Here at Living Streets Lambeth — We. Love. Nerds. ()

Today we’re profiling one of our very favourite nerds — Professor Donald Appleyard: urban designer slash owner of a handsome smile -- a nerd who forever changed our understanding of what a good street looks like.

Donald Appleyard was a Professor of Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley ().

But he was also one of those rare kinds of people who notices something is broken and then actually does something to fix it.

Donald Appleyard's obsession was the effect traffic had on the lives of local residents (). He had a theory that traffic in residential areas were stopping streets from being fulfilling and joyful places to be. All he had to do was prove it.

And being the big, beautiful, unbeatable, nerd that he was -- Donald Appleyard developed new survey techniques to relate people's perceptions and values to the design process and to resulting physical environments ().

Want to know what he discovered?

First off he compared three streets in San Francisco which, on the face of, were all pretty similar -- except for one thing: traffic.

The 1st street had light traffic, with 2000 vehicles chugging along it per day.

Street number two was medium, it had 8000.

The last street was a doozy -- with 16,000 big boys passing through each day. We call this "heavy".

Prefer a complex graph? Donald's got your back:

Donald Appleyard's research showed that the residents of the light street had THREE (3) more friends and TWICE (2x) as many acquaintances as those who lived on Heavy Street. Ouch.

Regardless of what Gollum says, the lack of friends wasn't because no one liked the residents of heavy street.

Instead, it's because they had less space to call their own, constantly squeezed into smaller pockets by the surrounding traffic.

This point needs a little bit of explaining, so buckle in: it's learning time! ()

Home territory, what Donald Appleyard called "exchange place" is where social interactions happen.

Light Street was close knit community. Front steps were used for sitting and chatting, kids played on their bikes and kicked the football on the road. The whole place belonged to the community. No where was out of bounds.

Heavy street, on the other hand, was desolate. No one hung out on the street. Instead, people scurried from their house to their destination dodging traffic the whole time.

Donald Appleyard realised streets could be more than just places to move and store cars. They are the lifeblood of our communities. The places where we meet, get to know each other, make plans, make friends, fall in love, break up, laugh, hell, they're where we LIVE ().

Maybe Donald said it best in his own words

Tragically, Donald Appleyard was taken from this world too soon. He died in Athens when he was 54 years after being hit by a speeding car.

He'd be 92 years old if he were alive today and able to see the plans for the kinds of streets he envisioned coming to life all over the UK

Luckily for us, we're going to get so many of those streets here in Lambeth -- with at least 7 low traffic neighbourhoods planned for our area. The first are already underway in Oval and Brixton.

Whatever you do today -- channel Donald.

Remember the street belongs to you. It is your community. Wave to a neighbour, ride your bike right down the middle of the road, hell set up a lemonade stand, everyone needs a drink in this heat.

And if the local traffic is stopping you from doing that at any step of the way -- keep channeling Donald and fight to make a change. Every single person in this beautiful city deserves a liveable street. And we all have the power to make Donald's vision a reality.

Want to learn even more about Donald Appleyard? ()

Here's a good place to start: https://www.pps.org/article/dappleyard

And here's a video for those of you who prefer visual learning: