A bar in Utica wanted to close the street so businesses could serve patrons. The request was denied…but not because of parking restrictions. What the request—and the reasons it was denied—reveal about our highest priorities.
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In a “car place,” pedestrians are grudgingly tolerated. In a “pedestrian place,” cars are allowed to visit. We need a lot more of the latter. Here’s where to start.
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Sometimes the way to best advocate for change in your city isn’t obvious or easy. And the inertia of the status quo is a challenge all its own.
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No North American city is overcrowded. Not a single one.
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Walking is one of the best things you can do, even during a pandemic. There’s just one rule…
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Great urbanism: if it’s good enough for a vacation, then it’s good enough for everyday life.
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Compact development isn’t just for big cities. Some of the best walkable urbanism in the world is in the smallest towns. And embracing this is the key to enjoying the best of both worlds: urban and rural.
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An accidental photo essay courtesy of Street View provides us a look at the appallingly low standard for what we expect people who walk in suburbia to put up with.
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Investing in a supposedly “smart” future won’t overcome the failure to get the “dumb” stuff right. The former mayor of Seattle explains.
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New studies confirm people are willing to pay more to live in walkable neighborhoods. So why don’t we build more of them?
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If you want to see more homes built in your city, good urban design isn’t your enemy. And neither are those who insist on it.
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Our world is isolating and disempowering for Americans who don’t drive. As the number of senior citizens reaches an all-time high, this desperately needs to change.
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We’ve long accepted a base level of carnage on our streets. But we should stop describing these as random “accidents.” They are the inevitable outcome of our chosen approach to building cities.
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Vision Zero is a simple engineering problem, but a wickedly complex social and institutional problem—at least in America’s car-dependent cities. Success in Norway shows us what the way forward looks like.
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The way we design our cities, the metrics we track, and even our language — they all betray how we’ve come to prioritize cars over human bodies. What’s lost when our transportation paradigm doesn’t account for the diverse ways people still use our streets?
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Until communities get serious about slowing the cars, pedestrians will continue to take safety into their own hands…often in very creative ways.
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Slip lanes are the quintessential embodiment of what happens when speed is the #1 priority and safety becomes secondary. They are incredibly dangerous for pedestrians. Yet states and communities keep building them. Why?
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The spooky wisdom of the spookiest night of the year.
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Does walkability promote economic mobility? A new study suggests so. But will planners, engineers, and policy-makers take notice?
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A trip to Italy reveals the physical, social, and even cultural benefits of walking. But coming home to the auto-oriented U.S. reveals something too: just how dangerous, difficult, and unpleasant we’ve made things for pedestrians.
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