City planners are questioning the point of parking garages

2023-02-01

Sustainable infrastructure for cities and societies

Regional Studies · 2023-05-19

"Sustainable infrastructure for cities and societies." Regional Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Ever-larger cars and trucks are causing a safety crisis on US streets – here’s how communities can fight back

2023-08-02

The potential of “bike-like” vehicles to provide big wins for climate change, safety and justice

2022-10-31

Urban living is the norm for more than half of humanity. Even in one of the most spread-out countries, the United States, three-quarters of the population reside in cities and suburbs. Residents in these locations share a common denominator: proximity to destinations. For the past century, public policies in most countries have steered residents to use cars, even for short trips. The cumulative impact of transport planning practices to support cars carries many costs. The costs of auto-dependence have long been recognized by transport professionals and have become topics of concern for decision-makers and the public. In communities everywhere, the first step is to recognize the startling differences between what exists and what is desired. Emerging solutions would need to be available to users across urban regions, offer multiple modes of travel, and require tens of millions of vehicles. Human behavior and attitudes regarding transport have been firmly ingrained for decades and would need to be adapted.

Can street-focused emergency response measures trigger a transition to new transport systems? Exploring evidence and lessons from 55 US cities

Transport Policy · 2021 · 65 citations

• Sociology
• Business
• Transport engineering

Transport planning and policy is increasingly being called to action in ways that differ from practices of yesteryear. Varied segments of society are increasingly looking to city streets-the workhorse of a city's transport system-as places to enact change. Namely, to change their character away from the type of streets pervasive in auto-oriented urban environments. Acutely experienced during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency response measures from many cities across the world abruptly altered the nature and purpose of street space. These "street experiments" fueled an opportunity, in part, to explore a transition to practices prioritizing forms of sustainable mobility such as walking and bicycling. This research inventories street-focused emergency response measures from the 55 largest cities in the US. We devise a rubric to systematically assess and locate characteristics of these measures that enable a transition. Results show that five "innovator" and several "early adopter" cities are using COVID conditions to test new forms of streets and in some cases, street networks. These cities excelled in conveying a vision for alternative future, articulating implementation pathways, leveraging political capacity, and circulating information. After six months, half of the cities continue their efforts, including only six which have expanded. The few showing continued strength demonstrate endeavors to evaluate the experiments, validate their feasibility, and embed the experiments into existing sustainability policy. These components, when leveraged together, could seed innovative break-throughs in how city streets are used, designed, and standardized. The paper establishes baseline evidence on which future research efforts can build and provides empirical evidence on early stages of the experimentation and transition processes of urban mobility systems.

Advanced Introduction to Urban Transport Planning

2021-05-31 · 1 citations

Road Transport Planning at the Urban Scale

Elsevier eBooks · 2021-01-01

Visioning transport futures through windows of opportunity: changing streets and human-scaled networks

Town Planning Review · 2021-01-21 · 10 citations

The COVID-19 pandemic helped reveal much-needed insights about how people view cities and interact with public space City leaders, planners and even the public realized how much space in streets is devoted to moving automobiles at the expense of walking and bicycling Responses to the pandemic, furthermore, helped people become aware of how the character of streets can change quickly Here, King and Krizek argue that there is an urgency to act now, being on the brink of a once-in-a-century occurrence where street use is changing potentially at the same time as new vehicle types They view the condition of the pandemic as one capable of spurring rapid change to fix long-standing problems with urban transport

Channelling human scaled modes to build repurposed street networks

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2021-08-11

To improve cities to be more human-scaled, transport planners and researchers do not need new ideas or technology; better use of what exists can be leveraged. This chapter argues for the value of future planning and research initiatives that start with first principles of orienting street reform towards human-scaled vehicles. We explain how prioritizing bicycles and bicycle-like transport provides a solid foundation for developing networks that promote access, safety and environmental goals. We demonstrate the feasibility of how bicycles have the potential to capture more than half of all trip-making. Relying on theories of network growth, we also present a strategy to seed meaningful changes - one that could help spark a transport revolution in many cities across the globe.

Emerging Transport Futures for Streets and How Eye Tracking Can Help Improve Safety and Design

2020-08-19 · 2 citations

As a wider array of existing and emerging transport devices arrive on city streets—everything from bicycles to scooters to autonomous vehicles—new challenges are emerging for how humans pay attention while traveling. The value of eye tracking is rooted in the concept that how users scan, navigate and respond to others can be measured and catalogued into patterns, and advances in using the tool in real-world settings open up new frontiers. We describe an emerging landscape for how eye-tracking research can help understand and address the safety needs of pedestrians and those in human-scaled vehicles.