Boulevards

Definition

Boulevards are Jane Jacobs's candidate street-type for repairing the car-ruined city: "Another kind of road, the boulevard, is capable of serving a district's full ranges of mobility: walks for pedestrians; lanes alongside them for bicyclers and roller skaters; lanes for public transit vehicles, and separate channels for automotive vehicles passing through and those heading for local destinations" (Jacobs 2004, p. 149). The concept's social core: "People in cities and neighborhoods in much of the world understand their boulevards to be at the heart of their communities" (p. 150) — "places to which people flock for a stroll when their day's work is done, to see the neighbors, get word of strangers, pick up other news, and enjoy a coffee or a beer and a chat while they take in the passing scene, including sidewalk play of children" (pp. 149–150). "A well-designed boulevard is always well provided with trees along its margins and its medians, because a major concern of serious boulevard designers is to create environments welcoming to pedestrians" (p. 150).

The concept's scientific register is its demonstration that North American traffic engineering outlawed the type on no evidence: "Traffic engineers in North America firmly outlaw, as unsafe, boulevard trees and turnoff channels for local-destination vehicles… But how do experts and teachers and textbooks know that trees and other boulevard features are unsafe? They don't know, say the authors of The Boulevard Book… The authors studied accidents and reasons for them and identified specific design flaws; they found that boulevards the world over have fine safety records for all the kinds of mobility they serve… the authors found no studies or other evidence to support the recommendations against boulevards… These were based on wholly unsupported dogma, nothing more" (p. 150). The dogma's content is "an unexamined belief that boulevards are 'heretical' because they embrace complexity and coexistence of multiple movements and users" (p. 151). The concept's structural virtue is access: the boulevard, "when properly designed… is an unlimited-access street, affording entrance and exit to adjoining grids at every corner instead of at a few choke points" (p. 219) — the direct answer to the limited-access highway's choke-point congestion (see attrition-of-automobiles). Its densification role: "when a formerly sprawling suburb becomes dense enough to populate a boulevard with strollers, users of mass transit, and errand goers, it will also have enough clout to lobby for a boulevard, and win it, to replace a stretch of bleak and more dangerous limited-access highway" (p. 151).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's advocate in this wiki: the multiway boulevard as community street; the no-evidence indictment of the engineering dogma (2004).
• Allan B. Jacobs, Elizabeth Macdonald & Yodan Rofe (not yet paged — see log) — The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards (MIT Press, 2002), the concept's research source: worldwide safety records, the missing evidence, "the flagship of urban streets" (Philip Langdon's phrase, cited p. 219). "The lead author… is not a relative of mine but a friend" (p. 218).

Related Concepts

• attrition-of-automobiles — the mobility frame: boulevards as the street-type that accommodates traffic without surrendering community; unlimited access against choke points.
• densification — the transformation context: boulevards as the replaced highway's successor when suburbia densifies.
• small-blocks — the grid principle the boulevard's access-at-every-corner extends.
• scientific-state-of-mind — the methodological frame: the boulevard dogma as one more case of evidence-free engineering paradigm.
• separation-of-uses — the regulatory regime boulevards reverse: channels for many uses on one right-of-way against zoning's single-use streets.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the multiway design and the Mediterranean social register (pp. 149–150); the trees doctrine (p. 150); the Boulevard Book's safety findings and the "wholly unsupported dogma" verdict (p. 150); the density-precondition for winning a boulevard (p. 151); the unlimited-access virtue and the Toronto waterfront application (p. 219); the Main Street's transformability into "bleak, standardized community killers" (p. 149).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits The Boulevard Book itself as a source ingest and the Complete Streets literature as the concept's policy descendants.

Open Questions

• The boulevard is a compound street type: multiple movement systems on one right-of-way. Is it the synthesis of Jacobs's own 1961 positions — mixed use at the scale of the street section — or a distinct concept with its own genealogy (the Spanish paseo, the Parisian boulevard)?
• Jacobs's evidence argument (no studies support the engineers' safety dogma) mirrors her 1961 Washington Square case. Do the two cases together establish a method rule: that the burden of evidence in street design lies with restriction, not with use?
• The densification-boulevard sequence implies streets follow density rather than lead it. Does this contradict the wiki's attrition-of-automobiles tactics (which are density-neutral interventions), or do the two operate at different phases of a district's life?