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Portland’s Greenstreets Program a Sterling Best Practice Model
When Streetsblog San Francisco took part in the Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform in Portland last week, city planners and transportation engineers treated participants to numerous tours of innovative network solutions that city has embraced, including its greenstreets program for stormwater treatment on street rights-of-way. With nearly five hundred greenstreet facilities already in the ground, Portland has plans to add another five hundred in the next five years, greatly reducing the burden stormwater can place on its sanitation system.
November 13, 2009
SF Transportation Authority Launches iPhone App to Track Cyclists
The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA), the city's congestion management agency responsible for modeling transportation and development patterns, has released its new bicycle route data application, Cycle Tracks, for iPhones and GPS-enabled iTunes players at the iTunes store. Like similar applications that give information such as speed and distance traveled, users of the TA app can map their bicycle ride, but the data they collect will be aggregated anonymously in the TA's server so that it can be applied to their SF-CHAMP modeling and travel forecasting tool.
November 12, 2009
Some Bay Area Developers Ditch the Extra Parking Spaces for More Units
When it comes to building new developments in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco, the battle over limiting the construction of new parking spaces is pitched. Parking reform advocacy organizations like Livable City, which maintains a listserv populated by car-free and livable-city advocates keeping a keen watch on planning commission parking exemptions, have long encouraged city leaders to tighten the parking-to-unit ratios in dense neighborhoods flush with transit and bicycling options.
November 11, 2009
Santa Clara VTA Proceeds with Bay Area’s First Bike Share Pilot Program
Despite the much ballyhooed talk by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that his city will implement a public bike share pilot (two years of talk that has garnered numerous press hits), the first bike share program in the Bay Area will likely be implemented by the middle of 2010 in Santa Clara County by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). While small size may still be a liability to its success and long term funding sources must be determined, the VTA is miles ahead of other transit operators in completing the process necessary to deliver a pilot.
November 10, 2009
Will San Jose’s New Bicycle Plan Mark Shift From Years of Car Privilege?
San Jose is on the verge of adopting its new bicycle plan at the next City Council meeting on November 17th, which, as anyone who has cycled in San Jose knows, would be a welcome change from decades of traffic engineering focused almost solely on automobility.
November 9, 2009
Planning Chiefs: Urban Planning Still Hindered by Politics, Past Mistakes
City planners have been on the hook for some of the last century's greatest metropolitan mishaps: urban freeways and "slum clearance," arbitrary minimum parking requirements, and land use laws that have left little room for the mingling of uses. Understandably, today's planners are a bit humbled. But when planning directors from some of North America's most progressive cities spoke at City Hall this week about the political challenges that face urban planners, several of them said the field needs to move beyond worrying about past mistakes.
November 6, 2009
LA Road Rage Doc Convicted for Horrific 2008 Cyclist Assault
Following
a highly-publicized, intensely-followed trial, Christopher Thompson,
the physician accused of using his car to seriously injure two cyclists
in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, is behind bars.
November 3, 2009
San Jose Provides Model for Bay Area Growth and Transportation Needs
In our ongoing coverage of the adverse affects of traffic engineers' over-reliance on automobile level of service (LOS) measurements, we've examined how new amendments to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) would allow local jurisdictions greater freedom in choosing whether they want to develop their cities for cars or for transit, cycling, and livable streets. Simply put, if the CEQA amendments are codified, cities all over the state could become more like San Jose.
October 30, 2009
News from NY: What We Can Learn from Times Square’s Public Spaces
When Tim Tompkins took over as President of the Times Square Alliance, one of New York City's largest Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), the primary concerns were the security and cleanliness of the most iconic, if chaotic, public space in the world. Despite incessant traffic and pedestrian gridlock ("pedlock" to borrow Tompkin's phrase), his Board of Directors and city officials on the whole weren't initially interested in Tompkins' vision for transforming Times Square into a world-class public space, with less traffic and higher design concepts.
October 28, 2009