Lexington streets could look very different, and be safer, under new design guide
Lexington’s local government has made moves toward making streets safer in recent years, from implementing recommendations by a task force focused on roadway safety to passing a policy goal of zero traffic deaths by 2050.
On Tuesday, a council committee took the first step in advancing what may be the most impactful of those moves: a new street design manual with robust requirements for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.
The Complete Streets Manual, if adopted, will set new guidelines for how Lexington streets should be built. Developers will be required to follow new rules set in the manual for new projects.
Developers, as well as the city, will have to do their best to adhere to the standards whenever improvements are made to existing roadways, although the manual does provide flexibility for existing streets that are harder to retrofit than a new road built from scratch.
The Urban County Council’s environmental quality and public works committee voted to send the new Complete Streets Design Manual to the full council.
The council will have an initial vote on approving the manual in August.
Where the current city street design manual has prioritized increasing speed for cars, regardless of the surrounding environment and the needs of nondrivers, the new manual prioritizes slower speeds and infrastructure for all road users.
“Our past emphasis on moving cars as quickly as possible, with as little delay as possible, has led to some poor safety outcomes,” city planner Kenzie Gleason told the committee Tuesday.
From 2020 to 2025, Lexington had nearly 88,000 collisions, according to state and local data, including 1,752 with injuries in 2025 alone. Also in 2025, there were 41 fatal incidents, as well as 15 pedestrians and one bicyclist killed.
But by requiring new street design features like protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, street trees and roundabouts, the city can work to bring down collision numbers.
The design guide creates new classes of streets that developers can choose from for their projects: alleys, neighborhood streets, avenues, boulevards and thoroughfares. As traffic capacity increases for each street type, so do the safety measures required in the manual, such as wider sidewalks and medians separating car lanes.
All streets - excluding alleys, which are encouraged for neighborhoods as an alternative to front-yard driveways - have sidewalks on both sides and street trees between the road and the sidewalks. Sidewalk widths range from six to 12 feet, depending on the context of the area.
Where the city has historically only asked for sidewalks to be five feet wide to meet standards set by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Complete Streets Manual aims to create a pedestrian experience that is safe and encourages more walking.
Most bicycle lanes in Lexington are simply painted lanes. But the manual provides a big upgrade for future bike lanes in the city.
Neighborhood streets would allow bicycles and cars to share the road. But all streets more intense than neighborhood streets would be required to have a protected bike lane on both sides, separated from car lanes by a planting strip.
The manual recommends roundabouts or smaller traffic circles at most intersections between different street types.
“They have a lot of benefits both to traffic flow and to safety,” Gleason said. “They self-enforce good, safe driving behaviors. You can’t run a red light at a roundabout.”
