Here’s more from the ol’ helmet cam — downtown to MSU. I go downtown for coffee every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. This is my route to school. One difference: Walnut between Kimbrough and Hammons is being renovated, so it’s closed for a bit. I take Elm instead. You’ll notice two “close” passes. The speed [...]
Park Central Square is finished. Here are the results. You’ll see that it has become a more pedestrian-friendly place. Technorati Tags: Springfield Missouri, Urban and Regional Planning, urban design, urban development, Urban Planning
The Holy Grail of bicycle advocacy is numbers of kiesters in saddles on two wheels on the road. Some advocates are willing to do almost anything to increase participation — including putting novices in danger. There’s a “but”: It appears rather clear that the more people who ride bicycles in a given area the safer [...]
A poll by the National Association of Realtors earlier this spring showed that Americans’ attitudes about where to live may be changing. A few (cherry-picked) highlights: Americans are three times more likely to say that the quality of life in their communities has gotten worse (35%) rather than better (12%) in the last three years. [...]
Joel Kotkin, writing on the NewGeography site, says that America’s biggest brain magnets are not the big coastal cities: “Indeed, college graduates, for the most part, are heading not to the big cities on the coasts, but to smaller, less dense and quite often Sun Belt cities.” His conclusion might seem written with Springfield in [...]
Disclaimer: This is not a complaint about the hard-working people who plowed the streets for the City of Springfield during Snowpocalypse ’11. This is, instead, a complaint about all of us, i.e. our culture. In case one needed proof that the car is king of the road — indeed, king of all transportation modes — one merely [...]
This morning I covered a lot of ground riding around the urban core of Springfield and taking pictures for a class project. Not a class I’m teaching. A class I’m taking (PLN271). I’m an “inputter” (i.e. my primary strength is collecting information), and I have always enjoyed being a college student. The project is about [...]
The single biggest problem I have in traffic in Springfield is the overly-polite driver. That should tell you that I travel around the urban core with almost zero conflict with automobile drivers. They treat me with respect. They pass me with plenty of room. They wait their turn when I have the right-of-way. Then there [...]
Yesterday’s transportation committee meeting for the new city/OTO strategic plan focused on writing a vision statement. I’ve done this kind of work before, and it is usually painful (partly because I’ve usually done vision writing stuff with fellow academics). But yesterday’s exercise was remarkably invigorating and productive. We enjoy a great deal of consensus on [...]
Image via Wikipedia One of the participants at the last transportation committee meeting tried to patiently explain to me that the reason people want to move to southwest Missouri is to have that house-on-three-acres lifestyle. This is part of what explains why Christian County is growing so fast. The towns of Nixa and Ozark offer [...]
