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Narrower, more connected streets coming to VA
But new urbanists may have muffed an opportunity to make the new standards even better.
On July 1, Virginia will begin enforcing new standards that require street networks to be better connected and that allow subdivision streets to be significantly narrower than in the past.
“I think they will have a great impact,” Nicholas Donohue, assistant secretary of transportation, said of the new Secondary Street Acceptance Requirements, which were enacted after 18 months of public consultation and refinement. “This is one of those common-sense policies that would have improved the traffic situation if it had been in place years ago.”
The standards will discourage developments from being built without direct links to adjacent neighborhoods. The commonwealth will use a “connectivity index” to ensure that people have choices of how to get from one place to another. Subdivisions will no longer be built with public streets that provide only one way in and out.
However, Daniel Slone, a Richmond attorney who specializes in legal issues affecting New Urbanism, says new urbanists let a larger victory slip through their hands.
“The State conducted a fully open process and encouraged new urbanists to the table,” Slone said. “Out of that process came a very good proposal. When this went out to public comment, it was largely ignored by new urbanists, but not by the Home Builders [Association of Virginia].” The Home Builders attacked the proposal and succeeded in having it diluted — after which “the new urbanist experts weighed in,” according to Slone.
“By then the Home Builders’ machine was engaged and we never recovered momentum,” said Slone, who has represented new urbanist developers for 20 years. “The missing ingredient,” in Slone’s view, “was public support for the more aggressive standard.” New urbanist experts had good arguments to counter the builders, according to Slone, but the builders effectively mobilized public opinion, and “the weaker arguments prevailed.”
Virginia’s extensive power
In 1989, new urbanists made their first concerted effort to persuade VDOT to allow new developments to be built with narrower streets. That year, Slone, Andres Duany, transportation consultant Rick Chellman, and others went to Richmond and tried to persuade the Virginia Department of Transportation to allow narrower streets in new developments. They sought the change because in comparison to other states, Virginia’s DOT has unusually broad jurisdiction, controlling the design of 58,000 miles of streets and roads, including neighborhood streets in most of the commonwealth’s communities.
Not much resulted from the 1989 effort, which was meant to smooth the way for Haymount, a still-unbuilt traditional neighborhood development envisioned by John Clark on approximately 1,700 acres southeast of Fredericksburg.
Traffic congestion worsened in the past two decades, especially in suburban northern Virginia, and frustration with clogged roads helped Timothy Kaine win the governor’s office in November 2005. That set the stage for new standards.
Under the new rules overseen by VDOT, if a developer wants newly constructed streets to be maintained by the public, “the developer must build streets that connect with the surrounding transportation network in a manner that enhances the capacity of the overall transportation network and accommodates pedestrians ….”
In supporting the change, Virginia officials point to the experience of Charlotte, North Carolina, where emergency response has speeded up since 2001, when the city began requiring more extensively connected street systems in new subdivisions (see Jan. 2009 New Urban News).
Measuring connections
To require better-connected streets, the commonwealth had to come up with a means of measuring connectedness. Virginia is using a “connectivity index” that Donohue says is identical to the index employed in Orlando, Florida. In any area where streets are being offered to the government, the number of street segments (sections of street between intersections) is tallied. That number is then divided by the number of intersections. (A dead end is counted as an intersection.) If there are six street segments and four intersections, for example, the result would be a connectivity index rating of 1.5.
In a “compact area,” such as an urban development area or census urbanized area, a connectivity index rating of at least 1.6 is required. In a “suburban area,” a rating of 1.4 or higher is required. External connections are also mandated in rural areas, but rural developments are not required to satisfy an index.
Chellman thinks the requirement has been formulated in a way that will not work as well as the state expects it to. “The standard for connectivity is perhaps too low,” adds Norman Garrick, a University of Connecticut transportation specialist who has worked on new urbanist street and road proposals.
Garrick argues that instead of judging street networks solely on connectivity, it would be better to use both connectivity and “intersection density” — the number of intersections per square mile — as the criteria. The January New Urban News summarized a California study by Garrick and Wesley Marshall that found that fatalities and severe injuries declined when the number of intersections per square mile rose.
“Our knowledge of the issue of network design is evolving, and I think we will get better at writing standards of this type as we learn more,” Garrick said. “I definitely think [Virginia’s standard] is a step in the right direction that is getting the issue on the radar screen.”
Some Virginians expressed concern that connected streets would encourage more traffic through residential areas, reducing safety. To compensate for traffic on minor streets, VDOT is allowing the streets to be narrower, to discourage speeding. Subdivision streets previously had to be 36 to 40 feet wide. New streets can be considerably smaller: as narrow as 29 feet when the street includes two lanes of on-street parking, or as narrow as 24 feet when parking is restricted to one side of the street.
“The street standards came out much better [than the connectivity standards], with less impact from the Home Builders, and should be well received by new urbanists,” Slone said. Narrower streets are also seen as environmentally beneficial because they reduce stormwater runoff.
Where lot sizes are under half an acre or where floor area ratios are less than 0.4, the state will require “pedestrian accommodation” along both sides of the street. Usually that means sidewalks or trails. Where lot sizes are between a half-acre and two acres, the pedestrian accommodation may be along only one side of the street or it may be within the development — a trail system, for example.
Generally, a developer will be able to reduce the connectivity requirement if a sizable part of the development is bordered by a “constraint” — such as a river, railroad track, or a steep slope — that would impede roadway access.
“A lot of developers were concerned about how it might increase cost.” Donohue says of the new policy. The narrowing of the streets should help offset the expense of building more connections. The state is also easing its off-street parking requirements, which could further reduce costs.
To further control speeds, “we’re developing a standard that will allow bulb-outs at intersections and elsewhere,” he notes. The new policy cites studies that new urbanists have made of street widths, travel speeds, injuries, and fatalities. Donohue expresses hope that the changes will lead Virginia away from “isolated patterns of development, where every trip gets forced onto an arterial network, even when people are trying to get to the development next door.”
This article is available in the April/May 2009 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.
By Philip Langdon
From the April/May 2009 issue of New Urban News.
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