Category: Articles

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 Australia Bring Data City Planners / Urban Designers Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Smart Cities Talks The Public Realm

Can our Tweets help us build better cities?

ARTICLE

Poppy Johnston, The Fifth Estate, 4 September 2018

By pooling publicly-available data from social media and other unconventional information sources – such as reviews and ratings sites, travel wikis, mapping sites, and event promotion pages – the company is able to depict in real-time the unique social fabric of a neighbourhood.

“We have memories and thoughts about spaces, and it’s that intangible stuff that makes somewhere sticky,” Ms Hartley, who is also the company’s chief innovation officer, told The Fifth Estate.

“It’s traditionally been hard to put data behind this and hard to put a value to it. Determining social value has also been hard because neighbourhoods are in a constant state of change,” she said

To visit Lucinda Hartley and co-founder Jessica Christiansen-Franks’s social analytics platform Neighbourlytics click here. To visit their placemaking consultancy Co-Design Studio click here.

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 Global Meet the Urbanists: The Canon Physicists Talks Urban Economics Urbanisation

The Science of Sustainable Cities

ARTICLE / TALK

Centre for Liveable Cities, Urban Solutions, July 2018

Underlying the extraordinary complexity and diversity of cities is an approximate simplicity. As a city increases in size, all of its various socioeconomic metrics scale in the same way no matter where you are on the planet. Through analysing data from thousands of cities in different countries, I found that when the size of a city doubles, there is an approximate 15% increase in its socioeconomic outcomes—from income, wealth and number of patents, to crime rate and number of flu cases. This scaling law is valid across the globe, although cities have evolved independently.

To watch Geoffrey West’s 2011 TED Talk 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 Global Infrastructure Ranked Cities Report Short Films Smart Cities Strategy Consultants

Smart cities: Digital solutions for a more livable future

REPORT

McKinsey Global Institute, June 2018

After a decade of trial and error, municipal leaders are realizing that smart-city strategies start with people, not technology. “Smartness” is not just about installing digital interfaces in traditional infrastructure or streamlining city operations. It is also about using technology and data purposefully to make better decisions and deliver a better quality of life.

To download the Briefing Note for the report 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.

Architects Articles Australia City Solutions Developers Housing

Nightingale Housing wants you to own a great apartment

ARTICLE

Lucy Feagins, The Design Files, 13 February, 2018

The Nightingale Model empowers architects to develop their own thoughtfully designed medium-density apartment buildings. Profit margins are capped, and savings are passed directly onto homebuyers. For their part, homebuyers have to play by the rules too. They must be owner-occupiers, and they must agree to certain limitations about on-selling their apartment in the future, to ensure affordability is passed on.

For more coverage of Nightingale Housing click here, for Nightingale Housing’s website click here, to watch Jeremy McLeod’s TEDx Talk click here, and for a short film featuring Jeremy and a tenant / soon to be owner, click here.

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.

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.

Articles City Solutions Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Newspapers (Print & Online) Parking Short Films

The high cost of free parking

ARTICLE / SHORT FILM

Will Chilton and Baird Bream, vox.com, Jul 19, 2017

Off-street parking requirements, really, spread throughout the United States faster than almost any other urban planning invention. They arose partly because of the lack of management of on-street parking. If you can’t manage the on-street parking properly you need off-street parking requirements or everybody will say, ‘How could you let this building be built when there’s not enough parking?‘

To boil an 800 page book down into three bullet points, I have three basic recommendations:

Remove off-street parking requirements.

Charge the right price for on-street parking. By which I mean the lowest price the city can charge and still have one or two open spaces on every block, so nobody can say there is a shortage of parking. In order to reach that price you have to vary it by location and time of day.

But you have done that, make it politically popular, and spend the revenue on public services on the metered streets.

To visit Donald Shroup’s website click here, for CityLab’s profile ‘Parking Is Sexy Now. Thank Donald Shoup’ click here.

Articles City Solutions Government Agencies Housing Singapore / Malaysia

Why 80% of Singaporeans live in government-built flats

ARTICLE

The Economist, 6 July 2017

Today there are about 1m HDB apartments, largely clustered in two dozen new towns that extend in a semicircle around the city’s coastal core. Each year the government sells a fresh batch of as-yet-unbuilt flats, predominantly to first-time buyers. They all come with 99-year leases and are sold at lower-than-market prices, though successful applicants must wait three or four years for their blocks to be completed. Alternatively Singaporeans can choose to buy existing HDB apartments directly from their owners, at whatever price buyer and seller can agree. First- and second-time buyers get money through government grants, regardless of whether they buy new or old flats. Quotas ensure that the mix of Chinese, Indians and Malays in each HDB block reflects the ethnic make-up of the country as a whole, a measure designed to preclude the formation of racial enclaves.

For another article about Singapore HDB program, see ‘“But what about Singapore?” Lessons from the best public housing program in the world‘ from the World Bank’s website.

Articles City Solutions Newspapers (Print & Online) Short Films Spain Streets, Roads & Mobility

Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

ARTICLE / SHORT FILM

David Roberts, Vox, Apr 22 2017

The idea is pretty simple. Take nine square blocks of city. (It doesn’t have to be nine, but that’s the ideal.) Rather than all traffic being permitted on all the streets between and among those blocks, cordon off a perimeter and keep through traffic, freight, and city buses on that.

In the interior, allow only local vehicles, traveling at very low speeds, under 10 mph. And make all the interior streets one-way loops (see the arrows on the green streets below), so none of them serve through streets.

In this way, you create a nine-square-block mini village, the interior spaces of which can be more equitably shared between cars and other uses.

For more from Vox on Cities and Urbanism, click here.