Livable Streets
Streetsblog Basics
NACTO Urban Street Design Guide Sets Out to Change the DNA of Our Cities
In a direct challenge to the long-standing authority of state DOTs to determine how transportation infrastructure gets designed, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) yesterday launched its Urban Street Design Guide.
September 24, 2013
Photo Contest: Send Us Your Pictures of Kids on City Streets
Two weeks ago, I posted some thoughts on raising kids in cities and right away, the comments section and Twitter lit up with a fruitful discussion of urban and car-lite parenting.
August 27, 2013
Meet Streetmix, the Website Where You Can Design Your Own Street
Last fall, Lou Huang was at a community meeting for the initiative to redesign Second Street in San Francisco. Planners handed out paper cutouts, allowing participants to mix and match to create their ideal street. Huang, an urban designer himself, thought the exercise would make for a great website. Now, after months of work beginning at a January hackathon with colleagues at Code for America, it is a great website.
August 12, 2013
Eyes on the Street: No Parking in the Low Post
Streetsblog reader Susan Donovan, a.k.a. Futurebird, posted this pic on Instagram yesterday. It's a DIY basketball court on Walton Avenue near Joyce Kilmer Park, a few blocks from Yankee Stadium. Writes Donovan:
June 18, 2013
Why Is the Manhattan Institute Afraid of Livable Streets?
The term “livable streets” first surfaced in 1981. That’s when UC Berkeley urban planning professor Donald Appleyard made it the title of his path-breaking new book on the social effects of cars on cities. But it was the advent of Streetsblog and the livable streets movement 25 years later that brought the term into public view.
September 30, 2011
Heads Up, Tom Latham: Livability Pays Big Dividends in Rural Iowa
You could say Oskaloosa, Iowa, population 11,000, is a model of small-town livability. Families rent apartments over renovated historic storefronts. Local college students take the bike lane down Market Street to grab a bite in the local restaurants. Visitors travel from distant towns to browse the city's local bookstore in its revitalized, walkable town square.
February 2, 2011
MAS Survey: New York City Is Livable But Not Everyone Benefits Equally
New Yorkers think their city is very livable, a new survey conducted by the Municipal Art Society shows, but livability isn't equitably distributed across the five boroughs. To make the city truly livable, said panelists today at an MAS conference, New York needs to figure out how to bring its best features to all neighborhoods.
October 21, 2010
Bill Thompson Was for Bike Lanes Before He Was Against Them
The current iteration of Grand Street, by most any objective measure, has to be considered a success. In the year since it was reconfigured to host the city's first parking-protected bike lane, with the blessing of Community Board 2, injuries are down 30 percent, with about 1,000 cyclists using the lane daily.
September 22, 2009
Did Bill Thompson Get a Copy of Today’s Fake Post? [Updated]
The latest production of the Yes Men hit the streets and the Web today: an Onion-esque "Special Edition" of the New York Post devoted completely to climate change, released ahead of this week's global summit at UN headquarters. Coming in at 32 pages in print, there's a lot here to digest -- including a fun take down of livable streets skeptic Steve Cuozzo, whose alter ego sees the error of his auto-centric ways.
September 21, 2009