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08 Aug 09

What Can We Learn from the Dutch Self Explaining Roads?

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.
QUOTE
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.
UNQUOTE
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.

blog.pps.org/he-dutch-self-explaining-roads - Preview

project_for_public_spaces roads transportation holland traffic traffic_safety

01 Feb 09

LimeWire Creator Brings Open-Source Approach to Urban Planning | Epicenter from Wired.com

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
QUOTE
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."
UNQUOTE
Yes!

blog.wired.com/...mark-gorton-ceo.html - Preview

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation

"P2P-to-people" initiative
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.
3 more annotations...
- "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."
- San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city
  to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do
  a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and
  figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid
  greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that
  barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of
  a private company that provides sub-par support.
  - Yes! - on 2009-02-01
  Add Sticky Note
- The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.
  
  While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.
  
  "It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.

12 Dec 08

Worldchanging: DIYcity Challenge: Build a Rideshare Program that Works

QUOTE
[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."
UNQUOTE

www.worldchanging.com/...009168.html - Preview

diycity worldchanging twitter carshare transportation infrastructure cities collaboration

16 Nov 08

The Bellows » Economics for Dummies

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.

www.ryanavent.com/blog - Preview

the_bellows ryan_avent oil peak_oil suburbia transportation sunk_costs economics

05 Aug 08

Protein® Feed | Could Globalization Be Going In Reverse?

"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.

proteinos.com/...balization-be-going-in-reverse - Preview

globalization trends economic_development manufacturing transportation factories shipping

For the first time in recent decades, it seems there are now real reasons to question the logic underlying the official future of ever-increasing global trade.
The biggest, of course, is the rapidly mounting cost of transportation. As oil prices rise, reports the New York Times, shipping costs are driving decisions to shorten supply chains:
9 more annotations...
- But transportation costs are not the only reasons why globalization as we know it might be in for some rapid evolution. Consider:
- *Far-flung supply chains may drop costs (even with higher oil prices), but the multiply climate change emissions. That already presents a marketing challenge as consumers grow more aware of their carbon footprints. And if political consensus emerges on pricing carbon (as seems likely), some of the price advantages of global complexity could vanish overnight.
- *Manufacturers and others are already increasingly aware of, and worried about, supply chain diversity. When the entire supply of a critical part or material comes from a distant factory or mine, every company that depends on that part or material is at risk. Increasingly, companies are trying to find multiple sources (and alternative sources), preferably close to home.
- *Some of the economic advantages of globalization have come from companies gaining the ability to skirt labor and environmental laws by doing business in countries with high levels of political corruption (corruption they have often helped create). But now, transparency activism has blown the cover of secrecy off these practices; now it is easier than ever to cause enormous brand damage simply by revealing an unsavory backstory.
- *Much of the logic of globalization assumes a one-way flow of materials, mined and grown in the poorest countries, manufactured into consumer goods in China, Brazil or Mexico, sold on the shelves of megastores in Europe or North America, then shipped away to the landfill. But as we move into zero waste and closed-loop systems (where there is no "away"), reverse logistics start to become a real concern. Producers become responsible for their products, meaning that running their current supply chains in reverse doubles (at least) their already mounting transportation costs. This alone could drive more local manufacturing.
- *Globalization suffers from some big disruptive vulnerabilities. An extreme act of terror, say a dirty bomb in a shipping container, could easily bring the whole system screeching to a halt. Ditto bird flu. Same with mass migrations triggered by environmental degradation and climate change in already desperately poor countries. Heck, even the right kind of invasive species scare could put a hiccup in the system, but some of these could stop trade altogether for quite some time.
- Especially in the developed world -- where we can draw on a huge basin of wealth and a huge capacity for innovation -- even a dramatic reversal in globalization would not fundamentally undermine our civilization (though it would certainly contribute to a number of real changes already underway, like greater urbanization, local food movements, cradle-to-cradle design and so on). We won't be headed back to de-industrialized farming any time soon.
- But if the scenario of a reversal in globalization in fact comes to pass, there will be some economic upheaval, and that upheaval will create winners and losers -- an effect that will be magnified if economic chaos occurs at the same time that the impacts of climate change begin to be felt in earnest. Some regions will plan ahead and do well. Others will suffer.
- One point is probably worth making in conclusion: because communications technologies are (comparatively speaking) dematerialized, a reversal in material trade patterns almost certainly would not also mean a reversal in intellectual trade patterns -- rising oil prices or climate change won't shut down the web or stop Bollywood from making movies or prevent innovators from licensing their ideas in other countries. In fact, it might be that expertise, innovation and culture will flow more freely in a world where goods flow more slowly. We might actually grow more interconnected in a world where supply chains shrank.
  - "...expertise, innovation and culture will flow more freely in a world where goods flow more slowly." = Interesting perspective/ idea, with implications for *location* (obviously)... - on 2008-08-05
  Add Sticky Note

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

24 Oct 07

Back to Basics in Transportation Planning | Project for Public Spaces (PPS)

www.pps.org/...ck_to_basics_in_transportation - Preview

automobile cars highway_system infrastructure planning project_for_public_spaces transportation

23 Oct 07

THE GENIE IN THE BOTTLE: The Interstate System and Urban Problems, 1939-1957

www.tfhrc.gov/...urban.htm - Preview

automobile blight infrastructure planning reference roads transportation

"The plight of the cities,"
the report states, "is due to the most rapid urbanization ever known, without
sufficient plan or control." The focal point of all cities, the central business
district, was "cramped, crowded, and depreciated."