Category: Planning and Design

The other day, I was riding my bike from a deeply walkable, bikeable neighbourhood to a more auto-dominated environment, and I was struck again by the tactile response when you’re walking or biking through this change. In the walkable neighbourhood, fellow cyclists were in the streets or in bike lanes, mixing safely... Continue Reading

"For forty-one million, you built a playoff team. You lost Damon, Giambi, Isringhausen, Peña and you won more games without them than you did with them. You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent one point four million per win and you paid two hundred and sixty thousand. I know... Continue Reading

Slow and steady progress is built on an ongoing series of course corrections. Subtle variations in direction based on new variables, new challenges, and new innovations. As times and circumstances change, some things inevitably become less productive. Or effective. Or conducive to contemporary sensibilities. So, we... Continue Reading

When it comes to misapplying -- or, more commonly, overly simplifying -- the Transect, we’re all guilty on some level. For instance, I often speak generally about its inherent rural-to-urban spectrum and how, as you move through it, the landscape changes its character. The highways and byways whisking you through... Continue Reading

Since meeting Chuck Marohn, I've advocated for his rational Strong Towns approach to reforming our inefficient auto-oriented infrastructure system. Chuck's message to focus infrastructure decisions on their long-term return on investment is radical because he is a Traffic Engineer. Honestly, the most frustrating and irrational... Continue Reading

As the planning profession roils in the confluence of the 21st century’s Great Recession, Peak Oil/Peak Auto Travel, Millennial [Re]urbanization, and the borderline religious fervor of sustainability, I have officially declared that ours is not the same planning profession John Nolen built. So, how can planning rebuild... Continue Reading

A while back, we talked about Connections, Community, and the Science of Loneliness, and how our laws have separated not just building uses -- residential, commercial, retail, civic -- but have also separated people. And that separation has led to a spate of ills -- ill health, ill economies, and ill environments. We looked... Continue Reading

Taking shots at the suburbs is like playing bass in a garage band: Easy to do, but hard to do well. After all, their original intent -- an idyllic melding of town and country, with all the advantages of both -- implied a tranquil, family-friendly promise that, over time, has proven notoriously unfulfilled. Surely that’s... Continue Reading

I’m a freak magnet. For reasons unknown, the more, err, colorful characters of the public realm seem to find my personal space especially attractive. If I go to a midday matinée and another patron -- let’s say an agitated mumbler in a trench coat with shoes crudely fashioned out of car wash sponges -- joins... Continue Reading

This is not the planning profession John Nolen built. A century later, our great recession has sparked a full re-evaluation of what a city’s urban planning department should be ‘doing’ for its citizens. As witnessed in Los Angeles and San Diego, the planning profession is being measured by its eternal conundrum between... Continue Reading