Streetsblog.net
Zoning Boards Shouldn’t Make Decisions By Judging People’s Lifestyles
A development of studio apartments planned for Berkeley, California, is setting off all the usual NIMBY complaints about height and proximity -- as well as a barrage of snap judgments.
August 27, 2013
Cincinnati Will Reform Its Parking Mandates
Bad parking policy can greatly harm a city. Too much parking makes walking impractical and uncomfortable. It also erodes the tax base, as the map of downtown Detroit we posted last week made painfully clear. Meanwhile, cities that manage the parking supply wisely have bolstered their downtowns, as we've seen in the cases of Pittsburgh and Denver.
August 26, 2013
How Fire Departments Both Perpetuate and Get Victimized By Sprawl
One of the big ironies of the safe streets movement is that a government agency charged with keeping us safe is quite often a major obstacle to preventing injuries and deaths. Fire departments tend to insist on wider streets to accommodate their emergency vehicles. But those wider streets encourage fast driving, which claims a lot more lives in the United States annually than fires.
August 21, 2013
Why Was Madison Left Out of the Midwest Rail Boom?
Does the state government of Wisconsin, under the leadership of Scott Walker, hate intercity rail or love it? Lately, it's been difficult to tell.
August 20, 2013
Message to Cities: Don’t Try to Be the New York Yankees
Today on the Streetsblog Network, Charles Marohn at Strong Towns writes about the tendency for cities to pin their hopes on splashy new projects. Kind of like how the Yankees always go out and sign an expensive free agent slugger.
August 19, 2013
Network Roundup: Building Trains Is Hard, Building Parking Is Easy
Here's a snapshot of what's happening around the Streetsblog Network today: headaches and heartbreaks on the way to passenger rail, smooth sailing for parking developments:
August 16, 2013
Should Cyclists Be Treated Like Pedestrians, Motorists — or Cyclists?
In places where cities accommodate multiple modes of travel, such as the Netherlands, cyclists and their bikes have their own space, just like pedestrians and motorists. This is not nearly as common the U.S., where dedicated infrastructure is scarce and the rules on where cyclists "belong" -- whether they should behave like pedestrians or drivers -- differ from state to state, city to city, or even block to block.
August 15, 2013
“Hyperloop”: Not Quite Shovel-Ready
The "Hyperloop," a conceptual high-speed transport plan from Tesla founder Elon Musk, received attention yesterday from almost every major news outlet.
August 14, 2013
Further Evidence That Road Diets Don’t Hurt Businesses
It seems inevitable that when a new bike lane or road diet is proposed anywhere in the United States, business owners fret that a loss of parking will scare away customers. But as more cities pursue safer streets, more data is helping prove the dire predictions wrong. In fact, in many cases we've seen the opposite: cycling infrastructure seems to actually boost business.
August 13, 2013