ANOTHER day, another snowstorm here in the United States of Antarctica. But in a growing number of neighbourhoods, everyone from safer-city activists to transportation engineers is watching how vehicles negotiate all that snow, and wondering if what they see might result in streets that are less dangerous for everyone.
For years, city planners have used curb extensions at junctions to slow vehicles as they make turns and give pedestrians a shorter span of road to cross—as well as somewhere safer to stand while they wait to do so. Known as “neckdowns”, these curb extensions also increase visibility, again improving safety. But working out where best to build neckdowns usually involves costly, time-consuming traffic-calming studies and computer modelling that cash-strapped local authorities can ill afford.
Cheaper, perhaps, to let it snow.
“Snow,” says Clarence Eckerson Jr., founder of Streetfilms, a New York non-profit that makes short films about urban transportation, “is nature’s tracing paper.” After a snowstorm, a number of patterns are traced across the gradually clearing surfaces. Rather than using up the entire breadth of the road, vehicles tend to take the slowest, most safely navigated route around the corners of a slippery intersection. When snow-ploughs clear roads, they leave large piles at roadsides and junctions, which vehicles must drive around. Finally, pedestrians also tread their own optimal paths through the snow. The result is the type of snowy neckdown, or “sneckdown”, shown in the photo.
Aaron Naparstek, a visiting scholar at MIT’s department of urban studies and planning, coined the term “sneckdown” this January when he was looking for a Twitter hashtag for the phenomenon. Since then, hundreds of photos of #sneckdowns have been posted. “Urban public space is an incredibly valuable and limited commodity, so why do we give up so much of it to its most inefficient user—the single-person vehicle?” he asks.
A growing number of urban thinkers and planners believe that sneckdowns offer a natural guide to where permanent neckdowns and traffic islands could be built. Earlier this week, for instance, the Office of Transportation Planning in Raleigh, North Carolina, tweeted “Since we know the snow is coming, send us your pictures of wasted space at intersections in Raleigh.”
Gary Toth, a long-term engineer for the New Jersey Department of Transportation who now works for New York’s Project for Public Spaces, says people have lost patience with the glacially slow pace of traditional street design and improvement. Sneckdowns, he notes, “let you watch real-time human behaviour rather than using computer models to predict it—models that often get it wrong.” He believes that “lighter, quicker, cheaper” is the way forward in urban street planning. Sometimes that means using temporary neckdowns, barrels or painted bike lanes to see what works. Sometimes it means waiting for snow.
Like all new ideas, this one has its forebears. As far back as the 1980s, road planners in Australia were covering intersections with flour, waiting a few hours, then climbing the nearest high building and photographing the paths vehicles had taken. The results were used to improve junction layouts. And at San Jose State University in California, among others, some footpaths were laid only after planners studied shortcuts taken by students rushing to class—the optimal routes known as “desire paths”.
Sneckdowns offer only a rough guide to how urban streets can be made safer admits Mr Eckerston. Before building permanent neckdowns or traffic islands, he notes, you have to consider numerous factors, such as the ability of emergency and sanitation vehicles to negotiate newly narrowed junctions. If parking spaces are lost, the impact on nearby businesses has to be considered too.
Mr Naparstek notes that some areas of snowy streets left untouched by vehicles are so large, they could be used as entirely new public plazas, with landscaping, chairs and tables—something that has already been done in parts of New York city. He has a hashtag for that, too: #plowza.
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