Category: USA

Articles Global Magazines Streets, Roads & Mobility USA

CityLab University: Induced demand

ARTICLE

Benjamin Schneider, City Lab, 7 September 2018

KEY POINTS

In urbanism, “induced demand” refers to the idea that increasing roadway capacity encourages more people to drive, thus failing to improve congestion.

Since the concept was introduced in the 1960s, numerous academic studies have demonstrated the existence of ID.

But some economists argue that the effects of ID are overstated, or outweighed by the benefits of greater automobility.

Few federal, state, and local departments of transportation are thought to adequately account for ID in their long-term planning.

For more from City Lab University click here.

Articles Biking Magazines Streets, Roads & Mobility Transport Experts USA

Why protected bike lanes are more valuable than parking spaces

SHORT FILM

Vox, 5 September 2018

Data shows that the 9th Avenue bike lane produced economic, mobility and safety benefits. “We saw crashes go down, some 47%, retail sales went up almost 49%, cars dad dedicated turn lanes so the traffic processed much better, and bikes had a dedicated lane. So it was a win for business, it was a win for drivers, it was a win for people on foot and it was a win for people on two wheels, and that really set the stage for all that followed.”

 

 

Articles Newspapers (Print & Online) Short Films Streets, Roads & Mobility USA

Road diets: designing a safer street

ARTICLE / SHORT FILM

Carlos Waters, Vox, 25 July 2018

Transportation officials across the country agree: Several minor traffic corridors in America are overbuilt and unnecessarily unsafe. So they’ve started to adopt European-inspired designs that change how drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians use the road in order to reduce speeding and encourage safety for everyone. It’s called a “road diet.”

For another short film from Vox and Jeff Speck click here.

Articles City Solutions Infrastructure Magazines Short Films Singapore / Malaysia Sustainable Cities USA

LA is doing water better than your city. Yes, that LA.

SHORT FILM / ARTICLE

Matt Simon, Wired, 12 June 2018

But Los Angeles is in the midst of an aqueous awakening, setting an ambitious goal to cut its reliance on imported water in half by 2025 by following an increasingly urgent rule of good water policy: diversification. In a nutshell, that means getting your water from a range of sources—rain capture, aquifers, wells, desalination, even right out of the air. A study from UCLA earlier this year even said the city could feasibly reach 100 percent locally sourced water. To do it, the city is diving into a series of high- and low-tech campaigns that could transform Los Angeles into a model city for water management.

To find out about Singapore’s ‘Four Taps’ and leading water supply policy click here.

Articles Construction Industry Housing USA

When affordable housing starts in a factory

ARTICLE

Eric Jaffe, SideWalkLabs, 18 May 2018

“On the one side, I was building all kinds of hardware and software with the engineering team,” says Holm. “And then in the outside world, looking at how to scale out the physical stores, I was looking at this world that was just completely inefficient.” He was dealing with city bureaucracy, working to obtain the right permits for various parts of the construction, and hitting seemingly unavoidable delays throughout the process. “I was like: ‘This is crazy.’ ”

Articles Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Streets, Roads & Mobility USA

There are better ways to get around town

ARTICLE

John Massengale, New York Times, 15 May 2018

New York City’s Department of Transportation has led the American movement for better streets …

The next step is to adopt congestion pricing below 96th Street in Manhattan and then:

1. Decrease the number of Manhattan streets that function as transportation corridors primarily devoted to moving machines through the city.

2. Design and build Slow Zones where people actually drive slowly.

3. Make the transportation corridors that remain better urban places, with a better balance between city life and moving cars.

Cities for People City Planners / Urban Designers Infographics Streets, Roads & Mobility USA

Automated vehicles can’t save cities

INFOGRAPHIC

Allison Arieff, New York Times, 27 February 2018

When we think about designing the future city, let’s focus on moving as many people as possible. For a starting point, considering how many people can move through a city using each transportation option:

Transit moves the most people – up to 25,000 people per hour, so make transit the first priority.

Next comes walking, with 9,000 people per hour on new, larger sidewalks.

Dedicated bus lanes carry 8,000 passengers an hour. Two-way bike lanes carry 7,500 per hour. Those come next. 

Whether they have drivers or not, cars move the fewest people per hour – about 600 to 1,600.

When we understand that urban transportation is about moving – people not cars – our priorities for space and investment become obvious.

FeaturedArticles Cities for People Journalists Living in the City Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Social & Economic Inequalities Talks The Public Realm Urban Activism USA

Designing a more inclusive city

ARTICLE

Allison Alrieff, The New York Times, 20 October 2017

“The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion,” a forthcoming book by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca and Georgeen Theodore, who lead the architecture, planning and research collective Interboro, refers to such things — which include cul-de-sacs, cold water, “No Loitering” signs, the Fair Housing Act — as “weapons.” They are the policies, practices and physical artifacts used by planners, policy makers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists and others to draw, redraw or erase the lines that divide us.

Allison Arieff is the Editorial Director at SPUR and is a columnist for the New York Times.

For Allison Arieff’s twitter feed click here, for her New York Time option piece ‘Automated Vehicles Can’t Save Cities’ click here, and for a New York Times panel discussion on Tactical Urbanism where she was the moderator click here.

For Interboro’s Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion click here.

Academics Africa Brazil City Solutions Colombia Korea Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Singapore / Malaysia Sustainable Cities Talks Urbanisation USA

The biggest risks facing cities – and some solutions

TALK

Robert Muggah, TED Talk, September 2017

It’s a small opportunity but a golden one: in the next 10 to 20 years, to really start designing in principles of resilience into our cities. There’s not one single way of doing this, but there are a number of ways that are emerging. And I’ve spoken with hundreds of urban planners, development specialists, architects and civic activists, and a number of recurring principles keep coming out. I just want to pass on six.

First: cities need a plan and a strategy to implement it. I mean, it sounds crazy, but the vast majority of world cities don’t actually have a plan or a vision. 

Second: you’ve got to go green. Cities are already leading global decarbonization efforts.

Third: invest in integrated and multi-use solutions. The most successful cities are those that are going to invest in solutions that don’t solve just one problem, but that solve multiple problems.

Next, fourth: build densely but also sustainably. The death of all cities is the sprawl. Cities need to know how to build resiliently, but also in a way that’s inclusive.

Fifth: steal. The smartest cities are nicking, pilfering, stealing, left, right and center. They don’t have time to waste.

And finally: work in global coalitions. You know, there are more than 200 inner-city coalitions in the world today. There are more city coalitions than there are coalitions for nation-states.

To learn more about Robert Muggah, his work on evidence based urban policy and data visualisations, visit the Igarapé Institute here and SecDev here.

Articles Magazines Parking Tools USA

See just how much of a city’s land is used for parking spaces

ARTICLE / TOOL

Adele Peters, Fast Company, 20 July 2017

At the moment, cars spend around 95% of the time parked, and only 5% of the time in use. Huge swaths of cities, either in parking lots, garages, or street parking spaces, are used as storage for cars (while, at the same time, many cities struggle to find enough land to build housing to keep up with demand). “There’s this huge space that’s basically wasted,” says Szell.

City Planners / Urban Designers Global Housing Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Podcasts Populism & Digital Disruption Suburban Cities Urban Economics USA

The New Urban Crisis

PODCAST

Andrew Tuck, Monocle, 4 May 2017

Special interview: Richard Florida

Our cities have become small little areas of concentrated wealth and advantage for the global super rich, for knowledge workers, for the members of my own creative class. It’s not just the 1%, it’s about a third of us who can make a go, but then the other two thirds, falling further and further behind and surrounding these areas of concentrated advantage much larger spans of concentrated disadvantage, and those are not only in the city, what’s so interesting about The New Urban Crisis, that’s spread out to what we used to think of as the great affluent suburbs, so it really is a new geographic divide in our society, and that divide is not only causing inequality it’s causing this terrible backlash.

To visit Richard Florida’s website click here, for an article from The Guardian about his previous thesis on The Creative Class and it’s relationship to The New Urban Crisis click here, and for a longer discussion of The New Urban Crisis with the LSE Cities Ricky Burdett click here.

Cities for People Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Podcasts USA

Jane Jacobs

PODCAST

Andrew Tuck, The Urbanist, Monocle, 15 December 2016

And really, Jane was the first time where I’d read a critique of cities and it really spoke to me, really resonated, it was incredibly human. It talked about mistakes and failure, it talked about things being imperfect, about things being informal, about the spontaneity, the ballet and dance of life that happens on our city streets.

Biking Short Films USA

Brooklyn bridge study sizes up expansion

SHORT FILM

New York Times, 17 August 2016

It’s a good problem to have right? Bicycling is now a mainstream mode of transportation in New York City. Almost a million New Yorkers now are riding their bikes regularly. And we should be providing for cycling as we provide for motoring in New York City.

Cities for People Community Documentaries Modernist Cities USA

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

DOCUMENTARY

Matt Tyrnauer, Altimeter Films, 2016

Jacobs understood when cities really work they’re phenomena that come from the bottom up. So a great neighbourhood is what happens when thousands of different actors – that’s the shop keepers, bar owners, the people walking the streets – they come together in an uncoordinated, but meaningful way to create the flavour and personality of the distinct neighbourhood. That not ‘planned’, that’s much more a question of organised complexity.

Engineers Games Transit USA Wayfinding

Brand New Subway

GAME

Brand New Subway, July 2016

It’s an interactive transportation planning game that lets players alter the NYC subway system to their heart’s content. Players can choose to start from scratch or one of several NYC subway maps (including present-day, maps dating back to the early 1900s, or maps from the future). They can build new stations and lines to expand the system to new areas, or tear it down and redesign the whole thing.