TRANSPORTATION NETWORKING& DESIGN

Transportation Networking & Design

We are leaders in fundamentally reforming the design of thoroughfares and patterns of transportation networks. We design street sections and streetscapes, with their multi-layered functions and users, as well as the overall web of streets in urban and rural contexts. We work hand in hand with those traffic engineers and transportation planners who recognize the community benefits of a fine-grained network of a full range of thoroughfare types, including lanes, alleys, queuing streets, full streets, avenues, boulevards, and parkways.

We take the approach that all thoroughfares are first and foremost "civic places" within a broader urban to the rural context. As such, they are the foundation of urbanism, not merely pipes for pumping traffic.

Often our work in reforming suburbs and redeveloping commercial strips involves infiltrating the limited arterial, collector, and local street hierarchy of modern traffic engineering by infilling superblocks with new local streets and establishing multiple parallel streets. A network of multiple parallel streets provides greater choice and enables all streets to remain narrower and more amenable to their urban contexts.

We use various metrics for determining the appropriate frequency of streets in a network, such as maximum block size, or the number of intersections per land area. The frequency of intersections and limited size of blocks has a direct corollary with the quality and convenience of the pedestrian realm.