Traffic Calming in New Developments: Avoiding the Need for Future Fixes

Abstract

Recent efforts in the United States to include traffic-calming design in new developments are described. These efforts prevent the need to fix speeding and cut-through traffic problems later. It is clearly more costeffective to design residential streets for speed and volume control than to go back and retrofit, as hundreds of communities are now forced to do. Traffic-calming initiatives of communities that are featured in the upcoming Institute of Transportation Engineers’ book Traffic Calming State-of-the-Art are summarized. The emphasis is on regulatory mechanisms that can be used to implement traffic-calming standards in new developments. Then the standards themselves are presented, and street-network-design principles from the state of Florida’s Best Development Practices are summarized. Standards are established for network connectivity and route density. Next, street-subdivision standards prepared for the Wilmington Area Planning Council, and currently under review for statewide adoption, are outlined. A rationale is provided for each proposed standard that differs from AASHTO’s generally accepted standard.

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