Community Design and Transportation Smart growth helps offer more choices for people to get to their everyday activities. The choice of walking, bicycling, mass transit, or driving is determined by several factors. The type of trip, the distance, the existence of alternative destinations, scheduling flexibility, cargo needs, and the physical system of sidewalks, roads, highways and transit that is available all play a part in how people make the decision. Smart Growth transportation planning is not just about building a transportation system that enables a range of transportation alternatives, instead of just driving. It is also about designing our communities so that choosing to walk, bike, or take transit for our everyday activities can almost always be a convenient choice. Making it easy to walk, bike, or use mass transit is important because driving imposes costs, both personal (insurance, maintenance, parking, stress, time wasted sitting in traffic) and societal (air pollution, accidents, congestion, energy security, physical inactivity) that can be reduced by driving less. In addition, it is in the interest of equity to improve the transportation options of those who cannot drive: children, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor. How a community is designed directly affects how people get around. The following design and planning concepts encourage smart growth and transportation choices. For more information about these and other community design techniques, visit the Community Design section of the Smart Growth Gateway. Mixed-Use Mixing uses, whether within the same building, development, or district, can often reduce the need to drive by enabling walking between different activities and allowing people to combine many different trips into a single trip to one area. A building that offers street-level retail with offices or apartments above is an example of a mixed-use building. This type of building can be found in both metropolitan high-rises and small main street two-story buildings. The traditional downtown, with its mix of shops, offices, apartments, and homes is the archetype of the mixed-use district. A diversity of housing types serves the needs of people in all stages of life. The complementary shopping times of residents, businesses and employees support retail services throughout the day. In addition, the complementary travel times of residents and employees enable them to share some of the same parking. Mixed-use on the district scale requires that diverse uses be within walking distance, with a functional walking environment. This mixed-use retail and housing development in Princeton hides a parking garage. Photo courtesy of the Greater Mercer TMA. Transportation benefits of mixed-use developments Reduces travel distance between different activities, enabling transit, walking, and cycling. Saves money. A family can own fewer cars - and save a considerable amount of money - if one parent can take transit to work or one teenager can walk to work. Reduces traffic. When different uses are located in single use zones, most people come and go from those zones at the same time, worsening traffic congestion. Think about an office complex that's only congested at 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. When destinations are mixed, these peaks are also spread out. While there is a need for single-use centers, these could be supplanted with mixed-use areas to mitigate traffic. Reduces parking crunches. When uses are organized into single-use zones, each development needs enough parking to accommodate all its potential visitors. But since these visitors follow predictable patterns, much of this capacity goes wasted. (For example, no one uses the mall parking lot at 3:00 a.m.) A mixed-use zone need less parking overall because the various uses have different parking demand at different times of day. Diners can use the spaces vacated by employees, and weekend shoppers can use spaces used by office workers during the week. Read more about shared parking in the Parking Solutions section. Compact Development Compact development works in concert with mixed-use development to encourage alternatives to driving, because it's not just the mix of uses that influences transportation choices, but also the distance between destinations. A short distance obviously makes walking and cycling more competitive with other modes. One-quarter mile is an oft-quoted rule of thumb for a comfortable walking distance. This is about a five-minute walk. When you consider the time it takes to walk to a vehicle, drive, park, and walk to your destination, you can see that walking is an easy choice for short distances. Cycling extends your reach. Compact, destination-rich districts are easiest to serve with transit. Because they attract so many visitors, it is easy to justify high-quality, frequent transit service to these areas, which, in turn, attracts more transit riders. Riders can take transit to the area and then take care of several activities on foot. For larger districts, transit can serve as an effective circulator for the relatively short trips between different parts of the area. Critics of smart growth argue against clustered development because denser areas have slower moving traffic than sprawling areas. However, traffic speed is only one measure of congestion. An alternative measure is per-capita delay, or how long the average driver is sitting in traffic. By this measure, compact districts can do better than highway strip development because the same activities require fewer miles of driving and fewer car trips. For example, to drive from your office to the mall you could spend ten minutes of a thirty-minute trip sitting in traffic, while in a city downtown you would spend five minutes of a ten-minute trip. You're taking care of the same errand, but in the city you spend less time sitting in traffic because even though the traffic is worse, the trip is shorter. Litman (2003) points out that while clustered development reduces peak-period vehicle speeds, it allows more activities to be accomplished with less travel. Street Design Streets are important public spaces, and their design communicates to the public how they should be used. Very often, streets are designed to maximize speed, volume, and safety only for cars - at the expense of pedestrians and bicyclists. Making streets safe and attractive for pedestrians is much more than just sidewalks. It's street widths, crossings, traffic speeds, landscaping, the frequency and location of driveways, the orientation of buildings to the street, and the location of parking. Bicyclists need space on the roadway and predictable traffic patterns. Given the design of our roads, it is understandable why so many people make the rational and safety-conscious choice to drive instead of walk or bike. And yet, this lack of walkers and cyclists is often cited as a reason these facilities aren't needed! Luckily, things are changing. State, municipal, and consulting engineers now have available to them design standards for safely accommodating both motorized and non-motorized users. But these standards are not compulsory; it is up to the community to advocate for a balanced street design that provides a balance of access and safety for all users. Traffic calming is the use of roadway design techniques to slow down automobile traffic and make the road safer for cars, pedestrians and bicyclists. Learn more about it in the Traffic Calming section of this website. This new professional building in Highland Park has many attributes that help it fit into the downtown: architectural style, height, rear parking. What's missing? The "front" door is really an emergency exit; the actual main entrance is around back with the parking. Photo courtesy of the Greater Mercer TMA. Street Connectivity Street connectivity is also an important part of smart growth. In the typical suburb, reliance on a hierarchical system of neighborhood, collector, arterial, and highway roads forces all traffic onto the same major streets. When all developments empty onto the same road, additional development invariably brings congestion to that main road because old and new residents and employees have no other possible routes. As an alternative, streets that connect in a network of minor and major streets allow drivers to take different routes to avoid congestion, and enable pedestrians and cyclists to use minor roads to actually get someplace. The traditional "grid" of an older city or town is an example of a highly connected street network, but connectivity can be achieved through a variety of street layouts. www.pedbikeimages.org/Dan Burden Transportation benefits of smart growth community design Enables walking between home, work, shopping Reduces parking needs by enabling shared parking and reducing the number of cars per household. Shorter distances between destinations make walking, cycling and transit feasible. Safe and attractive cycling and walking and effective transit serves non-drivers: the young, elderly, disabled, and poor. An interconnected street network provides the maximum of route choices, for all modes. Compact development can be oriented to transit. Less and slower moving traffic on local roads. Reduced vehicle miles traveled, resulting in less local and regional air pollution.