Seperation Anxiety and City Planning

Among progressive transportation advocates there is a common, if often quiet, debate as to how to redesign or retrofit our existing roadways into streets that are safe and accessible to all users, including cyclists and pedestrians. At the heart of this debate is the issue of separate facilities vs. shared space.

Proponents of separate facilities argue that only designs that separate and insulate pedestrians and cyclists from fast-moving automobile traffic will result in large numbers of people eschewing their cars and walking and biking in great numbers. These separations can be either physical, as in the case of cycletracks in Copenhagen, or purely psychological like your standard bike lanes. To their credit, separated facilities in parts of Europe have been correlated with significant increases in the number of people making trips by walking and biking.

On the other side of the debate, there is the increasingly popular idea of shared space, the idea that all roadway users should be mixed together and that automobile traffic should move more slowly and be one use among many in a busy street. The idea of shared space has been brought into the mainstream largely by Hans Monderman and his disciples. While many planners, engineers, and policy makers cite this idea as faniful and impractical, it is beginning to gain traction in certain circles.

I reflected on this debate between seperate facilities and shared space, between what was ideal and what was practical, and realized that this isn't really a debate at all. The idea of encouraging more people to walk and bike by designing seperated facilities like sidewalks, cycletracks, and shared-use paths - and the idea of creating streets that are properly designed to be shared by all users are not two contradictory views. Instead, there are part of the same overall process and progression.

Shared space has as much cachet as it does because segregation of uses on city streets only reinforces the notion that an effective transportation system is one that allows motorists to easily and conveniently travel at high speeds through built-up areas, which in the end does not promote safety or livability. Segregated facilities in many cases have their origins in the idea of getting everyone else "out of the way" of automobiles. That being said, segregated bicycle and pedestrian facilities are obviously preferable to a street design in which every mode save for the automobile is excluded.

The most livable streets, the ones that people tend to enjoy to most, are so often those that adhere closest to the idea of shared space. Segregated systems are too often retrofits of formerly auto-centric streets, and while these are positive improvements, they're still auto-centric streets at the end of the day. Shared space was the de-facto philosophy behind street design for much of human history, so the idea is not new, unreasonable, nor impractical.

At the moment, segregation by speed and mass may be a more feasible policy in a country, and specifically a state, where the land use pattern either necessitates or tacitly promotes high-speed automobile travel as the primarily mode of transportation. However, moving forward, shared space ought to be the goal, with the exception of facilities like limited access highways.

Segregated bicycle and pedestrian systems should serve as a necessary interim step, while land use patterns (hopefully) begin to develop in such a way as to lessen our dependence on high speed automobile travel and we move toward a system of streets that are designed such that all users can access them safely and comfortably without having to be physically separated from.

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