Neighbourhood street
A quiet residential street for people to spend time in an environment with a low speed and volume of movement.
- Neighbourhood streets have a relatively low volume of movement, with two travel lanes and two car parking lanes.
- This street type is common throughout 20th-century and modern subdivisions.
- They have a large range of carriageway widths, but common feature is car parking lanes on both sides.
- There is a wide variation in street reserves and treatments including cycle lanes, landscaped medians, swales, angled or inset car parking bays.
Urban context
- Typical street reserve: 20m
- Property access: street fronts address residential lots, and occasionally other land uses and buildings such as schools, places of worship, or parks.
- Car parking: variable depending on urban form and density. In high-demand areas, on-street parking is often optimised, occasionally by using angled car parking.
- Neighbourhood streets are the most widely used and adaptable street type, forming the basis of connected street patterns. They are resilient to changes in network, volumes and land uses.
- Design elements include upright kerbs, footpaths on both sides, street trees in the verge or car parking lane. Wide carriageways are often retrofitted with crossing treatments.
Suburban context
Cropton Street, Jordan Springs
- Typical street reserve: 18m.
- Property access: street fronts address residential lots and occasionally other uses.
- Car parking: demand varies with lot widths, urban form and density. In low-demand areas without parked cars, the street appears as four lanes wide.
- Suburban neighbourhood streets are the main type in the branching hierarchy between collector roads and yield streets.
- Design elements include upright kerbs; streets without parked cars are often retrofitted with lines, landscaped build-outs or trees in car parking lanes to delineate travel lanes.
Drawings
Section – 1980s suburban example
Neighbourhood street section.
Plan – 1980s suburb example
Neighbourhood street plan
Common issues
- Two clear travel lanes (relative to narrower local street types) reduce the technical complexity of reallocating space in car parking lanes to tree plantings or other place functions.
- Streets in low-density areas without frequent parked cars appear to have excessively wide carriageways with no travel lane definition, enabling people using private vehicles to drive at faster speeds than is safe or comfortable for other people using the street.
- Lack of street trees combined with large areas of dark asphalt road surface create a heat-island effect, raising the summer temperatures for all properties and deterring people from staying, walking and cycling.
- Overhead powerlines often lead to heavily pruned or misshapen trees, small tree species selection, or no street trees, resulting in unattractive streetscapes and hot microclimates.
- Overly large kerb radii at intersections signal a higher speed environment and priority for people who use private vehicles, deterring people from walking and lengthening their street crossings.
- Streets with footpaths missing from one or both sides deter people from walking (especially those with limited mobility), deter children from cycling, and grassed verges are degraded by foot traffic.
- Side-street intersections with large kerb radii, awkward pram ramps and long pedestrian crossing distances deter people from walking and children from cycling.
Design solutions
Low complexity
- Tree planting in verge to maximise canopy for shade and reduce heat island effect
- Continuous footpath treatment to reinforce pedestrian priority at driveways
- Painted threshold to reinforce pedestrian priority at intersections
Medium complexity
- Trees placed in parking lane to maximise canopy and narrow the perceived corridor
- Trees placed in medians to maximise canopy and narrow the perceived corridor
- Raised crossing to reinforce pedestrian priority at intersections
- Slow point with planting to contribute to the street composition
- Raised crossing to reinforce pedestrian priority at intersections
- Mid-block street closure to restrict through-movement for some modes
High complexity
- Intersection treatments (content to be developed for the next version of the guide)