Pedestrian-First Design

We have normalized living around hunks of metal that weight a ton and a half zooming by at speeds that would easily kill a child in both our cities and suburbs alike. One of the founders of project Eureka spent an early part of his career working at a medical examiner—by far the most common reason a body would end up there was a car crash or being hit by a car. After the third time you have to watch the mangled body of child cut up it becomes hard not to pledge to minimize this risk for your own children.

Too often communities are designed by people who we can only assume have never walked anywhere or ridden a bike because they combine bike and pedestrian pathways. We endeavor to create a community that is safe for both bicyclists and pedestrians with plenty of options for each group.
The community is designed to be easily traversable by both bikes and pedestrians without either hindering the other.

Why aren’t suburbs walkable? Because they have yards. Yards push houses further apart and thus lead to the need for private garages, which in turn necessitates roads in front of houses to get the cars to the private garages.
But why do we need the yards? Because they used to be needed to grow food. We can tell our self’s that they exist so our kids can play outside but wouldn’t any child prefer to be playing in the woods with friends than alone on manicured grass?

The walk-able pathways of Eureka flow through central nodes creating environments where interacting with other community members is the norm in the normal push and pull of life.
Through focusing on a hamlet layout it is easy to create centralized common spaces that both allow for informal interaction and more formal popup shops such as farmers markets.