The Cost of Bad Street Design

An AI narration of the article 'The Cost of Bad Street Design' by Jake Desyllas.

In this article, Jake Desyllas examines the hidden costs of a design ideology that came to dominate twentieth-century traffic planning: the idea that pedestrians and vehicles must be physically segregated, with streets re-engineered as conduits for through traffic. Drawing on his work in a pedestrian movement consultancy, he traces the lineage from Herbert Alker Tripp's 1940s advocacy of "fencing off the perils" through the influential 1963 Buchanan report, and shows how the resulting guard-rails, underpasses and signalised crossings produce the opposite of what they promise. The casualties are not only the obvious ones — dislocated communities, dying high streets, declining walking, rising obesity — but the loss of streets themselves as places where everyday life happens. An invitation to question whether the segregated, single-use street is really the only way.

Chapters:

0:00 Title
0:05 Introduction
3:03 The consequences of bad street design
4:31 Planning for traffic
8:29 Reshaping our cities
12:44 Dangerous streets
17:16 The death of walking
22:04 Alternative solutions
25:11 Conclusion

First published in 2006 by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.