Classifiying streets in a medium-size city in Argentina
Posted by pertile on 21 July 2018 in English.In Argentina we discussed and finally have a new highway hierarchy criterion.
Proposal is kind of loose so we can adapt it in different situations. I used it on my city and I think is an opportunity for other to understand the process. Specially if you live in a city similar to mine.
Context: Resistencia has 300,000 inhabitants, at East there is an important satellite city Barranqueras that has 50,000 inhabitants, at Southeast Puerto Vilelas has only 8000 inhabitants, at West you find Fontana, 20 years ago a town with 10,000 people, now 40,000 people. Resistencia is a wide city with a weak infrastructure, less than 40% of its streets are paved, and there are big areas where main roads are unpaved avenues. Its checkerboard city plan has “avenidas” (avenues) each 1 km, inside that avenues there are very few avenues. It is situated on a flooding plain, there is not any rocky outcrop, average precipitation is 1200 mm a year and it never snowed. Unpaved streets are maintained with gravel, mainly when they are in a public transport route. There are so many unpaved streets that it is very difficult to have them in good conditions all the time, more difficult when it’s rainy season, so public transport streets are heavily used because it’s very common that are the only one in good conditions.
Trunk: in a medium size city we shouldn’t have any trunk street. Exceptions are roads that get here: RN11 and RN16. In big cities it could be possible we find trunk internal roads.
Primary: under our scheme they are “trunk avenues”. In Greater Resistencia they are the main access to the cities, except for Puerto Vilelas.
- Resistencia has 7 primary links. 2 direct links to RN16 at North; two links to Barranqueras at East; two that go West, one of them remains primary up to RN11, the other one links to Fontana. Also I set 1 km sections in two avenues, which have 3 lanes for each direction.
- Fontana has only one primary link, that takes you to Resistencia and RN11.
- Barranqueras has 3: two linking Resistencia and another one that links to RN16, where they get together there is a fourt highway that arrives to city’s downtown.
- Puerto Vilelas: it hasn’t any internal primary road, only avenida Castelli that is mainly an access to Barranqueras. Nonetheless, I doubted about setting main avenue as primary, this his logical since our limit for a city to have a primary or secondary access is in 10,000 inhabitants. It is very likely in some years I have to set it a primary.
- All of this highways have in common that are heavy transit highways, they have higher priority in junctions. They are the only roads where traffic light are sync (so it is clear that townhalls are more interested in transit flow on this avenues). They have many shops, this is clear in 25 de Mayo avenue, which falls from primary to secondary without you can see any physical change. Avenida Sabín -which links Resistencia to RN16- has a short section in which they split up into 2 one-way streets, this streets have the same heavy and fast traffic, so they are primary too. But when they get at downtown there isn’t any avenue that is undoubtly its follow-up, I mean, when you arrive downtown you can go to main square by Lavalle or Ávalos, so they are both secondary..
Secondary: in proposal they are “paved avenues”. In my city they are paved avenues, 1 km length or more, and also unpaved avenues that are as wide as a paved avenue. I will explain this, in city plan checkerboard there is an avenue each kilometer, in some cases this avenues are not wide, so you can distinguish it from a regular street. It could also happen that they are wide, but townhall only maintains a regular street width, so you have a big non-used space between building lines, it is common when neighbourhood linked are not so much populous. In big areas without pavement you find wide unpaved avenues that have a heavy transit like a paved avenue, so in Resistencia unpaved avenues set as “secondary” are not an exception as it should be in more developed cities. I found just three secondary avenues without a physical barrier between directions: Combate de Obligado, 9 de Julio in Barranqueras and Soberanía Nacional/Malvinas Argentinas; in the first one you can’t park, in the other two there is enough land at botn sides to have a physucal barrier, they look like non-urban roads that were surrounded by the urbanization.
Tertiary: in our classification they are short paved avenues, unpaved avenues and major streets. In this hierarchy I put avenues wide as a street and without physical barriers for each direction; very short avenues (less than 1 km), and streets that are internal corridors between avenues, no matter if they are paved or nor. When they are part of public transport routes Town hall put its effort on them, they are better enlightened so they are preferred streets for cars and motorbikes. As a special case side streets along RN16 and Soberanía/Malvinas Argentinas are tertiary.