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Archive for the ‘Urban Planning’ Category

Los Angeles Parking Meter Reform, Reasonable Edition

Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

The LA Times Editorial Board published a post this morning imploring city officials to come up with a more just system, so I’m throwing out a few ideas. My motivation here is two-fold. First, to find a solution that maintains high enough fees to discourage scofflaws because parking turnover is important to both consumers and businesses — $23 simply doesn’t meet that requirement. Second, to minimize the frustration of excessive fines resulting from the rare, honest mistake, and to reduce the confusion that leads to those mistakes. If you get three parking tickets a month, it’s you that needs to re-evaluate, not the city. Parking tickets have a place in a congested, highly urbanized city, but they must be perceived as fair if they’re to survive. Here are my recommendations:

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Seattle, WA: Building Underground Walls to Fix Bertha

Friday, July 4th, 2014

Raw footage of crews installing one of the 73 intersecting piles that will enclose the 120-foot-deep pit that will allow crews to access and repair Bertha, the SR 99 tunneling machine.

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Lessons from the Green Lanes: Evaluating Protected Bike Lanes in the U.S.

Friday, July 4th, 2014
Figure ES-2. Protected Bike Lanes included in the research

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNITIES
As cities move to increase levels of bicycling for transportation, many practitioners and advocates have promoted the use of protected bike lanes (also known as “cycle tracks” or “protected bikeways”) as an important component in providing high-quality urban infrastructure for cyclists. These on-street lanes provide more space and physical separation between the bike lane and motor vehicle lane compared with traditional striped bike lanes. However, few U.S. cities have direct experiences with their design and operations, in part because of the limited design guidance provided in the past.

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Parking in San Francisco: Pilot Project Evaluation

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014
Smart meters, legacy meters and SFpark areas: Location of smart meters and blocks participating in rate adjustments

SFpark
SAN FRANCISCO MUNICIPAL TRANSPORTATION AGENCY
While the SFpark pilot project had many goals, its primary focus was to make it easier to find a parking space. More precisely, the goal was to increase the amount of time that there was parking available on every block and improve the utilization of garages. Besides helping drivers, making it easier to park more of the time was expected to deliver other benefits (e.g., reducing circling, double parking, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.).

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Stamford, CT Wants Bike Lanes NOW

Tuesday, July 1st, 2014

Stamford’s most passionate cyclists are rallying here at the town’s middle school, making their request loud and clear: They want bike lanes throughout the city and they want them now.

“So many people looking down while they’re driving – in town and they’re going 30 or 40 mph. It’s downright frightening,” said Kevin O’Shea.

The rally is fighting to have bike lanes placed here on High Ridge Road, where people drive at least 40mph if not faster.

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Palo Alto, CA: Everybody Loves Green Bike Lanes

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014

We’re thrilled to see our newly installed third corridor of green bike lanes getting lots of use!
-City of Palo Alto on YouTube

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Parking Craters: Scourge of American Downtowns

Monday, June 23rd, 2014

Angie Schmitt, editor of Streetsblog USA and originator of the “parking crater” term is blunt, “a parking crater is a depression in the middle of an urban area formed by the absence of buildings”.

Whether parking craters are formed due to the meteors of 20th Century bad policy, a city’s erosion of manufacturing or housing, the abandoned scraps leftover by freeway building or just plain unfortunate luck, they absolutely destroy sections of city downtowns and make the environment more inhospitable and unattractive for livable streets. In these areas there is virtually no street life.or vitality. You’ll find little greenery or open space. In hotter cities the heating of the asphalt and parked cars make the air oppressive. It’s hell on earth. It is a parking crater.

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Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros

Friday, June 20th, 2014
U.S. Metropolitan Land Use Options

SMART GROWTH AMERICA

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Reduce Speculation and Limit Gentrification: Penalize Absentee/Pied-à-Terre Owners

Friday, June 20th, 2014

While cities like Chicago, Austin, and Seattle can typically stave off drastic price increases by just building enough housing to meet demand, that’s not always possible for world cities because demand isn’t just local, or even national — it’s global, and in an era of growing inequality the demand for luxury investment properties and pieds-à-terre is vast. That demand is an obstacle to providing an adequate supply of affordable, middle-class housing, but it needn’t be. If harnessed appropriately, it could even be a strength.

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Every Neighborhood Has a Future…And It Doesn’t Include Blight

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014
Surveyed Properties: 377,602 Properties Surveyed within the City

DETROIT BLIGHT REMOVAL TASK FORCE
Eliminating all blight from Detroit is an enormous task, but Detroiters have the inventiveness, grit, and resiliency to get it done. Everyone within city agencies, private business, charitable and cultural organizations, and each resident has a stake and a role in accomplishing this mission. We all must do our part in getting rid of the blight and disinvestment that has held Detroit back from its full potential. We all must help ensure that our city will never experience such neglect again.

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