Urban Structure

the “cities vs suburbs” trope

Posted on April 22, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy, Urban Structure, Words, Unhelpful

We all have too much to read, so here's a tip to save time. Whenever any article (such as this one) cites information about incorporated US cities as a basis for any claim about trends in the culture, quit reading. US big-city boundaries are irrelevant to most people's lives, and to anything else that matters about our culture, economy, or destiny.

Christopher Leinberger makes this point in a New Republic article recently, usefully expanded on by Sarah Goodyear at Grist. Leinberger argues that "city" and "suburb" is no longer a useful opposition, and that what really matters are walkable urban places vs drivable suburban ones. True enough, but replacing city with it's near-synonym urban doesn't take us far. "City" and "suburb" are rich, evocative, and succinct words. The word city in particular must be fought for, redefined in ways that defend its profound cultural heritage. The word has an ancient and clear lineage from Latin, one that forms the basis for the word citizen, not to mention civic and civilization.

Greek and Roman political theory was all about the city, in a sense of that word that we can recognize today: groups of people living together in a small space for reasons of security and economy, but also the site of humanity's cultural and intellectual development. City is a word of enormous evocative power to capture a range of ideas that drive urbanism. Leinberger himself can't describe what really matters without using the word urban, which evokes a similar history and resonance.

What Leinberger is really complaining about are discussions of data about incorporated US cities, which are a very narrow and specific problem. A few of the oldest US cities (San Francisco, St. Louis) have coherent boundaries that describe real cultural and demographic units, but many are bizarre shapes of purely historical interest.

Nobody who understands the lived experience of Los Angeles would claim that the City of Los Angeles is a useful or interesting demographic unit. While the city excludes a great deal of dense inner-city fabric close to downtown, it has long balloonlike tentacles extending north to take in the whole San Fernando Valley and also south to grab the port of San Pedro. It also contains a good deal of near-wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The tentacular, pockmarked, pulsating blob that we call the City of Los Angeles is the map of a long-ago war over water and power. The only people who care about it today are those who work for city government or serve as its elected officials, plus a few who've considered city taxes and services as a reason to locate in the city or out of it.

Americans should notice, too, that bizarre and misleading city boundaries are largely a US phenomenon. Europe, Australia, and New Zealand generally allow central (state or national) governments to draw the boundaries of their local governments, so these boundaries usually (not always) end up making some kind of sense. (With the exception of Queensland, Australian local government areas are too small to have much influence, but that's a different problem.)

As Leinberger says, we need a distinction between walkable urban communities and drivable suburban ones, and American city limits are useless for understanding that distinction. But the word city — whose Latin ancestor meant "walkable urban" for millennia until about 1950 — is still worth fighting for. Legal US "city limits" are an imperfect and aspirational approximation of what cities really are, and what they really mean for the human project. Despite their pedantic misuse by the likes of Cox and Kotkin, city limits have no authority to tell us what a city is, and why we should want to live in a real city or not. The deep attractions and repulsions that we feel for big cities are the key to a longer and truer cultural understanding of what cities are, and of why the civic is the root of civilization.

should inaccessible employers subsidize transit?

Posted on April 14, 2011 in Access, San Francisco, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Urban Structure

Lisa Margonelli has a nice short piece in the Atlantic today on the sustainable transport achievements of Bishop Ranch, an enormous business park in suburban San Ramon east of San Francisco.

The park was developed from farmland by Masud Mehran's Sunset Development Corporation in 1978 on the belief that San Francisco real estate would soon become expensive and companies would need cheaper space for their administrative services. His grandson, Alexander Mehran, describes the transit program as "a necessity that developed into a whole different animal." When the park started, it was simply too far from anywhere. "We were getting crushed by people going to work in Walnut Creek and Dublin," where the BART stations are. As a result, the ranch bought a fleet of buses and worked with the city and county transit agencies to subsidize both bus routes and bus passes for workers. There are now 13 different bus routes running to the park, and the connections to BART and various local train and express bus services are coordinated. On its website, the Ranch now pitches its transit program as a competitive advantage.
The most important word in that paragraph, of course, is subsidize. Suburban business parks are expensive, per customer, for transit to serve, so a suburban employer can't expect attractive or useful service simply by demanding it.

The second most important word is cheaper, which in the suburban context is sometimes an illusion. Bishop Ranch exists because it was perceived as a cheaper location for business. It is, but partly because land value follows access. The cheapest site will usually be the one with the worst transportation problems, and if a business chooses the site solely on those grounds, they're transferring the hidden cost of transportation onto their employees, their customers, and the transit agency. Employees can quit, customers can go elsewhere, and increasingly, transit agencies, too, are pushing back against serving these cheap-because-inaccessible sites, by suggesting that employers take responsibility for some of the cost burden created by their choice of location.

Finally, it's worth noting that Bishop Ranch is a fairly intense business park, with many multi-story buildings. Effectively it was a single-use new town of considerable density, so while the location was difficult for transit, transit agencies still had a ridership motive in serving it. If it were being built today, I hope Bishop Ranch would be mixed-use, with some residences mixed in, and also located with greater care in relation to existing and potential transit corridors, on the "Be on the Way" principle. Still, for being what it is, Bishop Ranch deserves a lot of credit for taking responsiblity for the transit consequences of its site, and investing in services to help overcome those barriers.

connection-activated civic squares

Posted on March 26, 2011 in Architecture, Berlin, Connections, Transfers, Portland, Streetcars (Trams), Urban Structure

A few days back I asked for examples of connection-activated civic squares, public squares that serve as both a symbolic and functional heart of the community, but where people connecting between transit lines form part of the square's activity. I was looking for a real-world example of something like this, which is a design for a (non-existent) square in Surrey, an outer suburb of Vancouver:

The idea arises from the desire to have bus-rail connections happen in an interesting urban setting, rather than a typical suburban bus interchange that features an area where only bus passengers would be.

First, I should answer this comment:

Isn't the idea to reduce transfer penalties, not to deliberately increase them for other ends? Getting off the train on a cold, stormy night, I think I would resent being made to animate an otherwise deserted public square – running 200m for my bus, with my umbrella blown inside out, dodging puddles. Even worse if it was on the way to work in the morning!

Indeed it is. I always want connection walking distances to be as short as possible. The square above is 100m wide, so maximum walks would be no more than that, and that's not out of line compared to what you'll do in tunnels in many of the great subway systems of the world. But I'm not sure that walking across a square is more onerous than walking along corridors or tunnels, so long as there's some reasonable alternative in bad weather. And of course the urban designers are always telling us that visual interest makes walks feel shorter. When walking along a typical subway tunnel lined with shops, I feel reduced to the status of consumer. I would much rather walk across a square on a nice day.

One reason that these arrangements are unusual, and that I should have noted, is that they require buses to be organized in an inverted couplet. In a country that drives on the right, you would expect that a westbound one-way street would be north of its eastbound partner. That's the way two-way streets normally divide. In this Surrey proposal, we set up the car traffic to do that but the buses to do the opposite in contraflow lanes. That's how we got the bus stops to be on the square rather than across the street from it. This is a great trick in situations where you already have one-way couplets of streets. It gets buses out of traffic and puts them with their doors facing each other so that they can stop at opposite sides of a square (or even just at opposite ends of a pedestrian street or lane).

(Portland's transit mall is a famous example of an inverted couplet — the northbound street is west of the southbound street — and if the Pioneer Courthouse Square were one block further east, it would be a spectacular example of a connection-activated square. The mall couplet does help create an effective square at PSU Urban Center Plaza, where the mall and the streetcar intersect.)

It was quickly clear from the reader suggestions that really large connection-activated squares have to be in pretty big cities. Even there, size can be a problem. Note how Lyon's Place Bellecour, below, is reduced in width by a bit of landscaping. The whole block is 250m x 170m, but the trees reduce the purely open space to about 100m wide. At that, it's still the largest clear square in Europe, says Wikipedia. There's room for two soccer fields in the remaining open space, three if that guy on the horse would get out of the way.

Place Bellecour does have a bus stop facing onto the square on the east side, but the main east-west bus movement is east on the south side, west on the north side, which in France puts the stops across the street from the square.

Many readers pointed to Berlin's Alexanderplatz, a vast and intense area that includes Berlin's iconic tower, the Fernsehturm. Alexanderplatz is technically the northeast part of this image, but it's all intimately connected.

The interaction here is between rapid transit ("U") at the center of the image and tram and bus lines. One of the tram lines extends northeast and northwest from just south of the rapid transit station. As I recall some of these trams turn to stop alongside the station (so are not activating the plaza) but others do not, so some people do walk across parts of the plaza. Also relevant are buses on both the far northeast corner of the image and on Spandauerstrasse, which is the street cutting across the southwest corner. Greater Alexanderplatz is a series of spaces where the interaction of transit and urban life is quite intricate.

A clearer big-city example is Syntagma Square, Athens. It's about 110m on a side, and seems to work well, though Google is a little fuzzy there:

Syntagma has an underground metro station on the east side of the image, including entrances right into the square. Buses are organized as a couplet, and in this case, it appears to be an inverted couplet so that the buses open into the square, but I can't quite be sure. The Athens Tram also terminates there. The position next to the Greek parliament building ensures that the square is a symbolic center of the city and nation.

Several readers suggested Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, UK. I had in mind hardscaped plazas, but this one is interesting as an example of how much transit work a grassy park with a fountain can do. It's about 120m x 90m at its widest points.

This is clearly a major tram+bus terminal, with lots of space taken up by end-of-line storage as opposed to just stops. That's part of why the transit operations seem to dominate the space to a degree that urbanists are likely to find objectionable. Note that the main pedestrian links between connecting services are paved paths across the gardens. The landscaping is a nice way of saying "this is a park, not just a transit interchange," even as the paths serve the interchange volume.

Last among big-city examples, I'm intrigued by Insurgentes station plaza in Mexico City, which is in a roundabout roughly 120m in diameter.

Note that the red buses appear to cycle the circle in a contraflow lane, i.e. clockwise where all other traffic is counter-clockwise, so that they open onto the central plaza. (UPDATE: I am now advised that they are operating with-flow, counter-clockwise, but in their own lanes, and have doors on the left that enable them to open onto the plaza. The two silver-roofed structures are their main stops). Obviously, this is a massive bus-rail connection point. The red buses are from the city's Bus Rapid Transit system. This is certainly enough pedestrian volume to activate a space, and indeed it looks as though some kind of merchant activity is going on. But of course a roundabout is inevitably more of an island than a heart, as you'll need to go underground, through the subway station, to cross safely to any part of the surrounding district.

But when we step down to smaller cities, or to outer locations that aren't major transit hubs, the successful squares are quite a bit smaller. Several readers praised Mont Royal station plaza in Montréal. The subway station is on the west side, with bus stops on the east and north sides. This looks like a case where terminating buses are actually looping around the square.

But it's only about 50m wide. Many readers suggested connection-activated squares on this scale, often in secondary nodes of big cities or in suburban areas, especially in Europe. Many such squares were mentioned, but Stockholm's Odenplen is typical. And even in North America, small open spaces, usually less than 50m on a side, are common at some subway stations; Vermont/Santa Monica station in Los Angeles and the two Mission BART stations in San Francisco come to mind. Another example, at a simiar edge-of-downtown scale, is the PSU Urban Center plaza in Portland, which handles interactions between an inverted couplet of north-south buses and an east-west streetcar. The open space there, too, is less than 50m on a side.

So to sum up:

An obvious larger design point is that civic squares have to be scaled to their catchment area. The bigger the city and the more central their role in it, the bigger they can be. For squares that aim to serve a smaller suburban or neighborhood node, the squares are smaller, usually less than 50m on a side. The plaza we sketched for Surrey (at the beginning of this entry) was probably too big. Place Bellecour in Lyon a totally open space of 200x100m with only a statue as furniture, probably is too big.
At all scales, these squares can work as multiple-purpose plazas while also serving transit connections, and there seem to be many examples of these two functions supporting each other.
Inverted couplets are rare but work well with public squares. The inverted couplet is a key unappreciated feature of the Portland transit mall.

Thanks to everyone for contributing to this adventure! I'm sure there are many other great examples I haven't mentioned.

This work is important to me because many designs for great highrise urban nodes at rail stations collide with the needs of connecting and terminating buses, and it's often tempting to push the buses away. These examples, at a range of scales, capture how transit connections and urban life can happen in the same place, and indeed support each other. Links to other great examples are welcome!

information request: connection-activated civic squares

Posted on March 19, 2011 in Downtowns, Information Requests, Urban Structure

Thanks to all the commenters who responded to my too-vague request in the last post. Let me now be clearer and, I hope, more concise.

This image …

… shows an idea for the design of a civic square intended to be the "living room" of a suburban city east of Vancouver. It does not exist on the ground, so I'm looking for examples that do. The core of the idea is that:

The square is successful as a civic heart. It's a place people would naturally go to not just to catch transit but also (a) to eat a lunch that they've brought, (b) to meet friends or people-watch, (c) to rally for a political cause, (d) to watch a local sporting team on an enormous screen (e) to attend any of a range of festival events programmed for the space and (f) to feel, as one feels in great squares, that you're in the very centre of the community, a place that is credible as a symbol of the whole community. I'll settle for most rather than all of those things, but the point is to define a certain kind of civic importance. Note that the flexibility of the space to serve many purposes is part of what makes it effective as a symbolic centre. It is, as they say of Portland's square, the community's "living room." It may have some green landscaping but it is mostly hardscaped in the anticipation of handling large volumes of people.
To me, this means that the place is big, let's say at least 50m in its narrower dimension. (Smaller plaza spaces around rail stations are routine in Europe, but this thing needs to be big enough to do the symbolic and practical work outlined above.)
The square is also an important node in the transit network, where substantial volumes of people make connections, either between mulitple surface transit lines or between those lines and a rapid transit line. (In the last post I artlessly referred to the place as suburban. I now realize that what I really meant was: a place where the high volume connections happen on the surface, not inside subway stations as is the case in most big European examples. Such a place may well exist downtown in a North American city that lacks much of a subway network.)
All, or at least most, of the surface transit stops are directly on the square. That is, when you step off the transit vehicle, you feel that you are in the square, not across the street or down the street from it.
These high-volume connections require walking across the square, not just along one edge of it.
Finally, let me rule out plazas at universities, where the community served is artificial and intentional. I'm after places that serve as the centres of towns or cities.

I'm asking because I want to discuss this possibility in my book, based on my experience in developing the idea sketched above. It has particular relevance as a way to organize local bus connections at a rapid transit station that is also a local CBD. If really successful examples exist, I want to praise them. If they don't, I'm interested in credible theories of why not. Is there something intrinsically wrong or unrealistic about this kind of design?

The closest I've seen so far are as follows. People who are familiar with these spaces are encouraged to chime in with views on whether they work on the above criteria, especially the perception of the space as a centre or "living room." The notation C? means "I'm not sure if this really functions as a civic heart or livingroom. T? means "I'm not sure if the transit connections are major, that is, I'm not sure if lots of people have reason to make connections here.)

Copley Square, Boston. (C? T?)
Mont Royal station, Montréal. (C? T?)
Plaza on the north side of Gare Montparnasse, Paris. (C?)
Pershing Square, Los Angeles (T?)
Picadilly Gardens, Manchester, UK (C?) (not hardscaped)
Place Bellecour, Lyon, France (T?) (very close!)
JFK Plaza, Philadelphia (T?) (not clear where bus stops are)
Alexanderplatz, Berlin, specifically the area southwest of the elevated station, between there and Spandauerstr. (C? T?) (Is this a major bus-rail connection path?)

Thanks for everyone who's commented so far!

imagining cities without mobility

Posted on March 13, 2011 in Access, Mobility, Philosophy, Urban Structure

Philips Corporation, like everyone, is running a livable cities program, in this case a set of awards for individual projects rather than big-picture rankings of cities. I just stumbled on it, and got a rude shock.

There are eight categories: Neighborhood, Mobility, Care, Education, Water, Shade, Sport, and Regeneration — all excellent things. Obviously, I'm professionally interested in mobility, so I looked to see who was winning there.

The leading candidate for the Mobility award is Plaza Movil Street Park, a proposal (for Buenos Aires, Argentina) for temporary street closures to create community park space. Its benefits are described like this:

Creating recreational spaces for local communities to relax, play, meet, and chat.

That's wonderful. It's glorious. I'm all for it. To use Philips's terms, it's great for Neighborhood, and probably also for Shade. But it's not mobility!

The only relationship that this plan has to mobility is that it takes space normally used for mobility and uses it for something else.

St. Augustine observed that we are always either being or becoming. In urbanism, "being" corresponds to placehood, and "becoming" corresponds to movement or mobility. The late 20th Century car-centered model led to the massive conversion of land area from placehood functions to mobility functions. Transit's great virtue is that it provides a lot of mobility using relatively little space, so that more area can be devoted to places, both public and private.

And yes, a great street provides an experience that integrates placehood and mobility to a degree. And yes, good urban redevelopment also reduces our need for mobility up to a point.

Bravo for well-designed street closures. But to give a street closure a mobility award seems to imply that mobility — our ability to get to places we want to go to — just no longer matters.

There is a strong current in New Urbanism, not without detractors, that does seem interested in abolishing mobility. Patrick Condon's idea for Vancouver, for example, would cancel a single proposed subway line and instead replace all of the city's electric trolleybuses with streetcars that go the same speed as the buses do. He would cancel a mobility-improving project and instead spend money in way that that may do great urban things but doesn't increase mobility at all. Once his network was complete, nobody could get anywhere any faster than they can now.

This makes sense only in a context where going places (even under renewable elecric power) is an objective evil. Streetcars, in this vision, supposedly cause greater urban density to be built at livable neighborhood scales, so that people meet more of their needs close to home. People spend most of their time in their own "villages" and others nearby. They simply do not travel far across the city, and had better not be in a hurry when they do.

It's understandable that "urban village" is a winning concept right now. We do need to increase the self-reliance of each part of a city, so that travel demand for many of life's needs can met closer to home. The pendulum swung far the other way in the late 20th century, toward surrendering placehood to movement. I support and eagerly participate in efforts to help it swing back.

But I think we can see what it might look like to swing too far in the new direction. We stay close to home, and thus evolve transport systems that are useful for going short distances and useless for going long ones. And the obvious retort to this is: In that case, why live in a city? Why not just live in a country village, or in a small city?

The whole point of living in a city is to have access to unusual things that are only possible at a large scale. If you want major league sports or a good symphony orchestra or a world-class major university, you need to be in some kind of urban area. If you have a very unusual interest, only a place with lots of people will have a few people who share that interest. If you want choices, you need redundancy, also known as competition. You need there to be two or more sources for whatever service or product or experience you're looking for, readily available from where you live. For those things, you need a certain amount of urban mass, and some options for moving around within it.

The great irony of anti-mobility village-first thinking is that it inevitably leads to monotony — less choice and therefore less opportunity for people to form specalized communities where unusual thought and creativity can flourish. More disturbingly, it leads to a world where only the internet offers those things, which leads in turn to nightmare images of a world of plugged-in couch potatoes, people who never go outside anymore because their social and intellectual needs simply aren't met by the 500 people who happen to be within walking distance.

The antidote to conformity and monotony is the city. For a city to function as a city, you need mobility. Streetcars are fun to ride, but not if you're in a hurry. Closing a street on Sundays so people can dance is a great thing. But you can't run an economy that way, nor can your citizens feel free.

will car-dependent development have resale value?

Posted on January 17, 2011 in Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Urban Structure

Well, sooner or later, you'll have to sell to the next generation, so it makes sense to be paying attention to what they think.

redundancy in transit networks: a good thing?

Posted on January 14, 2011 in Brisbane, Mobility, New York City, Philosophy, Urban Structure

Transit planning consultant Bob Bourne is thinking about the Brisbane flood's impact, and wondering whether building more redundancy into transit networks is a good idea:

My heart goes out to everyone affected by the floods. It can be devastating on so many levels, individual lives lost; extensive property damage to individual residences, and infrastructure damage. I managed the system in Ames, IA during our floods in 1990, 1993, 1998, and 2005 and I have been assisting the Cedar Rapids, IA transit system in recovering from their 2008 floods. I worked in Chicago during the blizzard winters of 1977-78 and 1978-79 where the city and suburbs experienced several weeks of paralysis due to the continuous heavy snows as well as way too many blizzards in Iowa over the years.

In the U.S. buses typically operate without a lot of redunancy in the route network. Your commentary on numbering overlapping bus routes and make them understandable to the riding public is interesting and implies that there are lots of routes serving several corridors. In the U.S. that may be true, but usually the headways are pretty well trimmed to provide the absolute minimal level of service. When you add demand due to adjacent services becoming inoperative, the existing routes are overwhelmed. Overloading causes extended travel times and buses cannot make their normal cycle times which exacerbates the problem. Throw in a street network in chaos and the bus system will be criticized as not meeting the needs of the citizens in the time of crisis. No easy way to explain the problem.

The other problem that we had in Ames, Chicago, and Cedar Rapids was that some of the drivers lived in areas that were flooded or had immediate family in those areas. They needed to tend to their family/housing priorities and this decreased the number of people available when the workload of more passengers and longer travel times increases.

At some time in the future, after everything settles, perhaps you could solicit comments on building redundancy into your transit system. Sometimes, it is good to have lightly used routes that can be cancelled in a crisis allowing redeployment of drivers and vehicles. Sometimes it is good to have headways with a loading standard of less than 125% of seats at the peak point on the route instead of cramming buses with 150% or 175% of seated load. Your 10 or 12 minute frequent headway concept can provide additional resources if you need to cut it back to 15 to 20 minutes during a crisis.

After the September 11, 2001 disaster in New York, the subway system was able to recover quickly because the lower end of Manhattan was one of the few places in the subway system where there was some redundancy. Multiple routes close to each other and at the end of some routes made it easy for commuters to resume their normal lives long before the reconstruction of the subway damage.

Redundancy is not favored by policy makers and can add to costs. However, a system with excess capacity will perform well in times of crisis and will provide addtional service during normal times.

Our prayers are with everyone who is suffering through this disaster and we hope that good luck will shine on Australia again.

The kind of redundancy that Bob praises is something transit planners spend much of their time trying to get rid of, because on typical days when we don't need it as redundancy, we call it duplication and waste.

Transit agencies work on such tight budgets that it doesn't make sense to run, say, a bus line next to a rail line, doing the same thing, just for the redundancy. If the rail line is serving the market, the bus should be off somewhere else, providing unique mobility rather than duplicating the rail.

This is especially true in small cities like Bob's hometown of Ames, Iowa, or Great Falls, Montana. These networks' resources are stretched tightly to create the maximum amount of mobility for the budget.

Having said that, there are a few situations where an efficient network is also a redundant one.

Classic high-frequency grids provide redundancy for transit in the same way they do for cars. If one segment in a grid goes down, there's a parallel line 800m away that you can walk to in a pinch. It will probably allow you to complete the same L-shaped trip that you intended to make on the disabled line.

Ferries are more complicated. The long cross-city run of the CityCats mostly connects stations that are also connected by bus. The bus trip generally runs a shorter distance at a higher frequency, though it may require a connection. So there's no question that the intrinisic attraction of the ferry is part of what keeps it busy. There may also be secondary issues, like the legibility problems of much of the bus system in downtown Brisbane, where most connections occur. But there are also situations where CityCat and the smaller CityFerry does a link that's simply impossible by road, or much, much longer, and in these cases the ferry wins on pure mobility grounds.

Of course, bus operators generally have backup fleets in case they need to suddenly replace a non-redundant train or ferry line that goes down. In Australia, there are often standing agreements between government and private operators to shift buses into this role, and given a day's warning — which Brisbane had — it's not hard to replace a failed network segment with buses even while running the rest of the bus network.

So is redundacy a good thing in disasters? Of course it is. Is it a reason to design networks that are redundant all the time, at the expense of more mobility that could be provided at the same cost? No, probably not, because you're weighing a rare disaster against daily inefficiency. Are there styles of network design that are both efficient and redundant? Yes, the high-frequency grid comes to mind.

In really big and dense cities, you can also get both redundancy and efficiency, because there will tend to be overlaps of service just to provide capacity into dense centers like Lower Manhattan, and in these cases, as Bob notes, redundancy is often possible. The key there, however, is that the duplication of services isn't justified by the need for redundancy, but rather for the sheer capacity need, and providing necessary capacity, of course, is part of efficiency.

Transit’s Role in “Sprawl Repair”

Posted on November 15, 2010 in Access, Be on the Way, Bus Rapid Transit, Fresno, Los Angeles, Pedestrians, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Urban Structure

Duany Plater-Zyberk, one of the leading planning firms associated with New Urbanism, is thinking about “sprawl repair,” a process by which utterly car-dependent landscapes could be transformed into something more walkable, and thus more resilient. Galina Tachieva of DPZ has an article explaining the concept at Planetizen. Continue Reading →

Cul-de-sac Hell, continued

Posted on October 30, 2010 in Access, Journalism, Portland, Urban Structure

What’s so great about living on a cul-de-sac again? From the Oregonian:

Fallen tree blocks access to Lake Oswego neighborhood Continue Reading →

Guest Post: Richard Lenthall on the Busways of Almere, Netherlands

Posted on October 27, 2010 in Amsterdam, Bus Rapid Transit, Guest Posts, Urban Structure

Richard Lenthall is the founder of Sight of the Navigator, a European travel and transit advisory website based in Amsterdam. It aims to improve tomorrow’s journey experience by bringing together transit providers and their passengers.

Transit and urban planners will no doubt be familiar with the “Bus Lane”, the concept of designating a lane or segment of road exclusively for the use of buses and other permitted vehicles. When properly executed bus lanes can save time over the same section of a journey made with a car, and provide operators the means to keep to timetables during the rush hours, both of which can promote the use of public transit. Continue Reading →

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