---
title: "Boulevard"
url: "https://commonwaysystem.org/patterns/arterials/boulevard/"
id: "ART-BLV-02"
description: "An Arterial Typology combining through traffic with a pedestrian-first frontage, including the Multiway Boulevard variant with medians separating frontage from through lanes."
updated: "2026-09-10"
---

# Boulevard

`ART-BLV-02`

Recommended Arterial

Boulevard

An Arterial with a wide, pedestrian-first frontage alongside through traffic lanes, typically featuring a planted median or landscaped buffer. Includes the Multiway Boulevard variant, where frontage roads are separated from through lanes by planted medians, such as Octavia Boulevard.[1]

## Related Media

The items below come from outside the Commonway System, external videos, podcasts, and articles related to this page's topic, not part of the guidebook itself.

Aligned

### [Road and Street Design In the Netherlands](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGfdpDfw8Ms)

Streetscapes

The video explains the Dutch road hierarchy of through, distributor, and access roads, as applied in Groningen with reference to the CROW manual. It is a clean overview of the functional classification thinking behind the Commonway System's street types guide.

Aligned

### [How to design a great street](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xov7Ao_fPwQ)

City Beautiful

The video distills Allan Jacobs' street design principles: pedestrian space, climate comfort, enclosure, and active facades. It is a friendly introduction to the same street-design ideas the Commonway System's main street and boulevard patterns codify.

Aligned

### [Freeways almost ruined San Francisco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nSvy8jcNbU)

City Beautiful

The video recounts the 1950s and 60s freeway revolts and the removal of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway. It shows the history behind the Commonway System's skepticism of urban highway expansion and its preference for streets over stroads.

Aligned

### [Rochester gave up on a highway and filled it in. Should Baltimore?](https://www.thebanner.com/community/transportation/rochester-inner-loop-highway-removal-project-KA3KUYYNT5DO5KRAZIPQHCXZSQ/)

The Baltimore Banner

This long-form report traces Rochester's Inner Loop East removal, which turned a sunken expressway trench into homes, a bike path, and a boulevard. It is a deep single-city case for the Commonway System's highway-removal reasoning and corridor reallocation strategies.

Typical at: Compact Urban Core

Suburban is an edge case. Undeveloped and Rural are unlikely pairings.

## Speed and modal hierarchy

Design speed & speed limit

\[SPEED LIMIT 30\] \[SPEED LIMIT 35\] \[SPEED LIMIT 40\]

Follows the Arterial density-tiered baseline for its typical Compact, Urban, and Core contexts.

See [Design Speed & Speed Limits](https://commonwaysystem.org/guide/design-speed.md).

Modal hierarchy

Pedestrian > Transit > Bicycle > Vehicle > Freight

A judgment call reasoned from the Typology's purpose rather than derived cleanly from a listed override trigger, and open for correction.

## Design notes

Multiway Boulevard is confirmed as a named variant folded into this single entry rather than split into its own Typology, since both share the same underlying logic: separating slower, frontage-facing movement from faster through traffic within one right-of-way.

## Related patterns

[Default (No Parking, No Direct Property Access)](https://commonwaysystem.org/patterns/arterials/default.md) (ART-DEF-01) (the base Arterial rule this pattern applies pedestrian-first frontage to), [Stroad (Commercial Arterial)](https://commonwaysystem.org/patterns/arterials/stroad.md) (ART-STD-05) (named in Stroad's own "Instead, see" list as one of its two replacement patterns), [Median Island](https://commonwaysystem.org/patterns/elements/median-island.md) (ELM-MDI-45) (the Element pattern this corridor most often carries)

## Getting there: Retrofit path options

[Five-plus lane reallocation](https://commonwaysystem.org/retrofits/corridor/five-plus-lane-reallocation.md) (RFT-CDR-02)

## References

1.  Precedent-based [Jacobs, A., Macdonald, E., and Rofé, Y., _The Boulevard Book_ (MIT Press, 2002).](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262100908/the-boulevard-book/)