“What are the best Urban Planning Books Of All-Time?”

Not one of the nine books. 

I'll willingly concede that I've read only two of the nine (Jeff Speck and Janette Sadik-Khan). It gives me something to aim for in the coming year, although I've already promised JT that we'd read Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Charles L. Marohn) in December.

The introduction follows.

You'll have to follow the link to see the list.

THE BEST URBAN PLANNING BOOKS OF ALL-TIME

“What are the best Urban Planning Books Of All-Time?” We looked at 186 of the top Urban Planning books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 9 titles, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Urban Planning” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 175+ titles, as well as the lists we used are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Also, see our list on The Best Books About Living In The City.

Happy Scrolling!

"Getting people out of cars and rebuilding our main streets is not going to be easy, and cannot be oversimplified."

I appreciate the author's candor in this short but unsparing look at the realities of striving toward walkability. The bullet points in the excerpt ideally would be grasped by all local candidates for office; I wouldn't expect them all to agree, although it would be nice to think they'd at least been exposed to them.

Is there a "fundamental logic of walkability"? by Lloyd Alter (Treehugger)

 ... It is so complex, building a walkable city that works.

• We need higher average densities to have enough people to actually support small shops.
• We need a fairer tax structure that doesn't shift so much of property tax burden onto the commercial sector, making Main Street stores so expensive.
• We need better pedestrian infrastructure so that people in wheelchairs, with buggies and with strollers can actually all get down the street.
• We need to stop the subsidies on highways and fuel that support the suburban big box economic models.
• We have to charge car owners the true economic costs of maintaining the roads, police, ambulances and parking because even when the store is less than a mile away, it is still often easier to drive. If the car is there, people are going to use it.

Then there will be some logic to walkability. Right now, for many, it makes more sense to drive.

Stop building new infrastructure: "One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding."

This one's from 2015, but worth repeating.

Our recent experience in New Albany illustrates Charles Marohn's basic point. We're overbuilding local infrastructure wants while calling them needs; and Jeff Gahan has affixed his personal campaign finance needs to the profuse kickbacks from these wants.

One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding, by Alan Ehrenhalt (Governing)

After advising municipalities on how to construct roads for years, Charles Marohn now believes America needs to stop building new highways. Will his new way of thinking catch on?

... (Charles Marohn) reiterated his view that the country can survive a while longer without a sweeping new federal transportation bill. Doing nothing, he said, “is preferable to throwing a lot of money at the current approach.”

The gospel according to Marohn is simple enough to put into a few words: We have built too many highways. We have built them in places that didn’t need them. We have built them in places that can’t afford to maintain them. That’s why the federal Transportation Trust Fund is going broke. And if Congress approves a new transportation bill under the old rules, we’ll just build more unneeded roads and force the communities that host them into a further cycle of debt.

Marohn isn’t against spending federal dollars to repair the infrastructure we have. He’s against handing more money over to transportation planners who will always be able to find an excuse to build something new. “The present system is overbuilt and is going to contract,” Marohn recently wrote. “We have so much transportation infrastructure that every level of government is now choking on maintenance costs. I’m tired of seeing bridges fall down and expensive roads go bad while we spend billions on new stuff we will never be able to maintain” ...

As with INDOT: "Good intentions get subordinated, on project after project, to destructive business-as-usual practices."

Reading this essay you begin to grasp the nature of the problem.

The same old engineering and design vendors who play the game by stuffing Jeff Gahan's pockets with cash are the ones operating by INDOT template, institutionally reinforcing mistakes over and over, and yet they're hired over and over again even as the Zombie Mayor chants "walkability," which surely cannot occur in any substantive form when the same old engineering and design suspects are car-centric, declaring drivers the victors, not people seeking alternative mobility options.

Thus Gahan's pronouncements about walkability can be viewed only as propaganda touts from a shill primarily concerned with campaign finance, not genuine solutions.

Why State DOTs Keep Making the Same Mistakes... and How to Break That Cycle, by Daniel Herriges (Strong Towns)

You know the saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?”

No; we’re not saying the people who work at most of our state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the U.S. are insane. But advocates for safe, welcoming, vibrant urban streets just might be if we think we can achieve our goals without comprehensive institutional reform within these agencies. That’s the message of a fascinating new blog post series by our friends at Smart Growth America, called How to Build a Better State DOT.

You can read the whole series here, and it is well worth reading. Smart Growth America’s insights here are not superficial, but come from people with a wealth of accumulated experience within these agencies, and a deep understanding of how good intentions get subordinated, on project after project, to destructive business-as-usual practices.

Some key insights ...

Take note, progressives: "We’ve built an unsustainable transportation network that makes all of us feel isolated, vulnerable and embattled, no matter how we’re getting around."

It is my aim to continue repeating this simple fact: one needn't be a progressive to grasp messages like the following, but if you consider yourself a progressive in political and social matters, it's contradictory to dismiss messages like this.

I've educated myself. So can you. This writer lives in Washington D.C., and you might be tempted to reject his point insofar as it applies to a smaller setting like New Albany.

You'd be mistaken. It's a difference in degree, not basic facts. I learned them, and you can, too.

Our streets make us unhappy. They don’t have to, by Colin Browne (Washington Post)

... The crazy thing about the automobile is that despite claiming a wildly disproportionate amount of public space, it’s still a slow and frustrating way to get across town. This is not because of all the buses, pedestrians and bicyclists. It’s not because the speed limit is too low or the traffic lights aren’t timed properly. It’s a feature of the machine itself. Cars take an enormous amount of space to safely move the one person inside and another enormous amount of space to store when they’re not being used, which is 95 percent of the time. If you live in Nebraska, you can maybe make that work. In a major world city such as ours, the acreage simply isn’t there.

We’ve built an unsustainable transportation network that makes all of us feel isolated, vulnerable and embattled, no matter how we’re getting around.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can do better. We can think bigger. We don’t have to sacrifice the safety and livability of our neighborhoods to prop up a wasteful and dangerous transportation system.

What does a low-stress street network look like? We need wider sidewalks. Everywhere. Walking to the store with a grocery cart or pushing a stroller to day care or getting to the bus stop in a wheelchair should be smooth and easy for everyone, no matter where you live.

We need protected space on every single street for a variety of active transportation modes. Every child in the District should be able to ride a skateboard or a bike or a scooter to school safely. Not just once a year for a photo op — every child, every day.

We need dedicated space for affordable transit in every neighborhood. According to AAA, the average cost of owning a car in the District is about $8,000 per year. No one should have to pay that kind of money just because he or she can’t afford to live near a Metro station or a reliable bus line ...

New rules of thumb in transportation planning provide thumbnails for scoring local political aspirants.

It occurred to me to backdate this post to 2004, thus providing enough time for 4th district councilman Pat McLaughlin to methodically consider the potential uses of thumbs.

OUR OLD PLANNING RULES OF THUMB ARE “ALL THUMBS”, by Joe Cortright (Strong Towns)

We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick.

What purport to be “standards” in the worlds of transportation and land use are in many cases just elaborate rules of thumb. And while they might have made sense in some limited or original context, the cumulative effect of these rules is that we have a transportation system which is by regulation, practice, and received wisdom, “all thumbs.”

SNIP

Our “all thumbs” approach to transportation planning leads to a specific pattern of development that is as inefficient for cars as it is hostile for persons traveling on foot, via bicycle and on transit.

What is needed are a new set of rules of thumb. Like all heuristics, this isn’t meant to be taken as a final set of “standards” to fit every situation – but there are some emerging ideas about what we might emphasize.

NEW RULE OF THUMB #1: CLOSER IS BETTER
Having more different destinations close at hand facilitates a wide range of mode choices, especially walking and cycling. Mixing uses, which is often anathema under traditional zoning codes turns out to be desirable for consumers and expeditious for transportation.

NEW RULE OF THUMB #2: SLOWER IS SAFER
When cars and people on foot and on bikes interact, safety comes from slow speeds even more than separation. Local streets that move traffic slowly are friendlier—and safer—for non-auto modes of transportation.

NEW RULE OF THUMB #3: SHARING IS EFFICIENT
Rather than require every use to provide parking for the peak hour of the year, arranging uses so people can park once, and walk mostly leads to less traffic, greater safety and more congenial, fine-grained development patterns.

NEW RULE OF THUMB #4: OUR OBJECTIVE SHOULD BE ACCESSIBILITY, NOT MOBILITY
Many transportation heuristics emphasize speed: how do we make things move faster. But what we really care about is getting to (or being at) our destinations, not rapidly traveling among them. Speed should be secondary to choice.

* “I want to highlight and emphasize that the city did not rush to make a decision on the finalization of the conversion project. Instead, the city took its time and was methodical. The City also was not afraid to compromise and modify the plan as needed, especially when it came to changes prompted by the feedback received from residents. This project exemplifies how local government, community members, and contractors can come together to design the best plan for their city,” stated City Council President Patrick McLaughlin.

"American cities are getting a little loosey-goosey with curb control, experimenting with policies that just might make the places more livable, for everyone."

Blocking handicapped parking
to light the Christmas tree.
Quintessential New Albany.

As it pertains to HWC Engineering's ham-fisted hatchet job on Jeff Speck's grid proposals, it would be interesting to know if any of the curbside issues discussed by Aarian Marshall in this article ever were allowed to intrude upon the "modernization" conversation.

If the conversation was initiated with Jeff Gahan, then the mayor's likely answer takes the form of another question:

"Uber? What's that?"

In New Albany, "modernization" means catching up to the year you graduated high school, just prior to trundling off to the 35th class reunion.

TO SEE THE FUTURE OF CITIES, WATCH THE CURB. YES, THE CURB, by Aarian Marshall (Wired)

... The battleground is ubiquitous but rarely merits a second look. In some places, it occupies mere inches of space. But the territory is now fertile soil, its coveters many. We are talking, of course, about the curb.

The curbside has always been a a place for walking and loitering. But in just the past decade, smartphone technology has enabled new transportation services, all of them looking for their own bit of the terrain. The curb is home to bike share programs and the cycling lanes that help their users get around safely. It’s a spot to pick up and drop off passengers (Uber, Lyft, Chariot, Via, public buses and streetcars, paratransit) and things (UPS, FedEx, Instacart, Postmates). Some cities have set aside space for carshare services (Zipcar, Maven), or scooter-shares (Scoot). Others have found new and creative ways to charge for parking spots, experimenting with tech that adjusts prices based on demand.

“Cities have started to rethink how their streets are designed from curb from curb,” says Matthew Roe, who directs street design initiatives for the National Association of City Transportation Officials and authored a new curbside management white paper released this week. “They’ve started to realize they need more tools to manage that valuable curbside space. It’s the most valuable space that a city owns and one of the most underutilized.”

What you do with the curb sets the tone for your whole city. And through this grey chunk of concrete, local governments are starting to communicate how they'll handle their entire transportation systems. Favor a system that asks citizens to share resources, by making room for, say a bikeshare program, and you say one thing. Favor private parking for residents, and you declare war: “When I think about curb, the first thing that comes to mind is how people react when you take away parking,” said Sarah Jones, the planning director for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. She was speaking at a surprisingly lively event about curbs, hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area research and advocacy organization SPUR this month. Residents complain, Jones said, of private interests taking over the space, but they don't seem to get that this is exactly what's been happening all along. “I’m not sure what is privatizing public space more than storing your vehicle in it," she said.

Autocentrism: Isn't it time to free ourselves from the chokehold of the car?

The underlined passage might as well refer directly to the colossal missed opportunity of New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project. What Jeff Gahan has chosen to do constitutes the barest of minimums to (a) achieve paving on someone else's dime, and (b) declare victory.

$3 million (or more) later, we'll have climbed painfully into the 1980s. Just imagine what might have been, because if you can imagine it, that's considerably more than the suburban auto-centric mayor can conjure.

The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer

We tell ourselves that we cherish efficiency. Yet we have created a transport system whose design principle is profligacy. Metal carriages (that increase in size every year), each carrying one or two people, travel in parallel to the same places. Lorries shifting identical goods in opposite directions pass each other on 2,000-mile journeys. Competing parcel companies ply the same routes, in largely empty vans. We could, perhaps, reduce our current vehicle movements by 90% with no loss of utility, and a major gain in our quality of life.

But to contest this peculiar form of insanity is, as I know to my cost, to be widely declared insane. Look at how advertising is dominated by car companies, and you begin to understand the drive to ensure that this counter-ergonomic system persists. Look at the lobbying power of the motor industry and its support in the media, and you see why successive plans to address pollution seemed designed to fail.

Suggest a neater system, and you will be shouted down by people insisting that they don’t want to live in a planned economy. But in this respect (and others) we do live in a planned economy. These days transport planners make a few concessions to cyclists, pedestrians and buses, but their overriding aim is still to maximise the flow of private vehicles. Rather than encouraging the more efficient use of existing infrastructure, they keep increasing the space into which inefficiency can expand ...

Driver jailed for three years for ramming cyclist, though nowhere near here -- but that's okay, because bikes will win in the end ... nowhere near here.

Wait -- is this a glimmer amid the riverbank anchor's mud?

Here's a refreshing headline, one seen about as often in metro Louisville as unicorns in plaid.

Driver jailed for three years for ramming cyclist in north London, by Kevin Rawlinson (The Guardian)

Justine Henshaw-Bryan, 25, used ‘car as a weapon’ after Damien Doughty confronted her about using phone while driving

A motorist who used her car to chase a cyclist and ram him into a tree after an argument over her use of a mobile phone at the wheel has been jailed for three years.

Damien Doughty suffered serious injuries after the incident in north London in February last year. Justine Henshaw-Bryan, who is now pregnant and due to give birth in November, claimed her boyfriend had grabbed the wheel.

But the judge told her she had used the car “as a weapon” to injure the cyclist and could have killed him.

“Those who are unable to control their temper while driving and feel that cyclists are fair game must be dealt with severely,” Judge Gregory Perrins told her as he passed sentence on Wednesday.

He said she must have been aware of the risk her driving presented to him. “This was a calculated attempt to run him over and use your car as a weapon. It would have been obvious that to do so would have carried significant risk of injury.”

Similar instances of driver abuse in our vicinity rarely make it as far as a judge given that the non-enforcement culture habitually absolves drivers of responsibility.

But hey, don't get mad.

Get even.

The case for bicycles' inevitable triumph over cars, by Matt McFarland (CNN)

Bikes, long an underdog on streets, will rule the roads eventually.

That's the conclusion of Horace Dediu, a prominent analyst of disruptive technologies, who has spent the past three and a half years researching the future of transportation.

Transportation is arguably the hottest frontier in the tech world. Innovators in Silicon Valley and beyond are spending billions to build flying cars and self-driving trucks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks of digging costly 30-level tunnel networks for cars. Google cofounder Sergey Brin reportedly has a giant airship.
But as Dediu sees it, a familiar, unglamorous technology will own the future: the bicycle. And the big loser will be cars.

"Bikes have a tremendous disruptive advantage over cars. Bikes will eat cars," Dediu told CNNTech, referencing investor Marc Andreessen's seminal 2011 argument that software-driven businesses are dominating the world.

Golden oldie, no less vital: "Attacking the Language Bias in Transportation Engineering."

Cartoon by Ian Lockwood. 

My advice stays the same.

Print this 2013 article on card stock. Roll it up and add a rubber band. The next time Pinocchio Rosenbarger rises at a public meeting to defend a Gahanian campaign finance clip job, apply the article to Rosenbarger's cheek in a vigorous upward arc.

Congratulations. You'll have struck a blow against auto-centrism in New Albany.

Attacking the Language Bias in Transportation Engineering, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

“Improvement.” “Upgrade.” “Level of Service.” The traffic engineering profession is full of buzzwords laden with meaning — and, for the most part, the embedded meaning is something to the effect of “cars are king.”

Ian Lockwood, P.E., has been working in the engineering profession for 30 years. He served as the chief transportation official for the city of West Palm Beach, Florida, before joining the engineering firm AECOM as a consultant and completing a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard.

Lockwood is on a mission to reform the way his profession uses language. I got a chance to sit down with him last week at the Congress for New Urbanism conference in Salt Lake City. Here’s what he had to say ...

As New Albanians ruefully recall, it was called the East Main Street IMPROVEMENT Project.

AS: Can you give us some examples of biased words?

IL: Probably the one we hear the most is “improvement.” When a conventional traffic engineer talks about an improvement, often it might mean a widening. It’s hard to argue against an “improvement,” because it’s a subjectively labeled word and it implies it’s getting better, even though it might not be getting better for all the user groups. It contains a bias for the automobile user over and above the other folks.

Next, connectivity for all? "We are not only building bridges, we are biking bridges."

The late Kevin Richards, bridging the Czech Republic, 2006.

My old friend John (original designer of the NABC keg-aloft logo) recently has been writing about bicycling for LEO. His thoughts about bikes crossing bridges bring to mind my own merry band's experiences in Europe from 2000 - 2008.

Once you've seen what a rational bicycling infrastructure network looks like, the situation on the new East End Long Dead Overused White Guys Bridge (what, we ran out of assassinated presidents to name it?) is cast in sharp and sad relief. There, a multi-use path essentially leads to nothing on either side, a far cry from what I've observed in places like the Netherlands and Germany.

In these countries, transportation is far less of a zero-sum game, where anything "given" to a cyclist or walker is viewed by the intemperate among us as being "taken away" from autos.  Rather, especially in the Netherlands, space for cars, bikers and walkers exists side by side.

The horror!

Given that the most widely reported controversy on the new bridge to date has been complaints from walkers over lack of parking spaces (think about that), I feel like screaming that whatever the idiocy of the financing, we shouldn't build this or any other bridge solely as a means of carrying cars as they move back and forth to ultimate destinations. This notion of connectivity should apply to cyclists and walkers, too.

Where and how does one continue the journey, having reached the other side?

Why We Ride: Biking Bridges, by John Mahorney (LEO Weekly)

Unless you’re spinning away in your pain cave, or you’ve been riding out of town for the holidays, then you may have heard about the opening of the brand-new Lewis and Clark Bridge on Dec. 18. This beautiful piece of multi-modal infrastructure is the most-inclusive, publicly-funded road project I’ve seen in our area. It is the first highway and bridge project to receive an Envision Platinum Award from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. Among its sustainable construction practices is a wide, two-way bicycle and pedestrian path connecting Prospect to Utica, Indiana.

When I think about cycling to and from Kentucky and Indiana, I can’t help but remember all the other bridges we’ve crossed over the years. Adventurous, perilous, crowded, abandoned, remote and downright dangerous for the commuter and recreational cyclist alike. They are necessary. They are convenient. Some could be better. Some can go to hell. Some could just finally open someday.

Wouldn't it be nice if New Albany officials spoke publicly about the economic benefits of complete streets?

... you know, instead of remaining perpetually on the down-low, and refusing to modify one-way streets, and always finding auto-centric rationalizations for what little they actually do in pretending they're reforming the street grid?

Then again, for New Albany public officials to speak publicly about the economic benefits of complete streets implies that they'd have to understand what these benefits are.

And they don't. Because if they did, wouldn't they be talking about them publicly?

Scott Lane is a transportation planner in Raleigh. He's talking openly about the economic benefits of complete streets. Meanwhile, New Albany's John Rosenbarger ... well, have there been coherent utterances from the Oracle of Timeserving lately, apart from the meeting when he explained the clear-cutting down by the river?

Didn't think so.

Show me the money: Why complete streets make economic sense (Stantec)

The economic benefits of walkable cities are often overshadowed by the health benefits – but they shouldn’t be.

By Scott Lane, Senior Transportation Planner (Raleigh, NC)

We know that walking and cycling can help extend and enhance your life, but we seldom think about how these two modes of travel – collectively called ‘active modes’ – can enhance business opportunities. But if more cities and towns took a hard look at the numbers, I think they’d see there is a strong case for creating complete streets in their communities.

"On a main street, that which looks like 'vehicle delay' to a traffic engineer looks like economic activity and success to a local merchant."

What it looks like to Jeff Gahan is complete and utter  incomprehension.

Tell the Feds: Don’t Turn City Streets Into Highways, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

Will the Obama administration prod state DOTs to abandon the destructive practice of widening roads and highways, or will it further entrench policies that have hollowed out cities and towns, increased traffic and car dependence, and made America a world leader in carbon pollution?

It can't be stated any more clearly:

There’s a direct connection between how we decide to measure [congestion] and how we choose to address it. If we focus, as this rule does, on keeping traffic moving at a high rate of speed at all times of day on all types of roads and streets, then the result is easy to predict: our solutions will prioritize the investments that make that possible, regardless of cost vs. benefits or the potential impacts on the communities those roads pass through.

USDOT plans to measure vehicle speed and delay seven different ways, while ignoring people carpooling, taking transit, walking & biking or skipping the trip entirely.

"Highway engineers dominated the decision-making. They were trained to design without much consideration for how a highway might impact urban fabric."

If we retained the public transportation infrastructure we possessed 100 years ago, Bulldog fans could have taken the train to Indianapolis and back for last night's championship game.

This article makes at least two points that we should never tire of emphasizing.

First, that "gas taxes have never fully paid for highways," even though we insist on believing it's true.

Second, "An unmistakable part of the equation was the federally supported program of 'urban renewal,' in which lower-income urban communities — mostly African-American — were targeted for removal."

That's history, folks.

Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them? by Joseph Stromberg (Vox)

... So why did cities help build the expressways that would so profoundly decimate them? The answer involves a mix of self-interested industry groups, design choices made by people far away, a lack of municipal foresight, and outright institutional racism.

"Study: States wasting billions on highways."

In New Albany, the builders, pavers and excavators tithe back to the politicians who funded them with public money.

Gee, you don't think there's a connection, do you?  

Study: States wasting billions on highways, by Keith Laing (The Hill)

State governments are wasting $24 billion on highway projects that are unnecessary, according to a new study released Monday by the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund.

The study "details how despite America’s massive repair and maintenance backlog, and in defiance of America’s changing transportation needs, state governments continue to spend billions each year on new and wider highways," according to the group, which typically pushes for more transit investment.

“Many state governments continue to prioritize wasteful highway projects that fail to effectively address congestion while leaving our roads and bridges to crumble,” John Olivieri, the national campaign director for 21st Century Transportation at the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, said in a statement.

Speck casually advises Cincy: "None require widening a road; it’s simply a matter of restriping them."

Let's live dangerously and reprint the entire article (below).

It's too good to miss, and hits close to the target. As you're reading, think about New Albany, our situation here, and the personages in our town taking stances similar (and different) to these. Note that by campaign's end, Mayor Jeff Gahan finally had something to say in response to the News and Tribune's direct question:

Except that yet again, he said nothing. To the bitter end, evasive gobbledygook. But now we live with it, for the next four years.

Happy Sunday reading!

---

Bike lanes, two-way streets, parallel parking should be part of Cincinnati road overhaul, urban designer says, by Chris Wetterich (Cincinnati Business Courier)

When nationally known urban planner and designer Jeff Speck heard about Cincinnati’s plan to spend $91 million over the next six years to repair and replace the city’s streets and fleet, he saw an opportunity.

Speck, who wrote the book, “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time," was in town last week to keynote the Cincinnati Preservation Association’s Fall Forum lecture. The association holds the lecture to show it’s not just about saving old, historic buildings but about connecting them to the city’s core, as well.

I had coffee with Speck; Cincinnati’s economic development director, Oscar Bedolla; city economic development official Phillip Denning; Cincinnati Preservation Association executive director Paul Muller and others last week at the Contemporary Arts Center’s café.

Some things Speck noticed: one-way streets throughout downtown and the lack of bike facilities – bike lanes, protected bikeways like the one along Central Parkway and shared use sidewalks wide enough to accommodate both pedestrians and cyclists.

He recommended four things to make Cincinnati more walkable when the city starts to repave its roads. None require widening a road; it’s simply a matter of restriping them, Speck said:

• Make as many lanes no wider than 10 feet
• Convert one-way streets to two-way streets
• Have parallel parking on every curb possible
• Add an array of biking infrastructure

The first two slow down traffic and improve safety for both motorists and pedestrians. The third sets up a barrier between cars and pedestrians and bicyclists. The fourth makes each street complete for those in a car, on foot and on a bicycle.

Two-way streets are a way to spur economic development, Speck said.

“People who have lived through that (the conversion of two-way streets to one-way) in other communities, they all say the same thing: The barber went away and this went away and that went away. And it’s no coincidence,” Speck said. “When you go two-way, they go back.

“Often these great historic neighborhoods in which there is a mix of uses, there are buildings framing the street with friendly faces, which is comfortable and interesting – all they’re missing is the proper street geometry to feel safe.”

Mayor John Cranley remains a staunch opponent of dedicated bicycle lanes on roadways.

“I don’t believe that we should hurt bike riders for the benefit of cars or hurt cars for the benefit of bikes,” Cranley said at a recent Issue 22 forum, describing his views on bike lanes. “We all know it’s safer to have dedicated bike trails and walking trails and hiking trails.”

Speck dismissed the argument that “sharrows,” or marks on roads indicating that bicyclists can use the road, are enough. Mixing bikes and cars together only works when traffic is slow enough, he said.

“Sharrows do not count. It’s invitation to kill yourself, especially on some of the streets I’ve driven on in this town,” Speck said, later explaining that he was driven along Spring Grove Avenue, one of the flattest routes in the city between downtown and Uptown, which has the markings. “There are other streets out there which are six-laners in which the outer lanes have the sharrow markings. And that’s ridiculous.”

Some streets and roads can remain car-centered and unbikeable, Speck said.

“You don’t need to have bikes everywhere, you just need a way for them to go around the corner and get to their destination,” Speck said.

Speck even mentioned an infamous photo circulated locally on social media in which someone that either was Cranley or had a striking resemblance to him is seen riding a Red Bike on Vine Street’s sidewalk.

“In a proper bike network, there are some places where it’s OK to ride on the sidewalk,” Speck said.

“But if your outlook is the bicyclists should ride on the sidewalk, you will never generate a cycling population. The cities that want to bring millennials … the (bike) facilities are there.”

City Manager Harry Black said Speck’s idea “makes a lot of good sense,” but first will require more money than is allocated to the capital acceleration plan passed by council, a lot of community input and engineering work.

“We’re talking about getting in front of the deterioration curve,” Black said of the current plan. “What he’s talking about would be ‘nice to have’ stuff. We’re talking about stuff that must be done today.”

Black does not agree that it is simply a matter of changing the striping on city streets once they are repaved.

Speck’s plan “presupposes that the street is wide enough to accommodate all that stuff. I think it’s a simplistic viewpoint. Not to mention the impact on surrounding streets. It has to be a part of a larger design and community input process," Black said.

“He’s a planner. He’s paid for ideas. He’s not responsible for getting it built.”

Speck isn’t the first to make such a suggestion. In June, Over-the-Rhine resident and activist Margy Waller wrote a column in the Cincinnati Enquirer suggesting the city use the opportunity of new money being available for roads to implement the city’s bicycle transportation plan and its award-winning Plan Cincinnati.

The bicycle transportation plan outlines the type of network Speck suggests the city build.
“It's easy and very cheap to create the lanes while repairing our roads,” Waller wrote.

Black said he has not yet read the bicycle transportation plan nor is it on his immediate agenda.

“It’s not on my drawing board. My priority right now is to take care of the basics,” Black said. “That’s a discussion for other segments of the city to engage in.”

"When you design a city for cars, it fails everyone."

In a way a water park simply cannot do.

"The new transportation system in Medellín ... is not only a physical solution. It is not only transportation. It is also a social instrument that involves the community, that integrates the community in all the city."

But one must be willing to think outside self-limiting boxes. In New Albany, just the mere act of thinking itself would be a fine first step.

Where Did We Go Wrong? I never realized how dumb our cities are until I saw what a smart one looks like, by Maz Ali (Upworthy)

... A healthy diet and regular physical activity are some of the most important things we can do for our health as individuals, but flawed city design has restricted opportunities for people to make those choices, which has contributed greatly to what are essentially public health epidemics — ones that require public health solutions.

Most cities have been designed for cars, not for people.

Look out your window and see for yourself.

Here, there, everywhere: "Creating real transportation options" for all residents.

Specifically in this case, Denver, but the implications for Louisville metro are fairly clear.

Is the ORBP boondoggle finished yet?

Locantore: It's not about congestion; it's about freedom, by Jill Locantore (Denver Post)

... ultimately, congestion isn't the problem we should be trying to solve. The bigger problem is that many Denver residents don't have any options other than driving to their daily destinations. Automobiles have long symbolized freedom in the American imagination. Yet in our devotion to building communities oriented around driving, we've engineered the ability to walk, bike, or take transit out of many of our neighborhoods. Now here we are enslaved to our automobiles, obsessed with fueling them, parking them, and making sure they don't get too crowded on the roadways.

"Debunking the Myth That Only Drivers Pay for Roads."

The author writes, "The point is that America is an increasingly (and, now, majority) multimodal place, with a transportation network that offers personal options and collective benefits."

Has the point been grasped hereabouts?

Debunking the Myth That Only Drivers Pay for Roads, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

The use of general taxpayer money to construct and repair roads is enough on its own to shatter the concept that drivers pay their own way. But there's lots more to the problem—starting with the enormous social costs of driving. Those are the costs that society as a whole pays for car-reliance: the environmental impact of pollution, the health impact of accidents, and the economic impact of productivity lost to traffic, among them. These have been estimated at $3.3 trillion a year ...

... When you tally all these hidden costs together, alongside the assists that already occur for road construction and maintenance, the average household pays between $1,105 and $1,848 a year in what the report calls "uncompensated damage costs to support motor vehicle use in the United States." Again: whether they drive a lot or hardly at all.

One article you simply MUST read: "Cities for People—or Cars?"

Photo credit: Shutterstock, via The American Conservative

I'm pulling two paragraphs below as teaser, but you simply must read the entire essay at The American Conservative, which commissioned Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn to write it.

Let that soak in. New Urbanism in this context is neither a "liberal" nor "conservative" issue. It is a "people" issue.

Now, know this: Marohn's essay might as well be Platform Plank Numero Uno in the Baylor for Mayor independent campaign. It is principled, positive, and borne out in voluminous human experience, all across America and the planet:

New Urbanism is a civic design movement ... (advocating) the reforming development practices to support traditional patterns: building close-together homes in slow increments over time and storefronts pulled up to the street instead of buried behind nearly empty parking lots—designing cities and towns for people first and then for automobiles, not the other way around.

What good is independence without independent thinking? Please read Marohn's entire essay.

Cities for People—or Cars?: New Urbanism rediscovers centuries of walkable wisdom, by Charles Marohn (The American Conservative)

... The central task of the Millennial generation is not going to be expanding the boundaries of our cities but managing their contraction. We must find a way to unwind all of these widely dispersed and unproductive investments while providing opportunities for a good life—a modernized American Dream—in strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods. And we have to do all of this with the drag of large debts and a failed national system for growth, development, and economic management that largely associates auto-based development with progress.

This makes the work of the New Urbanists even more important. They are the ones who have applied the rigor needed to understand how a city really works. What are the nuances that make a neighborhood cohesive? Where do we place public buildings and how do we design them so they are not just functional but make a city wealthier? How do we make “good neighbors,” as Robert Frost might ask, without fences and a large setback?