Services

Service AReas

We serve landowners, developers, governments, and other groups. We work on projects of all sizes and scales: individual sites, neighbourhoods, cities, and regions.

  • We conduct traffic studies to understand how new land development will affect nearby streets and roads, and what to do about it. Municipal and Provincial authorities often require these studies as part of their development approval processes. These studies are commonly referred to as “Transportation Impact Studies”, “Traffic Impact Studies”, or “Traffic Impact Assessments”. They are often required for conditional use applications, subdivision applications, rezoning applications, and secondary plan ammendment applications.

    We complete these studies and provide related support; including attendance at stakeholder engagement events and public hearings.

  • We conduct traffic studies on existing streets and roads where things aren’t quite right. We review conditions quantitatively and qualitatively to define the problem(s), develop and validate options to address the problems, and communicate the findings to the road authority and stakeholders.

    These projects can include conceptual design studies, functional design studies, and in-service road safety reviews.

  • We conduct studies to help clients imagine new streets and roads that don’t currently exist. We help clients understand the trade-offs involved in different network layouts, connections, and designs.

    These projects can include conceptual design studies, functional design studies, and road safety audits.

  • We also do parking studies, traffic calming studies, access reviews, traffic projections, feasibility studies, and peer reviews.

    We’re always happy to contribute to site and neighbourhood designs, and we’re experienced in developing custom traffic and transport models to help diagnose problems and validate potential solutions.

Approach

Streets are, most fundamentally, public space. They should allow people to move within their communities, and they should be good places to spend time. In contrast, roads are strictly corridors for movement. You can tell whether a corridor is a street or a road by how the buildings relate to the right of way. Are the buildings set close to the right of way? That’s a street. Are they set far back and turned away? That’s a road.

Individual streets and roads connect together to form networks. Usually, we want to maximize the ability to move around and the quality of places over the network as a whole. Individual streets and roads each contribute, differently, to those overall goals.

We start every project by reviewing where the subject streets and roads fall within the network, to help understand their roles. This helps to identify problems and set the direction for potential solutions. We look at transport problems using insights from the Dutch Sustainable Safety system for road planning and design; observations from Hans Monderman and Colin Buchanan on the relationship between traffic and the built environment; and urban structure and design insights from Raymond Unwin, Leon Krier, and Camillo Sitte.