(2 of 3)
Traffic controls, such as speed limits or one-way streets, have only a limited effect. They do not change the fact that, seen through the windshield, the typical residential street looks like an inviting, concrete race track. Rows of parked cars on both sides become walls that seem to protect the driver from any interference. Yet oncoming cars on cross streets are difficult, if not impossible, to see, and the clear track ahead dulls a driver's awareness that a child chasing a ball may dart out at any moment from the barriers of pain ted steel.*
At the same time, those walls of parked cars hem in pedestrians, depriving them of living space and blurring the distinction between a street and a road. Explains Architecture Historian James Marston Fitch, who taught at Columbia for 30 years: "The road is a means of moving people and goods from where they are to where they want to get to; but a street is for people who are already where they want to be."
The new effort to sort out the two, tame automobiles in residential areas and restore city streets as a place where children can play, old folks can sit, joggers can jog and friends and lovers can meet, began in 1976 in Delft, Holland. "We were trying to stop child murder," says Dutch City Planner Thijs de Jong.
Dutch urban designers, like De Jong, have been trying to turn traffic control devices into positive forces for enhancing the streetscape, adding a new dimension to the fashionable term livability. They have made the street a social space, a kind of outdoor living room which invites spontaneous interaction between neighbors, particularly children and the old.
In deploring crowded cities and their lack of open space, planners have overlooked for decades this notion of returning the streets to a variety of human uses. The now no-longer modern movement in architecture and city planning attempted to resolve the conflict between cars and people by abolishing the street altogether. The modern ideal was Le Corbusier's dream of The Radiant City, which consisted of skyscrapers spaced far apart in a huge park, pierced by superhighways. The trouble was, of course, that the park too easily turned into a parking lot. The concept, which guided much urban renewal in the United States during the 1960s, had a deadening effect on city life.
The Delft system is changing that approach. To achieve peaceful coexistence between cars and people, the Dutch are rearranging conventional streets into sidewalkless Woonerven. The entrances to streets are necked-down to one lane to slow down autos; that lane is then broken up with trees, planters, play equipment, benches and flower beds. Cars are parked diagonally in small groups on alternate sides of the street, so that moving vehicles have to slalom around them. Intersections are marked by islands of greenery or with gradually raised crosswalks.
Special care is taken to placate motorists. Woonerf designers oppose the American torture of bumps and humps to slow down autos, relying instead on an environment in which the driver feels like a privileged guest who must mind his manners. "We don't want to irritate people in cars," says Planner De Jong.