Urban Design
Basics
T.A. Offers Reward for Park Slope “Post-Automobile Street” Designs
9th St. and 4th Ave.: "A dangerous crossing that divides surrounding neighborhoods and inhibits street life."
July 7, 2008
Plan B: Reallocating Street Space To Buses, Bikes & Peds
In a piece from the March issue of Outside Magazine that seems especially relevant today, Tim Sohn writes about public space reform in New York City. His article is accompanied by an illustration of what the future of our city could look like: complete streets with dedicated bus and bike lanes, traffic calming gardens, and sidewalks wide enough to accommodate window shoppers without slowing pedestrian traffic -- none of which would depend on Albany for approval.
April 8, 2008
Pint-Sized Parks Make Safer Streets and Cleaner Rivers
The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming "blockbuster."
February 14, 2008
Times Square: Too Many People, or Just Too Many Cars?
Why is Times Square so crowded?
January 10, 2008
Rocky Road
Cycling intimately acquaints you with every bump, slice, crease, divot, ledge, ripple and of course pothole in a street, because not noticing means you might get thrown off your steed into bone-breaking and life ending car traffic.
December 19, 2007
DOT Rolls Out the New Lower Manhattan Crosstown Bike Route
The street re-surfacing men and machinery were out in force in Soho last night. Houston Street Bike Safety Initiative Director Ian Dutton snapped this photo on Prince Street. Once the street is repaved, the Department of Transportation will stripe the hotly debated Prince and Bleecker Street bike lanes.
November 8, 2007
Jan Gehl: Gridlocked Streets Are “Not a Law of Nature”
It could have been just another gathering of urban idealists, agreeing with each other about how great it would be to have more public space for people, and less for cars.
November 7, 2007
Indianapolis Paves the Way for Bikes and Pedestrians
Construction is underway on what may be the nation's most advanced urban greenway system.
October 15, 2007
Meat Market Plaza is Open for Business
The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT's Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface.
September 27, 2007
Making the Case for Compact Development
From the people at Smart Growth America comes word of a new book, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, just out from the Urban Land Institute. In the book, researchers argue that more compact development (such as Atlantic Station, a mixed-use complex in Atlanta built on reclaimed industrial land, shown at right) must play a key role if this country is to reduce emissions:
September 21, 2007