A sidewalk or pavement is a path along the side of a road. Usually constructed of concrete, pavers, brick, stone, or asphalt, it is designed for pedestrians. A sidewalk is normally higher than the roadway, and separated from it by a curb. There may also be a planted strip between the sidewalk and the roadway and between the roadway and the adjacent land.
Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe, but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
A street is a public thoroughfare in a built environment. It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable surface such as tarmac, concrete, cobblestone or brick. Portions may also be smoothed with asphalt, embedded with rails, or otherwise prepared to accommodate non-pedestrian traffic.
Parking is the act of stopping and disengaging a vehicle and usually leaving it unoccupied. Parking on one or both sides of a road is often permitted, though sometimes with restrictions. Some buildings have parking facilities for use of the buildings' users. Countries and local governments have rules for design and use of parking spaces.
Road traffic safety refers to the methods and measures, such as traffic calming, to prevent road users from being killed or seriously injured. Typical road users include pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, passengers of vehicles, and passengers of on-road public transport, mainly buses and trams.
A curb extension is a traffic calming measure which widens the sidewalk for a short distance. This reduces the crossing distance and allows pedestrians and drivers to see each other when parked vehicles would otherwise block visibility. The practice of banning car parking near intersections is referred to as daylighting the intersection.
Pedestrian zones are areas of a city or town restricted to use by people on foot or human-powered transport such as bicycles, with non-emergency motor traffic not allowed. Converting a street or an area to pedestrian-only use is called pedestrianisation.
The car-free movement is a social movement centering the belief that large and/or high-speed motorized vehicles are too dominant in modern life, particularly in urban areas such as cities and suburbs. It is a broad, informal, emergent network of individuals and organizations, including social activists, urban planners, transportation engineers, environmentalists and others. The goal of the movement is to establish places where motorized vehicle use is greatly reduced or eliminated, by converting road and parking space to other public uses and rebuilding compact urban environments where most destinations are within easy reach by other means, including walking, cycling, public transport, personal transporters, and mobility as a service.
A parking space, parking place or parking spot is a location that is designated for parking, either paved or unpaved. It can be in a parking garage, in a parking lot or on a city street. The space may be delineated by road surface markings. The automobile fits inside the space, either by parallel parking, perpendicular parking or angled parking.
A bus bulb, also called a bus boarder, bus border, bumpout, bus cape, or a kerb outstand is an arrangement by which a sidewalk or pavement is extended outwards for a bus stop; typically the bus bulb replaces roadway that would otherwise be part of a parking lane. With bus bulbs or boarders, a bus can stay in its traffic lane to discharge and pick up passengers, instead of having to pull over to the curb.
A living street or residential street is a street designed with the interests of pedestrians and cyclists in mind. Living streets also act as social spaces, allowing children to play and encouraging social interactions on a human scale, safely and legally. Living streets consider all pedestrians granting equal access to elders and those who are disabled. These roads are still available for use by motor vehicles; however, their design aims to reduce both the speed and dominance of motorized transport. The reduction of motor vehicle dominance creates more opportunities for public transportation.
Bike lanes (US) or cycle lanes (UK) are types of bikeways (cycleways) with lanes on the roadway for cyclists only. In the United Kingdom, an on-road cycle-lane can be firmly restricted to cycles or advisory. In the United States, a designated bicycle lane or class II bikeway (Caltrans) is always marked by a solid white stripe on the pavement and is for 'preferential use' by bicyclists. There is also a class III bicycle route, which has roadside signs suggesting a route for cyclists, and urging sharing the road. A class IV separated bike way (Caltrans) is a bike lane that is physically separate from motor traffic and restricted to bicyclists only.
Shared space is an urban design approach that minimises the segregation between modes of road user. This is done by removing features such as curbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and traffic lights. Hans Monderman and others have suggested that, by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed, in turn reducing the dominance of vehicles, reducing road casualty rates, and improving safety for other road users.
A curb or kerb is the edge where a raised sidewalk or road median/central reservation meets a street or other roadway.
Decriminalised parking enforcement (DPE) is the name given in the United Kingdom to the civil enforcement of car parking regulations, carried out by civil enforcement officers, operating on behalf of a local authority. The Road Traffic Act 1991 (c. 40) provided for the decriminalisation of parking-related contraventions committed within controlled parking zones (CPZ) administered by local councils across the UK. The CPZs under the control of the local councils are also referred to as yellow routes and they can be easily identified with yellow lines marked on the roads with relevant time plates. Councils employ parking attendants to enforce their CPZs directly.
A disabled parking permit, also known as a disabled badge, disabled placard, handicapped permit, handicapped placard, handicapped tag, and "Blue Badge" in the European Union, is a permit that is displayed upon parking a vehicle. It gives the operator of a vehicle permission to special privileges regarding the parking of that vehicle. These privileges include parking in a space reserved for persons with disabilities, or, in some situations, permission to park in a time-limited space for a longer time, or to park at a meter without payment.
Car dependency is a phenomenon in urban planning wherein existing and planned infrastructure prioritizes the use of automobiles over other modes of transportation, such as public transport, bicycles, and walking. Car dependency has been attributed with leading to a more polluting transport system compared to systems where all transportation modes are treated more equally.
Cycling infrastructure is all infrastructure cyclists are allowed to use. Bikeways include bike paths, bike lanes, cycle tracks, rail trails and, where permitted, sidewalks. Roads used by motorists are also cycling infrastructure, except where cyclists are barred such as many freeways/motorways. It includes amenities such as bike racks for parking, shelters, service centers and specialized traffic signs and signals. The more cycling infrastructure, the more people get about by bicycle.
Neutron Holdings, Inc., doing business under the name Lime, formerly LimeBike, is an American transportation company based in San Francisco, California. It runs electric scooters, electric bikes and electric mopeds in more than 200 cities in nearly 30 countries around the world. The system offers dockless vehicles that users find and unlock via a smartphone app that knows the location of available vehicles via GPS.
The United Kingdom employs a number of measures to control parking on public highways. The main control is through signed bans on waiting or stopping such as clearways or yellow lines or through charging and time restriction schemes.
