Lancaster Boulevard is a four-lane street that runs straight through the high desert downtown of Lancaster, Calif.
Cars would speed through, passing a neglected and forgotten city center. Some transportation engineers would consider this a successful street – but was it a successful community?
This was the type of question raised at the Transportation and Land Use Forum, a meeting sponsored by Oregon Transportation and Growth Management Program, the Portland Bureau of Transportation and Metro.
The forum brought together the expertise of Reid Ewing, director of the Metropolitan Research Center, Peter Swift of Swift and Associates and Gary Toth, senior director of Transportation Initiatives for the Project for Public Spaces.
The three speakers represent the new guard of transportation engineers who focus on community building through transportation investment instead of automobile centered street design.
Ewing spoke about the hallmarks of a successful city, drawing from his book, "Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Design." One of these traits is a city that is built on a human scale - meaning that it is walkable with short blocks.
Another trait would be a visually complex city with different sized buildings and pieces of public art, Ewing said. This visual complexity also needs elements that tie it all together such as evenly spaced trees that line city streets.
Swift spoke about the inaccuracies of today's traffic engineering, like flawed traffic forecasting which results in roads being too large, or assessing roads on basis of congestion only.
Ewing, in a later interview, agreed with Swift's view on these outdated modes.
"For the most part, conventional traffic engineering is wrong," Ewing said. "In urban areas, these things are not true. You are not safer with a less forgiving highway design or street design."
Lancaster Boulevard in California is an example of street that is a success to some, because there is little congestion. Swift was the design engineer tasked with redesigning the street so Lancaster could revitalize its downtown.
Instead of four lanes of traffic, the center lanes became diagonal parking interspersed with evenly spaced trees and light posts. Wide, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks were added, as well as enhanced crosswalks and traffic was slowed to 15 mph.
Before and after: See a shot of Lancaster Boulevard before and after its renovation.
Since 2009, more than 50 businesses moved into the city center, revenue is up 96 percent and the number of traffic collisions have been cut in half, according to Moule & Polyzoides, the architects behind the Lancaster Ramblas project.
Toth spoke about looking beyond congestion as the most important transportation metric. He encouraged the crowd to think of themselves as place-makers. The old traffic principle, Toth said, was to build transportation through communities, whereas the new one is to build community through transportation.
Toth, like Ewing and Swift, spoke about getting away from old one-size-fits-all road solutions.
"Our current road system came out of the interstate era, with macro solutions being applied to micro situations," Toth said.
They spoke to a full room of 75 people, nearly one-third of the audience were engineers. Some audience members could directly apply the lessons from the forum to their work.
Joshan Rohani of the development firm David Evans and Associates said this was an opportunity to learn from experts.
"It was a great opportunity to share expertise from lessons learned around the nation," Rohani said.
Greg Raisman, from the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said that sharing research was important in creating a regional transportation system.
"Working from the same information helps us, as we all have different communities and different sized cities and goals," Raisman said. "Having this kind of common understanding is really great for delivering a regional transportation system."