Your Voice at Strong Towns: A Weekly Roundup

Our Strong Towns Canada Community Group leads some thoughtful discussion, and we explore Daytona Beach with our Member of the Week.

Your Voice at Strong Towns: A Weekly Roundup

Our first Member of the Week, Karl Fundenberger, tells us about Topeka, Kansas, and some of our advocates get heated about cycling.

Your Voice at Strong Towns: A Weekly Roundup

Beg buttons, ordering takeout, and a Strong Towns success story—who could ask for a better week? And you made it happen.

Slip Lanes Would Never Exist if We Prioritized Safety Over Speed

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?

Cracking Down on Pedestrians Won't Make Streets Safer

Could it make sense to put the onus on pedestrians to ensure their own safety—in Honolulu’s case, by considering making it illegal to cross the street outside of a crosswalk after dark? Maybe, but only if we had a system that actually gave people on foot equal opportunity to get around safely and conveniently. We don’t.

Walkability, Upzoned, Podcast, Top StoryStrong TownsMay 3, 2019Pedestrian Safety, Street Design, Hawaii, Kostelec

Question of the Week: How Can I Encourage City Leaders to Not Widen a Neighborhood Street for Cut-through Traffic?

Your Strong Towns Knowledge Base question of the week, answered here.

The Major Urban Revolution of Minor Transportation Means

Electric bikes and scooters have enormous advantages for short urban trips. How will they change our cities? When Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator in 1852, he never imagined skyscrapers.

Transportation, Bikeability, Top StoryYuval KarmiSeptember 13, 2018e-bikes, Street Design, technology, scooters, page highlight

The Power of Gridded Streets

One man’s quest to find the equation proving the value of gridded streets leads him down some interesting roads.

Urban Design, Roads and Streets, #DotheMath, Top StoryVince GrahamJuly 12, 2018Street Design

Trick Question: Is Your City Half Empty or Half Full?

Most of the land in our cities sits vacant for large parts of the day. Is this the best use of our resources?

What another city's streets can tell you about your own

Take the time to think through what you like and don't like about a given city's streets and you just might learn something.

Roads and Streets, Top Story, Urban Design, TransportationBryan JonesMarch 29, 2018Street Design

What if you and your neighbors redesigned your town's worst intersection?

I asked four different neighbors how they would redesign a dangerous intersection in my town. Here's what they said.

Walkability, WIlson, #StrongCitizens, #SlowtheCars, Top StoryKea WilsonFebruary 27, 2018Street Design

A System of Safe, Human-Centered Streets

What sorts of streets make up a strong town? It's time to get past the standard “local, collector, arterial, freeway” hierarchy of street design.

Top Story, Roads and Streets, Member Post, Engineering ProfessionJon LarsenNovember 27, 2017Street Design

Beware the Four-Letter Words of Vibrant Downtowns

Cities like Los Angeles, Houston, and West Palm Beach are leveraging their most valuable assets — downtown spaces — to create cookie-cutter, quasi-private developments.

Azzarello, Urban DesignMax AzzarelloAugust 24, 2017Street Design, shopping malls, Entertainment Districts

How to Make Museums an Active Part of Your City

Are there ways we can build urban museums to both engage visitors with the rest of the city and make the museum a better neighbor for residents who live nearby?

Urban Design, Top Story, QuednauRachel QuednauAugust 23, 2017Street Design, granularity

A Town Well Planned: Street Design

This neighborhood has three different types of streets to meet different needs—but all of them provide ample room for the best indicator species of success: people.

The Invisible Hand That Designed Your City

If you don't get involved in the planning of your city, it will be planned for you. Much of it already has been.

These resources will help you host a pop-up traffic calming demonstration in your town.

Get out there and start making your streets safer.

How Fire Chiefs and Traffic Engineers Make Places Less Safe

Of all the urbanism specialists with tunnel vision, fire chiefs, fire marshals, and traffic engineers are probably the most dangerous.

A Town Well Planned

If zoning codes are the primary tool in a planner's toolbox, that's a problem. Here's a three part system that would offer a better way for planners to design cities.