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17 May 09

Germany Imagines Suburbs Without Cars - NYTimes.com

Discussion of Freiburg suburb, Vauban, and its "car-free" environment:
QUOTE
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.
UNQUOTE

www.nytimes.com/...12suburb.html - Preview

suburbia cars green_strategies vauban germany

  • In Germany, a country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn, life in a car-reduced place like Vauban has its own unusual gestalt. The town is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.
  • The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.
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11 Mar 09

Putting Parking into Reverse - InTransition

"Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking" : on how free parking has distorted urban centers.

intransitionmag.org/...Free_Parking.html - Preview

intransition parking cars cities urban_design surface_parking_lots

  • UCLA Planning Professor Donald Shoup has written 733 pages that say otherwise. Because when cars aren’t going, they are parked somewhere, and when they are parked in one place, an average of six spaces per car nationwide stand vacant. Shoup considers the proliferation of parking spaces to be a plague on American cities, and because the vast majority lie open for the taking, they represent the largest devaluation of real estate short of the subprime mortgage crisis.
  • If America’s streets were a Monopoly board, it would be a dull contest indeed, with almost every space “Free Parking.” Each of the country’s roughly 200 million vehicles typically demands spaces at home and work, with shares of countless spaces at the market, restaurant, post office, mall and every other imaginable destination. Eighty-seven percent of all trips are made by personal vehicle and 99 percent of those trips arrive at a free parking space.
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03 Jan 09

"Oregon will move to tax cars by the mile," by Knute Berger

Oregon might transition away from a gas tax in 2009 and switch to a mileage tax instead.

Unfortunately, the scheme raises privacy issues/ concerns, since GPS satellite tracking systems would be used to keep track of one's mileage. Ouch.

crosscut.com/18746 - Preview

oregon carbon_tax cars tax taxation crosscut knute_berger mileage_tax

  • The Oregon mileage tax proponents claim that GPS satellite tracking systems installed in vehicles by the manufacturers would not gather or transmit data on where and when people travel, but multiple studies have cited public privacy as a major public concern.
10 May 08

Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit - New York Times

Something to think about "out west," where existing public transit might be spotty, or where the only public transit is buses. Rail definitely makes sense for many people here. "Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges — of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year — are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited."

www.nytimes.com/...10transit.html - Preview

transportation transit transit_oriented_development cars

01 May 08

In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

daily.sightline.org/...in-defense-of-townhouses - Preview

sightline_daily seattle urban_design urbanplanning cars parking architecture

  • Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?
  • Here's one explanation. Nearly every townhouse in the city is required by law to provide offstreet parking. Since cars don't fly, the practical effect of the minimum parking regulations is that each and every townhouse has a garage on the bottom floor. And these garages are often the prime culprit in walling off the townhouses from the street, and of sending the residents upstairs.
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24 Apr 08

Chicago's Green Dividend

Short video clip produced by CEOs for Cities, which asks, "How much is it worth, to live two miles closer to work?" The answer(s) is (are) astonishing, when you take those 2 miles and make them cumulative, for the whole US. That said, imagine what it does mean, then, if we build cities that are walkable, that engage people in public transit, that shave those 2miles off people's commutes/ daily drives?

blip.tv/848670 - Preview

ceos_for_cities automobile cars driving video walkability urbanism

25 Jan 08

My Other Car is a Bright Green City - WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future

via CEOs for Cities, an article by Alex Steffen, which argues for dense, urban communities that will help curb (literally) car use. \n\nFrom his intro preamble: "This is a rough draft of a long essay about why I believe building compact communities should be one of America's highest environmental priorities, and why, in fact, our obsession with building greener cars may be obscuring some fundamental aspects of the problem and some of the benefits of using land-use change as a primary sustainability solution."

www.worldchanging.com/...007800.html - Preview

alex_steffen cars cities environment green_strategies sustainability urbanism worldchanging

02 Jan 08

This Land: Visual Pollution | The New York Times

Fascinating slide show narrated by Kevin Fry of Route 1 (which runs 2000 miles from Maine to Florida), and which is in too many places a godforsaken strip mall. Fry's argument is that these places, built for cars not people, alienate us from any kind of authentic sense of place, and in turn this alienates us from citizenship, which is (and must be) local and specific. Relates to this article: http://tinyurl.com/2hkf25 too. (Slide show link via pricetags)

www.nytimes.com/...index.html - Preview

alienation cars kevin_fry nyt placelessness socialcritique sprawl visual_pollution

24 Dec 07

Waterfront plan: A magnet and, hopefully, model (Toronto Star)

Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze's vision for T.O.'s waterfront: "The point must be that we won't have to live on the waterfront to feel at home there." In this article by Christopher Hume, some really interesting discussion (by Geuze) about cars, how they've taken over urban spaces, why all-pedestrian zones aren't necessarily a good idea ("scary at night"), and that cities today compete with one another.

www.thestar.com/...288394 - Preview

cars christopher_hume development pedestrians toronto urban_parks urban_renewal waterfront

  • Relax, Toronto, all is not lost; the wheels of change grind no slower here than in any other city.

    So says Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze, whose firm, West 8, is now redesigning the central waterfront in partnership with Toronto's DTAH.

    "Bureaucratic resistance is normal," he says, smiling reassuringly. "It's the same everywhere."

  • Geuze and his team won an international competition last year to redesign the waterfront between Bathurst and Parliament Sts. It is a huge project, including the narrowing of Queens Quay from four lanes to two, the planting of thousands of trees, the construction of a boardwalk along the water's edge and bridges across various slips.
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