Fair street space allocation: ethical principles and empirical insights

ABSTRACT

Urban street space is increasingly contested. However, it is unclear what a fair street space allocation would look like. We develop a framework of ten ethical principles and three normative perspectives on street space – streets for transport, streets for sustainability, and streets as place – and discuss 14 derived street space allocation mechanisms. We contrast these ethically grounded allocation mechanisms with real-world allocation in 18 streets in Berlin. We find that car users, on average, had 3.5 times more space available than non-car users. While some allocation mechanisms are more plausible than others, none is without disputed normative implications. All of the ethical principles, however, suggest that on-street parking for cars is difficult to justify, and that cycling deserves more space. We argue that ethical principles should be systematically integrated into urban and transport planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical principles
• urban transport
• governance
• parking
• cycling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These AMs are also subject to an endogeneity problem. If street allocations are redistributed according to observed modal shares, modal shares will change with the modified space. This problem could be solved by an iterative process, assuming that modal shares and street space allocation will converge to a joint stable equilibrium.