The average American commuter spends about 3 1/2 hours a week fighting traffic between home and office.
Walter Kulash wants drivers to spend even more.
Nosing his Chrysler through a snarl of traffic on the main drag in Winter Park, Fla., near Orlando, the traffic engineer is rhapsodizing about how the narrow two-lane road, on-street parking, tree-lined curb and vibrant retail scene have conspired to reduce traffic to about 15 miles per hour.
“From a traffic engineering point of view, it’s a poorly performing street,” he acknowledges. “But in a more important sense, it’s a very high-performing street. I’ll bet a lot of these people don’t even have to be on this street,” he says, “They choose to, because it’s enjoyable.”
Kulash and a small band of radical traffic engineers have set out to shatter urban planning dogma by applying “traffic calming” lessons learned in thriving communities such as Winter Park to dying downtowns.
Racing traffic and the absence of curb-side parking have degraded center-city streets, they argue, chasing away potential customers of street-level stores and restaurants. Narrowing the wide, one-way streets that crisscross most downtowns, and adding on-street parking, they insist, will make urban streetscapes far more appealing to shoppers, diners and sightseers.
Flourishing, traffic-congested neighborhoods such as New York’s Greenwich Village, Miami’s South Beach and downtown Santa Fe, they say, offer proof that city streets need traffic crawling through at 20 m.p.h.
“Anywhere that doesn’t have congestion, you probably wouldn’t want to be there,” says Toronto urban planner Ken Greenberg, who, as the city’s design director in the 1980s, halted the construction of freeways and narrowed numerous streets. In successful downtowns, he says, cars should move “at the speed of a horse and buggy.”
For a generation of engineers to whom the free flow of traffic has been high religion, such notions border on sacrilege. Government transportation officials, who control road-building funds, often insist that planners conform to standards intended to maximize traffic flow.
“I don’t think you bring more life to (center cities) by increasing the congestion and accident hazards,” says Paul Box, a prominent traffic engineer who helped write national road guidelines. Narrowing city streets is “stupid,” he says, and on-street parking in downtowns will only increase accidents.
The abandonment of many city centers by all but the people who work there, Box contends, is an irreversible product of suburbanization, and no amount of street alterations will change that: “What we need, typically, are wider streets.”
This debate between traffic engineers could alter the way America’s cities handle their traffic. Maverick engineers such as Kulash have been embraced by an influential group of planners called the New Urbanists, who see the traditional town center as a model for modern development.
They have gained the ears of a handful of mayors grasping for new ways to reverse the generation-long flight of retail, residential and office jobs from the cities to the suburbs.
The reasons people have left many cities, of course, include a host of economic and social factors, and no one contends that changing traffic patterns alone can reverse that. But making city streets an attractive place to slow down, some argue, is a necessary component of revitalization.
The “pro-highway mentality” of state traffic planners meant city streets “just served as external ramps off the freeway,” Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist says. Now “our local city engineers are starting to understand that their job is to add value to the streets.”
Milwaukee has added parking to downtown streets, restored two-way traffic to some and studied tearing down deteriorating freeway spurs and replacing them with boulevards.
Other traffic-calming projects are being considered or are under way in numerous cities, including St. Paul; Portland, Maine; Providence, R.I.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Birmingham, Mich.
Even the federal Department of Transportation is reconsidering accepted notions about road design.
“Transportation should serve community needs,” says John Horsley, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for governmental affairs. “Too often we’ve delegated (road design) to professionals who thought their only goal was to move regional traffic.”
As he wheels around the Orlando area at a pace that leaves impatient drivers climbing up his tailpipe, Kulash concedes that traffic calming riles commuters.
“A lot of people are furious about tampering with their ability to drive fast,” he says. “But they aren’t politically organized. And it would look really bad (to complain). They aren’t about to show up at a (public planning) meeting.”
The 54-year-old Kulash has a theory about why people drive fast, which he says he arrived at through roadside interviews: The more attractive and engaging the road, the slower a person will drive.
As Kulash accelerates onto a four-lane, sun-blasted commercial strip outside Winter Park, he points out what he sees as design flaws: no trees or landscaping, vast roadside parking lots with wide mouths and a string of unattractive buildings set back far from the road.
“There should be fabulous value here. But the frontage has been poisoned” by the design, he says.
“It’s such a bleak, unrewarding scene that drivers deserve to get by it as fast as possible.” Traffic is indeed flying.
Kulash insists he isn’t anti-car, just in favor of a better balance between cars and pedestrians. He is adamantly opposed, for example, to closing streets to traffic. All but a few of the pedestrian malls installed in many cities in the 1970s have been a bust, he notes, because shoppers don’t like to walk far from their cars. Many of those malls are being torn out.
For two decades, Kulash worked in obscurity as a traditional traffic engineer, helping clients such as Arizona lay down highways.
In 1991, a partner at Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin Lopez Rinehart, the planning firm where he works in Orlando, introduced him to the New Urbanist theories. Intrigued, Kulash set out to analyze whether the grids of narrow neighborhood streets would outperform the wide, high-speed, suburban arteries that carry traffic between a series of cul-de-sacs.
He claims his computer analysis demonstrated that the grid of narrower streets allowed for shorter travel times and fewer delays. Though those conclusions are disputed by some, a paper Kulash prepared on the topic attracted the attention of many urban planners, bringing his firm plenty of business.
Kulash is working with engineers in St. Paul to transform Wabasha Street, a down-on-its-luck commercial drag, into a pedestrian-friendly central artery. The city recently took the first step, eliminating a lane of traffic and adding parking.
St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman points an unlit cigar to a vintage print on his office wall showing an architect’s design of the city, in which a central boulevard linked the state capital to the Mississippi River. But when a freeway was built, it divided the capital area from the city center.
“In the 1960s, the traffic engineers thought they had it all figured out. And they did, because moving traffic was their goal,” he says. But their success, he adds, “is inextricably tied to urban decline.”
St. Paul, a city of 272,000, has become a quintessential 9-to-5 commuter town. The 50,000 people who work downtown “come in to work, they stay in the buildings for lunch, and they go home,” says Department of Public Work Director Stacy Becker. Most evenings, the downtown is practically deserted by 5:30 p.m.
Like many cities, St. Paul converted a number of downtown streets to one-way in the 1950s, so they could handle more traffic. In the 1960s, a ring of highways was added around the center city. Then, in an effort to separate pedestrians from traffic and the harsh winter weather, the city built a system of enclosed, elevated walkways that link 50 blocks.
On a recent midmorning walk along Wabasha Street, Becker gestures to the featureless office-building facades and side streets without storefronts:
“Why would you want to walk down here?” she asks. Rather than encouraging visitors to stop, Wabasha “is a great street to get out of town.”
Indeed, cars zip along the street at an average of 28 m.p.h.–lightning fast, by urban standards. It is so efficient that 15 minutes after work lets out, rush hour is over.
But changing the street’s configuration wasn’t easy. State regulations set minimum widths for urban streets, and cities that didn’t comply faced the loss of gasoline-tax revenue.
Eventually, the state granted variances allowing the removal of one lane of Wabasha, the addition of on-street parking and a bike lane. The city is planning to line the street with trees, and is considering the restoration of two-way traffic.
City planners hope physical changes to storefronts, coupled with coordinated marketing, will entice workers to spend more time downtown and attract visitors from the suburbs.
Still, skepticism about the plan abounds.
“Everyone has a silver bullet,” says John S. Adams, a professor of planning and public affairs at the University of Minnesota. “Most of the planners don’t understand the economics” of the decline of the center city, which he attributes to tax and public-policy incentives favoring the suburbs. “I really don’t think that traffic patterns make much of a difference.”
The merchants on Wabasha, who have seen redevelopment plans come and go, remain wary. But they are enthusiastic, at least, about the added parking.
Denise Roseland, manager of a downtown bagel shop, says she has heard “a lot of comments from customers saying, `It’s so much easier to get to you now. I can just pull up out front and run in.’ “
“Traffic really slowed down. I was shocked,” says Alan Bloom, director of leasing for the downtown mall. “I didn’t think we’d see this much of a difference.”
As for the commuters, “I’m not sure fancy lights and pretty trees are going to satisfy people that are slowed down,” concedes Michael Klassen, a city engineer. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”
