Opinion piece by Amy Burbidge, Head of Master Development & Design, Homes England

Streets are really important. Once streets are laid out, their pattern lasts a very long time – just look at historic cities through time and you see that their medieval street pattern persists.  So decisions we make about streets are for the long term.  Streets can help us tackle climate change.  Transport is now the largest emitting sector in the UK. Emissions from it have declined only 3% since 1990 and short journeys are on the increase.  So streets which enable walking, cycling and public transport are crucial.  Walking, cycling and playable space in the street is also part of the ways we can enable greater movement and exercise to help combat rising levels of obesity.  Children walk/cycle to school far less than they used to (86% in 1970 – 25% in 2010) A quarter of children now leave primary school clinically obese.  Streets combat loneliness too.  Donald Appleyard’s 1960s study looked at residents’ movements to/from friends and neighbours on their streets.  Those living on lightly, versus heavily, trafficked streets had 3 times as many friends and twice as many acquaintances.  Its not surprising – if your kids can cross the road to play with kids on the other side of the road then you’ll get to know your neighbours.  But children play on their own street far less than they used to (80% in 1970s – 22% in 2022). . If the street has invitations to sit or play out in it, people are given the cues to foster social integration.  In addition, streets are where we should be planting new street trees, to comply with the NPPF, take the opportunity to provide biodiversity net gain, and manage surface water run off.  Streets are complex pieces of our urban fabric that should be working incredibly hard for us, so how come most of the time, decisions about streets are primarily about accommodating motorised traffic?

In 1998 “Places, Streets and Movement” published by the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions said that street design should seek to achieve a “good place” which included the street’s propensity to encourage social activity, its local distinctiveness and its visual quality.  Manual for Streets says that providing for movement along a street is important, but shouldn’t be considered trump the other place requirements.  But 26 years later, its still hard to design healthy streets for people.  As Jonny Anstead from developer TOWN recently explained to the currently running APPG on Children in Built Environment;  “For those of us who do wish to do more, we hit real challenges.  The kinds of things that we’d be looking to do would be around reducing the dominance and impact of cars in a neighbourhood, creating safer streets where children can play, where there’s a sense of independence, where children have the ability to play out on the doorstep.  But the path of least resistance is to create an environment that is very good for refuse and highways, but which is very poor for children”.

The barriers are understandable too.  Local Authorities are concerned about the costs of maintenance and liabilities.  Complaints about parking fill local councillors’ inboxes, so the call comes for more.  Residents are concerned about traffic jams. Then there is fear that streets designed differently, without standard visibility splays for instance might lead to more crashes or even deaths. 

So what can we do about it?  Better individual street design can’t be de-coupled from the wider movement issues, and so new approaches to transport planning and modelling are coming to the fore – a “vision led” approach with a jigsaw of multiple pieces from the strategic, to the detailed design.  Starting with transport modelling, this considers what type of place you want to create in the future and then back casts how to get there.  This approach allows for a more rounded consideration of sustainable placemaking – how can we ensure that there are sufficient jobs, shops and services for daily needs and to be able to access them easily by foot, bike or public transport to reduce trips by car. And it includes measures to reduce cars, such as car clubs, mobility hubs and consideration for last mile deliveries. 

This starts to allow the vision for a future which doesn’t need or want as much traffic at the whole site scale, which then can be combined with detailed street design that creates “sticky” streets – those where you want to stick around, chat to your neighbours and play.  These sorts of streets are already happening, and Homes England’s document “Streets for a Healthy Life” showcases them, and explains how they function, to show the art of the possible.  In addition, developers and Local Authorities are trying, through design coding and local street manuals, to agree different approaches which can be replicated.  The street manual developed for one scheme, the Duchy of Cornwall’s Nansledan in Newquay, has been adopted by Cornwall Council so that the street details crafted there, can be employed elsewhere.

Much of what we are asking engineers and designers to do goes against the established orthodoxy – making traffic flow freer by building more roads sounds logical, but famously “traffic isn’t water”.  Vehicles are operated by drivers with brains and if roads flow freely, then drivers will be attracted to them.  So more road capacity really does equal more traffic.  Same for visibility.  We forget that making driving trickier, with tighter corners, narrower carriageways and less visibility means that drivers will respond by driving slower and more cautiously. It’s a time of opportunity for those involved in streets – from transport planners, modellers, highways engineers, drainage engineers, urban designers and landscape architects  to go beyond the old ways of modelling and British standards to be at the forefront of the massive challenges that we are facing – to create joyful child friendly streets, and the tools are increasingly there to help us, we just need the bravery to use them.