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The Planetizen News Brief

12 June 2008 - 4:00am
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.

Full Transcript

Outdoor public spaces are the soul of cities – or at least they used to be. Today public spaces in America are more likely to be overlooked and ignored, with little to attract an increasingly distracted public. But the city of San Francisco is hoping to change that. They've just released the San Francisco Better Streets Plan, a 250-page document that lays down guidelines for redefining the role of the city’s streets and sidewalks. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle took a look at the plan, which seeks to recreate the city’s sidewalks, crosswalks, alleyways, and median strips into landscaped and attractive areas. Tack on streets and these public areas make up more than a quarter of the city’s land. Officials are hoping this broad plan and its long-range implementation will create public spaces the public actually wants to use.

And while San Francisco looks to bring life back to its public spaces, conservationists and tour operators are steadily bringing the "wild" back to the "Wild West". An article in The New York Times discusses the trend of "re-wilding" areas in the Western U.S., like the Great Plains. Locals have been advocating for re-introducing native plant and animal species and removing fences that keep the natural wildlife contained in certain areas. Tour operators are popping up all over Montana, North Dakota and other Plains states, where a new type of eco-tourism is developing. The idea spawned from a 1987 article in Planning magazine by Frank and Deborah Popper calling for the entire Upper Midwest to be restored from a largely agricultural area to one driven by eco-tourism and natural habitats. That hasn’t quite happened, but the boom in tourism and tourism-related commerce is pushing the Great Plains state back in a more natural direction.

And finally, officials in suburban Dallas are considering the creation of the nation’s first toll on a surface street. The Dallas Morning News reports that the city of Highland Park is considering a plan to levy a congestion charge on the heavily-used Mockingbird Lane in an attempt to reduce traffic. The street is swamped with more than 18,000 drivers a day. Because most of the drivers clogging the road are just passing through town to get to and from Dallas, city officials in Highland Park want to make out-of-towners pay for the right to drive through. The toll plan is still in its early stages, and many officials in Highland Park seem open to the idea. But neighboring cities that could end up absorbing the diverted traffic are not so excited.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

Transforming Streets Into 'Urban Oases'

Rewilding the West

First Toll on a Surface Road Under Consideration

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