Highways

Road Diets
Road Diet Handbook: Setting Trends for Livable Streets

What Is It?

A road diet entails removing travel lanes from a roadway and utilizing the space for other uses and travel modes such as bike lanes, on-street parking, transit, wider sidewalks, and landscaping. The technique is commonly used to convert four-lane undivided roadways into streets with two travel lanes and a center turn lane or raised median. The resulting benefits include reduced vehicle speeds; improved mobility and access; reduced collisions and injuries; and improved livability and quality of life.

The Road Diet Handbook: Setting Trends for Livable Streets authored by Jennifer Rosales, Parsons Brinckerhoff, is a comprehensive guide for practitioners on the decision-making of the applicability of road diets. The Road Diet Handbook takes a practitioner through planning, analysis, design, and implementation of road diet projects. It includes guidelines for identifying and evaluating potential road diet sites, design concepts such as typical cross-sections, and lessons learned from experiences. The handbook assesses livability benefits for case studies around the world including improved mobility for all modes of transportation and enhanced street character, and provides overall guidelines for the implementation of road diets.