The popular understanding of the origin of street design in Boston goes back to the original wisdom of cows pastured on the common and commuting home to farms. Although this is more folklore than fact, it does reflect the liklihood that streets were developed piecemeal in response to short-term needs and not as a part of an organized plan.
Such is always the case, unless a community has a blank canvas upon which to write…and millions of dollars of funding…and popular support for centralized design and planning of an urban utopia. Expect that confluence of opportunity sometime in the next century. In the meantime, improvements are opportunistic: a bike lane here, an updated intersection there…a new development bringing potentially more problems but at least some cash to manage solutions. When those micro-opportunties happen…advocates need to be ready to propose improvements, but these improvements should be seen NOT as accomodations for interest groups, but as opportunities to develop “complete streets” – recognizing that…
The streets of our cities and towns are an important part of the livability of our communities. They 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 designed only for speeding cars, or worse, creeping traffic jams.–National Complete Streets Coalition
Increasingly, communities are adopting policies to incorporate this new kind of paradigm. Even as they do so, however, they are not immune to the misunderstandings of those who view these measures as expensive luxuries that detract from “fixing potholes.” What opponents fail to realize is that today’s potholes were yesterday’s bogs and other “cow obstacles.”
Complete Streets is not about a master plan to impose a new design on cities, but an effort to develop a shared use strategy that recognizes how our needs are changing. We need safer ways for active transportation to be supported in our communities. Partly, it is “aspirational”–we do want to encourage more walking and biking–but successful change looks for real needs: where are people currently trying to walk and bike? It can never be about “build it and they will come,” it has to be “thank goodness they finally did something about that bridge!”
Adopting a Complete Streets strategy means coming together as a community to adopt a policy that commits to a vision of the future where the needs of all users are considered. It provides a reference point for “why do we want to do this?” and “why are we doing this?” so that changes/improvements are not seen as accommodations or concessions to appease a minority of outlier users, but as necessary steps towards ensuring a better future for all.
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