Urban Planning

As a charter member of the Congress for New Urbanism, I’ve now attended twenty of the organization’s annual conferences. This month’s event may have been my favorite yet, mostly thanks to its location in downtown Buffalo, a place that reminds us so poignantly of both the successes and failures of city planning, as first lovingly practiced and later ruthlessly perpetrated across America.

The inner Cleveland suburb of Lakewood (population 51,000) calls itself a "walking school district." Lakewood has never had school buses in its history, and kids grow up walking and biking to school.

Streetsblog's Parking Madness competition has highlighted the blight that results when large surface parking lots take over a city's downtown. Even though Rochester, winner of 2014's Golden Crater, certainly gains bragging rights, all of the competitors have something to worry about: Cumulatively, the past 50 years of building parking have had a debilitating effect on America's downtowns.

About 350 pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are killed each year by large trucks in this country. Big freight trucks are incompatible with cities in many ways, bringing danger, pollution, noise, and traffic congestion. They park in bike lanes and have shockingly big blind spots, putting everyone around them at risk. And yet, most cities haven't found a way to reconcile the need to move goods with all their other priorities.

In the late 1990s, an organization called Envision Utah brought together a broad spectrum of people to figure out how to plan for major population growth. They started by asking participants to mark out areas that shouldn't be developed -- wilderness, national parks, agricultural land. Then, they had to figure out how to fit future residents in the developable areas that were left. They concluded that the way to do that without massive congestion, soaring public costs, and environmental ruin was to build walkable development with good transit access.

If you’ve ever wondered how a deep-red state like Utah has managed to build some of the most ambitious transit expansions in the country, the short answer is: Envision Utah.

Folks across the blogosphere are geeking out over this new software created by Spencer Boomhower at the Portland firm Cupola Media. "Unity3D Visualization" lets users manipulate the features of a street and then evaluate the changes in an immersive animated display.

This week, Jeff and Tanya take on the Atlanta Braves' terrible, no-good, very bad decision to move their stadium to Cobb County, Georgia. We discuss cities that are (and are not) shaped like wedding cakes, and whether that means you need to smoosh your spouse's face in it. Tanya makes a pedestrian-rights argument against high-heeled shoes (and Jeff abstains from taking sides). We parse the differences between "shared streets" -- without marked-out space for cars, bikes, and people on foot -- and vehicular cycling.

What rhymes with “waterfront redevelopment plan”?