By james art Population growth and increased economic activity have transformed the Bull City over the past two decades. But that transformation came with a few growing pains. Residents are concerned that new construction projects and more vehicles on the road are making streets unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians, and that the city’s design standards are decades old, making them ill-equipped to handle the increased volume.
On Monday night, the City Council took steps to modernize the city’s design standards by adopting three new guidelines: the “Urban Street Design Guide” and the “Urban Bicycle Lane Design Guide” created by the National Association of Public Transportation Officials (NACTO) and “Content Implementation – Responsive Design of Multimodal Corridors: A Practitioner’s Guide” by the Institute of Transport Engineers (ITE).
Councilman Nate Baker spearheaded the adoption of the new standards, and the City Council voted unanimously to support the resolution.
“This is a decision to take a step that gives us innovative tools so we can move toward streets that are safer and more convenient for pedestrians and bicyclists,” Baker said.
Community activists spoke in support of the resolution.
Mary Rose Fontana, a member of the city’s Bicyclist and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) and a Bike Durham board member, said that when new projects are built, the BPAC often gets requests from residents to advocate for sidewalks and other bike and pedestrian infrastructure , but BPAC rarely has an opportunity to comment on developments that do not require rezoning from the City Council. With the updated standards, the types of infrastructure design principles that residents require will be incorporated into the city’s own design guidelines (such as the Uniform Development Ordinance, or UDO) for nearly all future development cases.
“Incorporating these guidelines into the city’s UDO, building standards, and interior street design will reduce these inconsistencies between developments, encourage more walking, biking, and transit use throughout the city, and move the city closer to achieving Vision Zero goals.” Fontana said.
John Talmadge, CEO of Bike Durham, shared a similar sentiment.
“We particularly support the development of the building standards as a way to implement the vision of these guidelines and to give clear expectations to private developers of what the city expects when the streets are built and then ultimately adopted in the city network.” , Talmadge said.
Durham’s transportation department already uses many of the standards NACTO offers to design projects in the city’s capital improvement plan, according to the department’s assistant director Bill Judge, who spoke during Monday’s meeting. Passage of the resolution unifies standards in other city departments, such as public works and the planning department, which is responsible for the upcoming UDO rewrite. Aligning standards also helps the city meet its sustainability and safety goals, as well as its Vision Zero plan, says Lauren Grove, Durham’s Vision Zero coordinator.
“We are the city; we’re the ones implementing that,” says Grove. “We’re the ones asking and requiring developers and other people who work within the right path to implement these standards, so having these conversations about what standard we want to set is a really big part of Vision Zero.” “
There are some exceptions to when the new standards may apply. As with many city infrastructure projects, only facilities maintained by the City of Durham are affected. City staff will still have to work with the North Carolina Department of Transportation on state roads, limiting projects like the redesign of the Roxboro and Mangum Street corridors.
Still, adopting the NACTO and ITE standards gives additional flexibility to local transportation departments, like Durham’s, that receive federal funding. State transportation departments often serve as a conduit for federal funding, giving them the right to prescribe their own design requirements for local projects. But a provision in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act would allow Durham to preempt those requirements by adopting the NACTO and ITE standards.
Baker says the new standards have been in development since January. City staff is collaborating with Baker and other stakeholders to understand how the guidelines fit into other important planning happening in other departments.
“[The Monday vote] it wasn’t just handing something over,” says Baker. “It was the culmination of dozens of conversations and going to the table, brainstorming and refining, getting people involved and building buy-in.”
Chris Perelstein, founder of the popular Reckless Roxboro Twitter account, was the final speaker during public comment at Monday’s meeting. He expressed concern that the city’s streetscapes are unfair, but by adopting NACTO’s new standards, the city could more easily apply up-to-date standards to future infrastructure projects, such as those proposed in the city’s two bond referendums this November.
“A vision without action is just a dream,” Perelstein said.
Creating a vision through planning is an important step in the development process, Baker says, but the city can do more to move projects out of the design phase and provide tangible infrastructure improvements.
“I agree with many members of the community that in some cases we do [planning] well, and other times we do it terribly,” says Baker. “The built environment is one of those areas where much more is needed, much faster. And so this responds to that and takes a step towards resetting the DNA of our streets.”
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