The First Rule of Road User Hierarchy Club

Oli Davey, Projects Director, UM

Last week I spoke at a very enjoyable Active City Leicester about Road User Hierarchies and the less than obvious connection they share with the film Fight Club (which is now 25 years old!). A number of people mentioned that they had found my presentation useful, so I thought that I would summarise it in a quick post.
 
As some of you may know, there are two rather well-known rules to Fight Club. The first is that ‘You do not talk about fight club’ whilst the second is ‘You DO NOT talk about fight club’. My suggestion is that we, as an industry, have found ourselves in a similar situation with Road User Hierarchies.
 
Many, if not most, highway authorities now have a Road User Hierarchy sitting somewhere near the front of one of their policy documents. I provided a few examples in my talk, including Greater Manchester’s Streets for All Design Guide, Surrey’s Healthy Streets for Surrey, Hampshire’s LTP4 and Wandsworth’s Walking and Cycling Strategy. I chose these partly because we’ve worked in all of these locations recently (and so I was aware they already had hierarchies) as well as to simply demonstrate the breadth of both documents and authorities that have them (rather than because there was anything special about these particular ones).

Road User Hierarchies look great in a policy document. We proudly stick pedestrians at the top, followed by cyclists, then public transport and finally on to various forms of motor traffic (servicing, car sharing, taxis, private cars, etc.) There might be some nuances to individual hierarchies (some include equestrians, for example), but this tends to be the general shape.
 
My issue is that, whilst Road User Hierarchies are fairly ubiquitous in our policy documents and reasonably well known by practitioners, I get the impression that the last thing anyone working at or for a highway authority wants is for a Council Member, Stakeholder or (worst of all) a member of the public to actually start asking why their latest highway proposals may not immediately suggest that their own hierarchy has been followed to the letter. I happen to think this is a real shame as, given a bit more thought, I think that they can be incredibly helpful, not least as a way of co-creating designs whilst ensuring that the final outputs are deliverable.
 
The first thing that we need to clarify is what a Road User Hierarchy actually means. As far as I am concerned, it should not be a ranking of who gets the most space. Neither should it be a ranking of who should have priority (both of which very quickly run into big trouble when applied to the vast majority of streets and, in my experience, generally lead to confusion and frustration). Instead, I believe that it is far more helpful if we think of them as representing the order in which a designer should consider the needs of any particular road user. 
 
Secondly, a Road User Hierarchy tends to be of limited value because it misses out so many other functions within a street. As Jan Gehl has so eloquently stated, we, as a profession, are responsible for designing the space between buildings and so it is a Road Space Hierarchy that we need. This way, we do not miss other key design elements of a street, including green and blue infrastructure, room for art and culture, hostile vehicle measures, etc, which are inherently missing from any Road User Hierarchy.
 
I would then argue that we easily have sufficient guidance to at least estimate what sort of space each element of the street requires. For example, Transport for London’s Pedestrian Comfort Guidance has a very handy guide to footway widths for various pedestrian flows squirrelled away in Appendix B. LTN 1/20 is the obvious port of call for appropriate cycling infrastructure. Whilst Urban Design London’s Designing Rain Gardens has a useful rule of thumb for the proportion of a streets cross-section that should be set aside to adequately manage surface water runoff. In such a way, a fairly standard two-way street with relatively low flows of pedestrians and cyclists (the latter in their own segregated, with-flow lanes), sufficient room for rain gardens, along with bus lanes and two-way traffic should require a street width of 25.1m (at least by my reckoning). Obviously, there will be the need for this to flex for elements such as bus stops and loading bays, but it’s a useful start.
 
And if we (inevitably) don’t have sufficient width to accommodate all that we need? Then we start at the bottom of the hierarchy, working our way back up, to see who needs to start sharing their space. Therefore, to begin with, cars must potentially start to share space with buses. Still not enough room? Then cyclists must begin to share space with other road users. Historically, cyclists have quite literally been bundled in with anyone – shared footways, bus lanes and general traffic lanes. And all have their issues. But the point is, if we have a Road Space Hierarchy and we’re honest about the room we have and the compromises it will necessitate, then we can start to have a grown-up conversation about how this is done. Usefully, if someone disagrees with the proposed cross-section that we end up with then it is the fundamental principles embedded in the Road Space Hierarchy that must be challenged, rather than some tit-for-tat pantomime of an argument. I have found that this is a far healthier and more productive way to discuss such issues.
 
The final elephant in the room is that, no-matter how well intentioned we may be, any Road Space Hierarchy can only really be applied once some fundamentals have been recognised and accommodated on any specific street. Most streets will almost always require a couple of footways and at least a traffic lane in each direction. And if we’re having a genuinely good-faith discussion about the future of our streets, whether with Council Members, stakeholders or the public, then we need to be up front about this. Ignoring this is a big part of the reason why I think we’ve got ourselves in a bit of a muddle over these hierarchies in the first place. But once these principles are in place, a street, and even an entire network, can be roughed-out relatively quickly, especially with the use of some ‘standard’ cross-sections.
 
So, that’s an incredibly quick canter through some of the key points from my presentation. Hopefully some of that was interesting and may even be helpful for you in your own work? Either way, let’s take a different approach to Brad Pitt and Edward Norton by starting to talk more openly about Road Space Hierarchy Club!