front cover of Global Street Design Guide
Global Street Design Guide
Global Designing Cities Initiative
Island Press, 2016
Each year, 1.2 million people die from traffic fatalities, highlighting the need to design streets that offer safe and enticing travel choices for all people. Cities around the world are facing the same challenges as cities in the US, and many of these problems are rooted in outdated codes and standards.
 
The Global Street Design Guide is a timely resource that sets a global baseline for designing streets and public spaces and redefines the role of streets in a rapidly urbanizing world. The guide will broaden how to measure the success of urban streets to include: access, safety, mobility for all users, environmental quality, economic benefit, public health, and overall quality of life. The first-ever worldwide standards for designing city streets and prioritizing safety, pedestrians, transit, and sustainable mobility are presented in the guide. Participating experts from global cities have helped to develop the principles that organize the guide. The Global Street Design Guide builds off the successful tools and tactics defined in NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide while addressing a variety of street typologies and design elements found in various contexts around the world.
 
This innovative guide will inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities to realize the potential in their public space networks. It will help cities unlock the potential of streets as safe, accessible, and economically sustainable places.

Example cities include: Bangalore, India; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Paris, France; Copenhagen, Denmark; Seoul, Korea; Medellin, Colombia; Toronto, Canada; Istanbul, Turkey; Auckland, New Zealand; Melbourne, Australia; New York, USA; and San Francisco, USA.
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front cover of The Insecure City
The Insecure City
Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut
Monroe, Kristin V
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil and regional war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent political and economic landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape.
 
While living in Beirut, Kristin Monroe conducted interviews with a diverse group of residents of the city. She found that when people spoke about getting around in Beirut, they were also expressing larger concerns about social, political, and economic life. It was not only violence that threatened Beirut’s ordinary residents, but also class dynamics that made life even more precarious. For instance, the installation of checkpoints and the rerouting of traffic—set up for the security of the elite—forced the less fortunate to alter their lives in ways that made them more at risk. Similarly, the ability to pass through security blockades often had to do with an individual’s visible markers of class, such as clothing, hairstyle, and type of car. Monroe examines how understandings and practices of spatial mobility in the city reflect social differences, and how such experiences led residents to be bitterly critical of their government.
 
 
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front cover of Transit Street Design Guide
Transit Street Design Guide
National Association of City Transportation Officials
Island Press, 2016
Transit and cities grow together. As cities work to become more compact, sustainable, and healthy, their work is paying dividends: in 2014, Americans took 10.8 billion trips on public transit, the highest since the dawn of the highway era. But most of these trips are on streets that were designed to move private cars, with transit as an afterthought. The NACTO Transit Street Design Guide places transit where it belongs, at the heart of street design. The guide shows how streets of every size can be redesigned to create great transit streets, supporting great neighborhoods and downtowns.
 
The Transit Street Design Guide is a well-illustrated, detailed introduction to designing streets for high-quality transit, from local buses to BRT, from streetcars to light rail. Drawing on the expertise of a peer network and case studies from across North America, the guide provides a much-needed link between transit planning, transportation engineering, and street design. The Transit Street Design Guide presents a new set of core principles, street typologies, and design strategies that shift the paradigm for streets, from merely accommodating service to actively prioritizing great transit. The book expands on the transit information in the acclaimed Urban Street Design Guide, with sections on comprehensive transit street design, lane design and materials, stations and stops, intersection strategies, and city transit networks. It also details performance measures and outlines how to make the case for great transit street design in cities.
 
The guide is built on simple math: allocating scarce space to transit instead of private automobiles greatly expands the number of people a street can move. Street design and decisions made by cities, from how to time signals to where bus stops are placed, can dramatically change how transit works and how people use it.
 
The Transit Street Design Guide is a vital resource for every transportation planner, transit operations planner, and city traffic engineer working on making streets that move more people more efficiently and affordably.
            
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front cover of Urban Street Design Guide
Urban Street Design Guide
National Association of City Transportation Officials
Island Press, 2013
The NACTO Urban Street Design Guide shows how streets of every size can be reimagined and reoriented to prioritize safe driving and transit, biking, walking, and public activity.  Unlike older, more conservative engineering manuals, this design guide emphasizes the core principle that urban streets are public places and have a larger role to play in communities than solely being conduits for traffic. 

The well-illustrated guide offers blueprints of street design from multiple perspectives, from the bird’s eye view to granular details. Case studies from around the country clearly show how to implement best practices, as well as provide guidance for customizing design applications to a city’s unique needs.  Urban Street Design Guide outlines five goals and tenets of world-class street design:

•    Streets are public spaces. Streets play a much larger role in the public life of cities and communities than just thoroughfares for traffic.
•    Great streets are great for business. Well-designed streets generate higher revenues for businesses and higher values for homeowners.
•    Design for safety. Traffic engineers can and should design streets where people walking, parking, shopping, bicycling, working, and driving can cross paths safely.
•    Streets can be changed. Transportation engineers can work flexibly within the building envelope of a street. Many city streets were created in a different era and need to be reconfigured to meet new needs.
•    Act now! Implement projects quickly using temporary materials to help inform public decision making.

Elaborating on these fundamental principles, the guide offers substantive direction for cities seeking to improve street design to create more inclusive, multi-modal urban environments.  It is an exceptional resource for redesigning streets to serve the needs of 21st century cities, whose residents and visitors demand a variety of transportation options, safer streets, and vibrant community life.

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front cover of Urban Street Stormwater Guide
Urban Street Stormwater Guide
National Association of City Transportation Officials
Island Press, 2017
Streets make up more than 80 percent of all public space in cities, yet street space is often underutilized or disproportionately allocated to the movement of private motor vehicles. Excess impervious surface contributes to stormwater runoff, posing a threat to the environment and human health, and often overwhelming sewer systems. This excess asphalt also poses a threat to public safety, encouraging faster speeds and dangerous conditions for people walking and biking. 

The Urban Street Stormwater Guide begins from the principle that street design can support—or degrade—the urban area’s overall environmental health. By incorporating Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) into the right-of-way, cities can manage stormwater and reap the public health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits of street trees, planters, and greenery in the public realm. With thoughtful design, GSI can bolster strategies to provide a safe and pleasant walking and biking experience, efficient and reliable transit service, and safer streets for all users.

Building on the successful NACTO urban street guides, the Urban Street Stormwater Guide provides the best practices for the design of GSI along transportation corridors. The authors consider context-sensitive design elements related to street design, character and use, zoning, posted speed, traffic volumes, and impacts to non-motorized and vehicular access. The Guide documents and synthesizes current practices being developed by individual agencies and recommends design guidance for implementation, as well as explores innovative new strategies being tested in cities nationwide. The guidance will focus on providing safe, functioning and maintainable infrastructure that meets the unique needs and requirements of the transportation corridors and its various uses and users.

The state-of-the-art solutions in this guide will assist urban planners and designers, transportation engineers, city officials, ecologists, public works officials, and others interested in the role of the built urban landscape in protecting the climate, water quality, and natural environment.
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