Urban Street Design
This course is part a three-course series..
The other courses in this series are Access Management and Site Access and Circulation Design.
Course Faculty: Robert Layton and Vergil Stover
There are many factors that make urban streets different from rural highways. Among those factors are increased numbers of pedestrians, bicycles, and business and residential driveways. Transit, drainage and intersections may also have unique design criteria when they are part of an urban street system. Traffic flow conditions, peak and off-peak speeds and volume variations are also significant and can affect street design. The course instructors will use schematic drawings and slides to illustrate various urban street design practices.
In workshop sessions, course participants will work on problems and case studies related to a variety of design issues including sight distance assumptions, determination of the functional intersection area, and length of left-turn and right-turns bays. Corner clearance, minimum centerline radii, the rationale for the cross-section of arterials, collectors, and local residential streets and the effectiveness of intersection and median changes to a major urban arterial will also be discussed.
Course Topics
- Street patterns and urban development
- Signal spacing
- Sight distances
- Pedestrian and bicycle considerations
- Principles of intersection design
- Warrants for design of turn bays
- Median benefits and design
- Drainage issues
- Criteria for the design of arterial, collector and local streets
- The geometric design of driveways
Who Should Attend
This course is appropriate for municipal and county staff involved in the development of the thoroughfare element of Comprehensive Plans, the planning and design of major roadways, or the administration of subdivision regulations. State highway engineers and planners involved in the design of roadway improvements in urban or suburban areas and consulting engineers and planners involved in the design of urban streets or subdivisions will also benefit from this course.
Continuing Education Units and Professional Development Hours
Course participants will earn 2.1 CEUs/21 PDHs upon successful completion of this course. The CEU is a nationally recognized measure of participation in a noncredit continuing education program that meets established criteria for increasing knowledge and competency.