Abstract Manager

With a focus on the safety and comfort of the most vulnerable users of our transportation system, transportation projects often come with a built-in multi-modal hierarchy. At the top of this pyramid stands active transportation; those walking, biking, or using other forms of wheeled micro-mobility. While transportation professionals focus on ways to better protect these users to achieve the project’s critical goals, the best intentions do not always yield the best results.

The complete streets approach is regarded as the industry best practice when trying to improve the comfort and safety of active transportation. Road diets or the reallocation of space transforms the typical cross-section of a corridor, resulting in traffic calming and improved comfort for people walking or riding a bike. This however comes as a detriment to the vehicular capacity of the corridor, the most common mode choice that sits lower on the modal hierarchy. Can innovative intersections further enhance the active transportation facilities beyond the minimums while maintaining vehicular operations along the corridor while staying within the site-specific constraints?

This presentation will take a journey down a completely incomplete street, one with little to no frontage, tight right-of-way constraints, and the absolute minimums when it comes to active transportation. We will take a stroll through the corridor three times, the existing corridor, the Complete Streets corridor, and the Innovative Complete Streets corridor. The presentation will challenge the standard approach to road diets, show how providing the minimum for everybody benefits nobody, and how sometimes the industry standard may buy active transportation a meter that only feels like millimeters. Innovative intersection and their applicability to complete streets will be presented as an enhanced approach that balances the modes along a complete street corridor while providing the greatest safety and comfort for the active user.