planted city

A few paragraphs from the CityFix article, ‘User Preference Key to Implementing Sustainable Transportation’, highlighting some important lessons for improving the walkability and bikeability of cities. The article profiles a new report, ‘Integration of Biking and Walking Infrastructure into Urban Communities’, which “highlights best practices and identifies program characteristics associated with high levels of non-motorized travel.” You can check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: TheCityFix)

Here’s a late day shot looking east along West Cordova @ Granville Street in Vancouver

From The Economist:

For years urban planners have emphasised the needs of the motorist over those of the pedestrian. Thanks partly to greenery, partly to a greater understanding of how pedestrians behave, and partly to concerns about social cohesion, priorities are changing.

London provides two good example of this shift. On February 1st Exhibition Road, a landmark street near many of the city’s museums, is being formally reopened after a three-year construction project to turn it into something that transport engineers like to call a “shared space”. Kerbs have been stripped out, along with the usual road markings, to create a thoroughfare that is designed to be shared by cyclists, pedestrians and cars alike. The idea, adopted from continental Europe, is to create an area which is not just more pleasant for people on foot but also safer because it encourages drivers to pay closer attention to their surroundings. 

Less experimentally, big improvements have already been made to Oxford Circus, one of the city’s busiest intersections. The junction between Oxford Street and Regent Street sees as many as 40,000 people pass through every hour, and only 2,000 vehicles. Until 2009, however, pedestrians came well down the pecking order. In the language of planners, pedestrians were unable to follow their desire lines, the paths they want to take as opposed to the ones they are meant to. At Oxford Circus, giving rein to people’s desire lines has meant ripping out guard railings that hemmed pedestrians in and allowing people to cross the junction diagonally as well as from side to side (a feature known as a pedestrian scramble). 

Check out the rest of the article here. The Independent’s ‘Walk on the wild side: Pedestrians could soon be on equal footing with cars’ and the Guardian’s ‘Exhibition Road, London - review’ both profile the pedestrianization project and are worth a look.

(Photo credit: The Guardian)

Here are a few more shots I’ve taken around #Vancouver over the last few months. If you’d like to see any of ‘em larger just click on the picture you’d like to see.

Steven

P.S. I’d love to take a look at an album from around your town. I used the tag ‘#my town’ in case you’re interested in doing the same. 

From Atlantic Cities:

New research from Southern California has found that residents of neighborhoods with a central core of shops and services – a pattern typically found in older, traditional communities – walk nearly three times more often than do residents of neighborhoods whose nearest shops and services lie along a major arterial roadway, a pattern typically found in newer suburban development.  Residents of traditionally styled and centered neighborhoods also drive less than their counterparts residing in the newer pattern.

This is true even when the data are controlled for individual and household economic and demographic characteristics.

…

Notably, the residents of the centered neighborhoods were found to take shorter trips, suggesting that walkable proximity – both closeness and a safe, direct walking route – to shops and services is also important. It may not do much to encourage walking, for example, if the dry cleaner’s is a quarter mile away as the crow flies but you have to travel two or three times that far navigating busy roads around the subdivision to get there.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Calgary Herald)

A key paragraph from a recent Globe & Mail article, ’Drivers, want more space on the roads? Push for bike lanes’. Co-written by urban planners Ken Greenberg and Trent Lethco, the article explains why increasing walking, cycling and transit use are central to improving the efficiency and sustainability of our urban transportation systems. It also serves as a great compliment to an iconic image from Muenster, Germany showing the amount of urban space occupied by different modes of transport.