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Originally Posted by eschaton
It would be much better if Pittsburgh moved towards a living street/woonerf/home zone model, where the roads are shared spaces - not quite pedestrian only, but designed so that pedestrians and cyclists have precedence, and cars drive at lower speeds. Oviously this can't be used on the main traffic thoroughfares, but I see no reason why the side streets in Downtown, South Side, North Side, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, or Oakland couldn't be converted. We'd be truly ahead of the curve as an American city, rather than just following a national trend.
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My understanding is the shared street model you are talking about does tend to have somewhat limited application. Specifically, they can work very well in mostly residential areas with low traffic volumes, but outside of limited cases like pedestrian-heavy plazas and such, I am not sure the evidence supports it working in mostly commercial areas with higher traffic volumes.
In fact, they have gotten some serious pushback from advocates for the elderly, disabled, children, and so on. The basic problem appears to be that when cars are too frequent relative to pedestrians, then cars don't slow down much, and pedestrians start having to defer to cars, and various "vulnerable" classes of pedestrians really struggle to navigate the space at all.
In any event, I think the "complete streets" concept is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of approaches--indeed, part of the idea is that street design should be very contextual. So I think under that umbrella the City could experiment with more use of shared spaces (in fact, that BIG plan for the Lower Hill looks like a good place to experiment, say on those diagonal streets), but I do think there are good reasons for not necessarily diving into it as a widespread approach.
Edit: Here is a Wikipedia article that summarizes some of the criticisms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
The citation link for this quote is broken so I can't independently verify this, but this is typical of what I have seen:
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The British Transport Research Laboratory found that below flows of 90 vehicles per hour adult pedestrians were prepared to mingle with traffic. When flows reached 110 vehicles per hour, they used the width between frontages as if it were a traditional road.
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The point, again, is that you may need car volumes to be below a certain level before shared spaces are a viable approach in most cases, and I am not sure how many streets really qualify.
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