Complete Streets Promote Walking and Biking

(Adapted from completestreets.org)

Streets are an important part of the livability of our communities. Streets and roads ought to be for everyone, whether young or old, motorist or bicyclist, walker or wheelchair user, bus rider or shopkeeper.

But too many of our streets are only designed for speeding cars or creeping traffic jams. These streets are unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists and unpleasant for everyone.
- Dan Burden (Video on Complete Streets Click on Chapter 9)

Complete Streets

The entire roadway is designed and operates with all users in mind – motor vehicles, bicyclists, public transportation vehicles and riders, and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.

  • Green space – landscaping and street trees provide shade, cool environment, provide visual interest, vertical enclosure
  • Pedestrians – sidewalks, refuge medians, raised crosswalks, audible pedestrian signals, sidewalk bump outs to shorten road crossing, slow traffic, prevent parking near crosswalk blocking pedestrian view of oncoming traffic
  • Cyclists – bike lanes, wide shoulders, or sharrows when road width is limited
  • Bus riders – special bus lanes, accessible bus stops, shelters and improved crossings
  • Motor vehicles – narrow travel lanes to naturally slow/calm traffic, tree cover provides sense of distance passing to minimize accidental speeding.

Benefits of Complete Streets:

  • Improve safety for all users by calming traffic and improve visibility of users at crossings
  • Encourage more walking and biking which decreases risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes, as well as reduces traffic, pollution and frustration. Health promotion through Active Living
  • Increase road user capacity. When pedestrians and cyclists feel safe and welcome the human capacity of the roadway increases.
  • Create economic vitality. Complete streets create places people want to go to. People want to spend time in these area, not race though to go elsewhere
  • Help children and elderly become or remain independent by providing a safer environment for walking and biking to school and around the community
  • Improve cost-effectiveness over traditional roadway projects that only consider motor vehicle traffic that require expensive retrofits later
  • Reduce pollution and carbon emissions when short trips around town are feasible on foot or bike compared to always using a motor vehicle:
    • 50% of all trips in metropolitan areas are three miles or less - easy distance on a bike
    • 28% of all metropolitan trips are one mile or less – easy distance to walk, bike, or hop a bus or train
    • Yet 65% of the shortest trips are now made by automobile, in part because of incomplete streets that make it dangerous or unpleasant for other modes of travel
    • Simply increasing bicycling from 1% to 1.5% of all trips in the U.S. would save 462 million gallons of gasoline each year

Speed Kills

Most drivers don’t realize just going 10 mph over the speed limit can mean the difference between LIFE and DEATH for pedestrians and cyclists. This is especially true for children and older pedestrians.

  • If a person is hit at: 20 mph Chance of dying is 5%
  • 30 mph Chance of dying is 45%
  • 40 mph Chance of dying is 85%

Once you see a pedestrian or cyclist in front of you and you slam on your brakes to stop, this is the distance it takes to stop:

Speed (mph) Thinking Distance (feet) Braking Distance (feet) Total Stopping Distance (feet)
10 15 11 26
15 22 24 46
20 29 43 72
25 37 68 105
30 44 97 141
35 52 132 14
40 59 173 232

School zones have a 20 mph speed limit for this reason. Oftentimes parents and staff at the school are the most frequent speeders in the school zone.

Unfortunately, Pueblo West trail crossings are distant from the school and are 30 mph zones with people regularly driving 40-45 mph. Please slow down and yield to pedestrians and cyclists!

Reasons for Traffic Calming

  • When a pedestrian or bicyclists is hit by a car, the risk of dying goes up exponentially.
  • Law enforcement cannot always monitor and ticket speeding motorists. Ticketing only has a short term effect on slowing traffic anyway.

The only way to slow traffic and protect PEOPLE along the roads on foot, in a wheelchair or on a bicycle, is to design the entire roadway to match the intended speed limit. Design strategies used to slow traffic or calm traffic include:

  • Narrow the travel lanes to 10-feet wide instead of 12-19-feet found in some communities
  • Remove excess travel lanes and replace them with:
    • Bicycle lanes
    • Tree landscaped medians and sidewalks separated by green spaces and trees along the outer edge of the roadway
  • Pinch down the movement through intersections with:
    • Bump out pedestrian crossings which narrow through traffic and allows pedestrians a safe and visible place to stand and look for traffic before crossing
    • Provide pedestrian island refuges between opposite direction traffic. Pedestrians only have to cross one direction of traffic at a time.
  • Replacing busy 4-way intersections with round-abouts.
  • Allow on-street parking – nothing slows traffic like a new parallel parker!

Complete Streets Resources