Population growth and increased economic activity have transformed the Bull City over the last two decades. But that transformation has come with a few growing pains. Residents are concerned that new construction projects and more vehicles on the road are making the streets unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians and that the city’s design standards are decades old, making them ill-equipped to manage the increased volume.
On Monday night, the city council took steps to modernize the city’s design standards by adopting three new guidelines: the “Urban Street Design Guide” and “Urban Bikeway Design Guide” created by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and the “Implementing Content – Sensitive Design on Multimodal Corridors: A Practitioners Handbook” from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE).
Council member Nate Baker spearheaded the adoption of the new standards and the city council voted unanimously in favor of the resolution.
“This is a resolution to take a step that gives us innovative tools to be able to move toward streets that are safer and more comfortable for pedestrians and bicyclists,” Baker said.
Community activists spoke in support of the resolution.
Mary Rose Fontana, a member of the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) and a Bike Durham board member, said that when new developments are built, BPAC often receives requests from residents to advocate for sidewalks and other bike and pedestrian infrastructure, but BPAC rarely has the opportunity to comment on developments that do not require rezoning by city council. With updated standards, the types of infrastructure design principles that residents request would be baked into the city’s own design guidelines (like the Unified Development Ordinance, or UDO) for nearly all future development cases.
“Incorporating these guidelines into the UDO, construction standards, and the city’s internal street designs will reduce these inconsistencies between developments, encourage more walking, biking, and transit use throughout the city, and bring the city closer to reaching its Vision Zero goals,” Fontana said.
John Tallmadge, executive director of Bike Durham, shared a similar sentiment.
“We’re particularly supportive of the development of the construction standards as a way to implement the vision of these guidelines and to give clear expectations to private developers for what the city expects for when the streets are being built and then ultimately taken into the city’s network,” Tallmadge said.
The Durham transportation department has already been using many of the standards that NACTO offers for designing projects in the city’s capital improvement plan, according to the department’s assistant director Bill Judge, who spoke during Monday’s meeting. Adopting the resolution unifies the standards across other city departments such as Public Works and the Planning Department, which is responsible for the upcoming UDO rewrite. Unifying the standards also helps the city meet its sustainability and safety goals, and its Vision Zero plan, says Lauren Grove, Durham’s Vision Zero coordinator.
“We’re the city; we’re the ones implementing this,” Grove says. “We’re the ones asking and requiring developers and other people who are working within the right of way to implement these standards, and so to be having those conversations about what standard we want to set is a really big part of Vision Zero.”
There are some exceptions to when the new standards can be applied. As with many city infrastructure projects, only facilities that the City of Durham maintains are affected. City staff would still have to work with the North Carolina Department of Transportation on state-owned roads, limiting projects like the redesign of the Roxboro and Mangum Street corridors.
Still, adopting the NACTO and ITE standards does give additional flexibility to local transportation departments, like Durham’s, that receive federal funding. State transportation departments often serve as a passthrough for federal funding, giving them authority to prescribe their own design requirements on local projects. But a provision in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law would allow Durham to preempt those requirements by adopting the NACTO and ITE standards.
Baker says the new standards have been in the works since January. City staff have collaborated with Baker and other stakeholders to understand how the guidelines fit into the other important planning happening in other departments.
“[The Monday vote] was not just passing something,” Baker says. “It was the culmination of dozens of conversations and going to the table and thinking through and making refinements and getting people on board and building buy-in.”
Chris Perelstein, founder of the popular Twitter account Reckless Roxboro, was the final speaker during public comment at Monday’s meeting. He raised concerns that streetscapes across the city are inequitable but by adopting the new NACTO standards, the city could more easily apply up-to-date standards to future infrastructure projects, like the ones being proposed in the city’s two bond referendums this November.
“Vision without action is just daydreaming,” Perelstein said.
Setting a vision through planning is an important step in the development process, Baker says, but the city can do more to move projects out of the design phase and provide tangible infrastructure improvements.
“I agree with a lot of community members that in some instances we do [planning] well, and other instances we do it horrendously,” Baker says. “The built environment has been one of those areas where much more has been needed much quicker. And so this is responding to that, and taking a step toward resetting the DNA of our streets.”
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to jlaidlaw@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.