• Highway, gutting a town (or not)

    Urban designer and architect Tom Low recently drew this side-by-side comparison of how a highway can gut, or work in harmony with, a city or town. The cloverleaf option, at left, is ideal for a highway interchange in the country, but creates an enormous barrier in or between neighborhoods. In the...Read more

  • Quick Build: Tactical Urbanism on steroids

    For about a quarter of typical road diet costs, semi-permanent street transformations have been successfully demonstrated in two cities.
    The economic and public safety advantages of walkable streets are manifold, and have been demonstrated time and time again . Yet well-designed thoroughfare transformations are also costly, time-consuming, and require substantial political capital. CNU wrote case studies on street transformations...Read more

  • Eight policies and programs that Opportunity Zones need

    Urbanists can do lot to help improve outcomes in particular Opportunity Zones. Here’s a checklist based on lessons from real communities.
    Opportunity Zones (OZs) have the potential be the biggest community development program in the nation’s history, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. There are more than 8,700 OZs designated in every state and most cities, targeting investments in low-to-moderate-income urban and rural areas—or...Read more

  • The troubling rise in pedestrian deaths

    We have made cars safer, but we still are reluctant to make streets safer.
    The steady rise in pedestrian deaths since 2009 has raised considerable alarm, and the latest data puts the 2018 pedestrian fatality rate near the 1990 peak. Nobody has a definitive answer for why this is occurring. “Analysts have speculated that the increase in SUV sales , as well as the growing...Read more