A few things to know this week: October 22nd, 2021
Flooding could shut down one-quarter of America's critical infrastructure
As we have learned from some of the major storm events of the last decade, flooding isn't just a crisis for residents - it's also a crisis for public services, infrastructure and transportation. Did you know that flooding has cost the US over $1 trillion dollars in the last 40 years? This article from Grist highlights the recently-released report "Infrastructure on the Brink" put together by the First Street Foundation. The maps are compelling, and include many areas which we might not ordinarily think of as areas in danger. The article is a good summary, and the report itself is thorough - and terrifying. Here's one excerpt: "an additional 1.2 million residential properties, 66,000 commercial properties, 63,000 miles of roads, 6,100 pieces of social infrastructure, and 2,000 pieces of critical infrastructure will also have flood risk that would render them inoperable, inaccessible, or impassable." The findings of this report make it much harder for cities to ignore the problem. I was surprised at many of the areas which were shown as having a greater risk of flooding than ever. Every state has a section devoted to it, ranking the municipalities with the highest risks - and why. Each state's section also looks at the changes in risk over the last 30 years. There is also a section with maps illustrating patterns in infrastructure risk, residential risk, social risk, commercial risk, and roads risk.
-AJ
Killmoenews on Twitter
I haven't dedicated much time in the past to Twitter, but I've made the decision to dive back in. (Shameless plug: follow me at @k_shepherd and our company account at @verdunity. We'll follow back and hopefully learn from each other 280 characters at a time!) I wasn't more than 5 minutes into scrolling when I saw this post. Two innocent children were hit my a car and seriously injured while walking in a crosswalk on their way to school. On National Walk to School Day, no less! The driver was apparently going quite fast and turned the corner into crosswalk without looking up or paying attention. These types of incidents happen every day on our streets. We can blame the drivers, or in some cases maybe the people walking, but the real fault goes to the cities and engineers who design these streets in a manner that allows this to happen. If we want to slow cars down in neighborhoods and account for the rapidly increasing distracted or impaired driver "excuse", we have got to design our streets differently so they force drivers to pay attention and drive slow. Are there tradeoffs for this? Absolutely, but I bet the parents of these kids or any other friend or family member of someone killed on local streets would have gladly made those sacrifices. To my fellow engineers, it's time to step up and take this challenge on. Stop defaulting to standards that prioritize wider lanes and turn radii for cars and fire trucks and start putting human lives first when you're designing local streets. If you want to dive deeper into what's broken with our transportation engineering process in North America, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Chuck Marohn's Confessions of a Recovering Engineer book, which was released last month.
-KEVIN
Public Space for Recovery
The design of the places we live and the communities we spend our time in are directly impacting our daily life and therefore our overall health. Those dots are not hard to connect. The health of those in our communities should be one of the greatest concerns as individuals that have a direct line to the design of the places and spaces that make up the world people live in. Small things can change the way people interact and embrace their surroundings, and therefore make a big impact.
Just like classical medicine can be a pathway to impact the individual and collective good, place making, civil design, and city planning can and should all work together to make our communities an avenue for benefiting interpersonal and individual well-being.
-RYAN
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