The NACTO Urban Street Design Guide shows how streets of every size can be reimagined and reoriented to prioritize safe driving and transit, biking, walking, and public activity. Unlike older, more conservative engineering manuals, this design guide emphasizes the core principle that urban streets are public places and have a larger role to play in communities than solely being conduits for traffic. The well-illustrated guide offers blueprints of street design from multiple perspectives, from the bird’s eye view to granular details. Case studies from around the country clearly show how to implement best practices, as well as provide guidance for customizing design applications to a city’s unique needs. Urban Street Design Guide outlines five goals and tenets of world-class street design: • Streets are public spaces. Streets play a much larger role in the public life of cities and communities than just thoroughfares for traffic. • Great streets are great for business. Well-designed streets generate higher revenues for businesses and higher values for homeowners. • Design for safety. Traffic engineers can and should design streets where people walking, parking, shopping, bicycling, working, and driving can cross paths safely. • Streets can be changed. Transportation engineers can work flexibly within the building envelope of a street. Many city streets were created in a different era and need to be reconfigured to meet new needs. • Act now! Implement projects quickly using temporary materials to help inform public decision making. Elaborating on these fundamental principles, the guide offers substantive direction for cities seeking to improve street design to create more inclusive, multi-modal urban environments. It is an exceptional resource for redesigning streets to serve the needs of 21st century cities, whose residents and visitors demand a variety of transportation options, safer streets, and vibrant community life.

The Global Street Design Guide is a timely resource that sets a global baseline for designing streets and public spaces and redefines the role of streets in a rapidly urbanizing world. The guide will broaden how to measure the success of urban streets to include: access, safety, mobility for all users, environmental quality, economic benefit, public health, and overall quality of life. The first-ever worldwide standards for designing city streets and prioritizing safety, pedestrians, transit, and sustainable mobility are presented in the guide. Participating experts from global cities have helped to develop the principles that organize the guide. The Global Street Design Guide builds off the successful tools and tactics defined in NACTO's Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide while addressing a variety of street typologies and design elements found in various contexts around the world.

"The Transit Street Design Guide sets a new vision for how cities can harness the immense potential of transit to create active and efficient streets in neighborhoods and downtowns alike. Building on the Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide, the Transit Street Design Guide details how reliable public transportation depends on a commitment to transit at every level of design. Developed through a new peer network of NACTO members and transit agency partners, the Guide provides street transportation departments, transit operating agencies, leaders, and practitioners with the tools to actively prioritize transit on the street."--Site Web de NACTO.

NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide quickly emerged as the preeminent resource for designing safe, protected bikeways in cities across the United States. It has been completely re-designed with an even more accessible layout. The Guide offers updated graphic profiles for all of its bicycle facilities, a subsection on bicycle boulevard planning and design, and a survey of materials used for green color in bikeways. The Guide continues to build upon the fast-changing state of the practice at the local level. It responds to and accelerates innovative street design and practice around the nation.

"The best streets in the world's villages, towns, and cities—whether modest or grand—continually remind one that simplicity is part of the recipe for success in this art. The advice of Victor Dover and John Massengale, their historic examples and their own designs, reflect that simplicity." —From the Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales “Street Design is a lucid, practical and altogether indispensable guide for envisioning and creating vibrant 21st century towns and cities. It should be required reading for every local political leader, planner, architect, real estate developer and engaged urban citizen in America." —Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 and author of True Believers "We are going to start walking around the places we live again, and as that occurs and becomes normal, we will rapidly redevelop a demand for higher quality in building at the human scale." —From the Afterword by James Howard Kunstler “Your charrette traveling library must include the important Street Design book by Victor Dover and John Massengale.”—Bill Lennertz, Executive Director, National Charrette Institute “What an amazing resource! For those who wish that my book, Walkable City, had pictures, this is the book for you. If either your work or your play includes the making of places, you will find Street Design to be an invaluable tool.” —Jeff Speck, AICP, CNU-A, LEED-AP, Hon. ASLA Written by two accomplished architects and urban designers, this user-friendly street design manual shows both how to design new streets and enhance existing ones. It offers step-by-step instruction and shares examples of excellent streets, examining the elements that make them successful as well as how they were designed and created. Topics also include strategies for shaping space in the public right-of-way through correct building height to street width ratios, terminated vistas, landscaping, and street geometry. This book is a valuable resource for urban designers, planners, architects, and engineers. With guest essays from: Kaid Benfield, David Brussat, Javier Cenicacelaya, Hank Dittmar, Andres Duany, Douglas Duany, Emily Glavey, Chip Kaufman, Ethan Kent, Marieanne Khoury-Vogt, Léon Krier, Gianni Longo, Thomas Low, Laura Lyon, Chuck Marohn, Paul Murrain, John Norquist, Stefanos Polyzoides, Gabriele Tagliaventi and Erik Vogt.

What makes strolling down a particular street enjoyable? The authors of Measuring Urban Design argue it's not an idle question. Inviting streets are the centerpiece of thriving, sustainable communities, but it can be difficult to pinpoint the precise design elements that make an area appealing. This accessible guide removes the mystery, providing clear methods to measure urban design. In recent years, many "walking audit instruments" have been developed to measure qualities like building height, block length, and sidewalk width. But while easily quantifiable, these physical features do not fully capture the experience of walking down a street. In contrast, this book addresses broad perceptions of street environments. It provides operational definitions and measurement protocols of five intangible qualities of urban design, specifically imageability, visual enclosure, human scale, transparency, and complexity. The result is a reliable field survey instrument grounded in constructs from architecture, urban design, and planning. Readers will also find a case study applying the instrument to 588 streets in New York City, which shows that it can be used effectively to measure the built environment's impact on social, psychological, and physical well-being. Finally, readers will find illustrated, step-by-step instructions to use the instrument and a scoring sheet for easy calculation of urban design quality scores. For the first time, researchers, designers, planners, and lay people have an empirically tested tool to measure those elusive qualities that make us want to take a stroll. Urban policymakers and planners as well as students in urban policy, design, and environmental health will find the tools and methods in Measuring Urban Design especially useful.

The Urban Street Stormwater Guide begins from the principle that street design can support--or degrade--the urban area's overall environmental health. By incorporating Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) into the right-of-way, cities can manage stormwater and reap the public health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits of street trees, planters, and greenery in the public realm. Building on the successful NACTO urban street guides, the Urban Street Stormwater Guide provides the best practices for the design of GSI along transportation corridors. The state-of-the-art solutions in this guide will assist urban planners and designers, transportation engineers, city officials, ecologists, public works officials, and others interested in the role of the built urban landscape in protecting the climate, water quality, and natural environment.

Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.

Streets Reconsidered is a fundamental rethinking of America's streets. It explores the future of streets and what America's roadways could be if they were designed for living, instead of just driving. The book includes: detailed design guidelines, fully illustrated, four color case studies of successful streets from around the world, a new paradigm of streets designed to promote human functions, turning new design ideas into a series of best practices that can be applied to any community. What would streets look like if they accommodated people of all ages and abilities, promoted healthy urban living, social interaction and business, the movement of people and goods and regeneration of the environment? Streets Reconsidered pushes beyond the current standards, focusing on the planning, design and construction of streets as a method for improving our built environment for everyone. The book is organized by the functions of a street: mobility, way finding, commerce, social gathering, events and programming, play and recreation, urban agriculture, green infrastructure and image and identity. Streets Reconsidered is the essential resource for city planners, urban designers, developers, architects, landscape architects, policymakers and community members who share a passion for great urban, human spaces.

A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.