By Chris Tilden

In 2012, the city of Lawrence took a huge step forward by passing a “complete streets” policy. A complete street is designed to promote safety and convenience for all users. Often seen as a way to encourage walking and bicycling, a truly complete street enhances roadway safety and convenience for all users, including those in vehicles. Hundreds of cities around the country now have complete streets policies.

Lawrence city engineers are now incorporating proven complete street design elements into nearly all street redesign projects. While there has been some community resistance to these designs, we should give fair and serious consideration to them. Complete street designs have the potential to make traveling safer and more convenient, and to make Lawrence a more active, healthy community.

Some of the more common complete street designs are roundabouts, bike lanes, reverse angle parking and lane reductions, often called road diets. Among current projects, roundabouts and lane reduction are being considered on sections of Kasold Drive and Bob Billings Parkway. The Federal Highway Administration has designated roundabouts and lane reductions as proven safety countermeasures because they:

l dramatically reduce the number and severity of crashes (reduced by almost a half in some places),

l decrease the number of excessive speeders, and

l make it safer to walk across streets.

Projects like lane reduction have been successful on roads with average daily automobile traffic as high as 25,000 cars without negatively affecting traffic flow. In comparison, Kasold Drive and Bob Billings Parkway generally carry less than 15,000 cars a day.

Just as important as safety is the impact of complete streets on physical activity. Everyone in our community should have access to safe, well-maintained sidewalks and trails. They are an important source of transportation for many, including the approximately 5 percent of Lawrence families that do not own a vehicle. They also offer just about every resident the chance to be active.

Research findings show people travel more on foot and bicycle in neighborhoods where roadways are safer and easy to navigate, and people want to live in walkable communities. According to a Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department 2014 survey, 70 percent of elementary and middle school students want to walk or bike to school and most live within reasonable walking or biking distance. Twenty percent of elementary schoolchildren in Lawrence live less than a half mile from school, and more than 50 percent live within a mile. Still, only 14 percent of our elementary and middle school children walk or bike to school. In Lawrence, where we have a strong neighborhood school system, we can do better.

In fact, we must. We live in an increasingly sedentary world where we are prematurely dying because we aren’t moving. A lack of physical activity is leading to increased incidence of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, some cancers and upper respiratory conditions. These diseases cause nearly 6 out of 10 deaths in Douglas County, and our children’s generation is the first ever expected to have shorter lives than their parents’ generation. There isn’t one simple solution to this problem, but it’s clear to me that creating a healthy built environment in Lawrence and Douglas County is a good place to start.

— Chris Tilden, is community health director for the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department