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hink about the trips you make each day, they may be:
From your house to work From your work to lunch To pick your child up from school To the grocery store

Why?
Despite what you first may think most trips are not taken by car because people are inherently lazy, but instead mostly because streets are

ow far are these trips?

If you are like many Americans, at least 1/5th of your daily trips are a short enough distance that they could easily be walked or biked.

designed with only cars in mind. When streets are

designed only for cars, they deny people the opportunity to choose more active ways to get around by making walking, bicycling, and taking public transportation inconvenient, unattractive, and often dangerous.

ow do you take these trips?

Do you walk, bike, or take public transit? Do you drive?

If you choose to drive almost all of your daily trips, you are not alone. In fact, of all the trips that are short enough to be walked or biked about half are still taken by the car.

Half of pedestrian deaths occur where no crosswalk is available, but in many of Orlandos neighborhoods crossing the street to get to a bus stop may require walking as far as 20 minutes out of the way in order to reach an official crosswalk

Even when sidewalks exist, they may be incomplete or unaccommodating for all users. Additionally, large intersections and speeding traffic may make any non-motorized travel unpleasant and unsafe

Get Active Orlando has recognized the actions necessary to create a built environment
more supportive of pedestrians and bikers. Based on Get Active Orlandos suggestions, the City of Orlando has taken initiatives to encourage Orlando to complete the streets by adopting a complete street policy into their growth management plan. Complete Streets is a policy initiative that hopes to modify our current transportation system so that roadways are routinely designed with all users in mind including bicyclists, public transportation vehicles and riders, and pedestrians. On Complete Streets, people of all ages and abilities are able to safely move along and across streets in a community, regardless of how they are traveling. Complete Streets make it easy to cross the street, walk to shops, and bicycle to work.

By reorienting our idea of streets as a place to move people, instead of cars, over-congested streets can be redesigned with low cost and high impact. These 40 people traveling down the street in cars cause a traffic jam. But if visualized as moving people, there is plenty of room for them to travel within the existing space of the street, with high street capacity for public transit or for cyclists and pedestrians.

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Safe Crossing design in Orlandos Baldwin Park

ut What Does a Complete Street Look Like?

There is no one set definition of what a complete street looks like: each one is unique and responds to its community context. A complete street in a rural area will look quite different from a complete street in an urban area, but both are designed to balance safety and convenience for everyone using the road. A Complete Street design may include:
Wide sidewalks & Bike lanes (or wide paved shoulders) Special bus lanes Road diets, or reducing the number of through and turn lanes Comfortable and accessible public transportation stops Frequent and safe crossing opportunities including midblock crossings, medians, and curb extensions to narrow crossing distance Visual friction including curbside parking, locating buildings closer to a roads edge, and/ or streetscape trees and features Traffic calming features such as traffic circles and narrower travel lanes

Streets designed with wide sidewalks, raised medians, better bus stop placement, traffic-calming measures, and treatments for disabled travelers reduce pedestrian risk by almost 30%. Additionally, when bike lanes and sidewalks are installed, studies show between a 25-65% increase in cyclist and pedestrian use, and there is a 15% increase in the number of people meeting recommended activity levels when these streets are within 10 minutes of their homes

Complete Street Design concepts in Downtown Orlando

he Future of Orlando
While a change in the design of Orlandos streets cannot happen overnight, many Orlando neighborhoods have undergone road improvement projects in a slow transition towards more complete streets. In Orlandos college park neighborhood, Edgewater Drive was put on a diet; it was reduced from 4 lanes to 3 and bike lanes and streetscape was added. Lake Eola drive and other downtown neighborhood roads now feature traffic calming pavement and bike lanes. Orlandos planning department envisions its future streets not only as places to move for pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit, but takes its vision one step further by hoping to create streets as places through the Main Street program.

Envisioning the Future of Orlandos streets

Additional Complete Street Resources:

National Complete Streets Coalition: http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets Project for Public Spaces: Rightsizing Streets: http://www.pps.org/reference/rightsizing/ American Planning Association Resource List: http://www.planning.org/research/streets/resources.htm