Historical Review of the Treatment of Context in Highway Design

Context sensitive design aims to incorporate multi-modal traffic and aesthetics to meet the demands of human and natural environmental issues on transportation projects. However, the approach and tenets of context sensitive design did not come about overnight. There is a proud history of multi-use roadway and roadside design and development in the United States that goes back to at least the late nineteenth century. The boulevards of the late 1800s addressed the adjacent land use context and accommodated multimodal travel in the roadway design. The landscaped parkways of the early 1900s were designed to integrate the roadway with the adjacent natural environment for a pleasing vista. From the 1930s on, however, with the growing popularity of automobiles, roadway design came to respond to the desire for faster speeds and efficient movement. As we move towards restoring a more balanced approach to design there is much to learn from our history about how to integrate streets with their context and the need to apply a multidisciplinary approach to design. In this paper, we evaluated some of the design approaches that have been employed in the past to produce such context sensitive roadways such as the urban boulevards in many of our older cities and the parkways of the National Parkway Service (NPS) systems.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Wang, Jianhong
  • Garrick, Norman W
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2006-1-22 to 2006-1-26
• Date: 2006

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 22p
• Monograph Title: TRB 85th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Arterial highways; Context sensitive design; Design practices; Highway design; History; Parkways
• Subject Areas: Design; Energy; Environment; Highways; History; I15: Environment; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01020533
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 06-0488
• Files: BTRIS, TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Mar 3 2006 10:22AM