01515232

Component

Parks and greenways can offer many benefits to urban communities in many areas including recreational , public health, and increased land value. However, there are often few opportunities to carry out a narrow, continuous green space in the built-up parts of our cities. One prospect involves using available land in rail or utility corridors; another involves radical road diets to create space along major roads. This paper examines another approach, using the right-of-way (ROW) of local streets to transform pavement into linear parks that the authors call Oasis Greenways. An Oasis Greenway has ultra-low motor vehicle speeds and volumes, allowing there to be a single, narrow paved area shared by motor traffic, pedestrians, and bicycles. The resulting reduction in road footprint creates space for vegetation bordering the paved area, turning the street into a path through greenway park. This paper describes the development of an Oasis Greenway concept and its application to the Fairmount Corridor in Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston identified as a “Greenway Desert” (Furth et al, 2013).

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFB40 Landscape and Environmental Design. Alternate title: Oasis Greenways: New Model of Urban Park and Bikeway Within Constrained Street Rights-of-Way

01503729

14-1358

English

8p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Bikeways; Case studies; Greenways; Parks; Right of way (Land); Urban areas

Shared-use vehicle systems

Boston (Massachusetts)

Environment; Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; I15: Environment; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-1358

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:31PM