Understanding Complete Streets Policy

Dover uses the concept of complete streets in its street redesigns, so let's break down the idea

Note: Updated this article to reflect the actual travel lane width along Silver street. Changed the value from 12’ to the correct 11’.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had a great time celebrating the New Year. My wife and I had an impromptu trip to Taiwan for family reasons, and we were able to see the fireworks show at Taipei 101 after 25 hours of traveling, which was pretty special despite our exhaustion.

Before we get into our topic, here are the details for our upcoming Monday Meeting:

Monday Meeting

Monday, January 20th 2025 6:30PM - 8:00PM
Juniper Kitchen in Dover

Our Monday meeting will be discussing upcoming complete street projects in Dover such as Henry Law Avenue. We want to look at the designs and discuss if there are areas where improvements could be made before the city starts to break ground on these projects.

Saturday Meetings Have Been Cancelled Going Forward

Our Saturday meetings were held at the Dover Public Library which is currently under renovation and unavailable for our use. That gave us a task of finding a new location, but our group discussed it and decided not to keep doing Saturday Meetings for the time being. We want to be reasonable about how much preparation and effort we are capable of and think that we can achieve greater success by focusing our attention on a single monthly meeting.

What Does “Complete Street” Mean?

The term “Complete Streets” is meant to capture the idea that a street is not considered “complete” until it has met certain requirements. Here is the language used on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s website:

“requires or encourages a safe, comfortable, integrated transportation network for all users, regardless of age, ability, income, ethnicity, or mode of transportation”

Many cities have their own policies for this and in fact Dover has a complete streets policy that has similar language in it. The intent of the policy is to be a flexible guideline towards making streets more accessible to different modes of transportation and all future street designs are meant to adhere to this.

This 4 lane highway is now considered a “complete street” because it has crosswalk and bike paths on it, but would you want to use it?

Awesome stuff, sounds great! I’ve advocated numerous times on this newsletter about making streets safe enough for children to use, ways to reduce vehicle speeds, and the importance of expanding our transportation network to viable alternatives to driving. So, this policy seems like it is a slam dunk towards those efforts, but… does it actually deliver on these goals?

Complete Street Results

Silver Street has very narrow bike lanes, but makes plenty of extra room for vehicles

Let’s look at a complete streets project in Dover, Silver Street. This street has both sidewalks and painted bike paths, and again that sounds good as it seems like multiple modes of transportation have been fully accounted for. Though if we look at the makeup of the street we can see that it has 11’+ travel lanes for cars, 5’ for sidewalks, and 3’ lanes for bikes. Those sidewalks aren’t any bigger than most streets and c’mon, that’s barely enough room for a single bike. According to NACTO, bike lanes are recommended to be 6’ wide and 3’ is the required minimum. With the vehicle travel lanes so wide you can bet that you will see vehicles driving upwards of 40mph pretty frequently regardless of the posted 30mph speed limit.

These bike lanes don’t have a buffer or any protection from the vehicles which makes them more dangerous to use next to fast moving traffic

If we are truly trying to create a street that “is safe and accessible for all transportation users regardless of age or physical ability”, I think we have missed the mark on this. Looking at NACTO again we can see that if vehicles are traveling 30mph+ speeds on this street that is not a safe speed for bicycle lanes here. It is recommended to either add protection to these bike lanes or reduce the speeds of the vehicles next to them. We could easily achieve slower speeds for vehicles and widen the bike lanes by narrowing the travel lanes from 12’+ down to 9’ or 10’. The bike lanes here are the bare minimum and if a vehicle moves just a few inches out of their travel lane into the bike lane it could easily result in a tragic headline.

So, yes we have a bike lane, but how comfortable is it to use? Is it actually safe? How come we can find room for 8’ parking lanes and even turning lanes for vehicles, but can’t find a couple extra feet for wider bike paths or even put up protection around them? The honest nature of this street is that it is designed to be used primarily by cars, but it technically has bike lanes, so check that box off the list of requirements. “Complete street” achieved! One last question for you to consider here, would you feel comfortable letting your child bike to and from the Woodman Park Elementary School on Silver Street with these bike lanes? If not, then the street is falling short of our stated goals.

Complete Streets Misses the Point

I want to like “complete streets” as a goal to strive for, even if we miss the moon we land among the stars and all that jazz. However, I think that the focus of the “complete streets” policy assumes that the only value to consider for a street is in its ability to transport people from point A to point B. Streets should be more than that and we should expect more than that from them.

Strong Towns makes a distinction between roads and streets, and designates roads as purely for transportation. For a road, the entire value is reducing travel time, making it faster to get to places. Streets on the other hand, are the places we are trying to arrive at. There are many functions of a street, but one of the main ones is to be a place for its residents to be. The nature of the street itself is its own environment to surround yourself in and the idea of changing it to be merely for transportation would lose its identity. Lets not mix these two values, lest we end up in stroad territory.

What I think we actually want is for our streets to belong to us, not traffic. To be a gathering place for the community, not a thoroughfare. When we stop to think of our streets in this way, we can see just how far off the mark the “complete streets” mindset really is. It doesn’t make a distinction between roads and streets and is still trying to apply both definitions at once. Lets focus on making our streets into places we want to be at and I believe that the end result will feel more complete.

Conclusion

Cities are still learning how to recover from the 20th century invasion of cars onto their streets and I do genuinely think that the concept of “complete streets” is at least an acknowledgement that something is wrong with the current approach. The Silver Street project might not have given us comfortable bike lanes, but there are some genuinely good improvements that have us moving in a better direction. Though, I do think cities are continuing to prioritize traffic speed above safety and we are going to keep falling short of our safety goals until we deal with that reality.