Peter Calthorpe's Urban Network Concept

Prepared by: Amanda D. Wettergren

 

 

Providing a solution for urban traffic congestion and pedestrian walkability       applicable to any community in the world

 

 

 

Over the past 30 years, Peter Calthorpe has become one of the design community's influential innovators.  His work has centered upon an environmental approach; projects he has completed in the past concentrated on new solutions for energy efficiency and passive solar design.  He has written several books, including, Sustainable Communities, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream, and his most recent, The Regional City, and has taught architecture and planning courses at several prominent universities in the United States.  He founded Calthorpe and Associates in 1983 to bring his theories to work in the real world under his own control.  Calthorpe is also the founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, an organization that promotes neo-traditional design and planning techniques and theories.  His most current work, The Urban Network Concept, which he considers to be a pretext to good community development planning, is outlined below.

 

 

The Urban Network Concept

 

Calthorpe saw a critical need for a new way for growth to happen that would match a new system of movement with the new forms of land use that the New Urbanism Movement has created; therefore, he created this Urban Network Concept as one solution to facilitate this process.

 

Calthorpe began with his belief that the current transportation system, with arterial roads spaced at one-mile intervals and commercial strip developments placed at intersections of these roads, is rational; however it is becoming dysfunctional as traffic congestion increases.  (Calthorpe, p. 2)

 

Goals of the Urban Network Concept

 

To create a new circulation pattern that:

Peter Calthorpe's Urban Network Concept Illustrated

 

This new circulation pattern, as illustrated above, includes FOUR TYPES OF ROADS:

 

·      Transit Boulevards: These boulevards form the heart of the network; they are auto related, semi-local routes that are designed to match mixed use urban development. At the town center, the boulevard splits into a couplet of one-way streets, eliminating time consuming, traffic stopping, left turns, and supporting high-density development along the sides.  The boulevard is broken into separate lanes of traffic for separate uses, at the center are lanes for inexpensive but efficient public transportation, such as light rail or Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), on either side of the public transit are smaller lanes for automobile traffic, with wide pedestrian walkways along each side, fronting the developments.  Each lane is separated from the other by a slight median with a line of planted trees.

 

These boulevards provide much needed separation of pedestrians from automobiles, while supporting and centering upon a public transit station that further reduces automobile use where pedestrians need it most, the places they work and shop on a daily basis.

 

·      Throughways:  These are limited access roads, designed for long trips and truck traffic.  There is a larger increment of space between these throughways, with roundabouts at one-mile intervals for ease of access.  These single use throughways would include auto oriented land uses, including manufacturing, warehousing, and light industrial.  The throughway plays the same role that many of today's older highways have been playing for some time.

 

·      Avenues:  These roads intersect the transit boulevards and throughways at one-mile intervals and serve to lead travelers to commercial destinations.  They include more frequent intersections and are designed to support Village Centers, which are smaller than Town Centers but similar, breaking into a couplet of one-way streets, similar to the transit boulevards in the Town Centers.  The avenues are designed to function like today's parkways, supporting the development of large lot homes along their sides.

 

·      Connectors:  Connectors provide local circulation between neighborhoods, direct access to local community centers.  They are designed to disperse traffic and relieve congestion that would normally have piled up on the avenues. 

 

 

"Streets, like land use, can no longer afford to be single purpose."

                                                                    ~Peter Calthorpe (Calthorpe, p. 4)

 

 

Other Objectives of the Urban Network

 

·      Walkable Town and Village Centers are placed at the crossroads of Transit Boulevards and Avenues

·      Surrounding the Village Centers are four neighborhoods that are no more than ¼ mile walking distance to the mix of uses placed at the center and anchored by a grocery facility.

·      A "grid network" of trees, as seen in the illustration above, is created by integrating natural elements along the four road types.  This improves the beauty of the site, and offers health and well being benefits as well.

 

 

This Urban Network is specifically designed to support the advantages of the New Urbanist Movement, including, land preserving density, a walkable mix of uses, and a range of housing possibilities in a pleasant urban environment.  The Urban Network is designed to be the framework upon which New Urbanist and Smart Growth developments are built.

 

 

 

 

Transit Oriented Developments

 

The world's population is increasing at an exponential rate, and our dependence on the automobile and other highly pollutant industries has put a great strain on the quality of our livable environment and on quality of life in general.  The "bigger, faster, better, more" philosophy of the United States, as well as many other industrialized nations, has led to increased health risks, traffic congestion, and stress in general.  The Urban Network Concept designed by Peter Calthorpe is one solution to the problems we have created for ourselves as a result of our dependence on the automobile.  The Network is one theory of Transit Oriented Development, or development that is centered on easing the traffic congestion and improving pedestrian walkability through the use and support of a centrally located public transit center.

 

The following links will take you to two communities that have initiated Transit Oriented Developments:

 

Plano's Transit Village      http://www.planotx.org/amicus

 

City of Portland Office of Transportation                 http://www.trans.ci.portland.or.us/projects/lists/planningprojects.htm

 

To learn more about Transit Oriented Developments in general, please visit the following sites:

 

Transit Station Communities        http://www.todcommunities.org

 

Rail-Volution        http://www.railvolution.com

 

 

Sources

 

Calthorpe, Peter.  "The Urban Network: A Framework for Growth" Calthorpe and Associates http://www.calthorpe.com, Dec. 10, 2002.

 

Transit Station Communities, http://www.todcommunities.org, Dec. 10, 2002

 

*All illustrations borrowed with permission from the Calthorpe and Associates website at http://www.calthorpe.com

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