• Urban adventure: Train travel in China

    The lack of connections and the view from the train were disappointing, but the hospitality more than made up for the inconvenience.
    The bumper sticker “Practice Random Acts of Kindness” is easily read but too rarely practiced. Yet, on a trip in China I was unexpectedly the recipient of just such an act. I had been frequently traveling to Nanjing for work, taking a nonstop flight to Beijing from Washington, DC, and a connecting...Read more

  • Parking is important and not important

    While off-street parking regulations are counter-productive, we still need to plan for parking. Here are some ideas on how to think about this issue.
    Who doesn’t want to talk about parking? Is there a topic that comes up more frequently, among both laypeople and planning/development professionals? I’ll always remember a “painfully funny because it’s true,” tweet in 2016 that essentially said, “The presidential debates erred by not asking a...Read more

  • Poynton video: A tribute to Hamilton-Baillie

    Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British architect and “shared space” advocate, died of cancer last month at the age of 63. He was a plenary speaker at CNU 22 in Buffalo in 2014, where he urged the audience of a thousand people to “take out all of the traffic signals in every city in the US — it would be a...Read more

  • Freeway cap would restore grid

    Since 2012, grassroots coalition Reconnect Austin has advanced an alternative, human-scaled vision for the I-35 corridor for the Texas capital city. The north-south section of I-35 that cuts through downtown Austin carries a high amount of traffic—more than 200,000 vehicles a day—but inhibits...Read more