For as long as most developers can remember, street width standards have been treated as untouchable. They are embedded in engineering manuals and municipal guidelines, rarely questioned and almost never challenged.

Yet at a moment when land is scarce, housing pressure is intense, and infrastructure costs are increasing, those standards deserve far more scrutiny than they receive.

Street width is one of the most consequential design and financial decisions made in the early stages of any development. And in many cases, it is quietly working against both project performance and public policy goals.

The uncomfortable truth is this: many of today’s streets are wider than they need to be, and the cost of that extra asphalt is far higher than the industry acknowledges.

The land we lose before we even start designing

By the time density becomes a discussion — at zoning, massing, or site plan — the outcome has often already been determined. Oversized rights-of-way lock in inefficiency long before a single building is drawn.

Every additional metre of street width reduces the amount of land available for homes. That loss compounds across an entire subdivision or master-planned site, quietly eroding yield, limiting housing choice, and inflating per-unit land and infrastructure costs.

Developers feel it in reduced flexibility and thinner margins; municipalities feel it later, when they are required to maintain the public right-of-way.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that wide streets are often justified as a neutral requirement — simply “the standard.” But standards are not laws of physics. They are policies, shaped by past assumptions that no longer reflect current realities.

Built for speed, not for today

Many street width guidelines were established in an era of cheap land, cheap infrastructure, and a singular focus on vehicle movement. They assumed high traffic volumes everywhere, generous turning radii, and wide curb-to-curb dimensions, even on streets serving only a small number of homes.

Today’s development context is very different. Land is expensive and municipal budgets are stretched. 

Yet the default response remains the same: oversized streets.

The result is a built environment that looks familiar but performs poorly: consuming valuable land, encouraging higher speeds, and creating long-term maintenance liabilities that neither developers nor municipalities fully account for upfront.

Density is lost on the street, not in the building

When communities underdeliver on housing, the conversation often turns to height, permissions, or political resistance to density. But in many suburban and edge-of-city contexts, the real constraint is much more basic.

It is the street.

Oversized rights-of-way limit how blocks can be shaped, how many front doors can be created, and how efficiently land can be used.

Right-sized streets do the opposite. They allow density to emerge naturally through smaller blocks, more frontage, and a finer-grained public realm. 

Fire, snow and other convenient myths

No discussion of street width is complete without invoking fire access and snow storage. These are real operational needs, but too often they are treated as absolute constraints rather than design problems to be solved.

In practice, many of the widest streets serve the lowest traffic volumes.

Fire access is often the first (and last) argument raised in favour of wide streets. In practice, meeting fire code is rarely the challenge it is made out to be.  

Snow can be managed through landscape design and seasonal operations instead of permanent asphalt. And narrow streets shape behaviour by design: they naturally slow vehicles, increase driver attention and create safer conditions without relying on signs, enforcement or added infrastructure.

Across multiple jurisdictions, projects have shown narrower streets can meet safety and operations requirements while delivering better outcomes. The barrier is rarely technical. It is institutional inertia.

Why developers should lead this conversation

At first glance, right-sizing rights-of-way can feel like a municipal issue. Street standards sit in city manuals, are enforced by public works and engineering departments, and are ultimately approved by councils. It is easy, understandably, to assume that if change is needed, it should come from the public sector.

But that assumption misses where the real leverage lies.

For developers, right-sizing rights-of-way is not an ideological position. It is a pragmatic one.

Narrower, better-designed streets unlock more value from the same land. They reduce infrastructure costs, increase yield, and support placemaking that actually improves market appeal. They create environments that feel calmer, more intentional and more human — qualities that buyers respond to, even if they cannot articulate why.

Perhaps most importantly, questioning street width standards early creates leverage. Once a subdivision framework is approved, inefficiency is locked in.

But when developers engage municipalities at the outset with evidence-based alternatives, there is real opportunity to align public objectives with private performance.

The municipal case is just as strong

Municipalities, too, have a stake in this conversation. Oversized streets carry long-term costs that far exceed their short-term comfort.

Wider rights-of-way mean more asphalt to maintain, more snow to clear, more stormwater runoff, and higher lifecycle costs per household. They undermine climate targets and mode-shift goals while delivering diminishing returns on safety and functionality.

Right-sizing streets offers municipalities a rare win-win: lower infrastructure costs, better land efficiency, and communities that support walking, social life and resilience — without requiring radical policy change.

Questioning standards is not radical, it’s responsible

Right-sizing rights-of-way is about asking whether inherited standards still serve today’s economic, environmental and housing realities.

At a time when every hectare matters, wasting land on unnecessary asphalt is no longer defensible. The question is no longer whether we can build narrower streets — it is why we keep choosing not to.

The opportunity is already there.

We just have to be willing to question what we’ve stopped questioning.