- I would define a complete street as a place where all of the different uses of a street scape from the sidewalk through the curb into the street can coexist peacefully.

In other words, where you can have buses, cars, maybe trucks and also pedestrians and bicycles and wheelchairs and small businesses and sidewalk cafes, if you're in that part of a community, that they can all fit together.

There was a period when I think America got so excited about the extraordinary potential of highway engineering, that we began to lapse into this idea that the only purpose of a road or a street is to zip traffic through it as quickly as you possibly can.

- [Presenter] Yeah.

- And while that might be appropriate on a freeway although even then speed needs to be balanced against safety, in the heart of a community, it can be devastating.

My hometown of South Bend had its most vibrant and important downtown main streets converted sometime in the 60s or 70s into basically a pair of one-way highways.

And one of the best things we were able to get done back when I was mayor was to reorient that into a complete street approach, slowed down traffic a bit, but a very reasonable amount in order to reopen a sense of life where it was the kind of street you would want to not only drive on but walk on the sidewalk or even sit at a at a restaurant or a pub.

And that really helped bring the life of our downtown back.

So a complete street is safer, it's more economically vibrant, and it's more appropriate to the context of the community it's in.

- [Presenter] Yeah.

- Than a lot of the street and road designs that our generation has inherited.