From highways to boulevards, from roads to streets

Urban traffic and transportation plans have the potentials to become more comprehensive planning tool for the urban environment. Starting from analyzing the UK context that created a framework of well-established tradition in urban street design, and the US recent tradition of tearing down highways and form based codes, this paper aims to underline the potentials of urban transportation plans when approached as innovative planning tools, able to create and build a more complex, integrated, thriving urban environment. These plans can actually support other planning tools, create a different urban landscape designing new grids and new systems, reducing space for vehicular traffic and connecting new green and pedestrian infrastructures to the existing public realm. They can also link land uses and transportation policies, selects a variety of transportation means to access the city that can actually help specific urban contexts to develop a mix of uses. Innovative transportation plans have the potential to create new urban geographies, different from traditional hierarchy of spaces and roads. Cities all over the world are facing traffic congestion problems and are investing in their transportation systems. This is due fundamentally to increasing rate of urbanization across the globe. Millions of people cluster in mega metro region, challenging the existing infrastructures and policies related to transportation. This document will focus on the impacts that transportation and traffic plans can have on the public realm. Different approaches to transportations issues If the vehicular traffic volume increases and the existing infrastructure network cannot keep up with it, the easiest solution is to build a new highway or to expand the existing one. Obviously, this kind of approach does not take into account environmental sustainability and apply a short-term strategy that can provide an immediate but temporary release to the problem. Nevertheless, many cities are still pursuing this strategy to solve their traffic and transportation issues. In other cases, the new infrastructures are built not to accommodate vehicular traffic but instead, to expand public transportation systems. Cities are increasingly investing in special buses routes, light rail and subways, but also car sharing and vanpooling. In both cases, the city’s officials have to roll out general master plans to coordinate their investments. If building infrastructures is a common strategy to solve mobility issues, in some cases it is true the opposite. Seoul, Portland and recently San Francisco, just to cite some of the most famous examples, have decided to tear down their highways; at least the ones that affected in negative ways the proximate surroundings. The torn down highway was outplaced by a park in Seoul and Portland and by a smaller urban boulevard in San Francisco. Still, we argue that despite the objective benefits of these kind of interventions, the rationale behind them is not so far from what brought the highways. The approach is always the same one: build an infrastructure, perhaps greener and more attractive, but still an infrastructure that is often disconnected and isolated from the existing, exactly like the one that was there before. These kind of interventions are the result of a way of planning that proceeds with extraordinary, isolated, episodes more than reconsidering the whole system of networks and open spaces that constitute the public realm. Traffic and transportation issues are just the tip of the iceberg of the urban environment that every citizen experience in their daily navigation of the city. Here we argue that traffic and transportation plans should not take into account the traffic fluidity and public transportation capacity only, but have the breath to redesign and improve the public realm as a whole. The UK and US context The country who invested the most, in terms of planning quality public spaces, is no doubt the United Kingdom. Its urban planning re-known past makes this country one of the most advanced in terms of street design. In England, every new development and project has to follow some basic principles in order to achieve quality public spaces and well-designed streets. There are manuals1 that will indicate the best practices and the right methodologies to curate every single detail of the streetscape, from the lamppost to the pavement size and materials, the storefronts design and the colors nuances options. Crossings, as well as the traffic signs have to respond to a certain standard of quality. Transportation and traffic plans have to compel to these rules and integrate them within their design. In America, cities are built around cars and the streetscape is too. Most of American cities presents highways juxtapose to smaller neighborhood-scale boulevards and streets to connect the different suburbs to the main thoroughfares. There is little attention to the street’s design because there is actually few people using those streets. Streets are considered just necessary strip of asphalt, useful to travel from one place to another.