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City Planning

On Being a City Planner In a Room Full of Engineers

Dec 12th, 2012
by Mark.
7 comments

A few words of encouragement if you’ve ever been the only non-traffic engineer in a room full of traffic engineers.

  1. It’s OK to question Level of Service and traffic volume projections. They’ve often been wrong before. They will be wrong again.
  2. It’s OK to advocate for narrower lanes.
  3. It’s OK to use the phrases “fast”, “anti-urban” and “does not meet livability goals” when describing one way couplets.
  4. Protected bike lanes are no longer radical ideas, even if they mean taking traffic lanes away from automobiles.
  5. Your intuition is correct. Sharrows on high volume streets are dangerous and should not be used just to placate cyclists.
  6. Full time on-street parking is not an impediment to traffic flow, even on urban arterials. It’s a retail-booster and a revenue generating traffic calming device.
  7. It’s OK to talk about big picture things when the conversation focuses on minutia.
  8. It’s OK to expect something exceptional and transformational from a project.
  9. It’s OK to suggest that the project engineers actually walk or bike on the street they are designing.
  10. It’s OK to question neighborhood design speeds in excess of 20mph, the 85% percentile rule, intersection geometrics and clear zones, even if you’re not an engineer.
  11. Aesthetics are just as important as function. Signal poles, bus stops, sidewalks, and the entire streetscape are as much a part of urban design as buildings and parks.

…learning how to make cities rich and fecund and great places to be so we’re comfortable and healthy and happy is the biggest problem we face. The only way we’ll not go crazy is to build beautiful, rich, life-enhancing cities….The majority of open spaces in cities are streets. That means the street system is too important to leave solely to transportation engineers. They’re way too important to leave to just moving traffic. So I’m interested in cities because they are the design problem for a habitable planet. – Laurie Olin

Keep on going.

 

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Surprising Places

Jun 23rd, 2010
by Mark.
3 comments

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/carless-in-america/

L.A.

The New York Times has a great panel of architects, planners, and economists discussing car free living. What is most surprising are the comments left be people who live without a car in places like Phoenix, Scottsdale, Houston, and small cities throughout the country. The number of people who would like to live without a car is also amazing.

While Baltimore doesn’t have the best transit, it has good “bones”. This means small blocks, grid street networks, relatively high densities and lots of small, local streets where walking and biking feels safe. This counts for a lot. While federal and state funding for green infrastructure is increasing, I think it will take a fundamental change in how we build cities in order to make going car free less of a dramatic lifestyle change in the U.S. Developers and local politicians have to get used to mixed use projects and increased densities. Cities and counties will need more versitile zoning codes and better land conservation ordinances. The public also has to see the benefits of getting out of their cars – at least for short periods of time at first. This means educating people about options they may have never considered in the first place.

Thanks to Nate Evans for lending me a bike until I buy my own. I’d like to make it clear that this is not an ideological crusade, but a practical option. Life is ultimately an experiment; I grew up in a station wagon riding to suburban malls in New Jersey. Now, I’d like to try something else.

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