The anecdote we’re about to relay happened in St. Louis County, but it could have occurred in almost any community between New York and Portland. Alex Ihnen at NextSTL caught local transportation officials admitting what generally goes unspoken: “We’re a highway department; we’re not a bicycle department.” This is how a spokesperson for the St. [...]
Editor’s Note: In this week’s excerpt from Are We There Yet? we return to the Thriving chapter and a discussion of how healthy lifestyles are encouraged with the adoption of traditional design components found in Opportunity Areas. The introduction to the Thriving chapter, “The Push For Complete Communities,” in online here. The push for complete [...]
Miami’s Overtown neighborhood was once known as “the Harlem of the South.” In this historic black neighborhood, legends like Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday would play to big crowds late into the night. But as an NPR story recently described, in the 1960s, the construction of I-95 “shattered the world” of Overtown residents. Matthew Toro [...]
Orlando, Florida, is consistently the most-visited city in the United States with 48 million annual tourists. It should come as no surprise, then, that a major portion of the local economy is made up of service, hospitality, and theme-park-related jobs relying on national and international visitors. Despite the industry’s importance to the area, local infrastructure [...]
Does your city have a parking crater problem? If so, it’s probably time for an ordinance prohibiting property owners from demolishing buildings and turning them into parking lots. In the 1990s, this type of legislation helped dramatically transform part of Denver from a surface parking wasteland into more of a real downtown. Today, other cities are [...]
Block Party If you’re like me, you find it inspirational to see a child freely moving about their neighborhood street. It’s life affirming to see a group of children running from one side of the street to the next or riding a bike in circles or playing ping-pong in the northbound lane or rolling a hula hoop [...]
The long legal ordeal is finally over for Raquel Nelson, the mother who faced three years in prison after her four-year-old son was killed by an impaired driver in suburban Atlanta. Charges of vehicular homicide against Nelson — who was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when her son A.J. was struck and killed — [...]
Now and then an aphorism comes to mind that seems so self evident that surely some guru must have said it by now. Perhaps someone did before 1990, but Google gives be nothing on “cynicism is consent.” So I’ll say it. Cynicism is consent. I know I’ve just offended millions of proud cynics, but it’s [...]
Gary Howe has been seeing things differently since he suffered a foot injury when he slipped on an icy patch of broken sidewalk in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, this winter. Since then, hobbling has replaced walking for Howe, who runs Network Blog My Wheels are Turning and lives car-lite in this northern Michigan city. The injury [...]
Because elsewhere in the building, the company will be housing its Washington, DC-based lobbying operation. They want to show that they are “urban.” Even though only 2 of the 6 DC Walmarts will be in vertical mixed use projects. Because “seeing is believing,” Walmart will have the upper hand with elected officials vis-a-vis local communities, [...]
According to the agenda for this week’s Board of Public Works meeting, B-Cycle LLC will be awarded $1.5 million for professional services related to the “Indianapolis Cultural Trail Bike Share”. $1 million of this will come from a CMAQ grant with the remaining $500k unknown at this point in time. According to prior communications, it could [...]
There’s a proposal on the table in Boulder, Colorado, to preserve 25 acres in the heart of the city for agricultural purposes in perpetuity. The problem, says Zane Selvans at Flat Iron Bike, is that from a sustainability perspective there are better uses for such a big parcel of urban land. Selvans says the proposal [...]
Yesterday, an Ohio newspaper reported that the state’s urban schoolchildren are 3.3 times more likely to be hit by a car on their way to school than students in suburban districts. More than one out of every 500 children in the state’s eight largest urban districts had been hit by a car in the last [...]
by Matt Johnson Last summer, the city of Greenbelt built a roundabout at the entrance to the Metro station with an innovative bike bypass. This improves access to the Metro for cyclists, motorists and transit riders alike. Before the roundabout was built on Cherrywood Lane, there wasn’t even a stop sign, so anyone leaving the [...]
The Federal Railroad Administration’s burdensome safety regulations have long been criticized for putting rail transportation in America at a competitive disadvantage. But a new study says it’s worse than that even: FRA’s over-the-top safety standards actually make us less safe. David Edmondson at Network blog Vibrant Bay Area, a co-author of the study, explains: A [...]
