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A sneckdown (or snowy neckdown) is a temporary
The Economist
* Sneckdown: Using Snow to Design Safer Street
BBC
* What the Heck is a Sneckdown
* 2014's Endless Snow Has at Least Been Good for Transportation Nerd
Atlantic Cities
* "Sneckdowns" Reveal the Street Space Cars Don't Us
Greater Greater Washington
* Sneckdowns: How snowstorms can teach us to build smarter road
The Week
* The 'sneckdown': Nature's pedestrian islan
WPIX11 News NYC
Traffic calming
A sneckdown (or snowy neckdown) is a temporary curb extension
A curb extension (or also neckdown, kerb extension, bulb-out, bump-out, kerb build-out, nib, elephant ear, curb bulge, curb bulb, or blister) is a traffic calming measure which widens the sidewalk for a short distance. This reduces the crossi ...
caused by snowfall, where snow has built up in the road but not been flattened by traffic, effectively reshaping the curb. Sneckdowns show how the space is being used by vehicle and foot traffic, and may reveal points where a street could be usefully narrowed with neckdowns to slow motor vehicle speeds and shorten pedestrian crossing distances.
History
The term "sneckdown" was coined by Streetsblog founderAaron Naparstek
Aaron Naparstek (born 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Streetsblog, a website providing daily coverage of transportation, anti-automobile activism, land use, and environmental issues in New York City. Since its founding in June 20 ...
in 2014, popularized by Streetfilms
OpenPlans is a non-profit that advocates for making the streets of New York City livable for all residents. Open Plans uses tactical urbanism, grassroots advocacy, policy and targeted journalism to promote structural reforms within city governmen ...
director Clarence Eckerson, Jr. and spread widely via social media
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
. Other Twitter hashtag
A hashtag is a metadata tag operator that is prefaced by the hash symbol, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services–especially Twitter and Tumblr–as a form of user-generated tagging that enable ...
s that have been used to describe snow-based traffic-calming measures include #plowza, #slushdown, #snovered and #snowspace.
The practice of using snow to trace the behavior of vehicles, pedestrians, and playing children was already described in Camillo Sitte's 1901 urban design treatise.
In the 1980s, some planners in Australia distributed cake flour
Wheat flour is a powder made from the grinding of common wheat used for human consumption. Wheat varieties are called "soft" or "weak" if gluten content is low, and are called "hard" or "strong" if they have high gluten content. Hard flour, or ...
in intersections to observe patterns of vehicle movement hours later.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at Baltimore and 48th Street, a sneckdown-inspired permanent upgrade to the pedestrian environment was made in 2011.
See also
*Desire path
A desire path, also known as desire line in transportation planning and many other names, is an unplanned small trail formed by erosion caused by human or animal traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or the most easily navigated rout ...
* Tactical urbanism
References
{{ReflistExternal links
* Undriven SnoThe Economist
* Sneckdown: Using Snow to Design Safer Street
BBC
* What the Heck is a Sneckdown
* 2014's Endless Snow Has at Least Been Good for Transportation Nerd
Atlantic Cities
* "Sneckdowns" Reveal the Street Space Cars Don't Us
Greater Greater Washington
* Sneckdowns: How snowstorms can teach us to build smarter road
The Week
* The 'sneckdown': Nature's pedestrian islan
WPIX11 News NYC
Traffic calming