But certainly not least Lisbeth McDonnell.

Prosper Donal is a professor
of urban design and

diversity of California Berkeley.

She is the co-chair of the master
urban design program at Berkeley and

her research focuses on the history
of urban for street the story.

Meanwhile that's McConnell.

Hi everyone.

I'm really pleased to be here today
to talk about Frederick Law Olmstead

legacy and his relevance of his ideas for
cities of today and

tomorrow I think this is a really
very very important topic and

I'm particularly pleased
to be here at Georgia Tech

to have this conversation and to help
you all explore the possibilities for

your programs that are made
possible by this really excrete

exciting new opportunity that
the ministers have made available to you.

So what I'm going to
talk about is almost Ed's

urban Parkway idea and how it can
be an inspiration for planning and

designing our cities today particularly
for designing complete urban streets.

We've talked about this a little bit
already and I'm going to talk about it

a great deal more so only steroids era of
the mid to late one nine hundred seventy

three was really a time when American
cities were rapidly expanding and

all kinds of new forms of
transportation were being invented and

there was quite a chaotic mix
of traffic on city streets and

so in response only stared
in vision picturesque parks.

Yes and he envisioned park ways that would
connect the parks with each other but

he also envision parkways as
streets that would help to organ.

Is that complex mix of
traffic uses allowing for

the complexity but
finding a way to organize it.

So the twentieth century as we all know.

Was an era of the automobile and
a functional approach to

street design really took hold in
many ways resulting in streets having

all too many single purpose vehicular
Orient roadways into in them and today for

a whole host of social environmental
reasons communities are rethinking

those practices of the twentieth
century and are really looking for

a new twenty first century model which
would be an air of complete streets.

So an acceptant definition of complete
streets is that there are streets for

many users for

all types of movement pedestrian cyclists
motorists public transit users and

the like my definition of complete
streets is that they provide for

multiple forms of movement and
for gathering.

And they also provide places for
urban Greening and

hopefully places where ecological
services could provide it.

Trees for shade but also trees.

For beauty.

Which is a very important thing
to include in our cities.

So one thousand sings three.

And in particular those with the three
roadway form which is the type I'm going

to talk about here today offer a model for
that can really be

adapted in many ways for complete streets
particularly those of the larger scale but

also smaller scale complete
streets in our cities today so

I'm going to use the Brooklyn Park
ways to illustrate Olmsted's urban

Parkway form and the special three
roadway design that he developed and

then I will talk about a research
project that I did with others.

Looking at the modern day ses and

usefulness of that type of street and
which was really research

they grew out of a realization that you
could not build an almost dead Parkway

today of this type according to today's
standards and so the research project

that we did really challenge
the accepted engineering standards and

norms which is something that I think
is actually really important thing for

research is to do is to always question
the regimes that we have put in place and

see if we're really getting the kind
of cities that we want to or not.

And then finally I'm going to discuss
professional street design projects that

followed from research that show how
Parkway design idea can be adapted today.

So the picture that you've been
looking at here is a picture of

Ocean Parkway one of the two Brooklyn
Parkway is that almost a design and

that's what it looked like in the eight
hundred ninety S. when it was a bucolic

roadway extending for about five and
a half miles through largely rural land

at the time of this photo that
the parkway had been in place for

about twenty years you'll notice
there's nothing really built along it.

It was an idea that was really
in advance of the urbanization

that would come to Brooklyn.

Today.

This is what Ocean Parkway looks
like it remains intact but

it isn't bet it within
Brooklyn's urban fabric and

it carries believe it or
not about seventy thousand cars a day.

It also carries lots and lots and lots and

lots of bicyclists which is one of the
things that's really interesting about it.

I got interested in researching
the Brooklyn parkways because of great

curiosity to to know how these
big beautiful streets came to

be why their design like they are how
people use them over time and

also how they managed to survive in spite
of the fact that engineering streets.

Science Standards work
against these streets.

So the full story.

Their whole social history in the
political process that actually allowed

them to come into being told
in my recently published book

pleasure drives and prominent ads.

But today.

What I'm going to talk about is
just the design qualities of these

of these parkways.

So an eight hundred sixty five owns dad
and his partner Calvert Vox were hired to

design Prospect Park and it was meant to
competing grander with the Central Park

meant Manhattan which in many ways is did
and I agree with Fritz This is probably

a much more superior park design but.

Didn't stop there.

Almost immediately he proposed
a lot of metropolitan scale vision.

Namely a park where system that was
supposed to go all the way to Central Park

in Manhattan and essentially it
would organize an eighty square mile

area all of Southern Kings County and
beyond into Queens County

provide the infrastructure
around which single family.

Bucolic neighborhoods would develop.

Now the and those were the major
Parkway routes that he envisioned but

he also invision a lot of smaller
secondary Parkway routes.

Weaving between between those major ones.

Well what actually happened is that there
were only two park was that were built and

but they have a combined
length of over eight miles.

So it's really impressive in
large scale Parkway system.

Of note is that while Eastern Parkway was
built wholly within Brooklyn city limits

Ocean Parkway was built wholly
outside of Brooklyn city limits.

So clearly he was thinking big.

He really had this
metropolitan scale vision and

the political struggle you can imagine
to build especially Ocean Parkway.

It was quite enormous and
he working with people like

James Stranahan who was the park
commissioner they were able to work with

the political process to actually
make this street happen but it but

it was quite an interesting struggle
which I invite you to read my book.

If you're interested to
hear about that struggle.

This is the planet that owns to Drew for
the for Eastern Parkway.

It's a two hundred ten foot wide Parkway.

With six rows of trees along it.

That's the parkway is in the middle.

He also envision flanking tree line
boulevards other side of the parkway.

This was an unparalleled within
the city two hundred ten feet most

streets in the city were about
sixty to seventy street wide

vision the street to be a pleasure
drive and prominent and

interestingly while he was considering
park space mostly to be for

contemplative types of recreation the
parkways were specifically areas that were

meant to be for gregarious are social
kinds of gatherings of large people.

Groups of people in other words prominent
was the activity that he imagined.

So on stead got his inspiration
from the European boulevards

that he had seen on his travels and he
was particularly taken with this street.

This is the avenue.

In Paris which links from the Shamsul
is a to the Bois de Boulogne Yeah.

And this street was was the was
Paris is most fashionable.

Around the eight hundred seventy S..

Like the present boulevards the Brooklyn
parkways were designed to accommodate.

The fast moving new vehicles that he just
been invented and these were lightweight

carriages which suspension springs and
they could go about ten miles an hour.

Doesn't seem fast to us but
at the time you know this is what cities.

It's look like they were packed they
were there were lots of slow moving

Wigan's there were people on foot.

There were people on horses.

It was a rather chaotic mix.

So the parkways were designed for
the new pleasure carriages but

they were also designed to accommodate
this to give ample room for

all of those activities and
as well almost to design the parkways

with cross sections that allowed for
the many different modes to co-exist.

But in separated channels so
that the central roadway was for

the fast moving pleasure carriages and the
side roadways on the other side were for

the slower moving carriages and also for
the way Guinn's that would be servicing

the houses that were to be built along
the parkways and then the train line

in between the roadways were for
the pedestrian prominent.

So in other words these
were quite balance streets

accommodating all the different modes and
I think that that's a key

to thinking often was how to
create a sense of balance.

Ocean Parkway quickly became the most
popular prominent in the New York region

and in the eight hundred eighty S.

when bicycles came into popular use
the malls were converted into bicycle

tracks and the Opening Day Parade
was really quite a spectacle.

Later on motorized vehicles were added
to the mix from the one thousand nine

hundred twenty S. on and the interesting
thing is how adaptable the design this

three roadway dot design has been over
the years so it evolved from a situation

where you had you know going across
across a slow wave carriages yet

slow you have the fast wagons carriages
and you had the pedestrians and

then you had the equestrians and you know
the exact era to a situation today where

you go from pedestrians on the sidewalks
to the slow moving autos to but S. Rians.

Bicycle is sharing the mall is to
faster travel in the in the middle and

so on repeating again
across the cross-section.

So it's really providing for
all those uses even today.

Now believe it or not Ocean Parkway.

It barely survived in the one thousand
nine hundred sixty is Robert Moses

built the prospect expressway fitting into
the northern end of Ocean Parkway and

he actually had plans to turn
all of Parkway into expressway.

The only reason why that didn't happen
is because of all the fights against

other thing to the he was trying to do
in Manhattan in the village people like

Jane Jacobs that helped
bring about his demise and

he just some simply had turned
this into an expressway.

But the sign by the time he was removed
from power in one nine hundred sixty eight

and the other thing that almost happened
to do Ocean Parkway in was that in the one

nine hundred seventy S. the local
community they had gotten a stray federal

grant to repave Ocean Parkway and but in
order to get that money they were going to

have to change it to meet Federal Street
design standards which meant widening all

the lanes which would have meant taking
out a row of trees on each of the mall.

So the local community fought that
they really valued the kind of

civilized balance design that was
in place in as a original design.

They managed to have the street
declared a national scenic landmark and

that won out over the uniform standards
they understood that the wider

lanes were not necessary because actually
the street was working just fine.

The ohms to designed humble Parkway
in Buffalo was not so lucky.

So this was also built as part of a park
in park way system and the humble Parkway

actually had a cross section that was
similar to the Brooklyn Park was but

in the one nine hundred sixty S.
This is what happened to it.

It was converted.

It into an expression way.

So in a moment I'm going to show you a new
trend which is to turn urban freeways back

into inspired boulevards which leads
to the research that I did with

Alan Jacobs and you don't refer to that
was published in the boulevard book.

So three roadways boulevards like
Ocean Parkway and its European.

Boulevard counterparts.

They seem to us to be a good way of
handling you know large amounts of

traffic in a city in those places
where it was necessary to do so

without killing the local environment
right that you could still have a local

environment at the same time
you handle that traffic but

after proposing a street like that in the
Los Angeles area area we were told that

we couldn't do it because they didn't
conform to the standards there was no way.

So traffic engineers consider them to be
unsafe because of the multiple conflict

points that arise because
of the multiple roadways.

When if you only analyze the street like
this it's a bit alarming right because

there's a lot of potential conflict
points but that's not the whole story and

engineers also consider the street
unsafe or unusual because it didn't

fit into the functional classification
of streets which has been used.

That's been in place really since
the one nine hundred thirty S. And

that's a system that puts streets
into different categories to pace.

Depending upon the movement and access
functions that they're supposed to perform

and if you think about this is the diagram
that's used to describe the functional

classification and
basically with that diagram.

It's impossible to have a street that
offers both a high level of movement and

a high level of access
it simply doesn't fit.

So a street like the multi-way
Boulevard which is the name that we

collectively term these boulevards
as well as the old park ways

they wouldn't fit into this classification
system so they were suspect.

So in our research we compared.

Of ARDS and parkways with nearby normally
configured streets carrying similar

amounts of traffic all over the world
including the ones in Brooklyn and

we found that they are not more
dangerous if they are well designed and

we learn that the street like
Ocean Parkway is well designed even for

today's traffic environment and
the real key is to design traffic columns

side realms that have narrow lanes in and
are controlled with stop signs.

Instead of signal lights and

then the closely spaced trees on
the median especially Olmsted's

form where you actually have you know six
rows of trees across the whole street.

All those things really contribute
to discouraging drivers

from driving on the side roadway and
create.

Really they reduce all those potential
conflict points that could happen in

the center so these are traffic flow
diagrams of Ocean Parkway over here

on your right and on the Grand Concourse
which is a poorly designed street and

you just notice that on the Ocean Parkway
everybody is moving in the center.

That's where the fast travel goes and not
very many people are moving on the side

and so that in this light DIA that
own state had about separating out

the different flows is actually still
in use today and what happens on

a well designed street like this is you
get this extended pedestrian realm that

goes all the way from the sidewalks
out to the end of the malls.

Fortunately only initial idea of this

mall to use separate
channels was reinforced

by the kind of traffic controls that
were put in place on the street today.

They didn't work against it.

They worked with it and
this is what the street looks like today.

Other multo you boulevards
this is the Grand Concourse

the one that I was showing
the other traffic flow diagram of.

A first glance you might
think it was the same kind of

street because it has the three
real reform but it's so

different because there's
an over emphasis on The View.

Kill or realm here and there's not enough
balance given to the other realms.

So this street is actually
very very unsafe.

Now I want to emphasize that field
observations were really really key

to our research watching
carefully by the hour.

Can lead to an understanding of what's
actually going on in streets and

in other places in our cities that may
lead to different conclusions than if you

just look at.

These kind of spaces in an abstract way
through as abstract forms of analysis.

So I really encourage.

Those of you civil engineers and designers
and others in the room to make sure that

you include field observations in
the kind of research that you do.

So just quickly the research that
we did on boulevards actually lid

led to the possibility of building
streets like Ocean Parkway today and

this is actually designed with my partner.

Alan Jacobs and this is
Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco.

Octavia Boulevard replaced a portion of
the central freeway that was damaged in

the one nine hundred eighty nine Loma
Prieta earthquake the elevated freeway

this is believe it or not what it looked
like had been built in part of a city

highway plan but it had been stopped short
in the sixty's by Sam says because famous

freeway wars but this spurred divide
it to his valley neighborhood for

years and the area under the freeway was
home to prostitutes and drug dealers

after the earthquake citizens debated for
many many years about what to do with

the damage structure and finally after
multiple citizen led ballot initiative.

Initiatives San Franciscans voted to take
the freeway down at Market Street and

replace it with the surface Boulevard and

we were brought in to
design that Boulevard.

We created an eight eight blah blah
way Boulevard ending in a new.

Park which was linked to
the local shopping street.

One of our objectives was to keep this
boulevard as narrow as possible so

that we could build new buildings along
the side of the street that where

buildings have been torn out when
that large wide freeway was put in.

So this is the cross section of it.

It's much narrower than
the Olmsted parkways and

that was a point that I wanted to make is
that you don't need that two hundred and

ten foot wide cross-section to get a lot
of the benefits of the design the design.

So the the many trees in
this is what this is what

Octavia Boulevard looks like today looking
from the park back up the boulevard.

The many trees in the park really mitigate
the impact of those big flows on the local

neighborhood and there's a book called
bucolic feeling that somewhat reminiscent

of the Brooklyn Park ways is starting
to emerge in the little park kids and

parents are playing happily and
people of all ages are gathering

in an area where once there was just
an overhead freeway and lots of asphalt.

The through traffic is keeping to the
central road roadway just like OWN set in.

Vision for the pleasure carriages and
the side roadways are quite traffic calmed

here people use them as a much needed
bike route for this part of the city and

the other puti of this type of street
is it allows people to cross this wide

roadway with ease because all of the
medians become places that are pedestrian

refuges across the street a benefit
of taking the freeway down

as well as creating this bucolic street
environment was that it liberated lots and

lots of parcels for
development because of the recession there

not a lot was built for
a while but interesting temporary

uses were were put on some of these
parcels of two of the narrow narrow us.

Which by the way are only
fourteen feet wide and

I am only just heard that the the city
has gotten a proposal for

an immense amount of money to actually
purchase those properties because people

are really interested in them even though
they're only fourteen feet swell and

will be interesting to see
what's built there but

their been temporary uses like these
community gardens and pop up retail.

Along the edges of the park.

Now that the recession is over and

the economy in San Francisco has been
booming new housing is being built.

So just like almost at Invision
the parkways to structure

residential neighborhoods that's in fact
what is happening here in San Francisco on

Octavia Boulevard and.

In some ways I would say that Octavia and
it's a little park at the end is a very

modest scale version of an almost
dead park in Parkway system.

My hope for the street is that in
the long term those cars will disappear

as we're driving less and less in cars and
it will become an even more and more

bucolic roadway and who knows maybe it
will be to able to take over some of that

central roadway and put in another row of
trees on its side or something like that.

It's a possibility of
future transformation for

this area is to me is very exciting and
I'm just going to show you quickly.

A couple of other projects that were also

boulevards this is Pacific Boulevard
in Vancouver British Columbia.

It's this is the street.

Before we got involved in it.

It's a it's a major roadway
in the north Creek area and

it had just been refurbished but
planners looked at it and

they said my goodness it's such a big wide
roadway and we didn't get the back bright.

It's an unsafe thing for
the people living in this neighborhood.

So they brought us into talk
about possibilities to make it

safer for pedestrians.

That's what it looked
like in our proposal was

to build a central median Boulevard
in the middle where there's a.

Commercial area and then along
either side where it's residential

to build a one sided multiway Boulevard.

We put that access road on the side where
we where new housing was going to be

developed and where it made
sense to have an access road.

So this is what it looks like
that's the central median area.

The relatively recently planted trees but

those will grow up to be quite large and
help with their verticality in the trees

leaving over the roadways to really
knock down the scale of that street and

then this is what it looks like along
the way Boulevard side realm and

here we were able to also include
ecological services that we have

rain gardens and things like that that
happen at the at the intersections and

we've also design with our
colleague Greg Tung from Friedman

tongue and
their current name Boulevard and

bottle Washington so it's the linear
one going up through the middle.

That is intended to read.

The community together that will
become their new Main Street and

ground has recently.

They recently broken ground on this and

this boulevard of Parkway is
starting to be built as well.

The one thing that I want to mention
here is some of the the lessons to

be learned from the parkways
from almost as parkways.

It's important to really get it to
understand that those streets could not be

built according to today's standards.

Right.
If they were operative.

So if we're putting in place standards
that don't allow us to build good

streets and valued streets.

Maybe there's a problem there.

So it and likewise the only way that
we were able to build Octavia Boulevard

in the place of the freeway was
by questioning the standards and

unfortunately the local community and
the governess tried.

San Francisco was willing to take a chance
on a street that didn't meet the local

standards and so I would suggest
that in the spirit of own owns.

What you would like to do for
both research and practice is to question.

To question what we're doing and

make sure that we're getting the kind
of places that we want don't put

in place rigid standards that get us to
kind of places that we don't want and

then finally is the issue of homeless
the issue of wholeness or balance.

One of the phrases that we used a lot
when we were designing Octavia Boulevard

is no one gets everything everyone gets
a lot because there was a tendency

as there isn't so many street design
projects for everybody to want to maximize

whatever their interest was right and

if you do that you'll end up with
the bad Street right or you'll

certainly end up with a wider street and
problematic Street in many ways.

So one other thing that
I would like to say is

when you're thinking about
designing complete streets.

Don't try and solve every possible
problem that you think could possibly

come up every possible conflict because
that will lead to designing a bad

story instead think about it holistically
how can things work together and

how can we do it so that no one may get
everything but everyone gets a lot.

Thank you very much.

Thank you Liz but.

We have time for one of two questions.

Yes so

the examples that you show are primarily
in urban areas what's your opinion

of using a multi-way Boulevard
in suburban areas as kind of.

Replacing the arterials
putting them all type.

A bill of art is a foundation for

beginning to transform
into rescale the suburbs.

OK And so we didn't plan this but
let me just show you some possibilities.

This is a sequence of slides that
were given to my colleague recall

which show the possibility for
transfer warming.

Yes little it was not set
up I just stopped her

because I was running out of time but so
take in an urban arterial like this and

transforming it and this is here how you
could do it through the sequence of slides

first putting in place the new
street in improvements then.

Second there's an opportunity
to bring buildings up to

the street line to face the street and
they have access immediate access and

parking in front of them because of
the boulevard design and then eventually

the street might be completed along
the other side with new buildings and

then more and more buildings and more and
more people can come to the street so

I would say that that is
an opportunity for how to do it.

You know we we haven't worked
in a street in a city like that.

I think that there's so
many possibilities for that and

it would be wonderful to be able to do
that you know one of the things is that.

I think now that we're starting to have
a few of these multiway boulevards built

that other cities are going
to be interested in it and

they will see it you know going beyond
the first adopter city which is what

San Francisco has other cities can now
look at it and hopefully we can convince

other public works department and
other traffic engineering departments and

other fire departments a lot of people
that have to be brought on board about

the possibilities for
the street so love to do it.

Haven't done yet.

What probably the easiest place just
to look at it is is in our book.

Which is called The is
called the boulevard book.

Yeah and it details all of the research
and the different data and

things like that but if you're
interested you could also contact me.

I've got some other numbers that might be
useful when when particularly when we were

doing the boulevard in Bothell Washington.

It was really useful to do
comparative of traffic flows and

things like that from different places to
help convince people that it could work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well like the what we did with
those traffic flow diagrams

those are the kind of things
that are typically drawn but

you know just really showing
what it was actually happening.

So maybe if you could figure out a way of
documenting what you're seeing right and

then and then putting that on the table
as well as the the numbers having to

do with throughput and capacity.

You know it might really help.

Yes.

But you know I think it's a great idea and
actually.

What I think as I was saying my vision for
how things could transform.

Over time is that even in a place
like the boulevard in San Francisco.

Hopefully it can be rebalanced
even more away from

the vehicular you use and
being used in different ways.

So for now all that we were
able to incorporate was

that community gardens which unfortunately
are temporary because of the need to build

more housing along the boulevard.

But it's a good point.

Thank you.

It's so we stopped.

OK Thank you.

Of the of once

again I'd like to thank all the speak
its really outstanding Talk of

the I can't think of another symposium
that's has such a diverse audience.

We're looking at the data earlier we
have a number of different units on

campus represented both in the College
of Engineering College Voc texture other

units C.D.C. every And then a Regional
Commission park at about line and

this is really in my opinion a spirit
a state in the spirit of the chair and

I can't think of a better way to
kind of kick off the search for

this through this chip So again thank
you for all your great talks and

for traveling all the way to Atlanta
to share your your insight with us.

Thank you again to the committee for
all the hard work.

I must say this is the first time being
a civil engineer and I've heard the word

happiness and actual symposium so
many times sell my colleagues or

get a kick out of that but
again thank the committee and

the staff to put this on and
I think the speakers will be around for

a few more minutes in the back and
thank you for attending.

Thank you.