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A view of northbound E Street on Tuesday, December 23, 2014 after the sbX bus system was installed in San Bernardino, Ca. (Photo by Micah Escamilla/The Sun)

#california #san bernardino #e street #brt #usa #boulevard

Cars are slowing down thanks to the simple addition of paint on Beaufort Street in the Perth (Australia) suburb of Vincent.

#paint&planters #paint

Boulevard Joseph Vallier, Grenoble, France.

A multiway boulevard, with transit up the middle. Shame about the pedestrian-repellent building frontage on the left, but I wanted to include this part to show all the detail of the access lane and the intersection with the minor street.

Firstly, note the two transit lanes in the middle. Curbed, tree'd with four tramway tracks hidden in the grass.

Next notice how the access lane rejoins the main section before the intersection. Contrast this with American multiway boulevards like Octavia and Chico where the access lane carries on through the minor intersection, dangerously.

And, although a bit far away here, note the access lane parking on the outside of the lane, enlarging the potential pedestrian area. (Unfortunately in this specific case, the chance is low of pedestrians being numerous enough to spill over into the access lane.) The two American examples usually use parking to squish pedestrians onto a narrow sidewalk.

Finally, notice how the minor intersection crossing is level with the sidewalk and marked by ground texture and bollards, not change in elevation. This clearly denotes the pedestrian as priority over the vehicle.

#grenoble #france #multiway #boulevard

An unremarkable, standard four-way intersection, somewhere in the middle of Denmark.

Features found here but not in the Canadian (or US) street engineer's toolkit:

Less than 50% of the building-to-building space is for cars. (Eyeballing, it looks about three equal thirds.)

Low curb (not 6-inch wall), humanizing.

Muted colour palette (not garish green, or highway concrete) also humanizing.

Curbed cycle track - the red part - at sidewalk height. Cyclists are pedestrian-plus, not car-minus.

Raised intersection: cars change level, bike/ped continue at level.

A wide turning circle on the near left, which could be used by rare larger vehicles, but isn't an excuse for a pork chop island and slip lane.

The angle of approach of the four streets terminates the view in every direction (the shop in the case of this picture), slowing traffic and creating a place.

One clearly dominant street, with two sidestreets, provides much clearer right of way than annoying and ambiguous four-way stop ("no you", "no you", "no you first"...).

By extension, how to design streets for people (which is the implied policy of every mayor that professes to care about climate change, death, fiscal responsibility, etc.)

Dedicate less than 50% of the ROW to cars.

Keep the whole area on the level, or with small (one or two inch) grade separation. No highway-concrete walls, etc.

Natural colour palette.

Cycle path conceived as sidewalk extension, not carved out of car-space.

Krier-corner or otherwise bulge your way to terminated vistas. A roundabout or something-about (statue, other island, or just painted shared) is also an option for deflecting (and so slowing) through traffic.

Note too the lack of cluttering signs, let alone the lack of expensive powered signals.

Streets For Everyone is advocating for a variety of improvements to Commercial Drive that include all-ages-and-abilities cycling facilities, an improved pedestrian realm, efficient bus service, additional cross walks, and more seating.

Nothing surprising for readers here: parking-protected, sidewalk-height bikelanes, bus bulges, dutch islands. Great to see the effort though, and you should all go sign their petition in support.

My main reason for posting is to link again to the idea for Streetmix3D. The renderings here look like they took many hours in Sketchup or even AutoCAD, but they're composed of such standard elements I feel like there has to be a way to create them with half a dozen clicks.

Imagine this workflow:

The Streetmix3D launch screen, like MS Word / Pages templates, offers you the option of building a street or an intersection. Click on the "dutch islands" four-way stop intersection design as your template.

Choose your two street cross sections from your Streetmix (2D) library, and apply them to the four entrances to the intersection.

Drag connection nodes if necessary to connect up the lanes (e.g. bike lane on the street to bike lane on the intersection).

Optional: assign a T4 zone to the lots either side of the street. (The parameters for your local T4 zone have been defined in Stoop, so the renderer can auto-generate a mix of compliant buildings.)

Render.

Since Streetmix3D "knows" you're building a street out of street elements, reskinning things (e.g. changing lane colours, applying textures) and generally improving the output with more detailed models, lighting etc. should be a relatively simple incremental process, compared to modelling in a generalist package.

#commercial drive #streetmix

With a single line of paint, Montreal creates a safe space for cycling. No sharrows, no bike logo, no elaborate cement-pouring and planters. Quick, simple. No fuss.

Do this everywhere tomorrow. Then you'll find the public support for budget to pour concrete next year.

#paint #bike #montreal

The "slow zone" street retrofit from NACTO's street design guide shows the power of paint.

I presume the central travel space was left wide for fire trucks: my preference would be for the parking to be in at the line, creating protected space for cycling or just a wider sidewalk. Maybe a single counterflow cycling lane. The camber/gutter/drains may make cycling unpleasant, though.

Related: Chuck Marohn's mayor stump speech and the cost of paint ($0.21 a foot).

#paint

How do you know you have a Strong Town?

Matthias Leyrer provides some examples of simple questions to ask.

If the President came to visit, is there a part of your town you’d be embarrassed to show him?

If the the price of gas quadrupled, would your town survive?

Can a 5th grader understand your zoning ordinances?

If your main street was destroyed, could you rebuild it under current code?

#Strong Towns

Earles Street, Vancouver

This is part of my new commute, so while cursing the sharrows I imagine how it could be different.

Here's the cross section today.

And here we are with parking removed on one side, to make room for protected 6ft tracks either side.

Because people get upset about parking removal, you might want to switch the parking side every block. That then opens up the possibility of a more interesting, slower, safer, placemaking intersection design like this. Earles, with the cycle track, goes left-right here, with a narrower cross street up-down.

For comparison, today we have something like this: car-dominated and desolate.

Never going to happen, but it's nice to dream.

#earles street #vancouver #bike #cycle

At present large sites require such significant up-front investment that only a small number of master developers or housebuilders can afford. A site will typically be masterplanned, broken into phases and then either developed directly, or sold on to other housebuilders (who will redesign the matsterplan). Most of the large housebuilders prefer sites of at least 300 units to create sufficient scale to cover the infrastructure and marketing costs.

In the alternative system that we are proposing each sub-neighborhood would be masterplanned to establish the shape of the development, the layout of the streets and open spaces, the density zones and the location of schools, shops and other uses. This is the 'Trellis' plan that we described earlier. [A regulating plan, basically - Ed] This will include:

A set of parameter plans setting the position, massing, access arrangements, parking standards and mix of uses across the plan.

A plot plan showing the division of the masterplan into development plots reflecting the different housing density bands.

A passport for each plot setting out what development is permitted. This will include a three dimensional volume into which the plot holder can building, relationship to adjacent plots (whether it is terraced or detached) and any restrictions on use.

The Wolfson Prize winner proposes a new system for planning new towns [pdf p67].

#wolfson

Proposed extension to the fictional English town of Uxcester ('uss-ter') by Wolfson Economics Prize winners URBED. (Their proposed process is more important, but the pictures are pretty!)

#wolfson

An image from the 2014 winner of the Wolfson Economics Prize (pdf). Related to the entrant's prior re-interpretation of Howard's snowflake. Also, unsurprisingly, reminiscent of my "world of neighborhoods" circles diagram and DPZ's re-analysis for Stevenage.

#wolfson #garden city #urbanism #map

Sprawl repair animated gifs

The first thing we notice of course is the new texture on the intersection, and the transit line. On the lower left block, existing buildings are maintained, with just a couple of infill buildings to complete the street wall. On the lower right block, a big box has been replaced by rowhousing, and new rowhousing has been put on the main street

On the top two blocks there's been radical rebuilding. Again, the first we notice is the new civic building and plaza on the upper left; there's also an interesting v-shaped building above it. The upper right block is completely rebuilt.

Here are the two static images:

In this second repair gif, the main change is the building at the top of the intersection. It gets an arcade frontage on main street, and is extended up to the side street, and then has the parking space as a cafe terrace. There's a liner building at the top of the picture, a really small infill building to complete the street wall on main, and on the lower left block a box has been replaced by perhaps a four-plex (I'm guessing). On the street, there's the obvious transit line and texture change. Apart from that the differences are just lots more trees, well lined up.

And the two static images again:

Source.

#sprawl #repair #dpz

In my opinion, this design would be much better than signals for when Vancouver's bike boulevards cross arterials. Complete post from 2013. Previous Stroad to Boulevard post on bulge, narrow, wiggle intersection design. Sit Up Vancouver suggested redesign for 10th & Yukon.

#roundabout #bike #intersection

Excerpt from DPZ's redesign of Stevenage as a Garden City (pdf).

#garden city #stevenage #dpz

This is a genuine "improvement" proposal in oh-so-walkable New York City. In response to recent pedestrian deaths they propose widening lanes and introducing collision, er, turn bays.

via Jeff Speck

#Stroad

Streetmix3D

Last year, Code for America made an awesome app called Streetmix.

I want to take this app (open source!) and run with it, making a drag and drop webapp to redesign all public space: streets, squares, parklets, parks, intersections, tactical street festivals, the works. All the space between the buildings is up for grabs.

Say you clicked on the Streetmix view in the bottom right corner of the mock-up above, it would expand to fill the screen so you could edit lane arrangements of various cross-section points. You could also edit on the plan view to show how those cross-sections connect, and to add paint and furniture (like planters).

Today, Vancouver demonstrates how cross-sections stitch together on plans like this, below. I bet other towns do it similarly and I think we can do better, making plans clearer and offering a quick and easy walk-through.

When you're done dropping in planters and widening sidewalks, you click to minimise the editing screen, and see the 3D view above again, which you can pan and zoom around. The buildings can be simple boxes (perhaps with crudely configurable massing) since they're not the focus here.

Brian Mount already implemented a simple plan view fork of an earlier version of Streetmix, shown below. Imagine being able to paint onto that, and drop in elements like planters and parklets.

Spencer Boomhower has made a reconfigurable 3D streetscape using Unity3D, below, that could also inform the app user experience.

Anyone else interested? Shall we Kickstart it?

#streetmix

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