A “sharrow” is a shared lane marker painted on the street. Sharrows should not create de facto bicycle lanes, i.e. be painted on the road in such a way that it shunts bicyclists to side of the road in the manner of a bicycle lane. Dan Gutierrez has posted some interesting photos on Facebook that show what’s [...]
I’ve mentioned the coming improvements to the Springfield bicycle route system that will be paid for with the CIP tax. The improvements include route number signs and sharrows. The City also has plans for a new project called The Link — an exciting plan to link existing and new greenway trails into a coherent transportation [...]
American suburbs were built for cars during a time in which it seemed oil would shoot from the ground forever. And once we knew that such was not the case, we kept building suburbs because people wanted to live in them. People were also encouraged to do so by the culture and the government. I [...]
I swear I’m not making this up. The following is a snippet of conversation I heard at the Mudshouse. The interlocutors were high school kids: Kid 1: “There’s just too much sprawl here.” Kid 2: “Yeah, not enough density.” Kid 3: “It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to live here anyway.” How do we make [...]
From David Roberts at Grist (extra links added to quote): On one side, you have people like Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Geoff Anderson of Smart Growth America, or Tom Murphy of the Urban Land Institute, who are focused on using land and urban assets more effectively, which means increasing density and [...]
Image via Wikipedia Take a look at this presentation by the Ozarks Transportation Organization, and pay particular attention to slides 17 though 30 about housing and job growth in Springfield and surrounding communities. You’ll see that demographic projections predict more sprawl. We must find a way to prevent further sprawl unless we wish to see [...]
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 [...]
Much has been written about the health benefits of burning calories instead of carbon to transport ourselves. This also happens to be one of the important components to Blue Zones — areas of the world in which people live longer, healthier lives. The premise of Blue Zones is: identify the optimal lifestyle of longevity and [...]
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 [...]
We spent much of our time in vision exercises during the strategic plan transportation committee meeting yesterday. Our goal was to imagine what role transportation should play in creating the kind of community we want to live in by 2035 (when I’ll be 78 years old). We did an overall visioning exercise and a series [...]
The Transportation Committee for the new Springfield Strategic Plan meets today in an all-day session to bring members up to speed on the planning process. You can follow the process here on Carbon Trace and at the committee web site liked above. I’ll be reporting our progress as part of my Urban Challenge series and [...]
