Urban Street & Cycling Guidelines

Linking transportation & land-use planning goals

When the State of Victoria, Australia set out to streamline and unify how peope think about street design, and how it's implemented across local agencies and jurisdictions, they engaged Gehl and ARUP to lead the process. Together, the team led a facilitation process and developed two documents for the state’s Department of Transportation (DoT). Building on the previous framework ‘Movement & Place’ developed by ARUP, the documents are inspired by international best practices, like the guidelines developed by NACTO in North America.

The documents serve as a guide to cycling and urban street design that those involved with the implementation process can use to design more context-responsive streets and to better manage the project process,,from ideation, to engagement, to measuring and communicating project impact.

To compliment the design guides, ARUP and Gehl authored a white paper for the DoT that outlines a series of actionable steps. To do so, the team to the guides to the streets, to train implementers and decision makers on how to use them, and to address various road blocks to success, like outdated standards and policies.

Workshops with implementers from across the state 3.

In the Fall of 2019, Gehl led a series of workshops with local implementers and thought leaders to ensure local knowledge was captured, and that the documents were rooted in in the real life opportunities and challenges that implementers face on a daily basis.

Design documents

The outcome of this process was two draft documents, that describe the role of streets across Victoria today, and how to rethink the approach to street and transportation design holistically, on both local and network scales.

The Cycling Guide document emphasizes infrastructure and network planning with the goal of delivering a complete and integrated cycling network.

Road and Street Guide lays out an overall vision and a set of guiding principles for safe, connected, vibrant urban roads and streets for all Victorians to live, work, move, play and stay. It contains 16 predefined street typologies that are based on local street examples, with descriptions of their role in the overall street network, their current qualities and challenges, design intent and components to consider when redesigning an existing street or implementing a new. T he next step for this process is for the DoT to take the draft documents back to the engaged stakeholders to gather further input before completing and publishing the guides.

Both documents provide guidance on how to define project goals and metrics, collect data to tell stories of impact, how to define metrics and how pilot projects can serve as a tool for change.

Illustration of an ‘Interchange Street’

While Covid-19 has created delays in the finalization of this work, it has also enabled the accelerations of some of the drafted guideline recommendations, such as the long awaited completion of a bike lane network. Now, the DoT is implementing 100 protected popup bikelanes across the greater Melbourne area.