So, what makes up a streetscape you can admire? There are numerous features you might find part of a well-designed street, like:. Creating a proper streetscape is no easy feat. However, Austin Engineering has an incredible amount of experience with various streetscape designs. Our civil engineers and landscape architects contribute to the streetscapes of cities throughout all Central Illinois.
Moreover, our designs provide greener solutions and present a streetscape that both vehicles and pedestrians can share harmoniously. To learn more about the work Austin Engineering has done, you can contact us at Civil engineers and landscape architects work together to help streetscape design achieve specific goals, such as: Visually Appealing — Streetscapes often consider the surrounding architecture and make a design that visually compliments already existing structures.
The choices in street design could be as simple as more shrubbery or as extensive as different road materials. Safe — A smart streetscape design often ensures the safety of everyone.
Wide lanes, buffers between the street and sidewalk, thoughtfully placed streetlights and more all contribute to the wellbeing of drivers and pedestrians alike. If properly executed, streetscaping can positively affect a community in multiple ways. Streetscaping incorporates principles of Complete Streets. Improvements to crosswalks, traffic control devices, treatments to assist persons with disabilities, bus-stop placement, safe routes to school, and traffic-calming can enhance safety and provide effective countermeasures to accidents.
Streetscapes that provide greater mobility and access to transportation choice can also lead to more healthy and active lifestyles. Attractive and inviting streetscapes that provide a safe built environment for pedestrians can help spur local economic activity. According to a report, Walking the Walk , walkability can help revitalize a downtown, increase private investment, and support the development of a good business climate.
Pedestrian, bicycle, and transit-friendly streetscapes can be achieved by widening sidewalks, providing buffers along the street, and reducing the frequency for curb cuts. Streetscapes can help increase the environmental sustainability by decreasing automobile dependency, minimizing traffic and congestion, and reducing carbon emissions.
Landscaping beautification encourages the enrichment of biodiversity in a community. Streetscapes also integrate and preserve bodies of water such as rivers, lakes and pond as well as other natural features in order to create biodiversity and a thriving ecosystem. The popular summer destination desperately needed a solution to safely manage seasonal traffic congestion from cars, walkers, and bikers. The City of Rehoboth set out to create an attractive business district and family-oriented public spaces to promote shopping, dining, strolling, biking, and entertainment.
Consider too that the bicyclist has more time to absorb the atmosphere and be attracted to shops in your business district. Depending on climate, you may need to install a drinking fountain. In some neighborhoods, the kind with the low bowl for dogs is popular. Fountains go a long way toward making a shopping or employment area friendly to pedestrians, but also they can be a real maintenance headache if you don't have a regular maintenance crew to address the chewing gum left in the fountain and to make sure they are correctly weatherproofed when temperatures dropped below freezing.
Our best advice for making the decision about drinking fountains is to think carefully about your climate, the particular customers you are trying to attract, and the availability of cold beverages at a reasonable price in nearby businesses. During your streetscape program, you also might want to consider public restrooms if that is a need in your town.
If you go to the expense of making them available and maintaining them, give us a discreet sign every once in a while to show where they are. New street lighting is a very common element of a streetscape program, as wiring can easily be installed or moved to accommodate the new bases when sidewalks are being replaced. Read our page for more detail on the topic. You also may need an electric vehicle charging station in a smaller commercial area.
In large shopping or employment centers, we think those should be placed in parking garages. If you think this is premature in your particular area, you might be correct, but you at least need to plan ahead for where these can be placed. Design your streetscape with future transportation modes in mind. The likely deployment of driverless cars, also called autonomous vehicles, in the near future means that you will need much more temporary drop-off space near popular destinations, and a gradual decrease in longer term parking.
To understand more about the implications of this technology, please see our page about driverless cars and their impact on planning. We think that the neighborhoods and business districts that plan for the upsurge of ride hailing, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles will have an important competitive edge over those that don't.
Your program also might include less common features, such as public art, ornamental fountains, or amphitheaters as gathering places. If you draw up your plans for a new streetscape and think it still needs more visual punch, consider one or more community murals.
A couple of links at the bottom of the page will give more information on some of these beautification options. As you're planning streetscape, look at your signs and awnings again. Attractive signs to help visitors find their way around are always welcome, as are signs pointing out historic sites, important government offices, and parking. If you have electric vehicle charging capability, a small sign mounted on an existing pole could let your visitors know where to find it.
If you work with a professional, they will call this "wayfinding" signage or a wayfinding system, which might involve pavement colors, for example, instead of signs. You can contract with a graphic artist to design attractive interpretive signs with vandalism-resistant coverings to explain your history.
You aren't limited to brass plaques. These signs would be oriented toward pedestrians rather than drivers. If you're interested in a common signage program, where each business has a small perpendicular sign of a common size extending out from its front door, for instance, this is the time to implement that program. Uniform awning programs work well with new streetscape too. Sometimes special business districts or business improvement districts subsidize the awnings for individual merchants.
A city government may sponsor an awning program productively as well, either by outright grants or through a loan program. If you decide that there is no financial assistance for businesses, you might just agree on a common color, or very small list of colors and designs, so that as private building owners replace awnings, they begin to harmonize with the environment.
Usually these color and design choices would be part of local design guidelines suggestions or legislation. If you investigate the choices and feel that your community can't afford any of the options, look carefully at some plain wood garden benches, that can be backed up to the storefronts and bolted down. Also check into large pots or half barrels that can hold annuals. Something inexpensive such as petunias or another flowering annual still will add color, motion, and vitality.
If you can't afford to color your sidewalk, maybe three times a year you sponsor a chalk painting contest and become famous for it. And keep in mind that I'd rather see a vital business district, where people are continuously going in and out of shops, with a plain old gray concrete sidewalk, than a dead business district with an artful streetscape.
That's because people are the very best ingredient for adding color, movement, unpredictability, and interest to your street! Another benefit of doing nothing is that a streetscape program, in which the sidewalk is replaced, street trees are planted where there were none before, and so forth, disrupts the business district for a whole season or more.
Can your businesses afford to alienate their clientele for two to five months while you pretty up the place? By that time, customers might have found another place to buy a cup of coffee. Now we still think a new streetscape is worthwhile if carefully executed, but the benefit has to be able to justify the cost. If you have one tiny struggling business on a block, that might not be the case.
If you decide to move forward with a new streetscape look, plan very carefully to provide for pedestrian safety, comfort, and an understandable system of showing where it is appropriate to drive, park, hitch a bicycle to a rack, and walk. Invent a slogan for your streetscape program and talk about how great it's going to be when it's finished.
Then prepare to support the businesses while the renovation is taking place. They may want to plan a festival or sidewalk sale just outside the boundaries of construction to call attention to their district and attract some extra sales.
Individual businesses will have to do their part with clever marketing as well. Unsubscribe any time.
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