Recent Posts
- Sustainable Transportation in Freiburg
- Cool Planning in Boulder
- Another City is Possible: Cars and Climate
- Boulder Biketopia at the ULI Salon
- A Goss Grove Neighborhood Greenway?
- Making Boulder into one of Jan Gehl's Cities for People
- Preventing Bicycle Fatalities at US-36 and Violet
- Bikes and Bus Rapid Transit
- The High Cost of Free Parking in Boulder
- Revisiting Junction Place, the TVAP and Multi-Way Boulevards
Linkstream
- Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl
Sprawling single-family suburban development is more expensive than compact land use. There's more infrastructure per capita and per unit area (pavement, power lines, water and sewage lines, etc), in conjunction with much lower tax revenues per unit infrastructure. This is true if you look at either the capital (up front) costs or the ongoing operational costs. Most subdivisions aren't actually prepared to pay their own way when the bill comes due. - The Fight Against Small Apartments in Seattle
A bizarre account of the NIMBYs fighting against tiny apartments in Seattle. They fear that small living spaces must necessarily end up filled with sketchy-ass meth-heads. But it turns out they're more often young professionals, retirees, and other completely normal folk who either don't want or can't afford the canonical American Dream of yesteryear... and would rather live downtown and have access to the city. - Break out the Bikes for the next Hackfest
Boulder's QuickLeft is hosting a Bicycle Hackfest, the evening of Tuesday, May 14th, from 6-9pm. Unfortunately, I can't make it, but it would be great if someone could work on getting our Mark-A-Spot Open311 testbed built out... contact me if you're interested! - Portland Retailers Love Bike Corrals
On street bike parking (bike corrals) have become very popular with local street-level businesses in Portland, Oregon. I think it's time for Boulder to regularize our bike corral program. We need to get some decent non-diagonal racks in there with higher capacity, like the Portland racks, and also create a process through which businesses can request the racks, and get them. Portland has nearly 100, by population, Boulder ought to have something like 16. - A Profile of Freiburg, Germany
A good short profile of the city of Freiburg, Germany, and their many sustainability initiatives. Freiburg is a little more than double Boulder's size -- both in population and area, so it has a similar average population density. It's also a university town with a strong tech sector locally. The whole city was re-built post WWII, but they chose to build it along the same lines as the old city, with a dense core, and well defined boundaries. Today about half of daily trips are done by foot or on bike, with another 20% on public transit. They have a
- Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl
Boulder Bikes
Incoming Memes
Tag Archives: cities
The Fight Against Small Apartments in Seattle
A bizarre account of the NIMBYs fighting against tiny apartments in Seattle. They fear that small living spaces must necessarily end up filled with sketchy-ass meth-heads. But it turns out they’re more often young professionals, retirees, and other completely normal … Continue reading
A Profile of Freiburg, Germany
A good short profile of the city of Freiburg, Germany, and their many sustainability initiatives. Freiburg is a little more than double Boulder’s size — both in population and area, so it has a similar average population density. It’s also … Continue reading
Posted in linkstream
Tagged cities, efficiency, energy, germany, KfW, passivhaus, policy
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Steamships, Landlines, and the Decline of the Private Car
A fun little musing from the Atlantic Cities on the difficulty of envisioning a very different world, even when we all know that big changes do take place over time. Old technologies slowly decay, and fade into the background, as … Continue reading
Another City is Possible: Cars and Climate
Last week I taught a class at the University of Colorado for a friend. The class is entitled Another City is Possible: Re-Imagining Detroit. She wanted me to talk about the link between cars and climate change. As usual, I … Continue reading
The Zen of Affordable Housing
A good list summarizing the ways in which density is good for affordability, ending with this zinger: Income inequality is the core reason why housing affordability is such an intractable problem in the United States. In pretty much every other … Continue reading
Suburbs == Ponzi scheme
Charles Marohn of Strong Towns on Grist, explaining the way in which American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme. Essentially, since WWII there have been several rounds of up-front financing for suburban expansion, including federal dollars, and debt leveraging supposed … Continue reading
Posted in linkstream
Tagged cities, design, economics, strong towns, suburbia, urban
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Making Boulder into one of Jan Gehl’s Cities for People
A couple of months ago I finished reading Jan Gehl’s book Cities for People, and I’ve seen Boulder differently ever since. I’m both more frustrated with it as it is today and more excited about what it could be in … Continue reading
Posted in journal
Tagged architecture, book, cars, cities, design, jan gehl, policy, review, transportation, urban
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The Silos of the Status Quo
Strong Towns looks at the absurdity of having separate city departments of transportation and land-use planning, which often end up directly at odds with each other, even when they’re both doing their jobs. In Boulder this dynamic has been bad … Continue reading
Europe’s Vibrant New Low Car(bon) Communities
ITDP wrote up case studies of 8 relatively new car-free (or very car-light) neighborhoods in Europe, with scales ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of people, and how they compare to adjacent, similar communities, in terms of … Continue reading
Posted in linkstream
Tagged carfree, cars, cities, climate, europe, itdp, transportation, urban
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Melbourne Urban Density Study
The city of Melbourne, Australia did a study of various types of urban density (it’s a PDF) to inform their own planning for the development of the Southbank area. The study as presented here is a little bit cartoonish, but … Continue reading
