Bicycles and Pedestrians

Complete Streets (www.completestreets.org)

Making streets accessible for everyone to use safely and conveniently, users include motorists, transit riders, bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities. By providing for these diverse users, complete streets can improve safety and health.

Florida State Statute reads: “Bicycle and pedestrian ways shall be established in conjunction with the construction, reconstruction or other change of any state transportation facility and special emphasis shall be given to projects in or within 1 mile of an urban area.”

City of Orlando’s practice is to include bike lanes, sidewalks and/or parallel multi-use paths whenever building new roads and adding bike lanes through road resurfacing projects. (pdf map)

Road Diets are another piece of the complete street puzzle. In 1996 Dan Burden (http://www.walkable.org/) and Peter Lagerwey introduced to the planning and engineering world the term "Road Diets."

Many hundreds of towns are introducing road diets (any reduction of vehicle lanes). Some of these former 4-5 lane roads are carrying 18-23,000 ADT. Thinner roads in urban spaces are proving to be safer, more economical and a better deal for healthy communities in many applications. Narrower lanes, in the right applications, move traffic slower and better. No capacity is lost, and with lowered speeds, safety is gained. Intersections can be more efficient, since signal cycles can be shortened in many cases.

As a general rule a Lane Diet introduces 10 foot travel lanes, and 9-10 foot storage lanes.
In a local Orlando downtown neighborhood, College Park, Edgewater Drive was put on a “diet” and was reduced from 4 lanes to 3 with bike lanes and streetscape added. The results were quite dramatic, reducing crashes 35 percent and increasing bicycling and walking 23 and 30 percent respectively. The change also helped spur economic development, breathing life into what was a pass through commercial corridor to create a livable community with a sense of place. Walking, bicycling and easy access to transit are all important elements of a livable community, complete streets helps end the inequity of valuing one mode of transport over another and ensures the public right-of-way works for everyone.