Exclusives

BLOG POST

When Spillover Parking Isn't So Bad

<p class="MsoNormal"> One justification for municipal minimum parking requirements is the danger of “spillover parking”: the fear that if Big Brother does not force businesses to build huge parking lots, that business’s customers will “spill over” into neighboring businesses or residential neighborhoods, thus reducing the parking available to the latter group.<span>  </span>For example, if Wal-Mart doesn’t build a thousand parking spaces, maybe Wal-Mart’s customers will park at Mom’n’Pop Groceries down the street, thus reducing the parking available to Mom’n’Pop customers. </p>

May 20 - Michael Lewyn

BLOG POST

Opportunities (and Mindfulness) of the Emerging HUD Blueprint

<p> By any measure, the HUD that is now emerging from the shadows of eight years of amateur hour, is focused on the right things: markets, coherent roles for public and private sector alike, and energy efficiency. Indeed the emphasis on &quot;urbanism&quot; and &quot;regionalism&quot; illustrates that this administration &quot;gets it&quot;. </p>

May 18 - Charles Buki

BLOG POST

Graduate School or Fight Club?: Finishing Up the First Year

<p> Last week marked the end of my first year of planning school. It’s been by turns enlightening, angst-ridden, sleep-deprived, soul-baringly revelatory, stimulating and intellectually crushing. </p> <p> The bulk of the second semester is occupied by a first-year workshop—kind of a studio with training wheels—in which groups are assigned a client for whom they do a site analysis, come up with alternative solutions and then suggest a final plan and way to implement that plan. You know, kind of like in the real world. </p> <p> And, like in the real world, sometimes folks don’t always get along as well as they should. </p>

May 17 - Jeffrey Barg

FEATURE

Brainstorm: What Should Cities Do With Their Newly Empty Car Lots?

With the auto industry struggling and car dealerships closing shop, what future do you see for empty car lots? Vote on ideas submitted by the Planetizen community, or suggest your own.

May 15 - Planetizen

BLOG POST

de facto Shared Streets

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"> Shared streets, the contemporary vernacular used to describe streets that have been intentionally redesigned to remove exclusive boundaries for pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, etc., work well within a special set of conditions.<span>  </span>It is, in reality, just a new way of describing the original use of streets (see <a href="/node/38401">this previous post</a> for more on that).<span>  </span>The most promising candidates for shared streets are those where traffic volumes are not too heavy, the route is not a critical corridor for vehicular through-traffic, activities and attractions along the street are plentiful, short distance connectivity is viable, and a critical mass of pedestrians (perhaps enough to pack sidewalks at certain times) exists.<span>  </span>A shared street may also be suitable in places where there is a desire to induce such conditions; however, care must be taken to understand the larger network effects of shifting or slowing down vehicular traffic.<span>  </span>But in some instances, seemingly unrelated changes to traffic patterns or the effects of a coincidental collection of the above conditions sometimes go unnoticed until a street that may have been all about cars gradually shifts into something I refer to as a “<em>de facto</em> shared street”.

May 14 - Ian Sacs


FEATURE

Observe, Transform, Model, Interpret

These are just a few of the ways Prof. Peter Bosselman of UC Berkeley analyzes the built environment in his latest book, <em>Urban Transformation: Understanding City Design and Form.</em> Julia Galef brings us this review.

May 14 - Julia Galef

BLOG POST

More on design competitions, and building a city's "culture of design"

<span style="font-size: small"> <p> Can a city&#39;s &quot;design culture&quot; be deliberately grown and fostered? If so, can City Hall be part of such a fostering, or must it come from the grass roots, from the cultural or design communities themselves? </p> <p> Readers know I&#39;ve been musing on these questions for a while. A few years back, after arriving here in Vancouver, I wrote on the difference between our city&#39;s reputation as a <a href="/node/23462" target="_blank">&quot;city BY design&quot;,</a> and the reputation some other cities have, as &quot;cities OF design&quot;. </p>

May 13 - Brent Toderian


BLOG POST

Why is it so hard to build a train?

<p>I received a newsletter in the mail recently about the <a href="http://www.purplelinemd.com/" target="_blank">Purple Line</a>, a light rail line in the planning process in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Like hundreds of other public transit projects across the country, the rail line is in the &quot;planning&quot; stages and nobody can really say exactly when it will be constructed or begin operations.<br /><br />The cause is simple: too little funds and a lack of political support both locally and from the federal government. Quite simply, we get more roads because our policies are structured to spend more money on them, and they&#39;re more popular with elected officials. Although the specific cause of the lack of transit investment is simple enough, its effect on the way transit systems are planned and perceived by the public is far from simple. The lack of funds has added complexity length to an already complex and lengthy process. As a result, project supporters and detractors alike are alienated from the planning, forced to navigate a morass of acronyms, plans, and steps.<br /><br />The problem lies in the fact that since there is some money available, local supporters of the <a href="http://www.reconnectingamerica.org/public/reports/375" target="_blank">roughly 400 planned projects</a> (with an estimated total cost of $248 billion) pretend they&#39;ve got a shot at it. Time and again local boosters tell the media they&#39;ll just submit for federal funds and break ground after they complete the required paperwork. As we&#39;ll see, this couldn&#39;t be farther from the truth.<br /><br />

May 11 - Robert Goodspeed

FEATURE

Capturing the Value of Transit

With stimulus funding creating new transit projects across the country, now may be a great time to use innovative methods for funding development around transit, say Nadine Fogarty and Gloria Ohland of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. Portland and Denver are just two communities that have seen property values rise around rail.

May 11 - Nadine Fogarty

BLOG POST

The World's Greatest Threat: Cul-De-Sacs?

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May 8 - Mike Lydon

BLOG POST

Congestion, Pollution and Freeways

<img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Owner/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-2.jpg" />A common argument in favor of building sprawl-generating roads and highways is that if we just pave over enough of the United States, we can actually reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by reducing congestion.  For example, a Reason Foundation press release cited a report by two University of California/Riverside engineering professors, “Real-World CO2 Impact of Traffic Congestion” (available online at http://www.cert.ucr.edu/research/pubs/TRB-08-2860-revised.pdf ).    But if you read the report carefully, its policy impact is a bit more ambiguous.<br />

May 6 - Michael Lewyn

BLOG POST

Bright Lights, Big City?

<p> I missed the APA national conference for the first time in 15 years -- but I quickly heard reports that one of the hot topics focused on banning electronic message boards.  I dissent. </p> <p> What would Times Square be without the colorful, multi-message, oft-changing signs?  Would Las Vegas have become the tourist definition that it has without the colorful signs?  I am not a huge fan of Las Vegas, but I certainly think it has the right to define itself as it wishes.   </p>

May 4 - Eric Damian Kelly

FEATURE

Should Fuel Taxes Pay For Alternative Transportation?

Planetizen has teamed up with <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/">National Journal</a>, a weekly politics and policy magazine, to explore transportation issues. As part of National Journal's <a href="http://transportation.nationaljournal.com/">Transportation Experts blog</a>, we've asked Planetizen Interchange bloggers and National Journal's Transportation Experts whether money from the Highway Trust Fund should be used for non-highway projects like bike lanes and pedestrian walkways.

May 4 - Planetizen

FEATURE

Breaking Silos in the City

May 4 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

Car Sharing Economies Of Scale

<p> Introducing car sharing (ZipCar, Hertz Connect, etc,) to a development can significantly reduce parking demand and, hence, construction costs. </p>

May 3 - Ian Sacs

BLOG POST

Tips on Gainful Unemployment for New Planners

In the United States the stimulus package will eventually kick in to create jobs for planners—in housing, transportation, design and such. However, in upcoming months students graduating from planning schools face a situation they typically had not planned on—where unemployment is relatively high and employers are hesitant about taking on new people. As I have been pointing out to my students, this is not the first time in the history of the world that such a situation has occurred. The following tips draw on my own observations of successful strategies for weathering such downturns.

April 27 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

Convergence of Mobility and Mobility (ConMaM)

<p> One of the many glorious perks of being an engineer is that we are so bad at thinking up clever names for programs and tools that there&#39;s been an unabashed, universal concession by the general public to accept our use of horribly convoluted acronyms.  My favorite transportation acronym sub-genre is the collection of traffic signal configurations that for no clear reason (other than because engineers are, deep down, fun people) have flown off on a winged tangent.  The original intersection signal control which included pedestrian push buttons was “PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled”, close enough to be named “Pelican”.  A “Pedestrian User-Friendly INtelligent crossing” alternative to the Pelican is named “Puffin”.  Since a combined pedestrian/bicycle signal means two (

April 27 - Ian Sacs

FEATURE

From Motor City to Garden City

Detroit may be struggling economically, but community groups and citizen activists are keeping the city vibrant with a wide variety of urban farming projects throughout the shrinking city.

April 27 - Michael Summerton

BLOG POST

The Next City

&quot;Rules established in another era need to be rethought, &quot; said Xavier de Sousa Briggs, associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget this weekend in Cambridge. Briggs&#39; job touches almost everything, from the postal service to the Department of Homeland Security, and it was admittedly exciting to see someone with an urban planning background in such a powerful position. Briggs spoke at lightning speed, and I could almost see the multitude of invisible connections going into his brain and back out to the White House. Much of what he&#39;s working on, he explained, is taking &quot;old stovepipes&quot; -- government agencies that have worked in silos for decades -- and making them talk to each other. <br />

April 26 - Tim Halbur

BLOG POST

Post Industrial?

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0in" class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-family: Calibri">I never put much thought into the term “post-industrial.”<span>  </span>In my college and grad years, the phrase seemed to be used like candy – a ubiquitous summary of the current state of cities in the US.<span>  </span>The phrase implies a kind of death in our cities, an inability to retain the industries that spurred their very growth.<span>  </span></span></span> </p>

April 24 - Scott Page

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