Twitterfeed
My TweetsRecent Posts
- No Agricultural Easements Inside Boulder
- 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
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: urban
No Agricultural Easements Inside Boulder
Setting aside large parcels of land in the center of a city for agricultural purposes is bad for sustainability and not in line with the mission of Boulder’s Open Space program. I am referring in particular to the proposal to … Continue reading
Posted in journal
Tagged agriculture, cities, community, conservation, easement, farming, food, long's garden, transportation, urban
2 Comments
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
Sustainable Transportation in Freiburg
I recently came across an interesting article by Ralph Buehler and John Pucher about the city of Freiburg, Germany and its transportation system and planning since WWII (when it was 80% destroyed by Allied bombing raids). The city isn’t so … Continue reading
Posted in journal
Tagged design, freiburg, germany, planning, policy, politics, transportation, urban
Leave a comment
Cool Planning in Boulder
I spent the day at a workshop organized by the city with Smart Growth America and Otak, looking at how cities in the US can change their transportation and land use policies to create more livable, healthier, less carbon intensive, … 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
Cars and Robust Cities Are Fundamentally Incompatible
A writeup by The Atlantic Cities of a paper in the Transportation Research Board journal of the National Academies looking at the effects of parking on the vitality of urban centers. It’s found that the detrimental effects of dedicating urban … Continue reading
Posted in linkstream
Tagged cars, data, development, economics, parking, planning, transportation, urban
Leave a comment
Shifting Suburbs
The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has put together a study of suburban densification strategies called Shifting Suburbs: Reinventing Infrastructure for Compact Development. I haven’t read it yet, but based on my experience of Belmar in Lakewood (which is one of … Continue reading
Posted in linkstream
Tagged density, design, development, planning, retrofit, suburbia, suburbs, ULI, urban
Leave a comment
Warm Winters
You don’t have to dress like a bank-robbing arctic ninja to stay warm walking and biking around town in the winter. Not even in Boston. Common sense stay-warm fashion tips from Bikeyface. In cartoon form of course.
Tax Land, Not Buildings
The Land Tax is revived in Minneapolis, at least in concept. Taxing land, rather than the improvements upon it (or at least taxing them at different rates, with the land more heavily taxed than the improvements), discourages speculation in valuable … 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
