Redesigning Our City's Streets
Should Cleveland Implement Standardized Street Designs? The answer to this question depends on how much you think road safety is a priority; my answer is yes. While there are a variety of street widths in Cleveland, there are certainly ways in which we can standardize designs based on the right-of-way width. For example, residential streets are generally narrow, while commercial streets are usually the widest. As such, it would be possible to standardize the number of lanes and bike/pedestrian amenities for each street width. From an efficiency perspective, this significantly simplifies the way in which street designs are implemented. In this post, I’ve created a few examples of standard street cross-sections that provide space for multi-modal transportation and also allow for increased safety. The widths I have chosen here are 50, 60, 80, and 100 feet. Of course, there are many widths in the City of Cleveland that are not represented here, so minor modifications could be made to fit
