The needs of our communities evolve over time, and our street design should, too. That’s the idea behind ‘rightsizing streets’ – reconfiguring the layout of our streets to better serve the people who use them, whether they’re commuters driving, shoppers walking, or children bicycling. Across the country, communities large and small are achieving impressive safety, mobility, and community outcomes by implementing such reconfigurations. Project for Public Spaces created this rightsizing resource to highlight the accomplishments of these communities and share best practices. Our transportation staff can advise stakeholders and decision-makers, skillfully facilitate a rightsizing process, and adeptly produce rightsized designs for agencies and community groups.
Our Rightsizing Streets Guide aims to help planners and community members update their streets to make them ‘right’ for their context. The centerpiece of the guide is a set of ten rightsizing case studies that highlight impressive outcomes using before and after data on mobility, crashes, and other parameters. These are just a few of the projects that have been built and many more are being planned all over the country. Our glossary of common rightsizing techniques and our best practices guide to street selection criteria and before and after measurements can help facilitate similar changes in your community.
Explore the Site, Help It Grow
PPS hopes that this will be the beginning of a larger set of resources with information on more projects that can lead to Livability and Streets as Places. We want this to be a project created by and useful to everyone—professionals, community members and advocates alike. We don’t want this resource to be static as of January 2013; we invite any and all of you to submit additional rightsizing case studies so that we can continually expand our highlighted range of solutions for our streets.