Bigger, wider streets not always better

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Ride Guys recently wrote about the problem of increasing traffic, particularly in the suburbs:

The blame really should be on street design, says Les Sterman, a top transportation guru in St. Louis. He says mindsets need to change on what main thoroughfares should look like. His organization, the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, is looking to hire a consultant to start working on leaders in the metro south area.

Sterman believes wider, straighter and faster streets aren't always better. They only lead to a zillion strip malls and chain stores that zap cities of personality, he says. And they can lead to horrible traffic.

"We're still in this big box mentality (of) wider streets, more traffic, faster speeds," he said. "They're really not sustainable."

Most postwar cities around St. Louis developed around heavily traveled highways. Check out Gravois Road, Lindbergh Boulevard and Manchester Road. The streets do little to foster downtowns, so city centers went by the wayside. Take a spin through Olivette. You won't even see a downtown there. . . .

"Some of this has been going on around the country," he said. "But somehow it hasn't happened here."

During my recent trip to San Francisco for a Thunderhead Alliance advocacy training, we saw many main streets that had traffic calming measures. In many cases these included narrower lanes, which help traffic to slow, and in other cases some lanes were removed to allow for center turn lanes and bicycle lanes (a so-called road diet [PDF file]). In all cases the provision of bicycle lanes was seen as an important part of the traffic calming effort.

Interestingly, in almost all cases in San Francisco, the call for traffic calming came from neighborhoods, area businesses, and area residents, not from the bicycling community.