Search Results
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Streetcar Smarts
Was the electric streetcar the Northwest’s first sprawl machine? That’s a topic that Price Tags (large-ish pdf), Gordon Price’s Vancouver-based urban design newsletter, looks at this week. He takes readers on a street-by-street tour of the remnants of streetcar villages in two cities that boomed during that era—Vancouver, BC, and Perth, Australia; looks at how "urban form responded to the opportunity" of the streetcar; and what automobiles brought to the...Read more » -
Measure What Matters
What gets measured gets fixed. Better indicators of progress focus attention on the neglected, slow-changing trends that are shaping our future: the health and well-being of our families, the strength of our communities, and the integrity of nature.Read more » -
Urban Planning and Smart Growth: Building Complete, Compact Communities
Building complete, compact communities—the opposite of poorly planned sprawl—yields an impressive array of benefits including: reduced reliance on imported fuel, less need for expensive road infrastructure, fosters closer relationships among neighbors, and saves people time.Read more » -
Measure: What Matters
There’s a great article in today’s Washington Post on Oregon’s Measure 37, the voter-approved initiative that is threatening to unravel the state’s anti-sprawl laws. To recap, Measure 37 requires the government to compensate anyone whose land value has been reduced by Oregon’s successful growth management programs—making those programs vastly more expensive and complicated to implement. To me, the most interesting point made by the article is that Measure 37 claims...Read more » -
Charlotte, NC-area Population Density
Charlotte, NC, is the most sprawling of 12 non-Cascadian cities studied in the report: The Portland Exception.Read more » -
Portland-area Population Density
Portland has excelled in recent years at protecting rural land from suburban development.Read more » -
Las Vegas-area Population Density
Of the 12 non-Cascadian cities studied by Sightline, greater Las Vegas is the densest, with half of its residents living in compact communities in 2000.Read more » -
Walking the Walk
An article in today’s Vancouver Sun (subscription required) reports on a new study showing that, in neighborhoods that are designed to make walking convenient, people do, in fact, walk more. To wit: People who lived the most walkable neighborhoods were 2.4 times as likely to walk for 30 minutes or more than those who lived in the least walkable communities. The study’s authors, led by UBC professor Lawrence Frank, defined...Read more » -
A Study in Contrasts
So Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood just unveiled a proposal to replace the 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington with a project whose centerpiece, according to the Seattle P-I, would be… a suspension bridge that would soar from near Interstate 5 over Portage Bay and Montlake and then descend to a new floating bridge on Lake Washington…. Neighborhood residents who overflowed a building at Montlake Park on Wednesday night were enthusiastic about...Read more » -
Tunnel Vision?
(This post is part of a series.) A while back, the Seattle city government decided that it wanted to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the seismically vulnerable aerial highway that cuts off the city’s downtown from its waterfront—with a tunnel. But what neither the city, nor anyone else, has decided is how to pay for the tunnel, which the state estimates could cost more than $4 billion. So far, the city...Read more »