UCLA Department of Urban Planning Associate Professor, Adam Millard-Ball concluded in his paper that the wide streets that many residential areas have wasted space that could be used for housing and other economically beneficial means. He details how the width of streets is usually chosen using traffic engineering and urban design conventions, but with no consideration for the value of the land that is being turned into road. Millard-Ball also notes that some urban planners and designers are already changing the way they think about street rights-of-way, by adding parklets, protected bicycle lanes, and bioswales.

 

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Most of all in, places with high land value, Millard-Ball reports that making streets thinner and thereby allocating more room for housing and other development, economic efficiency would be increased. His argument coalesces into the point that street-width requirements, of which there is currently a minimum value that must be followed by subdivision ordinances, should be reduced or eliminated. This would allow developers to decide for themselves on the trade-off between wide streets and housing land.

Read Millard-Ball's full study here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2021.1903973