Sustainable Streets: Foundations for an Emerging Practice

Emerging practices in street design seek to achieve a wide range of sustainability benefits. With public rights of way designed or re-designed to enhance ecological functions such as storm water filtration as well as to influence travel performance, both direct and indirect sustainability benefits are being sought by sponsoring organizations. This paper identifies three aspects of sustainability that can be meaningfully addressed through urban street design: movement, ecology and community. Each of these is linked to the three E’s representing the full array of sustainability concerns: social equity, natural environment, and economy. In its introduction, the paper cites theoretical and professional milestones that have led to attention in the street design field to these three aspects of design, arguing that the addition of “ecology” to the design paradigm is a critical expansion of a construct that is now widely accepted as including mobility and community dimensions. A definition of sustainable streets is proposed as: “multimodal rights of way designed and operated to create benefits relating to movement, ecology and community that together support a broad sustainability agenda embracing the three E’s: environment, equity, and economy.” Part Two of the paper presents examples of projects in six U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. The paper’s concluding section identifies three related areas of research and application that must advance in order to establish an improved foundation for this emerging practice: knowledge base, design innovation, and planning methods.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Greenberg, Ellen J
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2009-1-11 to 2009-1-15
• Date: 2009

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 88th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Ecology; Economic impacts; Environment; Environmental impacts; Equity; Planning and design; Sustainable development; Systems analysis
• Uncontrolled Terms: Street design
• Subject Areas: Design; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01128736
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 09-0729
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: May 19 2009 7:48AM