Welcome to one of the busiest roads in London. I’m standing beside three lanes of heavy traffic and the cars are hurtling past – but that’s tremendous, because it means the drivers are too busy to notice me.
A fluorescent yellow jacket is not everybody’s idea of a disguise, but I’m wearing my bright cycling top so that if anybody notices me they might think I’m a contractor working for the local authority. After all, surely only somebody working for the council would dig a hole beside a busy road and plant an apple tree. That’s what I’m doing, in my ongoing attempt to turn the town into the country.
In cities across the United States, you can find examples of “streetcar suburbs”—enclaves of mostly single-family homes built between the turn of the century and the 1930s. These are often good-looking, tree-lined places full of heterogeneous character and history, in many ways so different from contemporary suburban sprawl.
It’s been more than a generation since the Brazilian city of Curitiba pioneered Bus Rapid Transit. Since then this cost-effective and flexible transit system — which repurposes existing roadways into bus routes rather than constructing capital-intensive new railways — has become a worldwide model for urban mobility in both affluent and developing nations. A new addition to the BRT network was recently launched in India. Last year the northwestern city of Ahmedabad opened the first phase of the Janmarg — the People’s Way. Though still in its infancy, the system has already attracted favorable attention: early this year the U.S.-based Institute for Transportation & Development Policy awarded Janmarg its Sustainable Transport Award.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
