• Florida’s success with context-based street classification

    If context-based street design works in the most automobile-dominated state, it can make a difference anywhere.
    Attempts to create walkable places become an order of magnitude more difficult when state-owned thoroughfares are involved. The laudable goal of creating a human-scale neighborhood may descend into a multiyear battle—sometimes won by planners, more often by the engineers—and the outcome is nearly...Read more

  • Four ways to transform ‘stroads’

    Every city has commercial strip corridors, but there are proven strategies for rebuilding them as places for people.
    The functional classification system used by departments of transportation tends to build commercial strip arterials that are hostile to pedestrians and bicyclists, notes Portland-based architect and urban designer Laurence Qamar. At CNU 31 in Charlotte in early June, Qamar outlined four techniques...Read more

  • How JFK Promenade was saved

    A win for community over cars in San Francisco shows how systemic change in a city's transportation and public space network is possible when groups focus on shifting power, transforming land use, and resetting culture.
    Phil Ginsburg, General Manager of San Francisco's Recreation and Park Department, refers to Golden Gate Park and its 152-year history as the "keeper of San Francisco's story." In November 2022, the story changed with a big win for community over cars. Voters overwhelmingly approved (63 percent of...Read more

  • Changing street design is critical to reducing bike-ped deaths

    Planner and author Jeff Speck argues that efforts to make our streets and roadways safer will fail unless the traffic engineering profession reforms its design practices.
    The US is experiencing “a grave upswing of roadway deaths,” and that trend is most pronounced among pedestrians and bicyclists, according to Jeff Speck. “Cycling deaths are up 44 percent over the past decade, and pedestrian deaths have risen a stunning 82 percent since 2009 — and that in the...Read more