Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy

Joseph Kott's Personal Page

Streets of Clay: Re-Shaping Urban Arterial Streets for Sustainability A convergence of environmental, social, and technological factors is creating new possibilities for urban arterial streets. Advances in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are improving efficiency and safety for both private motor vehicle and public transport travel without necessarily adding physical capacity. Public policy in many developed nations favors an expanded role for non-motorized modes and public transport in metropolitan areas. Neighborhood and school commute safety advocates are calling for calmer arterial streets through residential districts. Efforts to re-engineer arterial streets to these ends have shown promising results, including slower vehicle speeds, reduced crash rates, better cycling and walking conditions, an activated street life, and improved streetscape amenity. These developments suggest that urban arterial streets can be re-shaped to meet a variety of demands and functions, yet retain their roles as conveyors of traffic between urban districts and connectors to intercity roads, including limited access highways. Nevertheless, the emerging new possibilities for the urban arterial street also raise a host of theoretical and practical problems. These include how to assess the suitability of an arterial street for re-engineering, what combination of physical re-design and electronics to consider under which circumstances, and how to evaluate projected and actual performance of the re-engineering measures chosen. The proposed dissertation will explore the topic of re-engineering arterial streets through both physical re-design and electronic traffic management. This work will entail a search for solutions to the difficult problems of assessment and evaluation involved in re-shaping these “streets of clay”. An important task will be and exploration, refinement, and adaptation of assessment tools such as vehicular, cycling, pedestrian, and public transport level of service (LOS), benefit-cost analysis, and multi-criteria evaluation. Interviews with pedestrians, shopkeepers, residents and others will provide narrative texture to the quantitative data collection undertaken. Research outcomes will include a presentation and application of a set of assessment and evaluation tools for re-engineering urban arterial streets for safe, multi-modal travel. I am interested in this topic because of having learned the importance of “complete streets” in my professional work as an urban transportation planner. Main streets can either be accessible to and accommodating of cyclists, pedestrians, and public transport passengers along with car drivers or can be barriers to all but car drivers. The most unsustainable main street is one that is so car dominated as to be unworkable and unsafe even for car drivers. joekott@pacbell.net 3421 El Camino Real #13 Atherton, CA 94027 USA