“[The] urgency to move fast is in conflict with the speed of trust, and the pace that actually allows for input from everyone who’s affected by these decisions.”
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An unproductive intersection looks different to different people: engineers, departments of transportation, tax assessors, etc. But bringing it to life starts with seeing it through still someone else’s eyes.
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How one urban advocate helped transform a downtown street into a pedestrian-friendly public space— plus tips for how you can do the same in your own city.
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How one small town in South Carolina destroyed everything that makes downtown downtown.
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This spring, hundreds of cities and towns moved swiftly to allow restaurants, bars and shops to open temporary outdoor seating areas. What have we learned?
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Large swaths of cities were bulldozed to build urban freeways. But there’s another reason freeway-building devastated city neighborhoods — and it’s a force still at work today.
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Oakland’s open streets program has become a national model. Not because they got everything right, but because they got started and keep getting better.
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An unproductive intersection looks different to different people: engineers, departments of transportation, tax assessors, etc. But bringing it to life starts with seeing it through still someone else’s eyes.
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We’ve engineered our streets for high performance when we should be engineering them for safety. Now’s the time to unwind the mess. Here’s how to do it.
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A new ordinance in Austin is trying to slow drivers and protect pedestrians. But does the city’s plan go far enough in addressing a key factor in creating safer streets: street design?
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We’ve never been able to afford the Suburban Experiment. But now that our 20th-century infrastructure needs to be repaired or replaced, the bills are coming due in an obvious way.
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Fire departments have a lot of influence over a city’s planning decisions. Too often, that influence is focused on one metric—emergency vehicle response times—rather than a more holistic approach to public safety.
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Wichita is spending $45,000 to repave a road. While that might not seem like a lot, sometimes it’s the small projects that reveal where our city’s spending priorities are—and where they should be.
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Why do we see so few people with disabilities in the conceptual designs of engineers and planners? Maybe it’s because people with disabilities aren’t at the design table to begin with.
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The Oregon Department of Transportation’s lies about safety are so blatant they can be seen 400 miles away.
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Do we size our city for the equipment we want, or size our equipment for the city we need?
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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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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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For a traffic engineer, to be conservative in your design is to spend extra money building capacity you don’t really need. The spiraling costs of this approach are enormous.
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Two simple photos show the difference between a street simply designated 20 miles per hour, and one actually designed to be safe. We can't regulate our way to safety.
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