An independent, citizen-built dataset · cvilledata.org

Charlottesville has miles of streets built too wide.
Most could be calmed with paint.

Wide, open lanes tell drivers to go fast. These are the city's local, 25 mph residential streets whose pavement is 36 feet or wider curb-to-curb — wide enough to reclaim a travel lane with striping alone, no concrete, no capital project. Every width here is derived from the city's own GIS and spot-checked against 2022 aerial orthophotos.

Where they are

Every candidate street, over the City of Charlottesville's 2022 orthophoto. This is not one block's complaint — it's a citywide pattern. Click a street for details.

The candidates

How this was built (and its limits)

Method

  • Candidates are streets the city classifies as local (LC) and posts at 25 mph, in the Road Centerlines layer.
  • Width is derived geometrically: perpendicular transects across the city's Road Area pavement polygon at many points along each street, taking the median. It is curb-to-curb, including parking lanes.
  • Context — neighborhood, park proximity, and sidewalk coverage — comes from the city's planning-neighborhood, park, and sidewalk layers.
  • Cul-de-sac courts and circles are excluded (their bulbs inflate width), as are segments under 300 ft.
  • Streets with a painted centerline are labelled, not hidden — a double-yellow line means a road is already functioning as a through-route (and is where multilane roads like 5th Street Station Pkwy show up), so it's a weaker calming candidate. Detected by scanning the orthophoto on the centerline for a yellow stripe and validated by eye, but the detector isn't infallible — so the 13 flagged streets are marked with a “centerline” badge and you can optionally hide them.

Honest caveats

  • A starting point, not a census — and it leans toward over-including. A street shown here that's a poor candidate is easy to see and wave off; a wide street we failed to surface is invisible. Because a false negative can't be caught by eye, we'd rather include a few wrong than miss real ones. Assume omissions exist — additions welcome.
  • Derived widths are screening estimates, ±~3 ft. Streets near the 36 ft line may fall either side of it.
  • An attempt to auto-measure widths from imagery colors failed (winter imagery — brown grass reads like asphalt), so widths come from the pavement polygon and were visually spot-checked on aerials, not pixel-measured.
  • We deliberately don't prescribe a fix or a cost per street. Everything here is an observation (width, context), not engineering. Any real treatment needs the city's review, including a fire-apparatus clear width of at least 20 ft.
  • This site is not affiliated with the City of Charlottesville.

Data: Charlottesville Open Data (Road Centerlines, Road Area, Parks, Sidewalks, Planning Neighborhoods) and the city's 2022 orthophoto. Download this dataset: JSON · CSV.