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Safety solution to mix up pedestrians, bikes and cars into "shared spaces."

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Danish Architect Jan Gehl on Cities for People: The Safe City


June 13, 2011

By Jan Gehl

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Read More: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/06/13/danish-architect-jan-gehl-on-cities-for-people-the-safe-city/


Feeling safe is crucial if we hope to have people embrace city space. In general, life and people themselves make the city more inviting and safe in terms of both experienced and perceived security. In this section we deal with the safe city issue with the goal of ensuring good cities by inviting walking, biking and staying. Our discussion will focus on two important sectors where targeted efforts can satisfy the requirement for safety in city space: traffic safety and crime prevention. Throughout the entire period of car encroachment, cities have tried to remove bicycle traffic from their streets. The risk of accident to pedestrians and bicyclists has been great throughout the rise in car traffic, and the fear of accident even greater.

- Many European countries and North America experienced the car invasion early on and have watched city quality deteriorate year by year. There have been numerous counter reactions and an incipient development of new traffic planning principles in response. In other countries whose economies have developed more slowly and modestly, cars have only begun to invade cities more recently. In every case the result is a dramatic worsening of conditions for pedestrians and bicycle traffic. In cities where the car invasion began early and has lasted decades, we can now see a strong reaction against the myopic focus on cars that has dealt such harsh blows to city life and bicycle traffic.

- In choosing street types and traffic solutions, it is important to start with the human dimension. People must be able to move comfortably and safely in cities on foot or by bicycle, and when traffic solutions are adopted special consideration must be given to children, the young, the elderly and people with disabilities. Quality for people and pedestrian safety must be key concerns. A number of recent urban planning ideologies deriving from accident statistics contend that the risk of accident can be reduced by physically mixing types of traffic in the same street under the heading of “shared space.†The underlying idea of these so-called shared streets is that they will give trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians of all ages the opportunity to travel quietly, side by side and with good eye contact. Serious accidents will rarely occur under such conditions, or so it is thought, because pedestrians and bicyclists need to be extra vigilant at all times.

- Mixing types of traffic is certainly possible, but not on the equal terms implied by the shared street concept. As the British “home zones,†Dutch “woonerfs,†and Scandinavian “sivegader†have demonstrated for years, pedestrians can thrive with other forms of traffic as long as it is crystal clear that all movement is based on the premises of pedestrians. Mixed–traffic solutions must prioritize either pedestrians or provide appropriate traffic segregation. There is every reason to applaud the many new types of streets and policies that ensure safety for pedestrians and bicyclists while allowing service vehicles to make door-to-door deliveries.

- From project to project, planners must consider which types of streets and degree of traffic integration would be a good solution. The actual and perceived safety of pedestrians must always be the determining factor. It is not a natural law that motorized traffic should be allowed access everywhere. It is generally accepted that cars are not welcome in parks, libraries, community centers and houses. The advantages to not having car traffic everywhere are obvious, so even though there are compelling arguments for allowing car traffic all the way to the front door, in many situations there are equally good arguments for establishing car-free areas surrounding the residences.

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Sibelius Park, a housing complex in Copenhagen, has cooperated with the Danish Crime Prevention Council to carefully define private, semiprivate, semipublic and public territories in the complex. Subsequent studies have shown that there is less crime and greater security than in other similar developments. Photos: Jan Gehl

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The concept of shared or complete streets suggests equality between traffic groups, which is a utopian ide- al. Integrating various types of traffic is not satisfactory until pedestrians are given a clear priority (shared space in Haren, the Netherlands, and a pedestrian priority street in Copenhagen, Denmark).

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Copenhagen-style bicycle lanes take advantage of parked cars to protect bicyclists.

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The principle of having bicyclists bike outside a lane of parked cars does not solve many safety and security problems. It does help to protect the parked cars, however!

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In Venice the shift from rapid to slow traffic occurs at the city limits rather than at the front door. This is an interesting and inspiring for the contemporary vision of creating lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities.

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Pedestrian and bicycle traffic save a lot of space in the city. Bicycle paths have room for five times more traffic than car lanes. The sidewalk has room for 20 times more travellers than car lanes.

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http://www.peopleandparticipation.net/display/CaseStudies/Morice+Town+Home+Zone,+Plymouth

I had the opertunity while working in the UK to comment/contribute to the Morice Town Home Zone. The most amazing thing of the process was the building of a community spirit that didn't exist before the urban renewal project started, or at least had been tamped down. It didn't affect the arterial roads, so the locals got all the say in how they wanted their neighbourhood to look and function.
 
Conveniently close to the Adam Giambrone TTC Headquarter Museum, with an entire floor devoted to TTC Font and Signage Experiments!

TTC - the transit system that branding forgot!
 
Shared spaces are easy. The key is to understand the difference in speed between different modes. If pedestrians and cyclists are moving at roughly the same speed they don't need any separation. If they are moving at slightly different speeds they need a little separation. If they are moving at greatly different speeds they need a lot of separation. The same thing applies to pedestrians and cars, and cyclist and cars. For a shared space to work all you need to do is get everyone moving at roughly the same speed as pedestrians.

North America has a lot of shared spaces - we just don't call them that. Every mall and plaza parking lot you've ever been in is effectively a shared space.
 
I'm actually not a big fan of bicycles behind parked cars because passengers can still door you. They may be even more likely to do so since they aren't used to checking mirrors and there's nowhere to swerve to avoid them. I've been doored twice and it's been on the passenger side both times.

I also think, in Toronto at least, it benefits cyclists and drivers to interact more (isn't that what this article is about?) so they are used to navigating around each other.
 
I'm actually not a big fan of bicycles behind parked cars because passengers can still door you. They may be even more likely to do so since they aren't used to checking mirrors and there's nowhere to swerve to avoid them. I've been doored twice and it's been on the passenger side both times.

I also think, in Toronto at least, it benefits cyclists and drivers to interact more (isn't that what this article is about?) so they are used to navigating around each other.

Yeah, if you're going to use parked cars as a buffer between bikes and the rest of traffic, there should be something like a curb to keep car occupants and cyclists out of each other's way:

http://goo.gl/maps/aoyOa
 
The notion of shared spaces with cars and pedestrians seems foreign and concerning to many people, but it seems to work fine in a parking lot. People walk through the aisles from their car to the building entrance. Cars are expected to go slow.

If drivers don't like going slow in the shared space, they should take an alternate route that's a standard road. But it's practical when you pedestrianize a street but have to maintain access for local residents and service vehicles.
 
What about restricting the time of day cars are allowed within a given area, so that deliveries and garbage service, or things that require a car can still happen.

For example, an area like Dundas Square or Kensington Market could be pedestrian & bike only during the days and open to cars say at midnight-7am or something like that.
 
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What about restricting the time of day cars are allowed within a given area, so that deliveries and garbage service, or things that require a car can still happen.

For example, an area like Dundas Square or Kensington Market could be pedestrian & bike only during the days and open to cars say at midnight-7am or something like that.

Just make it so cars and delivery vehicles can't pass through the area - they have to circle around and exit the way they came in. With that you will only get people who are starting or ending their trip there, not people trying to get through the area quickly. Most parking lots are designed to minimize cut-through traffic.
 
I'm actually not a big fan of bicycles behind parked cars because passengers can still door you. They may be even more likely to do so since they aren't used to checking mirrors and there's nowhere to swerve to avoid them. I've been doored twice and it's been on the passenger side both times.

If you can get doored in a protected bike lane, then the designer has done something very wrong. Here's a photo I took this August in Utrecht, showing the smallest parking-bike buffer I saw while in the Netherlands:
800px-Fietspad_Utrecht_Centraal.JPG


I also think, in Toronto at least, it benefits cyclists and drivers to interact more (isn't that what this article is about?) so they are used to navigating around each other.

What exactly are people learning from car-bike interactions, other than that cycling is scary? If you design infrastructure so that it is intuitive, it becomes irrelevant how much "experience" its users have.

I do see the merit of having some areas where cars are permitted to access cycling spaces in small numbers and at low speeds. It might help erode the idea that 'roads are for cars'. But sharing space in situations with speed differentials and/or high volumes of traffic (i.e. pretty much all major roadways) is highly counterproductive. It just makes everyone frustrated.
 
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If you can get doored in a protected bike lane, then the designer has done something very wrong. Here's a photo I took this August in Utrecht, showing the smallest parking-bike buffer I saw while in the Netherlands:

Yeah for sure, that seems like it takes up a large area though. It's certainly not a solution that would work on the downtown East/West arterials.


What exactly are people learning from car-bike interactions, other than that cycling is scary? If you design infrastructure so that it is intuitive, it becomes irrelevant how much "experience" its users have.

If you force cars and bicycles to interact they learn to accommodate each other. Try cycling in a suburb and see how the drivers treat you, simply because they aren't used to seeing a bicycle on the road. I myself noticed a significant contrast between the drivers in Ottawa and how they treated me, and the drivers here in Toronto who see far more cyclists on the streets. Like I said, isn't this exactly what the flipping article in the op is talking about?
 
If you can get doored in a protected bike lane, then the designer has done something very wrong. Here's a photo I took this August in Utrecht, showing the smallest parking-bike buffer I saw while in the Netherlands:
800px-Fietspad_Utrecht_Centraal.JPG

That looks like it might work on a fairly wide street like University.

By the way, that's taken near the station, right? I think I've found the building on the left in Google Street View but I can't figure out the angle that it was taken from:

http://goo.gl/maps/JvZM5
 
That looks like it might work on a fairly wide street like University.

Even in the Netherlands, this type of bikeway is quite uncommon in the centre of cities. They mostly appear within modernist areas where the traditional street pattern was obliterated, and as access roads to large parking facilities. In this case, it is both.

Inner cities tend to have mostly fietsstraaten (basically bicycle paths that some people can drive on to access some properties), single-direction bicycle paths, and occasionally bicycle lanes.

By the way, that's taken near the station, right? I think I've found the building on the left in Google Street View but I can't figure out the angle that it was taken from:

http://goo.gl/maps/JvZM5

Wow, that's some pretty impressive recognition!

Yes, I was just walking away from the Jaarbeursplein bicycle parking garage, toward the northeast.

It's really hard to tell where it is in Maps or Streetview, because the entire area is being re-built. Jaarbeursplein (the square) is much more grand now, and I don't remember that ugly slab building blocking the view of the station either. I think that this is Jaarbeursplein (the street), and the parking garage has been torn down and replaced with a light rail station. The picture is facing northeast.

Yeah for sure, that seems like it takes up a large area though. It's certainly not a solution that would work on the downtown East/West arterials.

No, this particular form of separation would not work in many places. In fact, there is no solution that will work in all places. But believe it or not, there are narrow streets in Europe too, and that does not stop cities from separating bicycle- and motor traffic. In that case, often the approach is to designate "bicycle streets" where people are permitted to drive to access properties, but are prevented from driving along the street for more than a couple blocks at a time using filtered permeability barriers. The streetscape is of course changed too, designed to encourage slow driving through passive and/or active traffic calming.

If you force cars and bicycles to interact they learn to accommodate each other. Try cycling in a suburb and see how the drivers treat you, simply because they aren't used to seeing a bicycle on the road. I myself noticed a significant contrast between the drivers in Ottawa and how they treated me, and the drivers here in Toronto who see far more cyclists on the streets. Like I said, isn't this exactly what the flipping article in the op is talking about?

I grew up cycling in Vaughan, which has the lowest bicycle-commute rate in Ontario, and now I live in the old city of Toronto, which has by far the highest. I notice little difference in terms of my comfort interacting with drivers. The drivers in Vaughan were definitely less comfortable with the concept of a bicycle on a road, but the drivers downtown seem to put their experience driving around bicycles toward passing disconcertingly closely.

I have also lived in Waterloo, where my experience is that drivers are considerably better than either Toronto or Vaughan, having the "experience" of Toronto drivers, with far less aggression than anywhere else I've cycled. But as I was riding home after chatting with Professor Jeff Casello about your exact argument, I stumbled upon the key issue in that idea. I was turning right, taking up the full right-turn lane, as recommended by CAN-Bike. There was a car, also turning right, following a safe and courteous distance behind. But even though this driver was demonstrating impeccable driving skills and manners, my stress levels were still considerably raised.

The fact is that no matter how good drivers are, cars and bikes cannot comfortably mix on arterial roads. The differences in speed and mass fundamentally make cycling inaccessible to huge portions of the population, especially children and the elderly.

As the article points out, bicycles and cars cannot share roads equally. In order for for bicycles and cars to comfortably share space, bicycles need to be very heavily favoured to offset the fact that drivers are wielding a highly deadly weapon while being heavily protected. There needs to be far more bicycles than cars, and the cars need to be limited to the speed of bicycles. This is not practical to achieve everywhere because it would make driving incredibly slow and inconvenient, hence the propensity for bicycle paths on streets that are car routes in the Netherlands.

Overall, my point is that it is not worth considering "giving people experience interacting with each other" when designing a transportation system. It will happen inevitably as the number of bicycle trips increases. What's far more important is designing interactions that are safe, comfortable and intuitive for all road users.
 
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