The Key to Slowing Traffic is Street Design, Not Speed Limits

The lesson we learn from these places is that walking down a narrow, shop-lined street in icy Boston or sweltering Savannah is a vastly superior experience to walking down an arterial between parking lots and car dealerships on San Diego’s best day. Get the design right and people will walk in almost any climate.

Under the banner of road safety and pedestrian education, cars had taken over the streets. Walking in the street had gone from being a right to being wrong.

By 1930, in the city street, motorists had all of the benefits of the free market (virtually unrestricted access to street capacity), but they had few of its costs (they did not pay a market price for the street capacity they used). Individuals took advantage of this as soon as they could, but the cost to the whole was paid in the resulting ineffic

But what of the road not taken? There was nothing inevitable about the way cars were adopted, first in America, and then by imitation in Europe and elsewhere. Are there other rules, and other ways of arranging urban spaces, that would have allowed cars to fit more smoothly into cities, rather than simply taking over the streets? Experiments in rece

Having long been shared by pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles, and used as public spaces where children played and pushcart vendors plied their trade, streets were now having to make room for increasing numbers of streetcars, cyclists, and, most of all, automobiles.

By 1940, most urban planners had come to understand that roads were not good per se, that a highway was not an unqualified boon for mankind. By the early 1950’s, much of the general public appeared to understand this, too, even if the press did not.