3.3 New Urbanism Urban Design

The urban design movement that has emerged in recent years is new urbanism（or“new urbanism”）, which is widely associated with new traditional urbanism or urban design.

The designer USES“neo-traditional”to represent contemporary development and introduces traditional urban features, such as“traditional”architectural styles arranged on streets （common road use of pedestrians and vehicles, built and decorated）, often including local shops and other hybrids, facing public transportation and pedestrians, and streets and generally having a corresponding model.

The new traditional urban design mainly studies three aspects. Firstly, it provides a contemporary design concept that combines architectural forms with transportation facilities. Secondly, in dealing with traffic, it embedded the concept of public transportation direction and pedestrian direction. Thirdly, it opens up the whole issue of street mode and network form: this balances gm's considerations with the solutions of things, as well as the comfort of the neighborhood and the needs of vehicle users. This section outlines the main features of new and traditional urban design, as they relate to traffic supply and urban structural design.

3.3.1 The Advent of Neo-traditional Urban Design

The issue of street pattern has become one of the major battlegrounds for design territory, as the‘irresistible force'of New Urbanism comes up against the hitherto‘immovable object'of highway engineering convention.

Previously, highway engineering orthodoxy reigned unchallenged. Following the modernist paradigm, each road would have a function and would be designed accordingly. The safest, fastest and most efficient roads would be segregated from pedestrians and non motor traffic, with a minimum of intersections and no direct frontage access.

The motorway became the epitome of the new order, with complete segregation, and access restricted to motor traffic only, and absolutely no parking or frontage activity of any kind. While the motorway sat atop the hierarchy, similar restrictions of access reached down the hierarchy of distributor roads until only the lowest recognized category of route, the access road, was left to cater for pedestrians and frontage access.

Hand in hand with this hierarchy came the notion that roads should only connect to other roads which were of equal or adjacent hierarchical level. Minor side streets would no longer be allowed to branch off from major arterials. In residential areas and elsewhere a new kind of road pattern came about-the familiar‘loop and cul-de-sac'arrangement. This arrangement became the‘conventional suburban'norm, as well as being successfully applied to new areas of comprehensive redevelopment. The strength of this system lies in its simplicity; its logic is easy to follow, and easy to defend.

Yet, increasing dissatisfaction with the kinds of suburbs that were being created led to the realization that the road structure and hierarchy appeared to be a major part of the urban problem. Once the highways had been laid out, and the essential form of a new district or settlement established, it was argued, there was little the urban designer could do to retrieve the situation when it came to the arrangement and design of the buildings.

When neo-traditional architecture came along, then, it was not going to be enough to produce traditional style buildings if they did not fit traditional urban context. To get the context right required a combination of factors including compact form, orientation towards the pedestrian and public transport, but, finally, these could not be achieved without the right sort of street pattern. Hence the revival of more traditional grid-like street patterns.

These generated some problems. The engineers had spent years trying to cut down the number of intersections on roads-particularly crossroads, and particularly on major roads-on grounds of safety. They also had been closing off roads and creating cul-de-sac on the grounds of safety. The resulting tree-lik&road pattern that they had become used to was safe and efficient in terms of traffic flow. Each road might be designed to the correct capacity according to its position in the system.

After a period where such principles went unchallenged, the planners and urban designers started to suggest that neighborhoods should be opened up to through traffic, with continuous grids, and worst of all, crossroads. In the ensuing period, the perceived rigidity of the highway engineers has given way to some extent, and we now see returns to quasi-traditional patterns and the creation of new composite, compromise and hybrid patterns. Life on the street pattern front has become interesting once more. Since public transport orientation and pedestrian provision have been discussed previously, it is primarily the battle over street pattern that will now be followed regarding the question of neo-traditional urban design.

3.3.2 New Traditionalism Design Concept

The new urbanism movement or iginated in the United States, but the British urban village design followed a largely similar, but radically different, new tradition.

The importance of new traditional design and new urbanism to this study lies in the degree to which it regards transportation as a key component. The new urban planning approach seeks to create highly comfortable, walkable mixed-use communities with high density, interconnected streets, and accessible public transport. Therefore, the new traditional urbanism is not satisfied with the design style of architectural form in the urban structure decided by highway engineering. Therefore, it directly solves the problem of the contribution of highway to the creation of design concept and effectively challenges the orthodoxy.

The new traditionalist urban design may in general provide an integrated design solution, combined with the new traditional construction form, which aims to recreate the traditional model of the movement, such as local travel and long-distance travel to the city center of public transport. This is in stark contrast to the modern（non-traditional）travel model. In the modern（non-traditional）travel model, cars can be used for both short trips and long trips.

As far as public transportation direction is concerned, the main principle of transport-oriented urban design is described as grid. The network is designed for street-oriented use and USES higher-density vehicles on arterial roads, improving access within arteries and blocks.

Therefore, street grid is regarded as the core part of the new traditional urbanism public transport orientation. In addition, from a public transport perspective, greater transparency is associated not only with good penetration of bus routes, but also with frequent bypasses required to provide good pedestrian access to major roads.

3.3.3 Discussion

New traditional urban design and new urbanism are of great significance in the contemporary urban design movement. They are particularly important here as they try to combine transport supply with urban design, at least addressing issues such as street patterns, the relationship between urban roads and buildings, considerations of pedestrian movement, and the need for public transport orientation. Many of these elements seem to be improvements to previous design paradigms that at least represent a synthesis of contemporary good practices. The emergence of new urbanism has also helped open debate about street patterns, both stimulating new creative thinking and encouraging technical scrutiny of subsequent forms.

However, in the design, there are quite a lot of ideas and opinions about the new traditional urbanism, especially the new urbanism. From the perspective of transportation, people have noticed that the influence of urban form on travel behavior is not sufficient. From the perspective of traffic safety and efficiency, grid layout is open to discussion. In both cases, positive results are possible, but so far those results have not been confirmed. In addition, the sustainability credentials of new traditional design may be questioned. To be successful in business, new traditional design must adapt to the market demand for vehicle mobility.

There are also doubts from a wider urban perspective. A lot of the design is to think that new cities seem to rely on a“big idea”, as simple and deterministic as the solutions that past modern movements have imposed on them. These wider urban impacts will be addressed in due course. At present, the main lessons learned from the new traditional design research may come from their ready-made statements of contemporary design ideas and Suggestions on how these statements can be translated into a comprehensive approach to the design of surface urban structures. The issues raised by new and traditional urban design concepts provide an important challenge in addressing the needs of transportation, sports and other urban design objectives.