Urban Street Speed Related to Width and Functional Class

Abstract

In recent years, land development professionals from various disciplines have advocated narrowing city streets as a means to slow speeds and improve the urban environment. This paper reports the findings of a study of relationships among urban street function (i.e., arterial versus local traffic), width, and resulting speed. Crash data for the roadways studied also were considered. The objective was to determine if the wider streets did in fact have more objectionable traits (e.g., higher speeds or crash rates) than did the narrower streets, taking street function into account. Six two-lane streets in a small city were considered; the predominate focus of the study was an old neighborhood with streets in a grid layout. The findings suggest that street width may play a small role in vehicle speed, but other factors such as trip function may be more significant determinants of the average and 85th percentile through vehicle speeds. From this study, one also can infer the need to segregate traits of through vehicles from local vehicles when collecting speed data for the purpose of contrasting the behaviors on various streets.