Reconstructing the Street? Move the Curb!

(Source: Strong Towns/Chuck Marohn.)

Like diet and exercise leading to healthier living, transformation into a Strong Town is the result of a long-term commitment to bottom-up action. There is no sweeping change or large transformation that can give a city lasting prosperity, but there is an endless list of small things we can do to continually make things better.

One such opportunity presents itself when doing a street reconstruction project. Where a routine maintenance project typically involves some type of repair to the road surface, a full reconstruction project is more involved. If your city is replacing the underground utilities, that generally means the street is being reconstructed and not merely maintained.

If the reconstruction project involves replacing the curb, don’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something transformative.

You can reduce project costs, reduce long-term maintenance costs, improve safety, reduce environmental impacts, and make the surrounding neighborhood a more pleasant and financially productive place by doing one simple thing: move the curb.

I could have said “narrow the street,” but I’m intentionally focusing on the location of the curb here. That is the key thing; get that curb moved! Design engineers have all kinds of ways to claim they have narrowed the street on paper that don’t translate into the real world. Move the curbs and everything changes.

(Source: Strong Towns/Chuck Marohn.)

Real Financial Impact

This summer, my city is working on a street reconstruction project near my home. My commute has been torn up for most of the summer, forcing me to walk through loose dirt and construction debris or take a more circuitous route. I’ve not minded at all. You see, my city moved the curb and I’m ecstatic about it.

Many decades ago, my poor and generally cash-strapped city took a quaint and walkable neighborhood and decided it was going to spend absurd amounts of money widening the streets. In a very practical sense, a wider street substitutes asphalt pavement for turf. The wider the street is, the more pavement and the less turf there is. 

Let me state the obvious: pavement is vastly more expensive than turf. Oh so much more expensive. By shifting to pavement from turf, the city is choosing to spend a lot more money upfront.

How much more? The bid tabulation for the current project gives a rough idea.

With an eight-inch-deep section, a shift from turf to pavement increases the cost by 350%. On the pavement side, there is compacted aggregate and bituminous pavement at a cost of $2.09 per square foot. On the turf side, there is fill (common borrow) and topsoil at just $0.60 per square foot. These prices will vary for different locations and different projects, but the ratio of 3.5x seems like a solid benchmark.

I’m not sure exactly how much the city moved the curb, but I estimate about eight feet on each side. If so, they cut well over $150,000 off the cost of the project. Here’s a link to the bid tabulation and a spreadsheet that shows how I came up with these results. 

Those are the initial construction costs, but the ongoing maintenance costs add up, as well. Every routine maintenance project over the years had to crack seal, seal coat, and overlay that much more pavement. Every time it snowed, the plows needed to clear that much more snow at a shockingly high cost. When it rains, we have to convey that much more water through systems that must be sized to handle all that unnecessary pavement.

An extra foot of street pavement is the extravagant luxury good we not only don’t appreciate, but also never really wanted.

If you’re reconstructing the street, reduce the street width by moving the curb in. As far as possible. Every foot saves you money today and every year you maintain that street. Fight for less.

My city moved the curb. That’s great leadership.

(Source: Strong Towns/Chuck Marohn.)

Beyond the Financial

Municipalities across North America are financially insolvent. Unnecessarily wide streets are a grotesque extravagance that displays a complete lack of fiscal awareness, not to mention basic prudence. We must move the curbs in for financial reasons, but the irony is that we sacrifice nothing—and gain so much—in the process.

Narrower streets slow traffic. While this isn’t a strategy for high-speed roadways where the extra width is needed for safety, we titled this article “reconstructing the street” for a reason. On local streets, the priority must shift from automobile throughput to human safety and wealth creation. If we want safe streets, we have to design them to be safe, and that means bringing the curbs in to tighten up the space.

Download this handy infographic here!

When it comes to wealth creation, narrower streets also outperform the over-engineered variety. Beyond the obvious observation that nearly all of us prefer to live on quiet, neighborhood streets with slow traffic (and greater preference correlates to greater market price), narrow streets where people feel more comfortable walking and biking provide more investment opportunity.

Your city might not be ready to bring back corner stores and other bottom-up neighborhood businesses, but they will probably never be if you don’t move the curb. Narrower streets create the virtuous feedback loop of more neighborhood housing demand driving more neighborhood business demand driving more neighborhood housing demand.

Then there are street trees. There is no higher-returning investment that a city can make than to plant street trees. Every dollar spent returns many multiples. Move the curbs and not only do you have the room to plant trees, but those trees also have a greater chance of survival. 

And when those trees mature, they do so many things. They dramatically lower temperatures in the heat and reduce wind in the cold. They soak up water in the wet and transpire water in the dry. They make walking more pleasurable and, when planted between the sidewalk and the curb, incrementally safer.

And anything that gets people out walking improves public health, allows families to become less auto dependent, keeps more of a community’s wealth local, and so much more.

All this is possible just by moving the curb. Don’t throw away your shot.

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