A Placemaking Journal

The B-Grid: A traditional city building pattern common in early western settlements, particularly on the more rectilinear grid-iron pattern of streets.

Typically, Main Street was the “A” street: a high quality, pedestrian-oriented space lined with continuous shopfronts and important civic buildings. But what about larger parking areas, vehicular services, and other uses not appropriate in such a context? Enter the B-Grid, adjacent streets running parallel, where a less pedestrian-friendly environment allowed for automobile-oriented uses to take place without detracting from high-quality public space.

With today’s refocussing on pedestrian-friendly places, the B-Grid once again finds its place as an important tool.  Commonly used in Form Based Codes and other urban-oriented development regulations, the B-Grid allows special exceptions for automobile-oriented uses, automobile-focused arterials and highways, and larger commercial uses that require sizable parking lots at their front door.

While arterial streets and gas stations are an obvious use for the B-Grid, the more important and perhaps more controversial is the allowance for larger retailers with front parking lots. Keeping in mind that not all developers are out to build A-level urbanism, when faced with the difficult choice of project viability vs. an uncompromised plan, the B-Grid offers a compromise. Most importantly, this compromise takes into consideration the evolution of urbanism over time by ensuring a connected street network and the formation of urban blocks.

Here’s how to get them right:

• Start the conversation from the standpoint of an all A-Grid plan, and then work backward to identify strategic B-Grids.
• Get all of your small retail onto an A-Grid. If you’re up against more conventional developers, diagonal parking will usually do the trick, though parallel parking makes for a better pedestrian environment.
• Connect the A-Grids to A-Grids forming an A-Grid network for pedestrians throughout the neighborhood. In theory, a pedestrian should not have to enter the B-Grid.
• Install walkable streets on the B-Grid, setting the seeds for future redevelopment, and acknowledging that pedestrians emerge from parking lots and need to walk safely to the A-Grid.
• Ensure that B-Grid utilities are installed along block perimeters, not through parking lots.
• Where parking isles intersect the B-Grid, anticipate the street that might be built in the future. Provide a continuous sidewalk that trumps the drive isles. Plant trees and install light standards so that they don’t have to be moved in the future.
• Up to 20% is an acceptable standard for B-Grid thoroughfares within any given neighborhood.

–Geoff Dyer