How To Turn a Deadly Stroad Into a Safe Street: The Broad Street Project
A two-way urban trail and a lane of on-street parking narrow Broad Street in Providence, Rhode Island, making it safer for everyone.
If you look at a map of Rhode Island, the city of Providence stands out as having the state’s highest rate of serious traffic crashes involving people walking or biking. Zoom in and you’ll see that the highest rate in the city itself is found along Broad Street, a corridor on the south side of the city. At least, it used to be. In the last few years, Broad Street has transformed into a safe and comfortable place for walkers, bikers, and drivers alike.
As part of the 2025 Strong Towns National Gathering, Toole Design experts Jason DeGray and Tom Nosal led a walking tour of the area, explaining the changes they helped design and how city officials pulled off the transformation.
The Transformation
Before the redesign, Broad Street was a quintessential stroad. It featured elements of a slow street — crosswalks, bus stops, shops and residences lining both sides — but the roadway itself was designed for the high-speed movement of cars, with four lanes of traffic that included two left-turn lanes.
DeGray and Nosal explained that Broad Street is so, well, broad because a trolley car used to run down the middle. Once the trolley was removed, the extra space was used to create the two left-turn lanes.
This decision was disastrous for the community. Between 2012 and 2017, Broad Street was the site of 84 serious crashes involving people walking or biking. Almost everyone in the neighborhood had either been hit by a car or knew someone who’d been hit by a car, DeGray and Nosal said. In addition, 20% of households in the area don’t own a vehicle and 40% of the community walks or bikes to work, so those extra lanes didn’t serve a large portion of the community in any way.
Those factors made Broad Street an immediate priority when Providence launched its City Walk project in 2017. Toole Design and city officials essentially asked the question, “What if we took that extra footage back and used it for something other than cars?”
The urban trail has gaps in its flex posts that allow cars to access existing parking lots. The narrow travel lanes, flex posts, and brightly colored paint remind drivers that they are crossing a space meant for people, prompting them to be cautious.
To that end, they used a combination of quick-build measures and permanent infrastructure to create a two-lane urban trail. Paint and flex posts offer a quick and cheap way to demarcate the entire trail. Meanwhile, concrete bus islands provide more robust protection to trail users, offer a resting point to people crossing the street, and make it easy to see where the bus stops are. The project cost approximately $2.5 million, most of which went to the bus islands and resurfacing the street.
Today, the urban trail stretches one and a quarter miles. It gives the community a protected place to bike and walk, and — more importantly to residents — it forces drivers to slow down and be more aware of other street users. According to DeGray and Nosal, recent data indicates that two or fewer serious crashes occur per year along the corridor.
The project has also had a positive effect on the area’s economy. DeGray and Nosal highlighted a local theater that had been derelict for years when they started the project. Now, it’s renovated and thriving.
A stroll through Google Maps shows other buildings that went through the same transformation — including these four that are all on the same intersection!
These images and the ones below were screenshotted from Google Maps at the intersection of Broad Street and Public Street. “Before” photos were taken in 2019. “After” photos were taken in 2023.
How They Pulled It Off
Prioritized Communication and Community Involvement
City officials and community residents both wanted Broad Street to change, but that didn’t mean everything was smooth sailing. One major concern was gentrification — residents worried that the redesign was being done to attract a wealthier demographic, not for the existing community’s well-being.
City officials allayed people’s fears through an intense public outreach campaign. They recruited local nonprofits to help with outreach, as well as hiring paid community ambassadors. They were also very intentional about the language they used to describe the project. It’s an urban trail, not a bike lane. Bike lanes are a polarizing topic, and the community didn’t care about bikeability per se — they cared about making the street safer. The term “urban trail” aligns better with the community’s goals, allowing for more productive conversations.
Providence officials didn’t just talk about the project, though. They also showed residents what they wanted to do. They hosted a two-day community event where they recruited local artists to decorate the excess pavement and invited the community to try out the new design. This helped residents visualize the proposed changes, grounded the project in the community, and gave city officials the chance to collect feedback.
Respected Local Context
One major piece of feedback that Toole Design and city officials received was that the community wanted to keep their on-street parking. There was a group of food truck owners who were particularly concerned about this, as they parked along Broad Street to serve the weekend crowds.
Toole Design and city officials worked this feedback into their plan in two main ways:
They decided to maintain on-street parking along both sides of Broad Street as much as possible, instead of keeping one of the left-turn lanes.
In areas where they couldn’t maintain all of the on-street parking, they maintained specific spots that could only be used by the food trucks.
This kind of creative solution illustrates the power of local decision-making. If this had been a state or federal project, the local context of the food trucks likely would have been lost, and the community’s fears of gentrification may have been reinforced. Instead, Providence officials showed that they care about the community’s well-being and increased local support for the project.
Toole Design and city officials created on-street parking next to the urban trail, denoted in white paint. This also acts as an extra layer of protection for people using the urban trail.
Prioritized Local Needs Over Federal Funding
Initially, city officials wanted to get a federal grant to cover the costs of the redesign. However, Providence’s low-budget, quick-build plans clashed with federal design requirements. In many cases like this, city officials choose to pursue federal funding anyway, sacrificing the urgent needs of their community and making projects more complicated and expensive. Providence officials took the opposite approach, funding most of the Broad Street project with city dollars so they could meet the community’s needs quickly and creatively.
For example, Providence officials wanted to make sure that bikers could safely cross intersections. The federal “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices” requires that bike signals only turn green when there’s no chance of conflicting traffic, including turning cars. DeGray and Nosal explained that this often creates very long wait times for bikers, who may then cross against the light. In addition, adding these bike signals is very expensive. Instead, Toole Design suggested the city add signs telling bikers to obey pedestrian signals. This was a much cheaper and easier change that took advantage of existing infrastructure, but it may not have been possible under federal standards.
Another major factor in the city’s rejection of federal funding was Broad Street’s unique red, white, and blue centerline. The neighborhood has a high Dominican population, and the centerline is a symbol of pride and community. If the project had federal funding, the centerline would need to be replaced. Providence officials knew this would be a loss for the community — and that it would reduce local support, potentially making it more difficult to complete the project. Self-funding the project allowed them to maintain the centerline and respect the community’s desires.
Broad Street’s distinctive red, white, and blue centerline. It is backed by one of the floating bus islands installed during the redesign.
What Comes Next
The Broad Street redesign was a great success, but that doesn’t mean the city’s work is done. The current tactical use of paint and flex posts doesn’t provide much actual protection to people using the urban trail. In addition, the floating bus islands can be difficult for drivers to see and several cars have hit them, even after the city added warning signs.
Alex Ellis, the principal planner for the city of Providence, said that he plans to replace the flex posts with actual curbs. He and his team are also brainstorming ways to make the bus islands more visible. The funding for these upgrades will come from the Safe Streets for All grant that Providence received in 2024.
To city officials who are considering a quick-build project, Ellis recommends creating a concrete plan for maintenance and upgrades. In particular, he said to have extra flex posts on hand, so you can easily replace any that get damaged.
The Broad Street project is a powerful example of incremental improvement, localized decision-making, and doing what you can with the resources you already have. Since the redesign, the rate of serious crashes has plummeted, the surrounding businesses have flourished, and the community is fully on board with the city introducing safety improvements on similar streets.
This is what it looks like to build a strong town.
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Mya Riley is the Copywriter/Editor at Strong Towns. She’s passionate about learning new things and sharing knowledge with others. In the past, that passion informed her work as a copywriter and researcher for an educational organization. Now, it’s drawn her to Strong Towns and its nonpartisan, ground-level approach to improving communities through education and civic engagement.
In her free time, Mya enjoys hosting game nights with her friends and writing fantasy and crime fiction. You can usually find her going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and she’s always ready with a fun fact about any topic.