Wes Craiglow, a city planner for Conway, Arkansas, describes the small college town where he grew up and now works as “young and progressive.” But last year he’d noticed that Conway—home to about 60,000 residents in the Little Rock metro area—was overbuilding a lot of its residential streets. So he found an example of an overbuilt street, and another of a “right-sized” street, and patched them together into the above meme.
Craiglow’s point is that the design of a street, more so than any posted speed limit sign, invites drivers to go fast or slow. It’s a critical message at a time when cities around the U.S. and the world are turning to Vision Zero and 20’s Plenty campaigns that stress the safety advantages of slower traffic. As the Strong Towns blog noted in picking up the meme: “We can't regulate our way to safety.”
