Great presentation. Usa desperately needs better streets.

As a bicycle commuter I am so jealous of cities with ANY bike infrastructure. We don't have adequate infrastructure in Lethbridge.

London UK could learn a lot from this talk. I'm a personal fitness trainer in London UK, and most of my clients complain about just how unfriendly London is for pedestrians and cyclists (but getting better in recent years). Here's my blog post about how we could make London more pedestrian-friendly: tinyurl.com/qaadqgc

@BoltGolf

7 жыл бұрын

That link is broken mate..

Adults did not bike commute in the past in the US. We aren't "bringing back" the bicycle but doing something new. My family was broke--two grad students--during the oil crisis, and so they were early "bike commuters," but when gas prices dropped, bike commuting lost what little traction it had almost everywhere. Even now, you are NEVER going to get people on bike going to workplaces that don't have full showers in the Sunbelt in the summer. It's not a prejudice against bikes. It's the reality that you're expected to arrive at work not stinking and dripping with sweat. Bikes commutes go way up in the winter there at the same time that people in Albany say "no thanks." It's not coincidence that bike commuting is big in the Netherlands and not so big in Switzerland.

@maddiekits

Жыл бұрын

wdym lol? we have bike share data from large cities in the early 1900s, the US had similar number of bike users as the European counterparts that today are considered bike cities. Also biking is decently common in Switzerland, with most of their large cities doing better than the US's, but it still has quite poor infrastructure so ofc it isn't going to be anything close to the best country in the world for cycling infrastructure.

lul it's everyone in the comment section is mad

The biggest problem with New Urbanism is its math problem and a fantasy problem. The US has about 23.6 sqft of retail per capita. Add in 10sqft per capita for those "pretty things" such as schools, libraries, churches, restaurants, theaters, etc, and AT MOST, you're looking at 34sqft of consumer-oriented destinations per capita. You can't get the kind of density to make every street a "complete street." For the less delusional New Urbanists who are willing to set down the Jane Jacobs and realize that there really are needs for some streets to be more complete and others to be more quietly residential, they still cling to the idea of the corner store on each block. You can have a corner store for every 1000 people or so. Those people aren't fitting in a block except in high rises. Let's extend to the other type of "mixed use" that are supposed to be the jobs for a jobs-and-roofs development: office space. Numbers are VERY hard to fine, but the best estimate I've come up with is 49 sqft of office space per person in the US. Now you have to pretend that both members of a couple are going to work in the same area (unlikely if they have different specializations) and you can add a PORTION of that office space to your complete streets--some offices are conducive to having nice big street-facing windows with displays, like real estate (which can use them to paste up houses for sale). But most offices only want to look out, not be on display. So that means that you can put them on the second floor (with elevators) or set apart so that now you have retail and restaurants with some office buildings next to them. 9 times out of 10, what do companies want? The office building that's walkable to the restaurants, that's what, not the one that's perched above it. There are other types of jobs that aren't sexy jobs acceptable to New Urbanists, Warehouses are just a bit less than office space, but warehouses don't make "complete streets." Pretty tech companies with campuses can have a leafy haven among the New Urbanist city, but there is no place for heavy industry--the type of industry that actually BUILT most of the old cities they love to talk about and made the "complete streets" in shopping districts in the 19th and early 20th century! Now, about those "roofs" again. Where do they go? Units without parking works only in areas where the cost of living is so high that people will struggle along without a car (and it is a struggle--the jobshed of a car owner is many times that of a non-car-owner even in the best connected cities) or that a reasonable rent is a good trade off if there is tolerable mass transit. Everyone else demands wrap buildings, parking podiums, or the like that only makes a city LOOK fully walkable. (In reality, literally no city is. I've used public transport on 4 continents, including some of the best systems in the world, and the only reason to use THE BEST over driving is because even though it's a longer trip, you don't have to drive. For travellers, though, transit is awesome.) This whole impulse is so misguided. We are about to enter the post-driving age with driverless cars, which will also be the absolute death knell of the dying transit system. Transit is dead in the US because the US is the most developed country in the world. We got electricity first. We got telephones first. We got driving first. And we got fat first! Only in cases of poverty, when massive Luddite or authoritarian impulses have rejected modernism, or when cities were straddled with streets incompatible with heavy car use did car ownership not take off massively, to the wealth and development of the people. YES, a lot of car-centric development was incredibly ugly. But with self-driving cars--microtransit, you can call it, if it makes you feel better--the age of the parking lot is over. We can work on interconnectivity and returning richness to our developments. You'd be much better off developing plans that sunset parking lots and personal car ownership gracefully than trying to shove everyone into doomed mixed-use developments which do many things badly in a wealthy car-owning area. When people's commute is transformed, you'll find that they'll be more willing to walk. People are generally happy to dedicate up to 1 hour a day moving themselves around--this is true everywhere in the world. If a commute becomes entertainment or work time (as it would be in microtransit), that time is freed for voluntarily doing less efficient but enjoyable and healthful trips.

@KirstinsHouse

3 жыл бұрын

Because you did something first does not mean it’s a good thing. If you want to leave a dead planet to your children, carry on with your beliefs. Meantime, I assume the COVID crisis has altered your views somewhat - or are you in denial about that also?

@garyjackson3531

2 жыл бұрын

@@KirstinsHouse "Dead planet!" Let me guess, you think global warming/climate change is real! The scientifically illiterate always fall for every scam.

The Seven Dials was at the center of the most notorious, filthy, violent, poverty-stricken, disease-ridden, rat-infested disaster of a district ANYWHERE in London. The monument dates from then, in the Victorian era, before the development caused by slum clearances, health code enforcement, and gentrification. Look at the Booth poverty map of London. It's dominated by pedestrians because it still follows a good deal of the medieval street design, which was little more than cow paths. It wasn't some savvy developer. The land wasn't desirable enough for someone with deep pockets to buy it up wholesale to build something big on it and force it into a more regular design. Funny how New Urbanists luuuuuuuuuuurve the grid but many of the most charming locations are anything but gridiron. Venice is my absolutely favorite city to walk in. Good luck finding 6 regular blocks in a row. It's a TERRIBLE design for modern business, of course, which is why the islands fell into a multi-century decline and now depends entirely on tourism. But good for us--we get Venice! Complete streets? Absolutely. Functional economy? Not if you take the tourists out.

There is a lot of sloppiness here, but the worst is the "Did your parents walk to school?" Most people will have Boomer parents. They walked to school using the 1950s-1960s suburbs you hate sooooooo much. Their kids walked to school in the late 1970s-early 1990s. They only walked less because standards of safety are different. I got hit riding a bike to school in those 1950s suburbs. Most people didn't, but that doesn't mean the danger wasn't there. My father walked to elementary school and crossed Royal Lane in Dallas to get there. No one would let a child of 5 do that now.

@maddiekits

Жыл бұрын

Have you considered that there's a lag time in the perception of safety and actual safety? Like it takes time for people to see examples of it being unsafe before they will use it to inform choices of what to do with their children, so the change being a generation behind the change in development isn't that unreasonable...