#Unwalkable community design update#

Adding to the list of pop-up street designs, GDCI has also implemented three pop-up plazas in Bogota with Bloomberg Associates, and worked with a number of local non-profits and the local BIGRS team to implement a one-day redesign of a busy roundabout with speeding vehicles into a pedestrian haven by adding 850sm of public space. Due to the success of this one-day event, a plan has been developed to add paint and planters and then make the transformation permanent by the end of the year. In Addis Ababa, as part of a capacity building exercise to train 120 professionals and academics in June of this year, the LeGare intersection was transformed from a traffic free-for-all into a pedestrian-friendly crossing using only road cones and chalk, reducing crossing distances from 50m to as short as 6m, increasing space for pedestrians to wait safely. Under the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety, the GDCI team has already started putting many of the guide’s designs into practice with temporary and interim design projects in three cities.

#Unwalkable community design update#

It is no longer a question of engineering or innovation but of the imagination and will needed to update city streets for a new age.” “The tested and proven designs in these pages can be adapted to city streets around the world to support local economies and make them safer for everyone, no matter how they get around. “When you put people first on a street, you get streets that work for all, and they’re worth fighting for,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, former New York City DOT Commissioner, a founding principal at Bloomberg Associates, and Chair at NACTO-GDCI. The Global Street Design Guide flips this standard, prioritizing people and transit, and adapting our streets to meet their needs and not the needs of cars. Traditional street design places cars at the top of the pyramid, prioritizing them over every other mode of transportation and forcing pedestrians, bicyclists and buses to jockey dangerously for space among the world’s one billion cars.

This document is the first-ever blueprint for cities to reclaim streets from cars, and a radical rethinking of who streets should be designed to serve. Janette Sadik-Khan and Skye Duncan, the director of the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI), recently launched the Global Street Design Guide at the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador. The answer starts with something as simple as how we design our city streets. The corollary horror of this sad statistic-which totals 1.25 million road deaths worldwide a year-is that virtually each one of these deaths is preventable. Many others will be caused by people speeding, driving drunk or distractedly. Some will be pedestrians crossing the street on their way to school or work. Not from heart attacks or handgun violence, but in vehicle crashes around the world. In the time it takes you to read this post, five people will die.