The Daily Source of Urban Planning News

The EPA creates a million-year health standard for Yucca Mountain dump.

August 11 - The New York Times

President Bush's energy bill is a "feeble initiative" that will not solve the nation's enormous energy problems writes Joe Conason.

August 11 - Working for Change

Nineteen years after the radioactive explosion in Chernobyl, the ecosystem has returned, and with greater biodiversity than before.

August 11 - Nature

President Bush says the $286.4 billion transportation measure will spur the economy.

August 11 - The Washington Post

Is Australia's capital on its way to becoming an urban sprawl nightmare comparable to Los Angeles?

August 11 - The Australian

President Bush acknowledged that the major overhaul of the nation's energy policy may not bring down high gasoline prices immediately.

August 11 - International Herald Tribune

Many homeowners in the midwest are "supersizing" their garages.

August 11 - Housing Zone

Amid the city's development boom, residents and local groups in one neighborhood wrangle with developers, the city and each other.

August 10 - Philadelphia Weekly

Ross Levin explains what accounts for differences in protection of property rights across different societies.

August 10 - National Bureau Of Economic Research

Kelo vs. New London continues to raise questions, as state and local officials in the Commonwealth discuss its implications.

August 10 - The Boston Globe

Richard Hollingsworth, director of a economic development organization, discusses the value of regional planning.

August 10 - The Metro Investment Report

Condos and loft apartments are going up at retail meccas around the Phoenix area.

August 10 - The Arizona Republic

A new study shows that a great many working class Americans are unable to purchase their own homes.

August 10 - Yahoo! Newswire

An interview with president of the American Society of Civil Engineers on how to get our public works back in shape.

August 10 - MetropolisMag.com

Paul Knox explores Vulgaria: the emblematic cultural landscapes of contemporary American suburbia.

August 10 - Opolis

Pennsylvania's new BluePrint Communities program gives community groups the resources to manage redevelopment.

August 10 - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mystery writer Walter Mosley reminds Angelinos that on the 40th anniversary of the Watts Riots, rage still smolders in the city.

August 10 - The Los Angeles Times

BLOG POST

Seriously supergood article on the history and technology of traffic <a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/17/blocking.php">here</a>, at Cabinet magazine. <img src='http://www.planetizen.com/tech/files//tower.jpg' alt='' width="200" align="right"/>How it works, what the terminology means, and how it's (not) controlled. Don't hate me for quoting so much, but it's a really wonderful piece:<br /> <br /> <blockquote>In 1930, Philadelphia put the "master controller" (both a device and a person) of its flexible-progressive signal system in the basement of its City Hall; and the groundbreaking Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control (ATSAC) center, created for traffic management during the 1984 Olympics, operates four floors below City Hall in Los Angeles.<br /> <br /> Once envied for its vast, efficient freeway system, Los Angeles eventually became the smoggy symbol of destructive automobile dependence and gridlock. Both images, however, are outdated. With one of the earliest and now most extensive traffic management systems, L.A. has become paradigmatic for "intelligent" urban traffic control worldwide. The Los Angeles district of the California Department of Transportation (CALTRANS) operates a traffic management center (TMC) in a fortified building, blocks away from the ATSAC center. ATSAC & CALTRANS combine with the Los Angeles County Public Works TMC to handle traffic flow throughout the region.<br /> <br /> Examining Los Angeles further as a case study in both traffic and traffic management, we find a feedback loop between the environment and the system: the environment can be described as the collective movement of vehicles across the urban grid; the system is the infrastructure designed to measure, monitor, and control the environment. More specifically, the system in Los Angeles has two primary realms: the physical and the virtual.<br /> <br /> In the physical realm, over 50,000 buried loop detectors, the insulated wire loops that passively detect subtle magnetic field changes from vehicles, combine with over 700 weatherproofed video cameras, some of which are remotely controlled to pan and zoom, to monitor and control traffic flow. Loops automatically trigger software in switching boxes linked to intersection signals but also send data to TMCs that allow traffic engineers to monitor flow patterns and adjust timings remotely. A simple click of a mouse button can start or stop the flow of movement on the grid.<br /> <br /> [snips]<br /> <br /> When traffic incidents occur, the system acknowledges and responds in various ways depending on the technological level of the area's infrastructure. In the case of most freeways or major intersections in the city itself, cameras are the first observers, recording the collision or obstruction and the immediate effect on the surrounding flow. An extreme incident is known as a Sig-Alert and is defined by the California Highway Patrol as "any unplanned event that causes the closing of one lane of traffic for 30 minutes or more, as opposed to a planned event like road construction, which is planned separately," and is named after Loyd C. "Sig" Sigmon. Mr. Sigmon developed a customized radio receiver and tape recorder that would detect a particular tone and record the bulletin, providing radio announcers with an analogue database of recent traffic incidents. This relieved dispatch from answering phone calls from the press. The first use of this device was in 1955 when doctors and nurses were requested to respond to a train derailment outside the Los Angeles Union Station. A traffic jam was the unintended result. It's oddly appropriate that Mr. Sigmon was to pass away only days before President Reaganís postmortem journey from a Santa Monica funeral home to Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, shutting down miles of the busiest stretch of freeway in the country (the 405), causing multiple Sig-Alerts in surrounding areas.</blockquote>

August 9 - Anonymous

Jack Nicklaus, Ben Crenshaw, and other golf course designers and investors have discovered that Nebraska's remote Sandhill prairies are perfect for stateside Scottish-style golf.

August 9 - ESPN

At 154 floors, the $900-million Dubai Tower will eclipse Taiwan's Taipei 101 by more than a third.

August 9 - BBC News