Shared Streets (Autoluw) and Space

This post made me want to talk about how we conceive of space. It's about Seattle (and really, Washington State) getting a legal space for shared streets: streets where cars are allowed but must yield to bikes and pedestrians (and bikes must yield to pedestrians as well). This is a situation that's a legal reality already in a number of places (as the post does a good job of illustrating, with images from around the world).

It feels like a logical continuation from talking about competing modes to consider how we think about space in the first place.

1. Shared By Who?

Now, a "shared street" can be conceived of as shared in general: everyone is sharing in this street no matter what mode of transportation they use. 

But that isn't really how we usually think of sharing, even if it might seem ideal. When my two children share, they remain very aware of who the toy belongs to. Even if it's supposed to be a family toy, they know who picked it up first this time, and thus who is "sharing with" and who is "being shared with." That doesn't mean they don't share--but it means there's more to the act of sharing than just communality. It can have a direction.

Are shared streets shared from cars to people or from people to cars (setting bikes aside for a moment)?

Pedestrians get priority here in Canary Wharf, but that's an easy case: it's actually hard to get to this spot by anything other than foot or public transportation.

I expect that here in the US we will think of these as graciously shared by the car, to whom the streets belong as by right. Perhaps it might be more helpful to think of these as pedestrianized spaces that are temporarily shared with cars, though. After all, in the first framing I have to ask a big question: 

2. Who Will Follow The Rules?

Car advocates tend to blame bikes in particular (though also at times pedestrians) for not following the rules. Those crazy bikes, am I right? Always pulling through stop signs.

But by far the most common failure to follow the laws of the road is cars, speeding. 

Good luck with that speed limit, Islington.

I routinely drive over Centennial Bridge, here in the Quad Cities, faster than the posted speed limit, but also much slower than the prevailing speed: it's signed at 30 mph and you still get passed if you go as high as 45 mph. That's a 50% margin. And that's not unusual; apparently traditional practice is to set speed limits based on the idea that 20% of drivers will still be speeding. That's not a recipe for safe streets. 

Our big four-lane streets here in Davenport aren't any better; good luck getting someone to go the speed limit, even near a school (I've been guilty of this myself, so I'm not throwing stones at glass houses here).

And it's worse when we consider the shared streets: a posted speed limit of 10 mph is great in theory but I have my doubts about it being followed in practice. And if cars are going 15, 20, 25 mph, that sharing is going to revert pretty quickly, just like when my eldest asserts that a toy is actually hers. We need to emphasize the idea that this is a pedestrian space first.

3. Consequences and Culture Shifts

Frankly, without real consequences for speeding and other dangerous driving, or really aggressive street redesigns, cars are still going to dominate these spaces in the US because the consequences for going too fast mostly accrue to the pedestrians and bikes, and the benefits to the cars.

Once a space becomes sufficiently pedestrianized, as here in Central London, this flips: someone driving through this crowd is going to get in serious trouble, even if the car isn't hurt the way the people are. 

So shared streets are a great idea--once they come into effect and become normalized.

This street in Haarlem was a lovely place to walk! One lane of cars, only, with people walking across the street as needed, and the post office truck (pictured) holding everyone up because it needed to deliver mail. And the businesses were thriving! But that's post-culture-shift. How do we get here? We have to take first steps, so I think the Seattle initiative is a good one. But as we do, we need to stick to our guns: cars and their drivers need to experience frequent and obvious consequences as they violate the shared space, and we need to build them out very publicly so that everyone knows who is sharing space with who.