MADISON, Wis. — Fewer crashes on all Madison streets is just one of the many goals of the city’s new Complete Green Streets Guide, which the Plan Commission unanimously approved Monday night.
“Hopefully this will be a kind of policy document that changes how we reconstruct streets,” said Madison’s director of transportation Tom Lynch.
Monday night, the Plan Commission met to approve a Complete Green Streets policy, which is essentially a formatting guideline for the city’s future road designs. Those policies essentially shift priorities for infrastructure to be more inclusive for all travelers, not just those with cars.
“For, really, I’m going to say 80 years, we’ve really been focused on arterials, collectors, and local streets and how they move cars,” Lynch said. “And that’s really reflected in our general ordinances too. So what Complete Green Streets does is it moves away from these arterial, collector classifications from ‘how many cars can we move?’ to ‘how many people can we move and what are the different ways we can move them?’”
One of the ways to move toward inclusive street design is by prioritizing safety for pedestrians during the construction and design process so that roads are built right the first time, not after multiple concerned citizen reports.
“Over time, we’ve moved from this narrow street that we’re all familiar with in our older neighborhoods, to these much wider streets that provide a lot more pavement and have a lot more focus on people in automobiles, the storage of automobiles,” said Madison pedestrian bicycle administrator Renee Callaway. “Even though we’re a city that’s known for complete streets and being bike and pedestrian-friendly, this has still happened here in Madison.”
The other part of this plan is to shift median landscape design to a medium or high priority, pushing developers to consider foliage when designing roads.
While the Complete Green Street Policy outlines priorities and goals, there is no one design of a complete street. Each street design will be different in that it’ll consider the specific context of the community, neighborhood, and street. Still, all designs will fall under one canopy plan of safety, equity, and reliability when traveling around the city we all love.
To see the full Green Streets Guide, click or tap here.
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