---
title: "Living Street / Woonerf"
url: "https://commonwaysystem.org/patterns/local-streets/living-street-woonerf/"
id: "LOC-LSW-06"
description: "A Local Typology where pedestrians and cyclists share the full street width with vehicles, who move at walking pace as guests. Includes NACTO's Home Zone."
updated: "2026-09-26"
---

# Living Street / Woonerf

`LOC-LSW-06`

Recommended Local

Living Street / Woonerf

A Local street with no separation between the pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle space. Vehicles are guests, moving at walking pace and yielding to people on foot or bike by design, not by signage alone.

## 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

### [Are Streets Too Complicated Now?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Xs5EA5_uU)

City Beautiful

Asks whether today's proliferation of lines, signals, and lane types on streets is overcomplication or a needed response to modern demands, a question that runs directly through CS's Element-scale catalog and the density-tiered Corridor retrofit paths this video is tagged to.

Aligned

### [Can we make cities car free?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9-9CxCxrVE)

City Beautiful

Covers Oslo's parking-elimination approach, Barcelona's superblocks, and Houten's ring-road-with-car-free-interior model, each a different route to the same modal-filtering goal.

Typical at: Compact Urban Core

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

## Speed and modal hierarchy

Design speed & speed limit

\[SPEED LIMIT 20\]

Follows the Local default: 20 mph hard maximum, no exceptions. In practice, the shared-surface design typically produces actual speeds well below this ceiling.

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

Modal hierarchy

Pedestrian > Bicycle > Vehicle > Transit > Freight

Vehicle ranks third as a guest in this order, not a peer road user: it moves at walking pace and yields to people on foot or bike by design.

## Design notes

NACTO's Home Zone is, strictly, an area-wide overlay rather than a distinct street type of its own, but the Commonway System folds it into this single entry rather than tracking it separately, since the on-the-ground design treatment is the same shared, no-separation street.[1]

## Related patterns

[Yield Street](https://commonwaysystem.org/patterns/local-streets/yield-street.md) (LOC-YLD-07) (the other Local pattern using street geometry itself, rather than signage, as the calming mechanism)

## Getting there: Retrofit path options

[Superblock retrofit](https://commonwaysystem.org/retrofits/network/superblock-retrofit.md) (RFT-NET-02) applies _within_ a multi-block area; this is one of the two typical results for its interior streets.

## References

1.  Precedent-based [Ben-Joseph, E. (1995), "Changing the Residential Street Scene: Adapting the Shared Street (Woonerf) Concept to the Suburban Environment," _Journal of the American Planning Association_ 61(4).](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944369508975661)