Author: Kent Lundberg

Here is a remarkable story from the United State’s Depart of Transportation. USDOT Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx is leading a ‘crusade’ to bring attention to the disruptive and discriminatory legacy of urban highways. Foxx has first hand experience of how transport designs influenced opportunity- “As a child, Anthony Foxx knew he couldn’t ride his bike far from home without being blocked by a freeway” (Washington Post).  …

To kick off Sunday reading here’s an interesting article by  transport professor Rachel Aldred. In “Getting people cycling on residential streets needs more than 20mph limits” she argues that enabling neighbourhood streets to support cycling takes much more than dropping the speed limits, it requires removing traffic.…

Here’s a light start to Sunday Reading from Alissa Walker at Gizmodo who has compiled a neat before and after series of images from Amsterdam,”Look How Much Better a City Can Be When It Designs for People Not Cars”. The images are from the Sustainable Amsterdam project.…

Chris and Melissa Bruntlett provide a thoughtful, jargon-free list of the barriers they see to designing better streets and places:  The 6 biggest roadblocks to building complete streets in our communities, VanCity Buzz. 1. An unintended, but counterproductive focus on the commute to work We agree that getting more people out of their cars and riding a bike to work is great.…

Here’s a great collection of aerial European landscapes by Alex MacLean, “Energy Landscapes: An Aerial View Of Europe’s Carbon Footprint“, Yale Environment 360. The summer calendar is jam packed with city-friendly events that have been helpfully compiled by Bike Auckland. Summer of bike love – Go By Bike Day and other upcoming events.…

Starting out the Sunday Reading with a cautionary tale from Canada where the commodity boom has quickly faded. The Loonie a “global laughingstock” is now down to US$.71 and in Calgary experts estimate a 16.3 per cent commercial vacancy rate, the highest in nearly a quarter-century.  …

Emily Badger, “America’s Cities Are Still Too Afraid to Make Driving Unappealing“, The New Republic. Badger raises a relevant point about the shortage of “stick” in US transportation systems. At a macro level, this decision-process implies that there are two ways to shift more commuters out of single-occupancy vehicles and into other modes of transportation, whether that’s biking, carpooling, walking, or transit.…

The idea of technological advances in transport captured our imagination in 2015. But besides the introduction of Uber in Auckland, things remain mostly unchanged. My experience with Uber so far has been mixed. In many cases I find myself awkwardly hunting around the city centre to position myself for both a direct pick-up and departure.…

Running motorways through cities, it seems, was not the best of last century’s ideas. Alana Semuels in The Atlantic describes the growing trend of Motorway tear downs in North America- “Highways Destroyed America’s Cities: Can tearing them down bring revitalization?“. “Where urban highway construction did occur, in urban design terms, it was highly detrimental to the urban fabric; creating physical and psychological rifts that are extremely difficult to bridge and introducing a substantial source of noise and air pollution,” Shelton and Gann wrote.…