Circulation[edit]

Main article: Traffic

See also: Street network

Circulation, or less broadly, transportation, is perhaps a street's most visible use, and certainly
among the most important. The unrestricted movement of people and goods within a city is essential
to its commerce and vitality, and streets provide the physical space for this activity.
In the interest of order and efficiency, an effort may be made to segregate different types of traffic.
This is usually done by carving a road through the middle for motorists, reserving pavements on
either side for pedestrians; other arrangements allow for streetcars, trolleys, and
even wastewater and rainfall runoff ditches (common in Japan and India). In the mid-20th century,
as the automobile threatened to overwhelm city streets with pollution and ghastly accidents, many
urban theorists came to see this segregation as not only helpful but necessary in order to maintain
mobility.
Le Corbusier, for one, perceived an ever-stricter segregation of traffic as an essential affirmation of
social order—a desirable, and ultimately inevitable, expression of modernity. To this end, proposals
were advanced to build "vertical streets" where road vehicles, pedestrians, and trains would each
occupy their own levels. Such an arrangement, it was said, would allow for even denser
development in the future.
These plans were never implemented comprehensively, a fact which today's urban theorists regard
as fortunate for vitality and diversity. Rather, vertical segregation is applied on a piecemeal basis, as
in sewers, utility poles, depressed highways, elevated railways, common utility ducts, the extensive
complex of underground malls surrounding Tokyo Station and the Ōtemachi subway station, the
elevated pedestrian skyway networks of Minneapolis and Calgary, the underground
cities of Atlanta and Montreal, and the multilevel streets in Chicago.
Transportation is often misunderstood to be the defining characteristic, or even the sole purpose, of
a street. This has not been the case since the word "street" came to be limited to urban situations,
and even in the automobile age, is still demonstrably false. A street may be temporarily blocked to all
through traffic in order to secure the space for other uses, such as a street fair, a flea market,
children at play, filming a movie, or construction work. Many streets are bracketed
by bollards or Jersey barriers so as to keep out vehicles. These measures are often taken in a city's
busiest areas, the "destination" districts, when the volume of activity outgrows the capacity of private
passenger vehicles to support it. A feature universal to all streets is a human-scale design that gives
its users the space and security to feel engaged in their surroundings, whatever through traffic may
pass.