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 stretches at least 150 ft long of the city's local, 25 mph residential streets where the pavement is 36 feet or wider curb-to-curb — wide enough to reclaim a travel lane with striping alone, no concrete, no capital project. Widths are derived from the city's own GIS and spot-checked against 2022 aerial orthophotos.

Where they are

Every over-wide stretch, drawn over the City of Charlottesville's 2022 orthophoto. This isn't one block's complaint — it's a citywide pattern. Hover a stretch for details.

The candidates

How this was built (and its limits)

Method

  • Candidates are wide stretches, not whole streets. Along every local (LC), 25 mph street we sample curb-to-curb width every 20 ft (perpendicular transects across the city's Road Area pavement polygon) and stitch the over-wide samples (36–48 ft — below that isn't over-wide, above is an intersection) into continuous runs, bridging short narrowings and intersections. So a street wide for a few blocks then narrowing still surfaces its wide part instead of being averaged away.
  • One entry per block. Runs are grouped by block, so a street never shows two entries on the same block — same-block pieces merge into one (drawn discontinuous if they don't physically connect). Each entry needs at least 150 ft of over-wide pavement; a street can still yield separate entries on different blocks.
  • Width is the median over the stretch, curb-to-curb (including parking lanes).
  • Context — neighborhood and sidewalk coverage — comes from the city's planning-neighborhood and sidewalk layers, computed over the stretch.
  • Cul-de-sac courts and circles are excluded (their bulbs inflate width).
  • Stretches 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 flagged stretches get 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, Sidewalks, Planning Neighborhoods) and the city's 2022 orthophoto. Download this dataset: JSON · CSV.