Streetsblog New York City

The Boston Globe serves up a smorgasbord of livable streets storylines in this gripping read, "The Future of Crossing the Street." An overview of Boston's evolving transportation scene, the piece starts with a look at the "shared space" philosophy of Hans Monderman, the pioneering Dutch traffic engineer who designed intersections with minimal controls, signals and boundaries.

Reporter Billy Baker captures the tension between making pedestrians conform to current street designs and adapting streets to put walking and other modes on more equal footing with driving. Here's how the situation looks to Boston transportation commish Thomas Tinlin:

The transportation department has a secure room inside City Hall known as the Traffic Management Center. It looks a bit like the war room in a Hollywood movie. Eight large screens and several smaller ones show real-time video of different intersections, and computer screens display the city's signal maps. A technician sits at a desk monitoring the ant farm, ready to make traffic-light adjustments. But fixing one intersection could create gridlock in the next. Everything they do, Tinlin says, is a trade-off . "Transportation commissioners of the past have always been about 'move the car, move the car.' The world is so different now. It's cars and bikes and wheelchairs."

The new reality, however, is still playing out inside an old reality. Greater Boston is artery-heavy; its main pedestrian streets are often choked with vehicles. Shared Space, Tinlin's engineers point out, is not designed for heavily trafficked streets. And tearing up and rebuilding the city is not realistic. Instead, there are many retrofits that are coming into vogue and appearing in a few nearby cities and towns to calm traffic and make the pedestrian safer.

A big one is to install things like bump-outs, bulb-outs, and curb extensions... They bring the sidewalk out past the parked cars, closer to the edge of the travel lane, put the pedestrian into the sightlines of drivers, and shorten the distance the pedestrian has to cross to the other side of the street. These extended sidewalks can also improve bus stops. Because the curb comes out to the travel lane, it eliminates the need for a 90-foot bus stop (which can actually add a parking space or two), makes the on/off safer and easier, and keeps the bus from having to fight its way back onto the street -- improving service and reliability and, advocates believe, encouraging more people to use mass transit, which they view as a huge component for making the entire system better. Of course, moving out bus stops means cars have less chance to pass a slower-moving bus, but advocates say you need to consider the fact that there could be more people on that bus than in the cars behind it, and the best way to balance the system is to consider how many people you move, not how many vehicles.

Another retrofit in wide use is the raised crosswalk, which brings the crosswalk level with the sidewalk and forces the car to have to come up onto the pedestrian's space, instead of the pedestrian having to step down onto the vehicle's territory (it also functions as a speed bump).

The full story is well worth the read, and another recent Globe article, on Boston's first bike lanes, makes for a good companion piece.

Photo: NYCviaRachel/Flickr