice
"...the NACTO guidelines give us a language to discuss transportation policy choices in human terms, on the level of values."
PlanPhilly
Blogs
Trumping the Transportation Progress Our Cities Need
Trumping the Transportation Progress Our Cities Need
A Changing Climate Means A Changing Society. The Island Press Urban Resilience Project, Supported By The Kresge Foundation And The JPB Foundation, Is Committed To A Greener, Fairer Future. This Post Was Originally Published April 4, 2017 in Governing
President Trump's proposed budget would be a disaster for the transportation networks that are key to the growth engines of today's economy: cities and their suburbs. Contrary to his often-bleak portrayal of them, cities are a remarkable American success story, contributing 90 percent of the country's economic output and 85 percent of U.S. jobs.
The preliminary federal spending plan would pull the rug out, jettisoning the funding that helps cities build new transit lines, eliminating the program that lets local communities directly access federal transportation funds, and axing a widely popular 42-year-old program that funds infrastructure of all kinds in every congressional district.
This severe approach flies in the face of national trends. Cities across the country are investing in transit, spurring job growth and economic development. More than 12 million people rode the new Green Line connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul last year, and the project has generated $5 billion in investment since it opened. Los Angeles' Expo Line has seen record ridership since opening an extension to Santa Monica, with more than 50,000 people hopping the train every day. And Houston's overhaul of its bus network, with a subsequent boost in the number of people riding at all hours, is inspiring the same in other cities, including Columbus, Ohio, and Austin, Texas.
Stopping this progress in its tracks is not just unpopular; it's irresponsible. Yet the White House has proposed to stop funding transit projects through the New Starts and Small Starts program, which matches over $2 billion in local funding for rail, streetcar and bus rapid transit projects every year. Without it, Seattle would be choking on traffic; instead, the city has been able to add 45,000 new downtown jobs, thanks in large part to investments in high-capacity transit.
Trump's budget also envisions eliminating TIGER, a program that is already chronically underfunded, with just 5 percent of eligible projects supported last year. It would also cut off all Community Development Block Grants, without which Portland, Ore., wouldn't have built the first legs of its highly successful streetcar system.
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