Safe Street Infrastructure

Safe and accessible street infrastructure helps create an optimum pedestrian and bicycling environment, which supports the increased likelihood of travel by foot or bicycle, in turn encouraging physical activity and enhancing mental health.

Key Terms

• Safe Street Infrastructure refers to features in street design that support use by pedestrians and bicyclists, such as traffic controls, traffic calming elements, high intersection density, sidewalks, and bicycle paths or lanes.
• Bicycle Lane is a dedicated and protected road or path that is separated from motor vehicles and pedestrians, and reserved for bicyclists’ use. 
• Diagonal parking is street parking that is designed so that drivers enter and exit diagonally, to have an unobstructed view of traffic and can enter the traffic stream directly, rather than parking that is parallel or perpendicular to the roadway.
• Signalized Crosswalks have electronic indicators and traffic lights that stop vehicles when the walk sign is “on.”

Strategy Insights 

• The qualifying safe street infrastructure elements surrounding a project do not need to be funded or installed by the submitting project. Municipal infrastructure equally qualifies, provided that it is within the maximum distances permitted in the strategy requirements.
• In order to qualify for this strategy, you must demonstrate the implementation of at least two total elements from different categories. 
  
  • Striped crosswalks alone do not qualify as Pedestrian Visibility; striped crosswalks are not considered Road Markers. 
  • A "sharrow" street is not a Designated Bicycle Lane.
• The link-to-node ratio is a technical measurement of street connectivity. Higher street connectivity is associated with slower overall traffic speeds due to 1) the frequency of intersections and traffic control measures in higher-density areas, and 2) the multiplicity of options available for drivers, which distributes traffic more evenly across an area. 
  • The link-to-node ratio can be calculated by dividing the total number of road segments between intersections by the total number of street intersections, including dead ends and cul-de-sacs.
  • Fitwel accepts a link-to-node ratio of at least 1.4 as computed by the above calculation.
• Multifamily Residential
  • The node/link is not required to extend for 1/4 mile; it just needs to "occur" somewhere within the 1/4 mile area. 
• Site
  • Elements must be provided from at least two categories on each of 51% of the street intersections or mid-block crossings.

Documentation Guidance

• Demonstrate installing/implementing two total safe street infrastructure elements, with the clarification that you can only pick a maximum of one from each of the five listed categories.
• Include annotations on all photographs or documentation to clearly indicate which safe street infrastructure element is shown.