• Plan would transform SoHo streetscapes

    The SoHo Broadway plan would greatly increase space for pedestrians and cyclists in the iconic Manhattan neighborhood, and be implemented over the next two decades.
    A Manhattan business improvement district (BID), the SoHo Broadway Initiative, seeks to revamp the streets in one of the densest, most distinct neighborhoods in America. The SoHo Broadway Public Realm Framework + Vision Plan , designed by Street Plans Collaborative with support from Karp Strategies...Read more

  • 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