Transportation Equity in Our City
“Level of Service” criteria give engineers an incentive to minimize auto delay, often at the expense of pedestrian service (which isn’t measured). That’s how we get designs with 30 second delay for cars with 120 second delay for pedestrians.”
How Engineering Standards for Cars Endanger People Crossing the Street
Think of city streets as places, not just a way to get through a city as fast as possible. City streets were designed for people–automobiles came much later, but now they dominate. Let’s change the focus back to people.
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-a-vitality-fellow-captured-the-imagination-of-a-city
Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition is not just about pavement. It’s about people.
“The most important tenet is that the process must be open and welcoming to all who want to participate. This is not to say that everyone will get what they want out of Placemaking. The point is that there will be an opportunity for people not just to share what they want, but also to listen to their neighbors’ ideas, and to be part of the process of shaping the public spaces that they share with those neighbors. The end result should be a space that’s flexible enough to make room for many different communities, and encourage connections between them.”
Place Making
“Placemaking is not just a design endeavor. Or a business proposition. Or a public health pursuit. Or an equity concern. Or an avenue for culture and the arts. It’s all of these things, and more. It’s the basis for how we, as human beings, organize ourselves. It’s how we physically embody our values in the built environment. It’s how we make opportunity available to all. It’s how we build resilient local economies and legitimize the prospects for people of all stripes to build wealth over their lifetimes.
But in the context of our present regulatory and financial environments, that doesn’t necessarily happen naturally, requiring the need for municipal intervention to ease the pains of change. Two things in particular: enabling meaningful placemaking so that good places can be built faster to meet demand; and, as that process unfolds, protecting — via tax policy, affordable housing initiatives, and similar endeavors — the most vulnerable who are frequently the casualties of rapid change.”
http://www.placemakers.com/2017/02/28/placemaking-geek-niche-or-the-root-of-pretty-much-everything/
APCSC members are delighted to be at the NJ Bike & Walk Coalition in Princeton! Doug McQueen and Polli Schildge are participating in the panel, “Grassroots Brainstorm”.
The least you can do to make a big difference where you live.
These are awesome and mostly ridiculously simple ideas to make your city a better place to live. #payattentionasburypark
https://www.curbed.com/2016/9/22/13019420/urban-design-community-building-placemaking
It’s about public health and traffic safety. The key is having the decisionmakers at the table,analyzing the data together.
“Hindy noticed how streets in Stockholm and Copenhagen were engineered to give cyclists and pedestrians as much a priority on the streets as cars. That seemed to foster respect among drivers for the other roadway users, too.”
“You don’t have to be a transportation enthusiast to see you’re in a different place with different priorities than most cities in America,” says Hindy.
http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-vision-zero-pedestrian-deaths-brooklyn-brewery.html
In many cities, the “not enough parking” argument goes round and round, and Asbury Park is no exception. As we begin to talk about the possibility of developing a transit center and transit oriented housing this data and sound reasoning should be our guide.
“This shows the traditional views of parking should be thrown out the window when you look at transit as a major component of a development…”
A big win for NJ Bike and Walk Coalition! Congratulations to Cyndi Steiner, Executive Director of NJ Bike & Walk Coalition and Paul Steely White, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives. (Note-Doug McQueen and Polli Schildge of APCSC were invited by Cyndi Steiner to participate on a panel at the NJ Bike and Walk Summit with Paul Steely White. Very much looking forward to this opportunity!)
“At the request of Transportation Alternatives and the New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition, the Port Authority released a plan in 2014 to route pedestrians and cyclists onto separate sides of the bridge (walkers on the south side, cyclists on the north), replace the north path stairs with ramps, and eliminate a hairpin turn on the south path. The advocates also won continuous pedestrian and bike access throughout the construction period, expected to last seven years.”
https://www.transalt.org/news/releases/7433
