Cities, Counties, and Countries

After public pressure, the City of Oakland held a second community meeting Wednesday about the design of the Latham Square pilot plaza, where a lane of car traffic was reinstated prematurely at the behest of Planning and Building Director Rachel Flynn. Despite a standing room-only crowd of attendees showing up to weigh in, the meeting was shut down 45 minutes early.

Earlier this month, NYC DOT put out a major new report, Making Safer Streets [PDF], that collects before-and-after data from dozens of street redesigns and distills five key principles to reduce traffic injuries. The excitement of election week overshadowed the release, but this is an important document that livable streets supporters will want to bookmark. It's an accessible guide to how DOT approaches the task of re-engineering streets for greater safety.

The crowning achievement for Oakland's new planning and building director so far might be ensuring that cars are being driven through the Latham Square pilot plaza once again.

Looks like the new LeBron James Nike ad that debuted during "Sunday Night Football" was at least in part the star's idea.

Here we present our final -- and most informative -- Streetfilm from Amsterdam. It provides a nice cross-section of commentary on life in the City of Bikes. If you'd like to skip directly to a certain section, use this table of contents:

In its second iteration, Sunday Streets Berkeley flooded Shattuck Avenue with an estimated 50,000 people last weekend in an even more powerful demonstration of the draw of closing streets to cars and opening them up to people.

Might the talking heads at Fox Business turn their gaze to the Plaza Hotel's lawsuit against a nearby Citi Bike station and sneer at the frivolous litigation tying up our courts? Of course not.

Despite pockets of new development, El Camino Real remains a dangerous, car-oriented urban highway along most of the San Francisco Peninsula. If it can ever transform into a great street, it will have to become safer for walking and biking. And while enhancing walkability is a key goal of the Grand Boulevard Initiative -- the long-term planning effort to improve El Camino Real between San Francisco and San Jose -- redesigning a state road to prioritize safety is always a tough lift, since Caltrans design standards create a thick barrier of red tape. In response, San Mateo County planners are working on four demonstration projects to show how a redesigned boulevard will function.

Note: This post originally appeared at Climate Plan.