The Board of Supervisors yesterday voted unanimously to establish the National Association of City Transportation Officials' Urban Street and Urban Bikeway Design Guides as official policy for all city agencies, as proposed by Supervisor Scott Wiener.
"Safe and livable streets start with smart street design reflecting the needs of all users," Wiener said in a statement. "Safe streets and livable neighborhoods require the three ‘e’s -- education, enforcement and engineering. Importing NACTO’s urban design policy will guide us to deliver on that third e -- engineering -- by ensuring we design streets for all users, including not just cars but also pedestrians, transit riders, and cyclists. For San Francisco to have a more sustainable future, we need an environment that encourages and allows people to safely and enjoyably walk, bike, and use transit, in addition to driving."
"Engineering is the most important because it naturally educates every user of the street," said Walk SF Executive Director Nicole Schneider, applauding the adoption at a hearing on Monday.
At yesterday's board meeting, Wiener said adopting the guides is "what we should've done a long time ago." The SFMTA already adopted the NACTO guides in January, but other city agencies that play a role in street design will now be able to rely on the latest American engineering standards for city planners to use in building people-friendly streets.
The NACTO guides "give us the toolbox and the tactics to make streets safer, more livable, and more economically vibrant," said Darby Watson, section leader for the SFMTA's Livable Streets subdivision, at Monday's hearing. "Both guides have been fully vetted through a peer-to-peer working group of city engineers and planners sharing and developing these guidelines specific to urban places."
A press release from Wiener's office noted that "one of the NACTO guidelines adopted includes the policy that individual lane widths on most streets not exceed 10 feet." As walkable urban design luminary Jeff Speck wrote on CityLab this week, wider lanes encourage drivers to speed and make streets more dangerous.
"While most existing lanes in San Francisco are 10 feet or less," Wiener's press release said, "certain departments recently attempted to require that streets approved for the Candlestick and Hunters Point Shipyard be widened to include travel lanes that were 13 feet wide." The leading "certain department" pushing wider streets in that development area has been the SF Fire Department.
In two weeks, the NACTO Designing Cities Conference will be hosted in San Francisco, from October 22 to 25. SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin is currently the president of NACTO.
