• Connected streets are needed to support mixed-use, study reports

    A study looks at hierarchical and interconnected street networks, concluding that you can't have effective mixed-use without street grids, which provide many benefits.
    Nearly all local land-use comprehensive plans nowadays call for mixed-use and walkability, but they often lack specific instructions on streets to enable those outcomes. A study in the Journal of Geotechnical and Transportation Engineering claims that well-connected street networks—e.g., street...Read more

  • Johns Hopkins study recommends narrow travel lanes

    A nationwide study of more than 1,000 street sections sides with urbanists and planners in the long-standing battle with traffic engineers over the benefits of narrow travel lanes in urban places.
    Narrow travel lanes, which benefit walkable cities because they provide more room for pedestrians, bicyclists, and landscaping, also do not contribute to automobile crashes, according to a new nationwide study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. According to the research team...Read more

  • I-81 transformation begins in Syracuse, but design is still an issue

    New York State DOT is moving forward with replacing the I-81 viaduct, which has divided the Upstate city for six decades, with a grid of streets. But the design will determine whether this is a human-scale community grid or marred by a suburban arterial.
    The City of Syracuse and the New York State Department of Transportation (DOT) agree that a "community grid" best replaces the aging Interstate 81 viaduct that has divided the city since the 1960s. Despite an ongoing court challenge from opponents, the state started clearing trees in July to...Read more

  • Toward a pattern language of corridors

    These five design and implementation ideas could be repeated in many locations to create more equitable and sustainable, socially and economically robust corridors.
    Automobile-oriented thoroughfares are the dominant form of corridors in modern urban America. Finding a way to tame those corridors—making them multimodal and valuable for many kinds of users—is a prime task for urban planners, jurisdictions, land developers, and traffic engineers. These corridors...Read more