Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared on Building Optimism and is republished with permission.
Setting goals is an important part of life, and I don’t intend to neglect the big stuff. This year, my goal is to get urbanists, and ideally the broader public, to understand one key idea about urban design: Right of Ways are the single most influential factor in how people experience the built environment.
A Right of Way is the technical term for the space between two property lines facing each other on a block. Specifically, it includes the roadway, sidewalks, public lawns, and sometimes even a portion of the private front lawn for each parcel. We’re going to stretch this definition to mean the entire area between two building faces. While it might be simpler to say street width, this term neither includes sidewalks nor front setbacks, so it falls a bit short for our purposes, especially in America where front lawns are ubiquitous.
So, some quick guiding definitions:
Street Width: curb to curb.
Right of Way: building face to building face.
Why are Right of Ways the most important factor in creating good cities? Because they frame our entire sense of place. Everything else — architecture, parks, museums, spontaneous outdoor concerts, Turkish barber shops—is subject to the defining lines of domain and boundary. While they may go unheralded, without a stage, actors cannot perform. So too with the ballet of street life: Right of Ways are the foundations from which everything else springs forth.
That’s why it’s crucial to get them right — and all the more curious that so little attention has been paid to them.
When a ROW is too wide, we feel small and exposed. These are not good feelings. But making the right of way too narrow is also a mistake, as it can induce claustrophobia.
More practically, tighter spaces more easily wear the scars of poor civic management: when street cleaning is neglected, trash piles up, and smells of unknown (and un-want-to-knowable) origin waft far closer than the guidelines of comfort would advise.
In North America, oversized Right of Ways are endemic, so we’ll mostly focus on narrowing them in this piece. Doing so accomplishes a few important things:
- Cars going too fast? Bring the lanes in and watch speeding evaporate. Drivers only go as fast as they feel is safe, regardless of what speed limits prescribe. We don’t need numbers printed on aluminum to tell us we can go faster on a highway than a tight, winding, country lane.
- Town feel boring? When most of the area is dedicated to wide streets and unused lawns, there’s little room for anything else. It’s no surprise that things get quiet, only to be punctuated by the shrill blasts of horns and quaking bursts of revving engines, the only noises these roads really invite. Cities aren’t loud; cars are.
- Streets too hot in the summer? All that asphalt acts as a magnet for sunlight, trapping heat and raising temperatures considerably. This is known as the urban heat island effect, an oppressive phenomena felt acutely in sun belt metros, where vast paved areas bake passersby in open-air ovens. Though I’m a devoted evangelist for street trees, planting will prove mostly futile if thousands of square feet of roadway remain unshaded. Medians of trees can help mitigate this effect, but not fully.
Most critically, reducing Right of Ways provides a sense of enclosure. What exactly does this mean? It’s principally about scale and pleasantness. Rather than the vulnerating nature of wide Right of Ways, properly enclosed places make us feel comfortable, like we’re gently being hugged. By moving from vast to moderate, streets transform from mean bits of infrastructure into outdoor rooms that offer shelter, promote commerce, and shape experience.
People are more likely to walk down a lane, or pop into a shop, if the way feels appropriately scaled for pedestrians. Moments of serendipity rarely happen on 6-lane arterials at the town’s periphery because so few want to walk there (if there’s even anywhere to go). But they’re almost guaranteed to happen on the vibrant passageways of historic cores that invite people in.
Why do we gravitate towards enclosed areas? It’s an evolutionary imperative. On the open savannas, our ancestors had much to be concerned about. A lion here, a pack of wolves there, another tribe hiding just around the bend. To be out in the open was to be a target, with little recourse for quick protection. Though we’re (mostly) shielded from the dangers our forebears faced, that primal response hasn’t left us.
As a quick exercise to illustrate this principle, imagine you have the first choice of seats in an open restaurant. Where would you sit? For nearly everyone, the answer is easy: the booth in the corner with your back to the wall, facing the entrance. We’re hard wired to scan for movement in front of us, without risk something coming up from behind. And we probably don’t want to sit with the people who choose the middle of the room with their back to the door — for more reasons than one.
As humans, we’re thigmotactic beings; we like to hug the edges and walls of rooms, buildings, streets, and plazas. Urban planner Jan Gehl famously observed this instinct in Italian piazzas, and later in cities around the world. In what’s come to be known as the edge effect, Gehl consistently recorded people clustering along the periphery of public places. In study after study, people rarely stand (or sit, where chairs/benches/ledges exist) in open, unprotected areas. We stick close to the edges because our brains sense protection, our bodies feel comfort, and our minds find they’re attractive.
Contrast this with the grim expanse of unprotected squares and wide streets in Brasilia where there is no defensibility, no stimulation, and no comfort.
We can, and should, apply these observations from good park and plaza design to the roads themselves. While it’s easy to understand how we might go about this on a High Street, I think many urbanists overlook the practicability and salience of applying the same principles in single family neighborhoods. The belief that low-rise (and even functionally mono-use) areas are incompatible with great urbanism is categorically false. Many of the most charming streets in the world, from Marbella and Bergen to Osaka, are single family in nature.
Recent North American planned suburbs distort our sense of what’s possible, but we have our own wonderful precedent to look to: Charleston, Vieux-Quebec, Philadelphia, and Newport, to name a few. So long as there’s a uniform street wall, a canopy of trees, and Right of Ways no greater than 60 feet for non-primary streets (ideally 20–40 feet, to preserve a sense of human -scale), any single family neighborhood street can become exemplary.
Attractive architecture doubtless does much in framing our conception of these places, but again, only because of the stage ROWs provide. Even better if there’s a terminating sightline.
This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics, commerce, cognitive security, or primal response (though they should be enough!). Narrower Right of Ways are also better for the fiscal health of cities.
By reducing the area that departments of public works and transportation need to maintain, cities can realize significant cost savings. There are far fewer potholes to fill, and far less surface area to repave, on a street measuring 20 feet curb to curb than 100. While this will reduce traffic volumes, core streets should be optimized for people, not cars.
On the other side of the ledger, tax revenues are very often higher in places with greater enclosure because they attract more people and cluster productive uses closer together. Sales tax receipts rise, property values increase, and vibrancy compounds. For municipalities so inclined, this can be leveraged into a calculated virtuous cycle:
Step 1) Reinvest tax revenues into the quality of place.
Step 2) Grow slowly out from the nucleus, concentrating efforts. Do not be deterred by the many worthy competing interests around the city; be firm in this step. While this is extraordinarily difficult politically, it will pay off in the long term as a more desirable and productive core will deliver far more benefits than sporadic, piecemeal interventions whose impact is dilluted.
Step 3) Watch appraisals and taxes rise further still. Repeat Step 1.
When times get good, public officials must not get decadent, nor forget what brought them to their prosperous state. Reinvestment into place must remain the city’s primary focus, else it risks losing all progress.
So, what can cities that aren’t blessed with cores of narrow streets do to kickstart this cycle? One of the more hopeful case studies comes from Lancaster, California — a decidedly sprawling, car-oriented community.
Redesigned from a five-lane expanse of asphalt to a green boulevard in 2010, the city’s main thoroughfare was completely transformed in a matter of only 8 months — far less time than it takes for small planning applications to even be approved elsewhere in the state!
At a cost of just $11.5 million, the intervention generated more than $273 million in economic output in its first decade. Across nine blocks in the city’s core, 50 new businesses, a park, and a museum have opened. Quoting from a Public Square article on the transformation:
“Lancaster BLVD amounts to far more than a street redesign, as the impact has reverberated throughout the corridor. More than 800 permanent jobs were created, in addition to 1,100 temporary construction jobs during the Great Recession. Just over 800 housing units have been built or rehabilitated; more 116,000 square feet of commercial space has been constructed or renovated. Tax revenue from downtown is up 96 percent compared to the same period in 2007, the year before revitalization efforts began.”
These results are simply extraordinary. Though the data speaks for itself, I’ll interrupt to ask one question: If a city can be so radically transformed through a targeted intervention spanning just nine linear blocks, what other wonders might be possible at a broader scale, across the country? How much human flourishing (and economic productivity) are we leaving on the table?
The Lancaster evolution is part of a broader school of interventions known as road diets. A road diet does exactly what the name implies: it slims down the space dedicated to cars and reallocates it to other uses, like bus and bike lanes, pedestrian islands, curb bump-outs, wider sidewalks, and planted medians, all in an effort to improve safety and accessibility for everyone, not just cars.
While I’m in favor of road diets as an improvement over the status quo, they don’t go far enough, because they don’t fully address the problems of enclosure and scale. A Right of Way 100 feet wide bordered by structures 25 feet tall has a 1:4 ratio of building height to street width. At the risk of being overly technical, my sense is that anything much above 1:2.5 loses it’s sense of enclosure.
Conversely, if the ratio flips too far in the other direction, things can become uncomfortable quickly. Some readers may be picturing the infamous Kowloon Walled City, but there are many other places that have surprisingly high building height to street width ratios. Genoa’s famous narrow stepped lanes, called Carrugi, were designed to protect from the sun, wind, and even pirates. What better way to defend from invaders than tight spaces that are easily defensible? Primal city building in full effect!
Modern denizens and visitors may be less charmed by the narrowest of these streets, however. Some paths are less than two feet wide! Elsewhere in the historic core, many lanes are just 6-8 feet wide, giving building height to street width ratios of 8:1 to 10:1. Even along the most generous streets, the ratio is still greater than 1:1 in favor of building height—unparalleled in our contemporary development patterns.
Despite having a fairly wide Right of Way (~100 feet), Las Ramblas in Barcelona is widely regarded as one of the best pedestrian promenades in the world. Its ratio ranges from 1:2 to 1:1.25. With a nearly continuous tree canopy, commercial kiosks, intricate tiling and mosaics underfoot, masterful urban furniture, and beautiful architecture, it’s no surprise the street is one of Europe’s top tourist destinations.
For cities that want to get truly ambitious, might I suggest something more revolutionary: build structures in the middle of wide ROWs —it’s likely the best way to save our cities from car dependency and the immiserating conditions that come with it.
While there are no panaceas in city building, right-sizing Right of Ways is as close as we can get. To make any city better, start with the streets. And if we could pair this “Right of Way First” policy with just three other urban design principles to move closer to an ideal urban form in four steps or less, they would be:
- Narrower lots
- Allow mixed-use by right
- Plant, pot, and nurture as much greenery as your local arborist deems responsible. And then double it.
But remember, the stage comes first. Right of Ways are the single biggest determinant in whether a city feels comfortable or not. We must rectify their dramatically underestimated role in the promotion of overall civic prosperity. Few other land use regulations have so many second, third, and nth-order effects. For these reasons, and all the others mentioned above, it’s crucial that North American cities pay careful attention them.
If we get the Right of Way right, almost everything else has a chance to go right, too.
