Automobility vs. Bikability vs. Walkability

Some of you will recall Robert Orr's informative presentation to the Planning and Zoning Commission earlier this month. Orr is an architect and town planner in New Haven, CT, and an early practitioner of what is called the 'new urbanism'.

Today's Hartford Courant features a commentary piece by Orr on the challenges faced by pedestrians in New Haven -- and all over the US -- due to decades of misguided street design. It's well worth reading. A passage that caught my eye:

"Engineering policy over the past 50 years has nudged streets toward increasing mobility. Mobility is the term used by engineers to describe measures to make drivers feel safe at higher speeds, called design speed. The tools for increased design speed are wide and multiple driving lanes; one-way streets; absence of parking and visual obstructions, especially near intersections; streamlined corners with large radii; and highly legible signage. All these measures make drivers feel safer at higher speeds."

Of course, and as Orr makes abundantly clear, enhanced roadway design speed translates into greater danger for pedestrians. "All these automotive assets spell liabilities for pedestrians, especially now that studies demonstrate 37 mph to be the threshold for guaranteed pedestrian fatality. By contrast, speeds below 20 mph rarely result in serious injury. Other studies now link accidents directly to street width; as streets widen, fatalities increase exponentially."

Another interesting feature of Orr's piece is a related point about cyclists, who feel a need to use sidewalks as bike paths because the streets -- even as they are progressively widened -- have become too dangerous for them. This results in the occasional pedestrian-cyclist collision.

The essay made me wonder about the degree to which Middletown's walkability has been compromised over the years, sacrificed on the altar of "design speed". Little things like the incremental widening of roads (especially East Main, Washington Street, Newfield Street, not to mention all the streets that were routinely widened during the sewer separation work in the late 1990s, such as our old haunt, Brainerd Avenue) to the absence of sidewalks to the "one-waying" of residential streets (Liberty, Court, College, Loveland, etc.), make what were and are centrally located neighborhoods seem like pockets of isolation. Add to this the cumulative effect of tree pruning and cutting for power lines, the destruction of the tree lawns by the salting of roads in the winter, and the plague of cars parked across the sidewalk, and you get a barren landscape that is not at all conducive to walking.

And I haven't even mentioned Route 9 and the loss of easy access to the riverfront, Middletown's raison d'être.

For an indication of how one street used to look, see this image of Washington Street (looking west from the intersection with Broad) in the collection of old photographs at Connecticut History Online.