About Us

In the spring of 2021, students in the planning capstone studio at CU-Boulder's Program in Environmental Design, were charged to envision a bold future for urban streets. Rather than assuming the traditional car always assumes prerogative in streets, we were challenged to chart alternative futures where varied uses and priorities could take priority--thereby furthering matters of safety, environmental stewardship, accessibility, and placemaking.

The students explored alternative futures by combining the need for new expectations, measures of performance, designs and rationales for change. They received review and inspiration from national experts, including the President of the North American City and Transportation Officials (NACTO)/Executive Director of Denver's Department of Transportation and Infrastructure; see his comments here:

The “play board” for the capstone were streets in and around Boulder and Denver and most of our prescriptions could be easily applied broadly to most urban areas. The collective aim was to heighten society’s understanding for what is possible, how initiatives might be enacted, and how to deepen the evidence that is needed for change. If you have further questions about our work or require additional information, please contact our Professor, Kevin J. Krizek (krizek@colorado.edu).

The core of the efforts centered on a handful of projects where groups of students split into teams, allowing further thinking to come to fruition. The focus of the five projects were:

• SUCCESS. The success of most streets, as gauged by predominant transport practice, is measured by Level of Service: the throughput of standard-sized vehicles given a stretch of street space. What might be new, innovative criteria that could be used to assess the success of innovative streets? What quantitative measures could be offered to cities to allow them to meaningfully measure the success of a street in ways that could replace current and outdated objectives? (e.g., if you were the new city manager and you wanted to see success on this initiative be measured in two years time, what would you measure?).

• WHERE: Where are the streets that would be easiest or most impactful to change and why (e.g., those owned locally, in low-income areas, those where residents are requesting change)? How can various criteria be refined to produce a model or a “proof-of-concept” for further development?

• HUBS: As electrification and modal diversity continues to work through urban transport systems what is the role of streets interacting with new forms of mobility hubs? In the process of street innovation (and transport, more broadly), what is the role of new mobility hubs in any sort of street transformation effort? Leveraging existing data from Denver, this project explores where mobility hubs should be placed to be the most equitable and convenient as well as their future role in these areas. What should these mobility hubs contain? Where should they be placed and why? On what basis?

• SPEED: Given worsening problems with safety and livability, speed of movement on streets needs to be addressed head-on. High speeds on streets create cities with higher crashes and less likelihood of other modes of transportation. Furthermore, speed of travel in street moderates prevailing rhythms of cities and their character. What strategies work to decrease the speed of vehicles on streets (e.g., regulation vs design), what are the costs of different strategies, and what factors affect the efficacy of such interventions?

• LIMBO: Given that ~roughly ¾ of streets in cities generally carry low volume and have low(er) speed traffic, what opportunities are there in street design that could be more universal in character—one that might embody the combination of the features of local, minor collector, and major collector streets. What are the possibilities and challenges involved, for managing streets in ways that balance place with slower movement? What might be prevailing design themes?

Our purview in this application is not every road in US cities. We’ve honed our work to include those streets that consume most of the center-lane miles in urban areas: minor arterials, major collectors, minor collectors and local (neighborhood) streets. According to the functional classification scheme, this rules out highways or major arterials, which are mostly outside the realm of our primary concern.