Tag Archives: urban design

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

ASLA on sustainable transportation

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The American Society of Landscape Architects has put together a website with a lot of resources and references for transportation design. This is a nice complement to the more traditional engineering side of transportation planning and design, and underlines the value you can get from a well-functioning interdisciplinary design team even if it costs a bit more upfront. Here’s an excerpt from the street design page.

Bicycle lanes and sidewalks should be physically separated from vehicle traffic by trees, bollards, buffers, parked cars, or curbs wherever possible. Research has shown that physically-separated bike lanes yield the greatest safety gains for cyclists and, as a highly-visible piece of infrastructure, even have the potential to attract new cyclists. Vegetated buffers can further protect cyclists from harmful air pollution and should be incorporated whenever possible.

Green infrastructure should be widely used. Bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavement can be used to manage stormwater runoff and reduce flooding as well as create more aesthetically-pleasing streets. New construction should incorporate as many green streets features as possible, and existing infrastructure should be retrofitted to include green infrastructure. In Edmonston, Maryland, a 2/3 mile stretch of road was retrofitted with bioretention systems that now capture 90 percent of the first 1.33 inches of water on-site, helping to mitigate flooding and improve local water quality.

Philadelphia’s new rail park

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This article on Philadelphia’s new rail park sounds kind of cool. Sure, we are copying an idea from New York with the typical one-decade lag, but it sounds like the designers have given some thought to ecology.

The Rail Park’s horticultural design is a “simple palette” with three main layers, he explained.

Hardy London plane trees — “the classic park tree” found along the outer lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway and throughout the city — will dominate the upper layer. Multi-stem oaks and Kentucky coffee trees will fill in the medium layer, along with shorter redbuds and other flowering trees, American holly and Eastern red cedars. A birch grove will “play off the window boxes” that adorn a neighboring apartment building, like “a domestic landscape writ large,” Hanes said.

The lower level of plants will be more diverse, with arrangements of shrubs and perennials that include:

  • Bottlebrush buckeye
  • Oak leaf hydrangea and viburnums
  • Sedges, tall grasses and ground covers
  • Several varieties of fern
  • Sumac
  • Asters
  • Sage
  • Goldenrod
  • Milkweed
  • Alum root
  • Wild petunias
  • Wild indigo

I can vouch for this part of town being sorely in need of some wildness.

Biophilic Cities

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Biophilic Cities is a group trying to create “cities of abundant nature in close proximity to large numbers of urbanites. Biophilic cities value residents innate connection and access to nature through abundant opportunities to be outside and to enjoy the multisensory aspects of nature by protecting and promoting nature within the city.” This seems a bit big picture and visionary, but they also have some practical resources such a collection of codes and ordinances used by various cities.

November 2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • I thought about war and peace in November. Well, mostly war. War is frightening. The United States of America appears to be flailing about militarily all over the world guided by no foreign policy. Big wars of the past have sometimes been started by overconfident leaders thinking they could get a quick military victory, only to find themselves bogged down in something much larger and more intractable than they imagined. But enemies are good to have – the Nazis understood that a scared population will believe what you tell them.
  • We should probably be sounding the alarm just as urgently, if not more urgently, on biodiversity as we are on global warming. But while the case against global warming is so simple most children can grasp it, the case against biodiversity loss is more difficult to articulate.
  • A theory of mass extinctions of the past is that they have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions burning off underground fossil fuels on a massive scale. Only, not quite at the rate we are doing it now. Rapid collapse of ice cliffs is another thing that might get us.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • You can get an actuarial estimate of your life span online. You can also search your local library catalog automatically whenever you consider buying a book online. Libraries in small, medium, and large towns all over the U.S. appear to be included.
  • “Transportation as a service” may cause the collapse of the oil industry. Along similar but more mainstream lines, NACTO has released a “Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism“, which is my most popular post at the moment I am writing this.
  • It’s possible that the kind of ideal planned economy envisioned by early Soviet economists (which never came to pass) could be realized with the computing power and algorithms just beginning to be available now.

 

who is left behind by automobile-dependent urban design?

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I like this list from Todd Litman on Planetizen of the groups of people who are left behind (quite literally, left at home or waiting for buses and taxis or friends or relatives that might never come) by car-dependent urban form.

Non-Automobile Travel Demands

  • Youths 10-20 (10-30% of population).
  • Seniors who do not or should not drive (5-15%).
  • Adults unable to drive due to disability (3-5%).
  • Lower income households burdened by vehicle expenses (15-30%).
  • Law-abiding drinkers.
  • Community visitors who lack a vehicle or driver’s license.
  • People who want to walk or bike for enjoyment and health.
  • Drivers who want to avoid chauffeuring burdens.
  • Residents who want to reduce traffic and parking congestion, accidents and pollution emissions.

I like this list because it is crystal clear that there is not any one political orientation, ethnic group, or income level disproportionately burdened. It is a large swath of the population cutting across all these groups. Reducing all the hidden subsidies and incentives to remain car dependent would not be a reduction of freedom for the population, as some self-styled “conservatives” would have us believe. It would be an increase in the options and lifestyle choices available to all of us.

The only thing I would change on this list is to start youths at age 0. Plenty of young families where I live (a very-walkable, somewhat-bikable-for-the-brave community with dirty-slow-but-reliable-public-transportation) put children in daycare by age 1, and almost all put them in preschool by age 3 or 4 because there is no public preschool provided. Then, starting at age 5, many people choose not to send their children to the public school within walking distance of their home because they believe a public, charter, or private school farther from home will provide a better education and give them advantages in life.

One more overlooked factor is that state law provides no flexibility on car seats and booster seats for children when using taxis or ride hailing services, or when driving on low speed urban streets vs. highways, or flexibility on helmet laws when safe protected bike infrastructure is available. (Mostly) well-intentioned politicians from car-dependent areas of the state pass these laws without considering the non-car-dependent portion of the population they serve.

NACTO on stormwater streets

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NACTO has a new guide integrating stormwater management and multi-modal transport ideas on streets. This is significant because NACTO is not just a bunch of hippies or even hipsters, but a transportation industry group that has real influence on the design approaches that end up getting incorporated into federal, state, and local design criteria and technical specifications. And this is how engineering business gets done – once design criteria are written into the codes, whether they are good or bad, engineers are going to follow them because this is the most efficient and lowest risk thing to do, and in some cases there are no alternatives.

January 2017 in Review

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I just realized I forgot to do a month in review post in January. Well, I had a lot going on in my personal life in January, most notably the arrival of a tiny new human being. Blog posts are not the only thing I forgot – I forgot to pay some important bills and to do some important paperwork at my job too.

3 most frightening stories

  • Cheetahs are in serious trouble.
  • The U.S. government may be “planning to roll back or dilute many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank, particularly those that protect consumers from toxic financial products and those that impose restrictions on banks”.
  • “Between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections.” The “Great Game” is back in Afghanistan.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories