• Rightsizing the automobile for local mobility

    Neighborhood electric vehicles offer a better local transportation option in light of climate threats, but the design of streets would need to change.
    Half of the work of urban design is deciding where to store cars. It’s a common lament of urban design professionals. In my community, controversy is brewing because Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and housing advocates want to build housing on a BART station ’ s surface parking lots. As usual NIMBYs...Read more

  • Transforming a suburban commercial strip corridor

    There is nothing so ubiquitous in the American landscape as suburban commercial strip corridors, typically built in the 20 th Century with a variety of single-use buildings, large surface parking lots, buffers, and thoroughfares focused on driving. These corridors have a lot of underutilized land...Read more

  • Every traffic projection is wrong

    Instead of accepting that dynamic relations of traffic are unknowable and developing a management approach that does not rely on false projections to provide an illusion of certainty, traffic modelers make their models more complicated and opaque.
    Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter Six of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town , the latest book in the Strong Towns series. It has been slightly modified for this space. The goal of traffic modeling is not to be right; it is to create a...Read more

  • Why we need Observational Urbanism

    Putting observation first, and theory second, helped to move the planning profession toward more beneficial city building techniques in the late 20th Century. It continues to be an important test and correction to theories, even new urbanist ideas.
    Ten years ago, this summer, I wrote an opinion article commemorating the 50 th Anniversary of Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which I may have coined the term “Observational Urbanism.” I had not heard the term before, or since, with the exception of presentation earlier this...Read more