• The walkable urban trend keeps going

    A national study shows strong demand for walkable urban development—cities with high rents perform surprisingly well on social equity measures.
    Walkable Urban Places (WalkUPs) continue to outperform other forms of real estate development in the nation’s largest metro areas, according to a new report Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America's Largest Metros • 2019 . The report finds a huge unmet demand for new WalkUPs, the...Read more

  • Health benefits of New Urbanism

    A study examined nine counties across the US and reviewed other research, finding evidence that health is positively impacted by urban design that follows principles of New Urbanism.
    Urban design factors can affect public health in several ways, including physical activity, traffic accident risk, pollution exposure, access to health resources, mental health and affordability, which affects households’ ability to afford other critical goods, such as healthy food and medical care...Read more

  • Walkability indexes are flawed. Let's find a better method

    Walking is vital to the economy, livability, and environment. Why can't we measure how many people are walking, versus driving, using data from smart phones?
    Walk Score was launched in 2007 and it was hailed as a big advance for pedestrians and urbanists. For the first time, you could type in an address anywhere in the US and get a score from 0 to 100 on “walkability.” Walk Score began as a small-scale project with a mission, “to promote walkable...Read more

  • Are street trees the key to better cycle tracks?

    Research shows that bicyclists prefer street trees, especially between the bicycle lanes and traffic.
    City streets and sidewalks in the United States have been engineered for decades to keep vehicle occupants and pedestrians safe. If streets include trees at all, they might be planted in small sidewalk pits, where, if constrained and with little water, they live only three to 10 years on average ...Read more