City Planning, Transportation Policy, Sustainable Living
As a new condo owner in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood, I spend a lot of time walking and biking the streets between going to karaoke bars and sipping $10 lattes. And just like Wynwood, the infrastructure hasn’t kept up with private investment. The sidewalks are too […]
I’ve helped design quite a few bike routes during my career. Some were as simple as a few traffic calming devices. Others involved fully protected bike lanes. They all had these things in common: They were all part of a slow, incremental buildout and part […]
Cities across the world are making a serious, coordinated effort to build new public spaces for cyclists and pedestrians in response to Coronavirus and related social distancing measures. Milan will add bike lanes and new pedestrian spaces to 22 miles of streets over the next […]
Micromobility devices have poured into American cities over the past 3 years. Go to any major city and you’re likely to see rows of e-scooters or dockless bikes lined up on sidewalks. According to NACTO, there were 84 million trips taken on shared bikes and […]
Not long ago, Downtown Miami was an empty expanse of vacant lots, warehouses and nightclubs. While some of the nightclubs still remain, the area has come a long way in the past 5 years. Mixed use projects like Miami World Center and a privately funded […]
The difference between roads and streets is often overlooked but important in creating livable cities. Listen to any Bruce Springsteen song and you’ll probably hear a reference to “the street”. This is often accompanied by stanzas about how he spent a summer building a ’72 Challenger […]
A few years ago I was lucky to see John N. LaPlante, P.E., PTOE speak at a TRB conference. As Chief Transportation Planner at the world–renowned T.Y Lin International, I was expecting road-widening rationales, travel demand models and an overview of ITE guidelines. Instead, he […]
Updates on Car Free America may be a bit sporadic for the next couple of months. I’ll be working on a book tentatively titled “Human Speed” which will chronicle my time living car free and the city planning lessons I learned from the experience. It […]
The highlight of the Dallas Festival of Ideas this weekend was seeing Janette Sadik-Khan speak. As former NYC DOT commissioner, she was instrumental in the design and installation of protected bike lanes, public plazas, Vision Zero policies and the redesign of many streets into more […]
I want to give a shout out to Spokane and their excellent North Monroe Corridor Project and website. Rarely do you see this much attention to detail given to making the case for a public project. People not familiar with basic concepts of complete streets […]