Museum of the Fur Trade- Learn about the history of the American fur trade at this Chadron, Nebraska museum With artifacts like clothing and firearms as well as an Heirloom Indian garden, the museum takes visitors back to a unique period in American history.
As a response, the notion of Livable Streets was introduced, and became a precursor for a shifting paradigm in the way in which streets and arterials are conceived. The Dutch government used the woonerf concept2 in 1976 to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over motorists. Similarly, the Home Zones Program in the UK operated to ease traffic and reduce accidents on residential streets. However, the regulation and standardization of woonerf as merely another category in the road hierarchy to be applied in residential areas subdued the enthusiasm for this concept, and Home Zones suffered the same fate in the UK.
In the Dutch province of Friesland, the Shared Space Project revived the concept of integrated movement and place. This project involved the rather radical intervention of removing traffic signage and redesigning the street as shared space. In his work, Monderman adapts social protocols to design the streets and public spaces of small towns and villages. He distinguishes between traffic behavior, social behavior, and social traffic behavior, and fosters their coexistence in shared public space without any one becoming dominant. The first example of shared space was in the village of Oudehaske. This resulted in a 40 percent reduction of vehicle speed, compared to a 10 percent reduction through conventional traffic calming. The project was based on the philosophy that slow and fast networks were mutually reinforcing. The slow network, a fine meshed path and lane network, made the public spaces safe and easily accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. The fast network consisted of high-quality thoroughfares engineered to enable motorized traffic to reach destinations. This example demonstrated that people were willing to change their behavior; such changes later came to be known as ‘psychological traffic calming’. The project also illustrated the integration of movement and place which could be applied to busy non-residential roads.
The New Urbanism movement in the US is founded on similar ideas. The aim of the street design model, The complete Streets Thoroughfare Assemblies SmartCode Module, is to create walkable environments with a typology of streets to suit different built forms, from rural to urban. The module divides the rural to urban transect into different zones determined by their level of physical and social intensity and character, and is based mainly on a linear progression of rural to urban thoroughfares. Thoroughfare cross-sections in different transects have been established solely on vehicles per day and have ignored multimodality or person capacity.
Nebraska Map Photo Gallery
In contrast to the above, person capacity rather than vehicle capacity was used to determine arterial street design in the Context Sensitive Solutions in Designing Major Urban Thoroughfares for Walkable Communities. CSS also shifted the focus from roads to the surrounding context and forwarded the notion that the road design depends on more than simply the road itself. A project-based approach, it provided a guide for safe environments for all users. In the late 1990s, the city of Boulder, Colorado, decided to improve the streets. Boulder has a population of about 100,000 and is in a region dominated by car commuting. The project aimed to integrate the context-sensitive design and aesthetics and enhance multi-modality. Instead of focusing on improving vehicle capacity, the city made a concerted effort to fund transit, thus emphasizing person capacity. There was an increase in the alternative modes from 35 percent in 1993 to 47 percent in 1997. Faulty areas in the roads were redesigned and reconstructed in a cost-effective manner, new bike networks were created and extended, and a high-frequency bus Community Transit Network was implemented. ‘Super Stops’, which retrofitted the intersection or underpass as a pedestrian- and cycle-friendly, high-quality place with a strong connection to the community and the surroundings, were planned. The Broadway, which carried more than 2,500 vehicles during peak hours, was retrofitted to increase traffic capacity. An example is the Euclid intersection, where a new bicycle and pedestrian underpass was created to benefit all transport modes, while providing a public gathering space with public art and landscaping integrated into the surrounding area. In total, forty-two prioritized corridors were retrofitted and landscaped for better user-centric functionality. These projects, along with initiatives on safety education, helped to reduce traffic fatality rates significantly. Pedestrian fatalities declined from four in the period 2009-2011 to one in 2011-2014. Bicycle fatalities declined from five in 2009-2011 to zero in 2011-2014.
