Woonerven

Woonerf is a Dutch word that translates roughly as "street for living," and refers to Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman's innovative and increasingly popular contribution to urban design: a streetscape stripped of lane markers, curbs, sidewalks, zebra crossings and other obvious boundaries denoting spaces meant for single forms of transportation. While at first blush such an experiment would seem to make the street more dangerous for its users, the woonerf actually ensures increased safety for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike, because of how the ambiguous design mixes otherwise discrete user groups. Below, a sign alerting approaching motorists of a woonerf ahead.

The hybrid space of the woonerf is governed by intuition and mutual respect. The only rule of the woonerf is that there aren't really any rules, beyond using common sense to "read" the street:

The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road with slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in fostering better urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to Belgium, France, Denmark and Germany...."What the early woonerf principles realized," says Hamilton-Baillie, "was that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer they become. So once you drive people off the street, they become less safe."

Monderman demonstrates by striding into the middle of a street in Drachten, Holland:

When Mr. Monderman, a traffic engineer and the intersection's proud designer, deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or shouted rude words out of the window. "Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."

The configuration of the "living street," with paving patterns, subtle grade changes, landscaping elements, and other suggestive--but not explicit--guides for movement, compels participation in "psychological traffic calming":

Without any clear right-of-way, so the logic goes, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed. "The whole notion behind psychological traffic calming is to give drivers responsibility for the speed they choose," said Andrew Parkes, a research scientist at the U.K.-based Transport Research Laboratory (TRL). Last year, TRL published the results of a four-year study on the new traffic safety approach. In simulator trials, researchers replaced road signs and white lane dividers with a variety of urban design elements: red bricks were used to make the road narrower, and trees, shrubs and street furniture were placed directly in the right of way. According to Parkes, traffic speeds fell by up to 8 miles per hour, and the speeds of faster drivers by up to 12 mph. The reasons are both counterintuitive and compelling, he said. "What we've been trying to do is make the roadway seem more risky by taking out the stripe of paint ... and by making the distinction between space reserved for cars and space for pedestrians less explicit," said Parkes. "Then the driver makes his own choice to slow down, rather than just being instructed to slow down in what looks like a safe environment." Psychological traffic calming has the added advantage of being more aesthetically pleasing than a slew of road signs and traffic lights, Parkes noted.

NPR's Talk of the Nation featured a discussion on woonerven/"shared spaces" recently, including an interview with Ian Lockwood of Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, and Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the Bristol, UK-based urban designer quoted above, whose office has developed many English "living streets." Listen.

Stateside, check out the design of a "festival street" in Oregon, and another in Seattle, where designers redesigned a stretch of that city's Terry Avenue, overcoming the challenge of making a woonerf ADA-compliant:

The modified Terry Avenue North guidelines were adopted into Seattle’s design manual last year and will be implemented as development occurs. Two key principles guided the design team: visual continuity linking pedestrian and car zones, and a lateral rather than linear approach to how people will use the street. “You’re not walking along a channelized conduit for people alongside a channelized conduit for vehicles,” says landscape architect Shannon Nichol, founding partner of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and a consultant on Terry Avenue North. “You’re walking through a series of spaces that extend across the whole width of the street.”

Continuous brick or concrete pavers will help define the entire street as pedestrian friendly. Instead of the kinds of evenly spaced trees that traditionally line streets (Bain calls them “lollipop trees”), stand-alone native canopy trees such as Douglas fir and western red cedar will act as grand focal points. Angled parking, creeping ground cover, and the streetcar will reinforce an atmosphere of eclectic disorder. In keeping with a traditional woonerf, Terry Avenue won’t have any traffic lights. But ADA regulations requiring separation between car-free and car-accessible zones did force a major concession: curbs and tactile warning strips for the visually impaired had to be added. “This runs absolutely contrary to having a seamless plane of undifferentiated material,” Bicknell says, adding that the unusual collaboration between the project’s traffic engineers and urban designers did mitigate some of the ADA’s impact. The final guidelines include a low two-inch curb along the east side of the street and white warning strips instead of the standard bright yellow.

(To me, woonerf design seems to open a world of possibility--how can "street" be redefined?--which in turn reminds me of projects like this.)

On a note somewhat related to the flexibility of the streetscape, I'll mention the "most high-tech urinal in the world," which rises out of the street during the evening and disappears in the morning (via remote control), to accommodate those who would otherwise be urinating on your doorstep.