How a Walking Audit Can Help You Quickly Improve Street Design
A recently completed sidewalk project in my community.
There has been much celebration around a new sidewalk that has been installed in my community (Charles Town, West Virginia). This 2-block sidewalk segment is a huge accomplishment and I am thankful that it has been constructed. This sidewalk completes the missing link connecting our downtown to our police station and public utility offices.
This project was no easy feat to accomplish. This street is a state-maintained road, and it required a lot of effort from the city to get this project designed, funded and constructed through the state department of transportation. Through recent development, this rural road is transforming into an urban street. This sidewalk project also included additional improvements, such as improved drainage and better-defined edges of the street.
Before and after the sidewalk project.
There are many places in my city where people want to walk but cannot because the sidewalk is missing. These kinds of projects should be celebrated because my community needs many more of them.
A Walking Audit of Our New Sidewalk
Now that this sidewalk is installed, we can experience and learn from the results. It is hard to understand the complex details of these types of projects when they’re presented at public meetings or viewed as construction drawings on a website. Even the best designers and top-rated contractors may miss the fine-grain details and unique field conditions of these projects.
A post-construction walking audit gives us the opportunity to learn and improve from every project. When moving at walking speed, we can observe user behaviors and measure widths and speeds. This allows us to be critical and ask if the project achieved the intended objectives. If it hasn’t, this information will help us make adjustments quickly, as well as inform our work on future projects.
Strong Towns members conducting a walking audit at the National Gathering 2024. (Photo by ZED Images.)
Let’s walk through this completed project and see where it could be improved.
Excessive Width
The first thing I noticed is the new shoulder — the area between the curb and the white line. The new curbs are farther back and more asphalt has been added to widen the street.
The result is approximately 6 feet of additional asphalt that looks like a third lane. Six feet is too narrow for parallel parking and too generous for an unprotected bike lane that would be connected to nothing. This is nothing more than extra pavement that will collect additional stormwater and that the public will have to maintain forever.
This extra pavement also optically widens the streets — making it feel much wider to drivers. Drivers will naturally drive at a comfortable speed, and the more room for error they perceive, the faster they feel comfortable driving. This street has a posted speed limit of 25 mph, but most drivers feel comfortable driving much faster. Increasing the actual and perceived width of the street will worsen the problem.
The extra pavement optically widens the street and increases the size of intersections.
We can observe driver behavior during our audit. I did not conduct a speed study, but I am aware of neighborhood complaints. Speed is such an issue on this street that a speed warning sign was temporarily installed on the very next block.
Missing Crosswalk
The primary objective of a sidewalk project is to increase the network where people can safely walk. These types of projects are intended to extend an existing sidewalk or fill in a missing link. This project has the potential to do both. However, this project does not include a crosswalk to connect the new sidewalk to an existing sidewalk on the other side of the street. This can be observed through a walking audit because our eyes will lead our feet to this missing crossing.
The omission of this crossing may be a construction mistake, instead of a decision by the designer. Had a walking audit been conducted during the construction process, this mistake could have been corrected immediately.
It is also plausible that omitting this crossing was intentional, based on the other design elements of this project. When the priority of a project is the throughput of vehicles, crosswalks are omitted or removed because they could slow the free-flowing movement of vehicles.
However, the omission of a crosswalk does not remove the desire and need that walkers have to cross the street. My neighbors crossed this street prior to this sidewalk being constructed, and now they'll have even more desire to cross. The struggle is that walkers who need to cross the street are now forced to make a decision in an environment with a very low tolerance for error and the risk of a fatal outcome. If the priority of this project is truly safety, the design should include features that reduce risky decision-making, including accommodations for walkers to safely cross the street.
The new sidewalk isn’t connected to existing sidewalks with a crosswalk.
Who Am I: Road or Street?
This road is transforming into a street. Before the construction of the sidewalk, the travel lanes were already very wide. The wider lanes aligned with the previous roadway character of a rural highway. We would not expect to see a curb, gutter or sidewalk on a rural highway because throughput and speed would be the primary design objectives. The addition of these elements, along with new development in the area, changes the character of the road to a street. The struggle here is that nothing changed between the white edge lines. This street-road hybrid — or stroad — is attempting to do two things at once and ends up doing both poorly.
Walking on this sidewalk feels much different than walking on other sidewalks on this street and in our neighborhood. The high speed and accompanying noise of the traffic is unsettling. It feels uncomfortable and unsafe. There is also no buffer between moving vehicles and people walking on the sidewalk. The wide travel lanes and the 6 feet of extra asphalt make it easy for drivers to make fast right turns at the intersections and driveways, as well as giving drivers room to pass on the right of a left-turning car. As a walker, these fast turns and frictionless throughput of vehicles feel like a crash waiting to happen.
Next Steps
My community just made a major investment to improve this street, but important adjustments still need to be made. Some of these adjustments are necessary for ensuring safety. This is the primary objective, so these recommendations should be immediately deployed and then monitored in case there are any other necessary changes. Other adjustments are longer-term or more applicable to future projects.
In the Short Term
Here are a few quick responses that my local leaders could implement immediately to achieve the safety objectives of the project.
Bollards or delineators could be installed near intersections and driveways for optical narrowing and daylighting. These temporary vertical elements communicate the desired speed of the street to the driver. These quick-build, temporary features also prohibit dangerous driving maneuvers such as passing on the right within the shoulder.
Bollards or delineators could also be installed as curb extensions, reducing the overall crossing distance for walkers and alerting drivers to all users of this street. These simple features also inform the driver that they are transitioning from a rural highway into an urban street.
A crosswalk could be added to connect the new sidewalk to the existing sidewalks. The crosswalk could be installed quickly with high-visibility paint and signs.
The travel lanes could be reduced from 11 feet to 10 feet. This additional lane width could be given to the shoulder, allowing for parallel parking against the sidewalk. This change can be done with paint, thus making all of the pavement productive. Right-sizing these lanes communicates the intended speed of 25 mph for this street.
The addition of on-street parking would address an existing need for parking in this neighborhood. These parked cars would also provide a buffer between the sidewalk and moving cars, similar to other streets in our community. This natural friction communicates the desired urban street character to drivers and results in slower speeds.
Paint and bollards could be quickly deployed to narrow the street and create the missing crosswalk.
In the Long Term
The walking audit is also an important tool to guide longer-term changes to this street and to inform the design of future projects. Here are a couple of longer-term modifications that could be used at this location or in future projects:
The 6 feet of additional asphalt should be omitted. If the lane widths cannot be right-sized for the desired 25 mph speeds, the curb could be moved to the edge of the travel lane and the extra asphalt could be put to more productive use. For example, the sidewalk could be constructed wider to accommodate a multiuse trail, or a landscape area could be constructed with shade trees to create a buffer between the traffic and the sidewalk.
Notes should be added to the city’s street standards to remind roadway designers that the space between curbs should always be used productively — the use of asphalt should be restricted to travel lanes or on-street parking, not wasted on awkwardly sized shoulders.
This project included a new stormwater system. The design of this system follows a conventional approach with stormwater inlets and pipes buried deep in the ground. It is important to note that my community is built on a giant rock, so digging is really, really expensive — probably the most expensive part of this project. In other projects I worked on in the area, we found that greenspace could be used for stormwater conveyance and treatment. In other words, linear rain gardens adjacent to the street are not only cheaper to construct and maintain, but they also create a beautiful buffer between cars and the sidewalk that adds value to the surrounding properties. This is an approach taken on another state roadway in our community, so it is not an unfamiliar idea. The result is a beautiful street that costs a fraction of the conventional approach.
Examples of linear rain gardens installed on other state roads in the county.
Your Turn
Walking audits provide a feedback loop for projects that can be measured in days, instead of years.
I share this approach not as a critique of this specific project, but as an example of an approach that anyone can do at no cost to quickly learn and improve. You can complete a walking audit in about the same amount of time that it took you to read this article. Your observations can be written down in a notepad, documented with photographs, or packaged into a one- or two-page memo. This is an approach that can be repeated many times and at scale. The results can convince even the most critical citizens and can be measured through the reduction of crashes in your community.
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Edward Erfurt is the Director of Community Action at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.