Mumbai’s muddled streets are too packed to walk through, so India’s commercial capital has come up with a solution. Uplift the masses—not in some fuzzy metaphysical way, but on “skywalks” made of steel.
Popularity: 14% [?]
New Yorkers maintain that Los Angeles is a city with no center. But Angelenos argue that the city of freeways has its core in the Stack, a tower of overpasses — the first four-level connector interchange, according to the California Transportation Department — where the Pasadena, Harbor, Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways intersect.
Popularity: 55% [?]
A 30-day test run of a new streetscape design in St. Louis has been so successful that the city may leave it in place, including restriped lanes and temporary concrete barriers, until final construction can begin next summer. With four city streets chosen for upgrading by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, the six-block-long slice of South Grand Boulevard is the first that is seeing results.
Popularity: 41% [?]
By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.
Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.
Popularity: 36% [?]
A new report ranking the nation’s most dangerous metropolitan areas for walking finds that ‘incomplete’ streets are a major culprit in the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. Dangerous by Design, from Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Project, finds that as many as forty percent of fatal pedestrian crashes are in places where no crosswalk was available, and that arterials designed only for cars are the most dangerous.
Popularity: 26% [?]
We know climate change is happening and that its impacts on our society will be serious. Despite this knowledge, planners and elected leaders are not doing enough to prepare our transportation infrastructure for global warming’s effects. That was the message of Friday’s panel discussion, “Perspectives on Adaptation to Climate Change,” hosted by the Engineers Forum on Sustainability.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Orenco Station, the award winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, has failed to persuade a majority of its residents to use mass transit to get to work.
About two out of three Orenco residents drive to work in cars, slightly less than some other suburbs but hardly the car-free utopia many idealists expect of the transit-oriented area. Even as the neighborhood has grown closer, block by block, to the MAX light rail station named for it, the use of cars for work trips remains relatively high.
Popularity: 29% [?]
British Ministers are considering making motorists legally responsible for accidents involving cyclists or pedestrians, even if they are not at fault. Government advisers are pushing for changes in the civil law that will make the most powerful vehicle involved in a collision automatically liable for insurance and compensation purposes.
Popularity: 20% [?]
What the city giveth, the city taketh away — at least with regard to the balance of power between pedestrians and automobiles. The Bloomberg administration has been trying to tame vehicles with bike lanes, the pedestrianization of Broadway and the failed congestion-pricing initiative. But a century ago, just the opposite was happening. The city was cutting back sidewalks to make room for the increasingly popular automobile, which was displacing the horse and carriage and even people on foot.
Popularity: 44% [?]
Portland’s future and its past intersect at 28th Avenue and East Burnside.
A hundred feet or so from an old red brick trolley barn — long since converted to offices — workers are constructing an eye-catching, four-story condo with ground-floor retail.
Popularity: 38% [?]