The negative social impacts of traffic: Revisiting Appleyard's Livable Streets

Well, my first post in nearly 4 months.

Needless to say, school has been keeping me busy. Things appear to only be getting busier -- mostly in a good way. So, I am not sure of any upcoming regulatory in posting.

Nonetheless, I came across a couple of excellent items that I wanted to share, and this one relates -- rather belatedly -- to my last post.

A great short film revisiting Donald Appleyard's Livable Streets:



Revisiting Donald Appleyard's Livable Streets from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Ironic in the worst way.

Check out this brief wikipedia bio of urban design theorist Donald Appleyard:

Donald Appleyard (1928–1982) was a Professor of Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his book Livable Streets, he showed that streets have many social and recreational functions which are severely impaired by fast car traffic. For example, residents of streets with light traffic had, on average, three more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on streets with heavy traffic. His work provides a quantitative rationale for traffic calming and living streets.

Appleyard was killed by a speeding automobile.

Traffic jam in China lasts nine days!

I started my planning program at UBC, two weeks ago.

The orientation week included a talk from a new faculty member from China. He explained the desperate need of educated, competent planners in China with its rapid urbanization:

China is expecting a population of 350M people to move to the cities in the next 20 years. That is the population of North America moving to currently not-built city.

On a related topic, Beijing just experienced a 9-day, 100km long traffic jam.

Sounds like some kind of hell: Never knowing when the cars will start moving... for 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days....

My hunch is that this all bodes well for the world.

Anyways, this may be my return to blogging... we'll see how the semester goes.

Pedal Power documentary on CBC, tonight!

Thank you to my good friend Tosh for passing this one along to me:

CBC is showing a documentary entitled Pedal Power, tonight (9pm on CBC-TV) and Friday night (10pm on CBC News).

In Canada, bicycles "don't get no respect." From the story of Igor, and the anatomy of the underground world of bike peddlers in Toronto, this film spins out to how other cities are making riding safe. Using innovative "bike-cam" techniques to convey, up-close, the sensation of bike riding, a series of character-driven mini-narratives propel the film through a study of what makes a city "bikeable". Whether it's the public bike program in Paris, bike mega-garages in Amsterdam, bike paths in Vancouver and Montreal, or the surprising leadership of New York City, we follow the story of this remarkable little conveyance as it wheels though the first decade of the 21st century.

Sounds like it could be good.

CBC article/info here.

More Cyclists = Safer Cycling (Montreal Gazette)

From the Montreal Gazette:

cyclechic.be

“The studies are showing that the more cyclists there are on the street, the safer they are,” said Dr. Patrick Morency, a public health and safety specialist with Montreal’s public health department.

A 2003 study published in the Injury Prevention Journal by Peter Lyndon Jacobsen concluded: “A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking or bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling.”

Another study, called Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling to Improve Public Health: Lessons from the Netherlands and Germany, showed that pedestrians and cyclists in the United States were much more likely to be killed or injured than were Dutch and German pedestrians and cyclists, both on a per-trip and on a per-kilometre basis, even though the European countries had far more cyclists on their streets.

That study showed that Germany and the Netherlands have implemented a wide range of policies over two decades that simultaneously encouraged walking and cycling while dramatically lowering pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and injuries.

Read the full article here, as it relates to Montreal and Toronto.

Pedestrian Streets in Copenhagen - video

Copenhagen's Car-free streets & Slow-speed zones from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

San Francisco's new automated demand-based parking pricing

One day, posts will return with some frequency.

I have been wanting to write about parking for a long time but... have not. However, San Francisco is unveiling a new parking management system that works on the premise of market-rate parking, whereby prices increase (or decrease) depending on demand -- usually so that ~90% of spaces are always occupied. In SF's case, they aim for one free spot per block.

This sort of parking strategy can provide a myriad of benefits (as demonstrated in the video) as well as increase revenues for -- as utilized in other cities -- local area improvements (public space aesthetics, etc.).

Anyways, check out this video...


SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.