Narrow Lanes Make Safer Streets
We can make our streets around the seacoast region safer by using narrower driving lanes
Thank you for reading the Strong Towns Seacoast Newsletter I am thankful for your interest in our group. Some news to share, I just bought an e-bike! Even though this has been a tough year for us, I took up a side job (catering on some weekends) to earn some money for a bike and was able to take advantage of a Labor Day sale to get one. I’m really excited about using a bike as transportation in place of a car and being able to explore town with it.
September 2024 Meetings
Monday Meeting Details
Monday, September 16th 6:30PM - 8:00PM
Juniper Kitchen in Dover
Juniper Kitchen is opened back up again, so we will be watching some videos that discuss Strong Towns principles and help explain what makes a place resilient over time.
Saturday Meeting Details
Saturday, September 21
Starts at 10:30AM
Henry Law Park Near the Parking Lot
We are partnering with Dover Doers to cleanup the mulch beds and paint the benches in Henry Law Park in downtown Dover. There is no commitment needed, so if you can only show up for a little while we will still appreciate any amount of help. So bring a gardening tool with you to help dig out weeds then come as you please and leave when you need.
Narrow Lanes Make Safer Streets
Our topic today is one that the broader Strong Towns organization has been talking about this year because of a new study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that concluded that narrow lanes, sometimes as narrow as 9’ wide, make safer streets and promote community health. I brought some attention to the width of our street lanes in a past article talking about speed limits, but there are many benefits to using narrow lanes for our urban streets. Strong towns has written an article and also released a podcast episode featuring the research leader for the study, Shima Hamidi, if you want to dive deeper into it.
The study looked at 1,100 streets around American cities and was focused on finding an optimal lane width that reduced car crashes and maximized opportunity for biking and walking in cities. One of the key findings was that narrowing lanes to between 9’ and 11’ created no increased risk in vehicle crashes, but lanes of 12’ or wider had a significant increase in the risk of crashes (around 1.5x higher). That means that streets that are 12’ wide or more are more dangerous and as I noted in my speed limit article, many streets around this area have 12’ wide lanes. Why are 12’ wide, highway-sized lanes our default?
Additional Benefits to Narrowing Lanes
Using narrower lanes also means pouring less asphalt, plowing less snow, and overall maintaining less street. This reduces maintenances costs over time and can help reduce the burden our infrastructure costs place on our city budgets.
It also gives us a chance to apply an appropriate context to a street. Right now, with so many streets being the size of a highway, there is little local influence on how the street should serve the people who live or work along it. With the confidence that narrowing lanes reduces crashes, we can choose a 9’ lane for small, residential streets or an 11’ lane for streets that need use from larger vehicles such as a truck. We can cater the street’s design to the needs of the community.
Because narrower lanes use less land, we can reuse the leftover space for other things. Maybe we can plant some street trees or widen the sidewalk. Perhaps there is enough room for a bike lane now.
Conclusion
We repaint our street lines every couple of years or so to refresh the paint, on our next pass we could select a few streets to try this out on to see how it goes. Narrowing lanes doesn’t have to be a whole project on its own and we can tie it into our current ongoing maintenance. We could also set our city’s new default lane width to 10’ and if a wider lane is needed, let an engineer justify that choice with a contextual reason. We don’t need highways through our neighborhoods and this seems like an easy step to take towards safer streets.