Now, let me be clear that I'm not attacking the idea of Complete Streets, an idea that is well-intentioned and has done a lot of good. There's no question that pedestrians and cyclists are getting a level of much-needed policy attention lately that they were deprived of in mid-20th-century American cities. For example, four-lane death roads used to be standard design practice. (Thanks to Bill Lindeke of Streets.mn for the evocative term.) Now they're pretty universally deplored, and most cities are working to phase them out when the time comes to reconstruct or restripe arterial streets. This is a good thing.

Yet the ways we have begun to retrofit auto-oriented streets for a wider range of users tend to still be a case of using the master's tools to demolish the master's house. The mindset of the engineer, not the artist or the chef, predominates to an unhealthy extent in the way we approach streets. We rewrite standards and rule books. We apply the new standards in every bit as formulaic and context-insensitive a fashion as we used to apply the old standards (those old standards being, basically, "maximize vehicle Level of Service above all else").

A Google image search for "complete streets" confirms this. At a glance, we see a slew of examples of overengineered and overdesigned places that, while they may be improvement over what passed for state-of-the-art street engineering 50 years, are costing us money we don't have and money we don't need to spend. By applying a uniform rule book, we tend to fix things that aren't broken. In the worst cases, we get completely ludicrous results.

Old Bradenton Road through my neighborhood in Sarasota, Florida used to be an utterly typical 2-lane collector street. It has a 30 mile per hour speed limit, pretty low traffic volumes, and narrow, mediocre but functional, sidewalks.

Now we've got state-of-the-art green bike lanes: