Rightsizing the automobile for local mobility

As talk intensifies around the interactions that we have as pedestrians with motor vehicles the more people are starting to realize just how LARGE our day-to-day cars and trucks truly are. For the sake of our safety and the sake of our future as a system of communities there is a need to turn to the future. Thinking about the way we scale our streets and our vehicles so our urban environments can be the best for everyone, not just a car-centric cluster of pavement. 

There is still a lot of work to be done. With the right information and evidence to prove expanding our community’s streets and highways is not the sustainable solution to mobility across the US we hope that others will listen. 

-Ryan

Kevin DeGood - I-35 Widening in Austin

Kevin DeGood - I-10 Widening in Baton Rouge

One of my favorite Twitter follows, Kevin DeGood, had a great thread this week about TxDot's traffic projections in Austin and how they've been grossly over-projected. Arguments for highway expansion typically use these numbers to justify a project, and predict a catastrophe if a project is not built. However, the thread shows that this is not the case, and travelers will adjust their habits based on the infrastructure that is already in place. DeGood's conclustion: "First, traffic forecasting is deeply flawed. Second, we get the travel behavior we build for, not the behavior we claim to want. If we want different behavior, we need to build a different system."

I've also included a similar link to one of Kevin's threads about another highway expansion in Baton Rouge. If you'd like to dig more into these topics, I highly recommend following Mr. DeGood.

-Tim

Architecture prize goes to woman who reclaims toxic dumps

Julie Bargmann has won the first ever Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize for her work transforming brownfield sites into enjoyable public spaces. For our North Texas readers, if you've been to the The Turtle Creek Water Works in Dallas, Texas you know Bargmann work. How we are going to remediate these otherwise unusable places into something that is a benefit to our communities is a very important discussion we need to be having. I'd suggest following the link above if for not other reason than to have a look at some beautiful examples of just that.

-Marshall

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