Posts in the 'Urban Development' category
Image from Moving Cooler. If anyone’s not seen it yet, the new Moving Cooler report is destined to be a real landmark moment in United States sustainable transportation. It’s quite rare to see any sort of think tank or government ...
2thinknow, an Australian company that sells information about cities, released their list of what they consider to be the 75 most innovative world cities. D.C. ranked 15th in the world. These rankings are a mixed bag and access to the ...
It’s been quite wonderful to watch huge swaths of the planning community get suckered by the Manhattan Airport Foundation. This prank, which suggests turning Central Park into an airport, won some utterly serious howls of indignation. It also sparked a ...
The environmental movement is, rightfully, focused almost entirely on greenhouse gas emissions right now. That is almost certainly strategically correct, given the stakes. It’s important to remember, though, that there lots of kinds of pollution out there that aren’t GHG ...
These plans for a new bus terminal and mixed-use development behind Union Station have the potential to be truly transformative. First, by connecting the Greyhound bus station to Union station, you make it functionally intermodal. You can take local transit ...
The Post’s article about how U Street residents are beginning to get tired of the increasing noise of their neighborhood. My first reaction was basically the same as Ryan Avent and BeyondDC’s, that it’s hardly as if these residents didn’t ...
Strip malls need a makeover. Not just to look prettier, but to be safer and more accessible to pedestrians, cyclists and other people on the street. Photo by Dean Terry. On the beauty spectrum of community design, nothing’s uglier than ...
This is a serious question, but can any of the folks who get so upset with arguments for BRT point me to any resources showing that high-investment BRT—Bogota, not Houston—with physically separated right-of-ways and permanent-seeming stations and the rest, do ...
I hate to do another round on BRT with The Overhead Wire, but I can’t help myself. It’s an important discussion, particularly with BRT gaining momentum in D.C. The latest discussion started with Streetsblog making what seems like a very ...
Now that there’s significantly more information available than a short AP article, I thought it might be useful to compare the fairly extensive transportation plans of the two candidates for governor of Virginia. Let’s start with Bob McDonnell and really ...
I hadn’t noticed this fun parlor game of an article in Sunday’s Post: “Where Should Sonia Sotomayor Live?” It’s really further proof, along with good restaurants, that D.C. is becoming more like New York; we talk about real estate! Unfortunately, ...
Another day, another set of notes from an interesting speech: this time Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, one of the founders of the New Urbanism, speaking on Retrofitting the Suburbs at the National Building Museum It was quite a good talk and I ...
Funny business abounded in D.C. development news yesterday. I’m not sure what to make of it, so if you have any sense, please help me out. First, the Washington Business Journal reported that Councilmembers Mary Cheh and Kwame Brown have ...
I wrote a couple of days ago about the need for smart growth advocates and urbanists to get smarter about playing the inside game. We’re winning the messaging but then losing behind closed doors, I argued. So I was particularly ...
One of the most pervasive critiques of urban life is that suburbia is the only good place to raise a family. It’s a powerful argument—parents will do anything for their children—and it’s a deeply rooted one. So it was very ...
