Aerial photograph of suburban housing in Maryland. Photo by Vidiot.

The BeyondDC newsfeed yesterday just blew my mind. Of yesterday’s five headlines, each and every one is about some part of Montgomery County embracing a more sustainable, more urban land use pattern. Let’s go through them one by one:

Read more at The City Fix DC…

By reducing parking space requirements, cities can reduce car culture - and encourage the development of healthier grocery stores - in underserved areas. Photo by Wenzday01

Today, the New York Times alerted me to a problem that I had no idea sustainable transportation could solve.

It’s well known that low-income urban neighborhoods are “food deserts,” where supermarkets are rare, understocked and overpriced. Greater Greater Washington ran a great piece detailing this phenomenon in the District earlier this year. What’s more, I’ve been familiar with attempts to increase access to supermarkets, including in D.C.

The New York Times, though, mentioned that one of the strategies New York City is using to attract more supermarkets into food deserts is to change the city’s zoning laws that would “free smaller supermarkets from having to supply parking spaces.” Reducing or eliminating parking minimums for new development is good urbanism. But if it can help provide affordable, accessible, and nutritious food to low-income residents of the District - which is already a District goal - the planning commission has one more very good reason to wean us off of cars.

Read more at The City Fix DC…

A graphic rendering of the proposed “Central Plaza” of CityCenter DC. Illustration via CityCenter DC.

There’s been a lot of big transportation news in the last two days. Between the Purple Line vote and Sec. Ray LaHood and Rep. Jim Oberstar’s competing proposals for the transportation bill (a topic that you should definitely follow over at DC Streetsblog), there are a lot of major political decisions being made about transportation.

At the same time, some of the most important changes needed to create a sustainable transportation system in D.C. have nothing to do with transportation at all. For example, redeveloping the old convention center site downtown would be a major victory for sustainable transportation in D.C.

Read more at The City Fix DC…

Map via PurpleLineMD.com.

Great news today: The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board, the region’s federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), unanimously approved the inclusion of the full Purple Line project in the region’s long-term plan.

Read more at The City Fix DC…

Boston’s commuter rail is informally known as the “Purple Line.” Maryland still hasn’t decided whether its Purple Line will be light rail or bus rapid transit. Photo by Pylon757.

Today’s a big day for the Purple Line. (Check out our previous post about the controversial transit project here.) The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board is voting on whether or not to include the Purple Line in the long-range transportation plan. The NCRTPB is the D.C. area’s metropolitan planning organization. MPOs are critical parts of any planning process, in that federal transportation dollars won’t go to projects that the regional MPO doesn’t include in its plan. (Nashua, N.H.’s MPO provides a decent guide to the role of MPOshere.)

Moreover, if the Board does include the Purple Line and are then able to secure funding, opposition suddenly becomes a lot harder. It’s pretty rare to see someone give back federal dollars.

Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed.
Read more at The City Fix DC…

D.C. plans to build 15 miles of new sidewalks. Photo by BrittneyBush.

The Wash Cycle pointed out today that Mayor Fenty has announced he’ll be spending $4 million in stimulus money on new sidewalks, enough to build 15 miles of new sidewalks out of the 200 missing miles in the District. The Washington Post’s Get There blog adds that these particular streets were chosen “by matching medium and high pedestrian activity areas with missing sidewalk locations and reviewing comments received from Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners and residents.”

Read more at The City Fix DC…

Steve Price won the Livable Streets Contest for his vision of a “complete street” in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Last week, GOOD announced the winners of its Livable Streets Contest.

It was a simple assignment: “Take a photo of a street or intersection you know and hate, and then use Photoshop or any other image editing techniques at your disposal to make the changes you’d like to see implemented.”

The winning submission was from Steve Price of Portsmouth, Virginia.

Contest judges Aaron Naparstek from Streetsblog and designer Carly Clark said Price’s “holistic approach is just what what’s needed in a barren urban environment like this. He’s thinking about new infill development, light rail, bike lanes, and outdoor space for pedestrians and putting it all together to create an entirely new neighborhood. Portsmouth should go and make this happen right now!”

Click here to learn more about the contest and see the other winning entries.

This summer, residents in Chicago and the surrounding region will be asked to plan for their own future, thanks to a collaboration between the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and a real-life version of SimCity, known as MetroQuest.

From the University of British Columbia Public Affairs:

How do you want your city to look in 100 years? A technology created at the University of British Columbia [based on models developed by the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES)] is giving communities around the globe a peek at how today’s decisions can rewrite tomorrow’s cities. Like a Web 2.0 crystal ball, the software dramatically illustrates the future impacts of city planning proposals, helping to steer stakeholders away from pitfalls such as urban sprawl, gridlock and decay.

Inspired by the game SimCity, which allows players to imagine different scenarios for fictional cities, the tool is called MetroQuest, a computer software that allows various stakeholders in the urban planning process to simulate the consequences of different policy choices 40 years into the future. For example, how will expanding mass transit affect commute times? If regional policies favor car drivers, how will that impact local air quality?
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Supercities will “radically redefine the world’s future macroeconomic and cultural landscape.” But how do you make sense of it all? Image via 192021.org

Some of the greatest minds of design and marketing are working on a five-year, multimedia project to collect information about the rise of urban populations to better understand its impact on urban and business planning and its effect on consumers.

The project is known as 19.20.21, based on the premise that there will be 19 cities in the world with populations of 20 million people in the 21st century. You can learn more about it online in a spiffy Flash-based presentation:

http://www.192021.org
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Illustration by via GOOD Magazine.

GOOD magazine published its jam-packed, 112-page “Transportation Issue,” devoted to a “drastic rethinking of how we move around, how we design our cities, and how we power our vehicles.”

The articles cover a lot of ground, discussing the problems and solutions of congestion pricing; comparing choices that will make commuting to work more convenient (a dilemma that’s referred to as the “last-mile problem”); and also, reviewing a range of transport projects, like bus rapid transit in Bogota, carpooling in San Francisco, and bicycle rental in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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