3. Delivering Healthy Streets

Street design has typically prioritised journey times for people in cars, and the space to park them, leaving precious little space in the street for those on foot and bicycle.

Many residential streets have become a sea of concrete and tarmac given over to the car, with little to differentiate their character within new housing development across the country.

This approach is very different to the visions of the original Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, where the large leafy verges, and generous boundary hedgerows created beautiful, green and healthy streets. Attractive streets have been found to directly support not only increased levels of walking, running and physical activity, but to also improve mental health for local residents, and directly aligns with the ambitions of Ebbsfleet’s Healthy New Towns Programme.

EDC’s approach has been to develop the ‘Healthy Streets’ Public Realm Strategy, to rebalance the use of space within the public realm for walking, cycling and public transport alongside the car. The Health Streets Public Realm Strategy illustrates four types of street, each one designed to balance mobility within a different part of the neighbourhood.

Each street design provides a layout for a 50m length of street that allows EDC to quantitively benchmark the number of trees, and the area of planting within every future street, to ensure the vision for Garden City streets are delivered across the city. Each layout also illustrates how the street can be designed to integrate with the garden-grid, providing green infrastructure to support biodiversity and flood resilience, as well as a wider range of facilities for people to meet, come together to play, exercise socialise and create.

The approach also extends to the design of Ebbsfleet’s parks and open spaces, which have been planned to form a network of attractive and relaxing green routes. These spaces incorporate alternative walkways and cycleways- away from the bustle of the streets, for those keen to exercise and travel more leisurely. Public art can also provide an opportunity to create more interesting and enjoyable walking and cycling routes.

The street cross sections on the next page are taken from the Ebbsfleet Public Realm Strategy, and illustrate how generous walkways and cycleways have been incorporated into each scale of street, from the busier distributor roads that link villages, to the quieter lane and mews where many homes are located.