Complete Street Planning and Design: A Framework to Develop Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation Method

Abstract

Many countries over last few decades have worked on complete street planning and designing. As per various researches and organizations, the complete streets are the streets that are context sensitive and designed to accommodate all types of users, considering safety, accessibility and mobility for all types of users. The type of user for every street may vary due to the function and context of the street. Streets are not only the linear linkages but should be treated as 3D spaces. To have a context sensitive street it is equally important that the built mass along the street should be evaluated and designed accordingly. The proposed evaluation methodology will be done at overall level to study the street context, overall quality of services, detailed study for street design elements and measuring urban design qualities for pedestrians through which the study will go one step ahead and evaluated the importance of integrated approach for complete street planning and design. For the evaluation of the streets the selection of study area was on the basis of its context and function. The urban landuses identified are residential, commercial, intuitional and open spaces, which contributes about 85% of the land reservation in master plan. This paper aimed to present the quantitative and qualitative framework evolved to evaluate the street planning and design through identified streets to assess the completeness of the existing streets in Gurgaon. The method of evaluation will help to check the completeness of streets in terms of context, quality of services, street design elements and urban design quality for pedestrians. Through street evaluation the shortfalls can be prioritized and streets can be improved accordingly to become the complete street. The method will help to check the completeness of streets in Gurgaon and other cities with some variations for better cities and better streets.