A Better Street Width – and City – Is Possible
We’re wasting a lot of our city. Do you see it in this picture? Not the buildings, not the sidewalks, not the bike lanes, not the vehicle lanes, not the turn lane, not even the parking; those are all productive or delightful or functional in some way. It’s the foot or two here, six inches there, cumulatively 14 extra feet of width that bloats this street and does nothing. It’s surplus that isn’t simply wasted but expensive and hazardous.
Construction is almost complete at Mira Vista on Clairemont Drive in San Diego. It has 40 homes opposite a high school and recreation center on a street that is 14 feet wider for this configuration than the City of San Diego nominally prefers.
Overwide roads carry many costs. Most literally, maintaining roads is expensive and more surface area means more cost. A 2025 estimate put San Diego’s road maintenance needs at $1.9 billion over 10 years to achieve a ‘good’ condition of repair. Surplus road width is a money sink, a real cost burden with no return.
Road width also impacts vehicle speed and safety. As a 2025 review reported, “a one-foot increase in lane width is associated with a 38.3% increase in the odds of an injury crash.” This, of course, carries substantial expense and incalculable human toll.
For walking and biking, overwide streets are easily understood as hazards. It takes longer to cross the street and cars speed down them faster. One feels, and is, more exposed the wider the roadway. And straightforwardly, surplus width increases the distance between destinations. The density that makes housing and urban amenities and city services more affordable is not only about height. It’s also about the horizontal dimension and its efficient use. Our desirable ‘streetcar suburbs’ are mostly single-story but achieve gentle density in part because they were planned with modest road widths.
We experience narrow and wide streets differently and that affects the productivity of those places. Compare India Street to Kettner Boulevard, parallel and a block from each other. They’re very similar in most respects: both have two vehicle lanes and street parking, similar buildings and heights. Both have shops and dining. But the roadway on India has been reduced with bulb-outs and outdoor seating. People gravitate to and make more connections in the former, as we know anecdotally and from scientific study. The excess width contributes nothing; it’s an ongoing opportunity cost.
India Street (l) and Kettner Boulevard (r), from West Fir Street.
Unfortunately, we’ve got what we’ve got. However valuable it would be to have fewer overwide streets, our buildings aren’t moving. Narrowing a roadway on its own and in isolation carries a very high cost relative to the value that can be captured by doing so. There’s a reason these things don’t change.
Not so fast.
Buildings get built (and California has much more building ahead). That’s an opportunity. We should leverage new construction to improve our streets by offering builders a fair trade: rebuild this street in exchange for adding the adjacent excess ROW to your parcel. That in turn would allow for more homes or commercial space and for more projects to pencil out.
It’ll help to think of a typical block-long mixed-use 5-over-1 as the paradigm. When we see these projects today we should have mixed feelings: great! New homes for San Diegans! And shops! But it’s more than a shame to leave the adjacent street unchanged when it could be safer. When it could be cheaper to maintain. When it could be more inviting. And when we could have more homes to boot!
Let’s go back to our Kettner Boulevard example. San Diego’s Street Design Manual establishes preferred curb-to-curb widths for every type of street and configuration. Kettner, as configured for parking, has a preferred width of 46′ but is 50′ wide. Not a big difference (there are countless more pronounced examples) but consider the Kettner Crossing senior Affordable Housing project that recently opened there. Adding four feet of depth amounts to another 150 square feet for each of 64 small apartments. Even a few feet of discarded roadway width makes a big difference to our city’s balance sheet and well-being.
Other preferred widths in San Diego are 30’ for low volume residential streets with two lanes and parallel parking on each side; or 32’ for somewhat higher traffic volume. Those were instead built to be 38’-40’ wide. Some, like Arizona Street, have that simple configuration but are 50’ wide. And then there are multilane streets that don’t have the traffic volume to justify their 4 or 6 or more lanes, in most cases with little way to repurpose the excess.
Understandably, trading right-of-way to landowners sounds like a giveaway of public assets. Again, though, the excess isn’t an asset: it’s a liability that generates only costs and injury and which could instead contribute to our city and provide recurring revenue. Fortunately, we can leverage new construction to that end. The alternative is living with what we’ve counterproductively got.
But how?
Creating a process and policy for this is the task at hand. Between now and a future where this is routine and ministerial there’s a lot of discussion and trial and error to take place. We don’t currently ask our Planning and Street Departments to conform to our Street Design Manual’s preferred widths when those are exceeded. We don’t because there’s no mechanism to do anything about it. But to begin, we can state that we mean for our preferred widths to be adhered to and that we will allow fixes to be made. That might require enabling ordinances. Pilot projects and/or districts may be useful. And builders should be encouraged to approach the Planning Department to say “our project and the neighborhood can both be better if this street conforms to the City’s preferred widths, allow us to fix it.”
Ulric Street – 5 feet wider than preferred for this configuration – with newly built homes.
Every building that’s built without narrowing an adjacent overwide street is a hazard tolerated and an opportunity missed to improve city finances and fabric. Land use, surprisingly, is a game of inches. Let’s not surrender those for no reason.
Editor’s Note: This post was authored by Jeffrey Davis, a Circulate member. We occasionally host written materials from members and allied organizations. To submit something, email [email protected].