Yule Heibel's Library tagged transportation →  View Popular, Search in Google

D'oh. Big surprise - not.
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The activity of driving to work should be better thought of as inactivity, and all that time sitting on your butt is slowly eating away at your cardiovascular health – and probably adding to your waistline.
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cars transportation health atlantic_cities

Dwight D Eisenhower's interstate freeway plan did not intend for freeways to run through cities. Too bad that memo was ignored...
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But Eisenhower never intended that the Interstates be built through densely populated cities. A memorandum of a 1960 meeting in the Oval Office, available in the archives of Eisenhower’s presidency, makes this crystal-clear:

[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way . . . and that he was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored. He added that those who had not advised him that such was being done, and those who steered the program in such a direction, had not followed his wishes.

The Secretary of Commerce and head of the Federal Highway Administration were in the room. (Thanks to urban transportation whiz Rick Hall for finding this memo.)
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atlantic_cities freeways highways eisenhower kaid_benfield transportation

Introduction to Jarrett Walker's book, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. Excellent points. Eg.:
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Transit debates also suffer from the fact that today, in most of our cities, most of our decision makers are motorists. No matter how much you support transit, driving a car every day can shape your thinking in powerful subconscious ways. For example, in most debates about proposed rapid transit lines, the speed of the proposed service gets more political attention than how frequently it runs, even though frequency, which determines waiting time, often matters more than vehicle speed in determining the total time a transit trip will require. Your commuter train system will advertise that it can whisk you into the city in thirty-nine minutes, but if the train comes only once every two hours and you’ve just missed one, your travel time will be two hours and thirty-nine minutes, so it may be faster to drive or even walk.
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human_transit jarrett_walker transportation planning portland

On retooling old expressways in urban cores:
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The hearings and the public process on these three interventions have revealed a cultural clash: old vs. young, bicyclists vs. solo drivers, yuppies vs. townies, and so on. The fight is in the trenches, in long discussions and blog posts on traffic counts, state modeling and projections, and the methodology of license plate surveys. Everyone's voice must be heard, a legacy of the exclusion of citizens in the original construction of the roadways, but seemingly a guarantee of paralysis when it comes to repairing the damage they have caused.
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anthony_flint atlantic_cities transportation highways traffic

It's obvious that without efforts at TOD (transit-oriented development) there is a danger of HSR (high speed rail) making sprawl more attractive. But if we get the development angle down right, there's no reason things couldn't turn out as they have in Europe, where HSR does *not* equal sprawl. Why should it do so in North America? Are we that stupid - or greedy? (Don't answer that...)
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In theory (and hopefully in practice) the priorities of HSR in the U.S. are a wide mix of economic, environmental, and urban planning, goals. But some urban planners are arguing that an unintended consequence of actually building HSR lines could be a major step backwards in the notion of sustainable living.

(...SNIP...)
Granted, as Yonah Freemark points out, this foretelling of sprawl takeovers could be all speculation — there’s been no link established between existing HSR stations in France and Spain and an epidemic of suburban growth. Also there’s no evidence that the “commute from afar” attitude has been embraced en masse in the parts of the U.S. serviced by fast trains — how many people live in Philadelphia and take the Acela to New York City every day?
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Bingo. Do TOD, plan better, and make living in cities attractive through amenities (including community).

high_speed_rail transportation transit sprawl transit_oriented_development

Fascinating read about how the concept of "forgiving highways" (forged in the 1960s), and why it needs rethinking in built-up areas, and how the Dutch are leading the way.
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Forgiving Highways is a concept that designs roads to “forgive” mistakes made on the road. It seeks to smoothly redirect the vehicles that leave roads, and allow wide enough clear zones to bring vehicles to controlled stops if and when they leave the roads. Breakaway supports, burying the end of guardrail, clearing the roadside of unneeded obstacles, and flattening and rounding slopes and ditch sections became standard design as part of the concept.

The idea that Forgiving Highways (wider and straighter) would reduce crashes on non-freeways took root during the 1966 National Highway Safety hearings.
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Obviously, "forgiving highways" works well in a non-urban context, but in an urban context, arterials built with those guidelines provide a false sense of security for drivers, and leave pedestrians and cyclists (anyone "weaker") in the lurch.

I'm particularly interested in this entry right now, because it seems to me that the City of Victoria's Engineering Department is stuck in a "forgiving highway" mindset as it tries to convince us that the city's Johnson Street Bridge needs to be replaced.

project_for_public_spaces roads transportation holland traffic traffic_safety

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
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You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
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Yes!

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation

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[DIY city]'s second challenge, issued earlier this week, asks participants to "conceive of a grassroots ridesharing system that can overcome the problems inherent in ridesharing and achieve critical mass."
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diycity worldchanging twitter carshare transportation infrastructure cities collaboration

A great post by Ryan Avent critiquing the notion of "sunk costs," particularly as (speciously) applied to suburbia. In particular, Avent shows why, when talking about suburban housing, the concept of "sunk cost" is not (or should not be) a disincentive to selling.

the_bellows ryan_avent oil peak_oil suburbia transportation sunk_costs economics

"The world is flat" or "the world is spiky" or ..."the world is complex," maybe? At any rate, this article questions the idea that outsourcing will continue to continue, spreading outward in some sort of new and flattened topography (akin to a downward spiral insofar as the search for ever cheaper labor and laxer labor laws continues, but not wholly downward because economically, there's an upward trend associated with it, too - hence perhaps the "flat" topography). And it presents some interesting data as well as suppposition for why this might be so. It's not just the huge up-tick in transportation costs (although that's a key factor), it's also the logistics -- including "reverse logistics." For example, consumers *want* to do better, and are becoming more aware of the "carbon footprint" of the products they buy.

globalization trends economic_development manufacturing transportation factories shipping

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."

transportation transit transit_oriented_development cars

automobile cars highway_system infrastructure planning project_for_public_spaces transportation

automobile blight infrastructure planning reference roads transportation