Send Us Nominations for Best Urban Street Redesign This Year

Memphis' Manassas Street was redesigned in Memphis with protected bike lanes and raised colorful crosswalks. Photo: Memphis Medical District Collaborative
Memphis' Manassas Street was redesigned in Memphis with protected bike lanes and raised colorful crosswalks. Photo: Memphis Medical District Collaborative

streetsie_2018Did your town conduct a great road diet this year? Did your mayor roll out lots of protected bike lanes? Or did the city DOT fix a dangerous intersection for pedestrians, or create dedicated rights-of-way just for buses?

We want to hear about it! We’re asking for nominations for our annual competition seeking to find the “Best Urban Street Redesign” for the year.

Last year, Argyle and Grafton, won top honors with a redesign that prioritized pedestrian movement on a retail corridor in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

We took the liberty, as we do every year, of nominating one project right off the bat. This year, we chose Manassas Street in Memphis, pictured above. The street redesign included adding protected bike lanes and bumpouts as well as colorful raised crosswalks to improve pedestrian safety. Pedestrian space is protected with concrete planters that self water, according to the Memphis Flyer.

Send us your nominations including photos and a description by December 27th, either by commenting below or emailing me at Angie [at] Streetsblog [dot] org. We’ll accept five or six other entries, chosen by our editorial staff based on the nominations we receive and then open voting when we return from Christmas break.

  • Joe

    It technically got underway in November 2017, but the King Street Pilot in Toronto has been great. For 4km of the busiest surface transit route in the city, streetcars and bikes are allowed to go straight through while cars are legally required to turn right at most major streets (and are never allowed to turn left). As detailed in the data reports, one of which is here, travel times have gone down, vehicle bunching is down, and ridership is way up – 65,000 per weekday to 84,000. Car travel times on nearby streets have varied by less than a minute as compared to pre-pilot, cycling volumes are up year-over-year, and the economic impact on King Street businesses has, on average, been a wash.
    On top of all this good news, the mere fact that the city is reporting the data on this project in a fairly consistent and comprehensive manner is the icing on the cake.

  • Gale

    Hrm, the link to your email doesn’t seem to be working…

  • Frank Kotter

    I know I’m not completing the assigned homework here but it would be great to get a follow-up report about a specific project completed in the past. Argyle in Chicago comes to mind. It was a pretty legit albeit small-scale streetscape improvement. Possible to speak to the project leadership as well as merchants and residents?

    Possible to build momentum off of this and/or learn from limitations.

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