Street smarts: Better streets by design
Making Hamilton a more livable city means a rethink on how we design our streets
We experience our city through our streets.
Whether it’s by walking, cycling, transit or driving, our streets connect us to the places and people we want to visit. As we decide how we want to grow Hamilton moving forward, we should ask ourselves how our current street design is working out and how we can make them better.
Safety
If roads don’t have sidewalks, we aren’t going to walk. If they don’t have bike lanes, most of us are not going to cycle. If a street is wide, straight, with long distances between lights or stop signs, they are built for speed and will encourage speeding. The same can be said for timed traffic lights. Such streets create unsafe spaces for pedestrians. We know that speed kills. The British Department of Transport found that the rate of pedestrian death from being hit by a vehicle rises from five per cent at 32 km/h to 45 per cent at 48 km/h to 85 per cent at 64 km/h.
While these statistics are alarming, we need to remember that we control the design of our streets. If we can’t walk on our streets, that’s as a result of choices we have made. If the speed of the streets is dangerous, that’s our choice for allowing speed limits and conditions we know might cause fatalities.
One solution to this is a strategy called “Vision Zero,” a global movement transforming the way we use, interact and travel on our roads. It has a simple and clear goal: zero fatalities or serious injuries on roadways. Vision Zero aims for safer streets through improved education, enforcement, engineering, evaluation, and engagement. This involves everything from adjusting speed limits, to installing speed bumps and pedestrian bump-outs. The City of Hamilton has endorsed Vision Zero, but it has yet to implemented city-wide. We know our current street design is dangerous, why would we delay making them safer, or worse, stick with the status quo?
Walkability and Economic Development
Poorly designed streets are not just unsafe, they limit economic potential. Countless economic development studies show that streets that are designed to support walkability also support the local business environment. When shops are clustered together, foot traffic visitors are encouraged to visit multiple neighbouring stores and spend money. Think about local main streets like downtown Dundas, Locke Street, Ottawa Street or Concession. Where there is little to no foot traffic, there is usually no retail activity. Just think of Main Street through the city centre. It is economically stagnant.
Improved design could mean anything from adding sidewalks where there aren’t any, to the creation of a Living Street or Dutch Woonerf, where equal priority is given to all modes of transportation including vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians. If we improve the design of our streets, we will expand economic potential, boosting tax revenues. This should be top priority for a city that can’t keep up with its growing infrastructure maintenance deficit. Healthy Lifestyles
The design of our streets has a direct impact on our health. By prioritizing all forms of mobility, we choose to encourage more active lifestyles. This applies to kids as well. According to a Metrolinx study, from 1986-2011 the rate at which Greater Toronto and Hamilton (GTHA) students 11-13 years of age were driven to school doubled. At the same time, the number of students walking and cycling fell from 62 per cent to less than half. This decline in levels of physical activity has significant implications for the health of the region’s youth, leaving our students more susceptible to the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other related health issues.
Through Civicplan’s local work on walking to school, study after study highlights street safety as the No. 1 concern for parents. This directly impacts decisions to allow or encourage their kids to walk or wheel to school. In order to reverse these troubling trends, we must design our streets to be as walkable and safe as possible so that the walk to school becomes an entrenched habit. If our streets are not safe for our kids to walk to school, that is clear indication of a fundamental design failure.
Let’s Decide to Take Control
Our current street design is limiting Hamilton’s potential, putting people at risk, suppressing economic opportunities, and restricting our quality of life. The good news is the tools to fix these problems are in or hands.
As we decide to take control of our future as a community, a rethink on how we design our streets needs to be top of mind.