News & Notes

Some people get wicked excited to take the bus…

Via Human Transit.

Biking in Heels: Watching the Pedestrians

My theory is that when pedestrians feel that the rules aren’t fair to them, or create unnecessary hardship for them, they ignore the rules and do what is simplest and easiest for them. By making things clear and easy for pedestrians, Cambridge has created a place where pedestrians are happy to obey the “rules” and generally don’t interfere with other modes’ right of way. In Boston, where pedestrians are forced to wait too long for their “turn,” are given signals that don’t seem to make sense, and aren’t given enough legal places to cross, they take the law into their own hands.

USA Today: City living will feel like a blast from the past

In the next American metropolis, people will live in smaller homes, relax in smaller yards, park their smaller cars in smaller spots. They will be closer to work, to play and, above all, to one another.

Global warming will be a fait accompli in 30 years, and so these urban Americans will raise their own food, in fields and on rooftops, and build structures to withstand everything from hurricane winds to Formosan termites.

They will walk and ride more and drive less. And they will like it.

This is the future envisioned by Andres Duany, architect, town planner, teacher and polemicist. And the future, he will tell you, is his business.

Salon: Let’s swim to work!

People like MacAdams and Strel are early adopters of the idea that cities’ rivers and canals, cleaner than they’ve been in a century, are ripe for recreational use. Just a few short years ago, the notion would have repelled most people. But we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. Kayakers have become a sporadic sight on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, the industrial-sludge channel that famously caught fire in 1969. Clammers have returned to dig in the sands around Boston’s once-notoriously polluted harbor. Last month, the New York Times reported that, after years of dancing around them because they’re so difficult to clean, the Environmental Protection Agency is finally going all-in on revitalizing urban waterways. “The public wants this stuff picked up and hauled away,” a consultant on one of the EPA’s waterway Superfund projects told the paper.

DC Streetsblog: NACTO Beats the Clock With Quick Update of Bike Guide

Once again, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has proven what an agile, modern coalition of transportation agencies is capable of. It was just a year and a half ago that NACTO released its first Urban Bikeway Design Guide and today, it’s released the first update to that guide.

NACTO’s guide is far ahead of the industry standard, old-guard manuals: the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials’ design guidelines.