The Case for Changing the Transportation Paradigm—by Ken Shelin
For many years we have used a suburban standard for movement through our city. It has focused our roadway design on moving vehicles. It has encouraged streets that went nowhere, often passing through courts and culde sacs emptying on collector streets concentrating traffic onto major marterials that eventually become relentlessly congested encouraging more and more lanes to carry the traffic that had no where else to travel in order to get to their destination.
We need to move from that paradigm to a new one which shifts from a focus on moving vehicles to one which provides a variety of means of movement for people including, not only motor vehicles, but various types of public transit, bicycles, personal mobility devices, walking and running while diffusing traffic instead of concentrating it.
The challenge for us in Sarasota is balancing the interests of travelers and community stakeholders. One will be most concerned about travel time and speed and the other about the character of the community.
There are new tools being used in forward thinking communities for making that shift. One approach is called “Complete Streets” and another is called “Context Sensitive Solutions.” Context Sensitive Solutions look at the built environment through which streets pass such as the suburban context, the urban center and the downtown core and selects design criteria for those streets taking its context (a new urbanist would call it a transect) into account. It also takes into account the type of street it is such as arterial, boulevard, avenue or street. It’s ultimate goal is to create a walkable community by creating multimodal transportation systems with an emphasis on walkability. The solutions take into account speed, on-street parking, sidewalks, pedestrian scaled lighting, street trees, landscaping, placement of buildings, their height and mass.
Posted by kenshelin 
