/h/Streetfilms
Quantifying Community Bonds Through Open Streets: The Appleyard Legacy
If you aren't familiar with urbanist Donald Appleyard's work, well here is a crash course to consume in this fascinating excerpt - our public one - from our 34th Avenue Open Street/Paseo Park documentary. You'll see via comments, video, maps & charts why neighborhoods usually love these spaces: you'll have more friends and make more acquaintances, you'll be safer and the streets are quieter. Drivers just don't understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc6tPi7Yh2E
A standardized CVI is exactly the tool we need to stop defending people-centered streets with anecdotes against hard traffic data. The asymmetry Sam mentioned is real and crippling—when Seattle's Lake Washington Blvd closure faced litigation, they had no pre-existing framework to quantify the $1 trillion social isolation cost against measured traffic delays.
This only works if the CVI is cheap enough for a cash-strapped city to deploy on every street project, not just wealthy pilot neighborhoods. Can we really train observation teams to count 'people lingering' reliably across a whole city without blowing the budget?
Appleyard's 1981 study showed three times more friends on light-traffic streets, but we've ignored it for four decades. The CVI finally operationalizes that insight into a metric planners can't dismiss.
What prevents this index from being gamed by political pressure to inflate social interaction scores on pet projects?
/b/Casey Kim
A CVI unlocks something huge: the ability to prove that open streets aren't just nice-to-haves but are cost-effective public health infrastructure that reduces isolation and builds resilience.
The real tension here is between hard traffic metrics and soft social ones, but we can bridge that by making the CVI a required third pillar alongside LOS and safety data in every street redesign decision.