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Green Step Cities <br />Attachment H <br />areas are able to pay higher rents for their space, and housing near <br />walkable commercial areas commonly sells for higher prices than in <br />more distant areas. Note four 2018 road conversion (road diet) case <br />studies on the MnDOT web site. <br />• Connected street networks —grids or modified grids —disperse rather <br />than concentrate traffic as do hierarchical streets networks (with with <br />loop roads and cul-de-sacs branching off of arterials) and provide <br />a perfect corrective for congestior Modest street and lane <br />reconfigurations, attending to context sensitive street design principles <br />and adding traffic -calming measures, can reduce speeding by 40%, <br />auto crashes by more than 50% and increase the number of walkers <br />and bikers. In urban areas the least severe crashes are achieved <br />when lane width is between 10.5 and 11 feet. Narrower vehicle <br />lanes also carry more cars up to 40 m.p.h. See Safer Streets, Stronger <br />Economies (Smart Growth American: 2015) for data analysis of benefits <br />from 37 complete streets projects. See also The National Association <br />of City Transportation Officials Street Design Guide. Note that a car <br />hitting a pedestrian at 20 m.ph. kills the pedestrian 10% of the time, but <br />at 40 m.ph. kills the pedestrian 90% of the time. <br />A 2010 Metropolitan Council analysis of the effects of land planning and <br />urban design on travel demand documented that changes in vehicle <br />miles traveled are most strongly related to (1) accessibility to <br />destinations, especially jobs, and (2) street network design variables. <br />Those variables - street connectivity and intersection density - correlate <br />with improved public health outcomes. These variables are the key <br />attributes of the old-fashioned grided networks that allow multiple ways <br />to travel from A to B. Recent research shows that hierarchical street <br />systems (the dendritic pattern of freeways, arterials, collectors and local <br />streets) are less resilient to disruption and have less capacity than the <br />grided network of streets. Arterials and collectors are also especially <br />hostile to non -automotive modes of travel such as bikes and <br />pedestrians. <br />Quantitative measures of walkability, the degree to which a <br />neighborhood or city facilitates people to walk/shop in it, include <br />Score. Property values increase between $700 and $3,000 for each <br />point increase in the Walk Score of a property. In cities walkability, <br />facilitated by small blocks and a higher proportion of land area devoted <br />to streets, is in tension with efficiency (large blocks with few streets and <br />higher speed traffic). Like Walk Score and Transit Score, Bike <br />Score provides an easy way to evaluate bikeability at a specific location. <br />