0:00:00.767,0:00:06.065 [music] 0:00:06.065,0:00:12.482 Bruce Appleyard: Livable Streets provided the first evidence based research of the problem of traffic on neighbourhood streets. 0:00:12.482,0:00:15.716 It provided the foundational arguments for traffic calming. 0:00:15.716,0:00:18.619 [music] 0:00:18.619,0:00:22.155 Mark Gorton [00:19] Donald Appleyard, who was a professor, conducted a series of 0:00:22.155,0:00:29.830 studies on three different streets in San Francisco chosen to be as identical as possible in 0:00:29.830,0:00:32.866 every dimension except for one – the amount of traffic on each street. 0:00:32.866,0:00:39.840 And what Donald Appleyard was able to show that just the mere presence of cars with the envelope of 0:00:39.840,0:00:47.814 danger that they project around them, and the noise and the pollution, crushes the quality of life in our neighbourhoods 0:00:47.814,0:00:51.652 Bruce Appleyard: What’s really interesting about the graphics in Livable Streets and what they really provided 0:00:51.652,0:00:57.469 was it removed us from just looking at specific numbers of people being hit or killed on streets, 0:00:57.469,0:01:03.964 but actually showing that there was this other way that we could measure the environmental impacts of traffic on neighbourhood streets 0:01:03.964,0:01:10.203 Things such as a light traffic street helped knit a community together, and in contrast, a 0:01:10.203,0:01:18.345 heavily traffic street would actually rip it apart and fewer social ties were able to be created. 0:01:18.345,0:01:23.584 Mark Gorton: [01:18] This chart here shows the social interaction on these three different streets 0:01:23.584,0:01:30.123 So each line shows a connection between one person on the street and another. 0:01:30.123,0:01:34.995 There are just a lot fewer lines on the heavily traffic street as opposed to the 0:01:34.995,0:01:40.033 moderate or the light traffic street, which clearly has a lot more interconnection. 0:01:40.033,0:01:45.973 So what these charts are showing is that people on the light traffic street know more people, have 0:01:45.973,0:01:49.142 more friends than on the heavily traffic street. 0:01:49.142,0:01:58.285 On the light traffic street people have on average three friends per person, and on the heavily traffic street 0.9 friends per person 0:01:58.285,0:02:03.557 The fact that the amount of traffic on the street on which you live can impact the number 0:02:03.557,0:02:06.660 of friends you have in the world is of enormous significance 0:02:06.660,0:02:15.102 The other thing that Donald Appleyard plotted on these charts are these little dots that indicate where people gather 0:02:15.102,0:02:21.174 So it shows on the heavily traffic street there are a much smaller number of dots and there 0:02:21.174,0:02:26.313 are only a handful of places where people would gather on their street. The fact that they 0:02:26.313,0:02:31.084 were able to measure and quantify the reduction in number of friends, in number of 0:02:31.084,0:02:40.496 acquaintances that’s caused by traffic is enormously important and helps to illuminate the invisible harm that’s done by traffic everyday. 0:02:40.496,0:02:43.897 [music] 0:02:43.897,0:02:47.934 Bruce Appleyard: Also these graphics showing the extent of one’s home territory 0:02:47.934,0:02:53.073 were incredibly important in helping people understand that the nuisance of traffic, the 0:02:53.073,0:02:59.046 threat to our safety, the noise, the pollution, that really had a diminishing effect on what 0:02:59.046,0:03:02.215 we felt was part of our neighbourhood or our home territory. 0:03:02.215,0:03:06.808 [music] 0:03:06.808,0:03:11.358 Mark Gorton: And what we have plotted here are peoples’ responses on the 0:03:11.358,0:03:16.296 three different streets, the heavily traffic street, the moderately traffic street and the 0:03:16.296,0:03:19.700 lightly traffic street. And so it’s probably easiest to understand these charts on the 0:03:19.700,0:03:25.038 heavily traffic street cos people basically drew red rectangles which shows their 0:03:25.038,0:03:31.078 apartment, or in some case, their whole building, as being their home territory. So people 0:03:31.078,0:03:37.150 defined their home territory as just the individual space in which they lived or maybe the 0:03:37.150,0:03:44.124 building. If you look on the lightly traffic street you start to see that most of the people 0:03:44.124,0:03:51.039 are defining their entire street as their home territory, with some people saying their 0:03:51.039,0:03:58.939 building or a slightly larger area. When you get to the moderately traffic street some people still said it was just their apartment. 0:03:58.939,0:04:08.515 You had more people saying it was their whole building, and then you had a few people who defined territories as being their whole street. 0:04:08.515,0:04:19.793 These invisible harms are things that people need to be aware of, they need to be conscious of when they drive so they’re aware of how their driving affects the people around them. 0:04:19.793,0:04:24.336 Bruce Appleyard: At the basic level, a livable street is one that feels comfortable to you, it’s one that gives you energy. 0:04:24.336,0:04:29.469 So an unliveable street is one that you want to escape from, and the important part of the 0:04:29.469,0:04:35.759 research was that it actually shows the senses that we do have about our street environment. 0:04:35.759,0:04:41.047 Mark Gorton: Another part of the survey that Donald Appleyard conducted with 0:04:41.047,0:04:46.520 residents on these streets was he gave them a blank map of their street and asked them to 0:04:46.520,0:04:52.225 draw their street. And what he’s produced here are composite pictures indicating how 0:04:52.225,0:04:57.798 many times each feature was drawn. What this shows is that on the heavily traffic street 0:04:57.798,0:05:05.338 they just drew the entirety of the street with very little in the way of details. As you start 0:05:05.338,0:05:12.212 getting into the moderately traffic street, people start drawing more details about the specific buildings. 0:05:12.212,0:05:23.256 And when you get to the lightly traffic street, people start including details of buildings, plantings, things like that, that people just know their street a lot better. 0:05:23.256,0:05:29.162 When they picture it in their head they can picture lots of details, lots of nuances. 0:05:29.162,0:05:38.772 These studies were the first piece of academic research in the United States to document the social harm that is done by traffic. 0:05:38.772,0:05:45.445 Bruce Appleyard: Auto ownership in this country has grown threefold since livable streets was first published. 0:05:45.445,0:05:52.018 So traffic conflicting an incursion on neighbourhoods is still a major issue we need to deal with.