Exclusives

BLOG POST

Dear Uncle Sam: Transit Design Really Does Matter

Over the past decade more than $75 billion in public dollars has been invested in rail transit. Los Angeles, Seattle and Denver alone are investing an additional $65 billion to expand their systems and enhance the livability of their communities. The federal government will be asked to play a major role in funding each of those systems. Up until now the federal role in major transit investments has largely avoided the question of how we ought to design our transit systems to be good neighbors and leverage livable communities.

September 7 - G.B. Arrington

BLOG POST

Urbanist Thinking at the Temporary Metropolis of Burning Man

It's already disappearing. The temporary city that forms during the annual Burning Man event is fading away, as the tens of thousands of people who traveled out to live in the desert of northwestern Nevada for the past week have filed out of the void and returned back to the rest of the world. The event's organizers and volunteers are still erasing the traces of the event, from demolishing structures to removing fencing to picking up trash. Within another week or so, the entire city will have disappeared. It's an interesting way for a city to exist -- just a few weeks at a time, once a year. But it's been working for Burning Man and Black Rock City, the name of that temporary city that forms and disbands almost as soon as it comes to full life. On top of what's already a unique experiment in citymaking, the theme of this year's event was Metropolis, which spurred the tens of thousands of people and artists who make up the city to think a little more about how their "party in the desert" is actually a little city and community (the fourth largest city in Nevada during its run), and how it relates to their world beyond the desert.

September 6 - Nate Berg

BLOG POST

Incorporating Health Objectives Into Transport Planning

Planning decisions often have significant indirect effects. As planners, our challenge is to clearly describe these impacts and quantify them as much as possible so they can be incorporated into decision making. An example of this is the effect that transportation planning decisions have on human health. These impacts are significant but often overlooked or undervalued in the planning process. I have worked on several research projects that explore the nexus between transport planning decisions and public health, and are developing practical tools for incorporating them into planning. Let me share some of my current thinking about this issue.

September 6 - Todd Litman

BLOG POST

Snow, Cars and Growth

A couple of years ago, I was listening to a friend explain why she left Rochester for Jacksonville. "I was tired of digging my car out of the snow." It occurred to me that the nexus between driving and winter weather may at least partially explain the decline of America’s northern Rust Belt. Here’s why: car care and storage makes snow a bigger bother than might otherwise be the case: if you don’t have a heated garage, you have to dig your car out of the snow every day, and if you park on the street you may have to constantly move your car to accommodate municipal snow removal.

September 3 - Michael Lewyn

BLOG POST

Plans, Places, and Processes: Do You Need to Travel to Understand Them?

<span style="widows: 2; text-transform: none; text-indent: 0px; border-collapse: separate; font: medium 'Times New Roman'; white-space: normal; orphans: 2; letter-spacing: normal; color: #000000; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px" class="Apple-style-span"> In recent blogs I have written about places and plans in many different locales and through time. Students often ask, “do I need to visit places to know about them”?

August 31 - Ann Forsyth

BLOG POST

The Search for Scientific Validation: When Our Feelings Are Just Not Good Enough

Planners are taught to be analytical thinkers who use quantitative data, but also qualitative research. Remember the Myers Briggs personality test? It assesses an individual’s personality based on four preferences: A focus on the outer world (extraversion) or inner world (introversion); basic information (sensing) or interpretation and meaning (intuition); making decision based on logic (thinking) or people and special circumstances (feeling); dealing with the outside world with clear decisions (judging) or staying open to new information and options (perceiving). As planners, we are constantly in conflict with these preferences as we straddle the world of technician and analyst.

August 30 - Melissa Hege

FEATURE

Post-Katrina New Orleans: Focusing on What Could Be

Patrick L. Phillips, CEO of the Urban Land Institute, reflects on the state of rebuilding efforts in New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. He sees an impressive level of planning, momentum and cooperation among stakeholders.

August 30 - Patrick L. Phillips

BLOG POST

Changing Travel Demands: Implications for Planning

The graph below shows the most recent USDOT vehicle-travel data covering the last 25 years. Although vehicle-miles of travel (VMT) grew steadily during most of the Twentieth Century, in recent years the growth rate stopped and even declined a little. It is now about 10% below where it would have been had past trends continued. <img src="http://www.vtpi.org/images/VMTtrends.jpg" alt="US VMT Trends" title="US VMT Trends" width="656" height="359" />

August 22 - Todd Litman

BLOG POST

Do You Have Innovative Smart Growth Projects That Need Funding?

As the post-recession economy continues to plod along, those in the non-profit sector continue to face stiff funding competition. Organizations furthering the smart growth/new urbanism cause may find this to be particularly frustrating, as re-working how and where America builds has never been so important.

August 22 - Mike Lydon

BLOG POST

Campaign Fundraising Holds City Hostage

I wasn't even in Los Angeles yesterday, and for once I'm glad. Everything from my Facebook feed to the morning headlines told me that traffic on the Westside yesterday afternoon was so awful that only a parade of obscenities accompanied by words like "cluster" and "show" would have sufficed to describe it. Hardened locals were driven nearly to tears behind the wheels of their unmoving cars. The president was in town.

August 17 - Josh Stephens

BLOG POST

Park51, Planning and the Freedom of Religion

As planners, we are accustomed to (and expect) some types of urban development proposals to attract controversy. Whether the opposition is to new roads, higher-density housing or undesirable land uses such as industries or prisons, such controversies are becoming far more common as environmental, economic and social issues become more pronounced and widely understood. In most cases, we generally assume that we can make use of a suite of engagement strategies to engage stakeholders and try to resolve typical development conflicts.

August 17 - Michael Dudley

FEATURE

Making Sense of Neighborhood Structure

Planner Sam Gennawey details a public participation exercise he regularly uses, taken from the ideas of Christopher Alexander, that makes complex ideas simple for public understanding.

August 16 - Sam Gennawey

BLOG POST

How To Raise Fares

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a bus in Chicago and noticed something that I had not noticed before- that how you paid to get on the bus affected how long you took to get on the bus. People who flashed monthly passes boarded in a few seconds. People who put in dollar bills got on a lot more slowly, as they fumbled for the right number of bills. People who had to pay change took longer still. So to speed buses’ on-time performance (pun intended) transit agencies should encourage the former and discourage the latter.

August 13 - Michael Lewyn

FEATURE

Beyond the Priesthood

In 1995, author and planning authority Peter Katz wrote an article scolding planners for being "planners who talk" rather than "planners who draw". The original article generated much controversy, and appears here with a postscript added by Katz that reveals a glimmer of hope for the planning profession in the U.S.

August 12 - Peter Katz

BLOG POST

Internalizing the Externalized: The Case of Roads

In a <a href="/node/44927">previous blog post</a>, my discussion of externalities, public goods and roads spurred an unexpectedly lengthy set of posts and repostes. In this article, I want to address a trickier topic: Whether road users have effectively shifted the burden for paying for roads to non-users and whether the reason we pay for roads out of general taxes is a result of that lobbying effort.

August 9 - Samuel Staley

FEATURE

Supermodel Sirens on "Sanctuary" Island

Is there an ideal model for a city's circulation, a "supermodel"? Fanis Grammenos reviews a new paper that proposes the use of organic forms first recognized by Christopher Alexander.

August 9 - Fanis Grammenos

BLOG POST

Can "Webinars" Make Planning Workshops Obsolete?

Can planners effectively use on-line meeting technology to host public participation workshops? The City of Los Angeles' Department of City Planning recently decided to find out for itself by experimenting with a "webinar" format for two kickoff workshops highlighting the City's 2010 draft citywide Bicycle Plan. A webinar is a web conference, where participants can access a virtual meeting using a computer and Internet connection. Participants access a website to see the presente's computer screen and also listen to the presenter through the computer's speakers or using a telephone.

August 6 - Ken Bernstein

BLOG POST

Value-Based Land Planning

A few years back, I was involved with helping a land owner master plan a 30-acre parcel in Las Vegas just off the Strip, near the MGM Grand Hotel. The parcel was zoned for casino uses and also had potential for hotel, residential towers and other retail uses. The land owner paid about $9 million for the underutilized and nearly vacant property and received minor residual income for lower intensity uses that were currently operating on the site. Initially, the land owner tried to flip the land using a prestigious national real estate brokerage that marketed the property with a glossy aerial photograph, a large red b

August 5 - Rick Abelson

BLOG POST

A Planning Parable, Circa 1984

Burning rainforests. Smog alerts. Gridlocked cities. Seabirds caked with oil. That's how it was, ladies and gentlemen, as we entered the '90s. This list of environmental peril is familiar still today, although we can cite some success fighting the smog. In this case, the quote is from a TV reporter in 1984, a character in a Ray Bradbury story called "The Toynbee Convector."

August 4 - Tim Halbur

BLOG POST

Planning After Our "Empire of Food"

Recently, a Briton armed with a metal detector uncovered a trove of more than 50,000 Roman coins, which archeologists believe was an ancient farming community's offering to the gods to ensure a bountiful harvest. Our own agricultural practices have moved past any pleas to the gods to incorporate instead an industrial-scale arsenal of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetic modification.

August 3 - Michael Dudley