Advocates who aim to retake streets from cars for people need the technical tools to articulate which streets should be reclaimed, and why they should be removed from the urban network. We argue that the immediate impacts of climate change (from flooding to particulate matter emissions to traffic) are the strongest and most urgent justification for street removal.
One of these tools advocates ask for is a comprehensive and localized “street hierarchy.” A street hierarchy is a transportation planning technique useful for network analysis that uses “functional classification” to classify each street according to its “value” or “role” in the network. Why create a street hierarchy? Advocates claim that cities that employ street hierarchies are better able to plan open, pedestrianized streets and reclaim public space for people because they are able to eliminate streets that are not connected to primary roads from the grid. We wanted to take a critical and reparative approach to street hierarchies that rejected the mistakes of the technocratic structures of the past that gave us urban renewal and racist highways. We deliberately created more flexible, open, and expansive use categories directly informed by participatory research.
