Urban planners' paper cited as year's best by
Journal of the American Planning Association

A paper penned by an assistant professor of urban planning and a former graduate student at Texas A&M has shattered myths about the safety of suburban road and related community design, said associate editors at the Journal of the American Planning Association, who selected the paper for prestigious journal’s 2009 Best Paper Award.

The paper, "Safe Urban Form: Revisiting the Relationship Between Community Design and Traffic Safety," was written by Eric Dumbaugh, a member of the Texas A&M Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning faculty since 2006, and Robert Rae, who earned a Master of Urban Planning degree from Texas A&M in 2008. It appeared in the quarterly journal’s 75th volume.

"The Best Paper Award is a high scholarly honor in the field of planning," said Sam Brody, associate professor of urban planning and director of Texas A&M University at Galveston's Center for Texas Beaches and Shores. Brody earned JAPA’s Best Paper Award in 2007.

Dumbaugh and Rae, who now works as an analyst in the Dallas office of the built environment consulting firm Kimley-Horn and Associates, are scheduled to receive the award at the APA's April 13 national planning conference in New Orleans.

In their paper, the authors demonstrate how many of the safety assumptions embedded in contemporary community design practice are not substantiated by empirical evidence.

"Local land development codes are responsible for the creation of environments that lead to traffic-related injuries and deaths — ironically in the interests of making communities safer," said Dumbaugh.

The paper presents a historical review of safety considerations that helped shape conventional community design practice, followed by results of models developed from a geographic information system database of crash incidence and urban form.

"While it may be true that disconnecting local street networks and relocating non-residential uses to arterial thoroughfares can reduce neighborhood traffic volumes, these community design configurations appear to substitute one set of safety problems for another," the authors argue. "Surface arterial thoroughfares, arterial-oriented commercial uses, and big box stores were all found to be associated with an increased incidence of traffic-related crashes and injuries, while higher-density communities with more traditional, pedestrian-oriented retail configurations were found to be associated with fewer crashes."

Dumbaugh and Rae said the results of their study suggest that access should be strictly managed along arterial thoroughfares, and that commercial and retail uses should be located away from these roadways, or at least oriented towards lower-speed access lanes that limit their connections to the arterial system.

"Their paper is an excellent piece of research that reinforces the notion of evidence-based design," said the JAPA editors in the award announcement. "The authors focus on a critical issue associated with urban design, the research design is well-conceived, the statistical analysis is rigorous, and the implications to the practice of urban design are powerful."

As previously noted, the new Best Paper Award marks the second time in three years a paper by a faculty member from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning has been so honored by JAPA.

Sam Brody's paper, “The Rising Costs of Floods: Examining the Impact of Planning and Development Decisions on Property Damage in Florida,” was published in 2007, winning the JAPA Volume 73 Best Paper Award.

It was written with Praveen Maghelal, a 2007 graduate of Texas A&M’s Urban and Regional Science Ph.D. program, Wesley E. Highfield, who earned a Ph.D. in the program in 2008 and a Master of Urban Planning in 2004, and Ph.D. student Himanshu Grover.

- Posted: Jan. 26, 2010 -