Livable Streets

My mind keeps coming back to this post I saw on Kottke a couple of days ago. For whatever reason, Jason resurrected a graphic from a 1981 book by a Berkeley urban design professor named Donald Appleyard. His book was called Livable Streets, and this graphic from it says a lot:


(Click to enlarge for better viewing.)

As you may surmise, these three streets were studied with some intensity by Appleyard. They were similar in scale, type of housing and buildings present, and location (San Francisco); the only significant difference was the amount of street traffic (16,000 vehicles a day vs. 8,000 vs. just 2,000).

Appleyard measured how the residents used their streets. The little dots represent gathering spots identified by the people, and the lines represent friendship connections. As you can see, the less traffic there was, the more gathering spots and the greater number of friendships across the street and even on the same side of the street.

His second map showed what the people considered their "home territory," and again it grew larger with less traffic:


Kottke ends his post this way:

In a sad twist of fate, Appleyard died relatively young at 54 — he was struck and killed by a speeding car in Athens, Greece in 1982 [the year after the book came out].

So now I have to get ahold of a copy of Livable Streets and see what other revealing insights it contains.