Complete Streets - Principles

Principles

Proponents of complete streets policies claim that they improve safety, lower transportation costs, provide alternatives to private cars, encourage health through walking and biking, create a sense of place, improve social interaction, and generally improve adjacent property values. Opponents may consider automobile-only infrastructure to be a better use of public funds, or consider efforts to encourage other forms of transportation to be coercive. Individual projects and policies have sometimes faced specific local opposition, typically based on concerns over traffic flow and automobile access.

The National Complete Streets Coalition, a pro-complete streets advocacy group in the United States, defines complete streets as those that are designed and operated to allow all users, not only drivers, to use them safely. The specific design elements of a complete street vary from place to place, but they may include:

• Pedestrian infrastructure such as sidewalks; crosswalks, including median crossing islands and raised crosswalks; accessible pedestrian signals, including audible cues for people with low vision and pushbuttons reachable by wheelchair users; and sidewalk bulb-outs
• Traffic calming measures to lower driving speeds and define the edges of car travelways, including road diets, center medians, shorter curb corner radii, elimination of free-flow right-turn lanes, staggered parking, street trees, planter strips and ground cover
• Bicycle accommodations, such as dedicated bicycle lanes or wide shoulders
• Mass transit accommodations, such as bus pullouts or special bus lanes

Complete streets policies normally exempt three kinds of roadways: freeways or other roads where non-motorized transportation is banned, roadways where the cost of accommodation would be too disproportionate to the need or expected use, and roadways where accommodation is shown to be unnecessary.