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The Planetizen News Brief

10 May 2007 - 7:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

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Full Transcript

The recent collapse of a portion of a freeway interchange in the San Francisco Bay Area has put transportation planning in the spotlight. Many feared congestion would skyrocket after the interchange collapse, but to their surprise traffic after the accident turned out to be just as good as before– if not better. According to the Caltrans Freeway Performance Management System, traffic was considerably lighter in the days following the freeway’s collapse, by 11, 15 and even 22 percent. Transportation engineers are touting that decreasing the amount of drivers on the road by only about 10 percent can show huge improvements in traffic flow. And it seems that many of those drivers who stayed away from the freeway took advantage of free rides on BART - the bay area’s commuter train system which posted record ridership the day after the collapse.

And San Francisco has joined a host of other U.S. cities and even more international cities in creating a temporary car-free zone in one of its urban parks. The city plans to close a mile of road in Golden Gate Park every Saturday this summer, providing much-needed open space to the dense city’s cyclists and pedestrians. The Christian Science Monitor reports that, aside from San Francisco, an increasing amount of American cities are proposing pedestrian friendly, car free zones in their public parks, including New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Cleveland. These American examples draw their inspiration from a program started in Bogota, Colombia in 1983 that closes the city’s streets to cars every Sunday. That program brings more than a million people out to the city’s streets each week, and has been recognized internationally for its success.

While those urban areas are looking for ways to provide open spaces for their steadily growing populations, the former industrial city of Youngstown, Ohio, may have found a way to deal with its steadily declining population. City planners and local officials have decided to actually embrace the population decline by setting up a plan to allow their town to shrink. The Wall Street Journal reports that Youngstown will let declining areas continue to decline with the hopes of eventually demolishing underutilized buildings and streets to create rural and open spaces. Officials are going to devise plans for each of the town's 127 neighborhoods to determine which areas can be thinned out, which can be turned to open space and which should be preserved as is.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

Traffic Drop Of 10% Makes World Of Difference After Freeway Collapse

More Parks In U.S. Going Car-Free

Youngstown, Ohio, Tries To 'Shrink' Smartly

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"To ignore this space is shortsighted." -- Jennifer Wolch, Director of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities
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